The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [103]
14
The Freakonomics of Piracy
MODERN SCIENCE MIGHT TAKE A SCEPTICAL VIEW OF COMPUTER’S psychic talents, but it is hard to argue with success, and his clairvoyant directions could not have been more effective in leading his pack to a helpless victim. Despite travelling in the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC) and being within 80 to 160 kilometres of a Turkish warship when she was attacked, the Victoria was captured with relative ease. What made her such an easy mark? It turns out that the vessel possessed several attributes that rendered her particularly vulnerable, listed in Table 2.
In short, the Victoria was slow, low, and undermanned. The disadvantage conferred by her lack of speed is evident: with a thirteen-to-twenty-knot edge, Mohamed Abdi’s team overtook the Victoria less than forty minutes after they were sighted. Once they reached her in advance of the Turkish attack helicopter, the difficult part was over. The pirates must have been delighted to find a freeboard of only two metres, close to the lowest possible for a ship that size. Finally, the Victoria’s small crew not only meant fewer variables to interfere with a smooth boarding (such as crew members blasting the attackers with high-powered hoses), but also fewer sets of eyes on deck watching for pirates.
The only element favouring the Victoria’s crew was the timing of the hijacking. Pirate attacks most often occur at dawn and dusk—to take advantage of reduced visibility—and the fact that the pirates chose to attack in the middle of the afternoon meant that the crew was afforded an unobstructed view of the oncoming attack craft.
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Hussein Hersi’s insider account in Chapter 12 provides a detailed sketch of the Victoria gang, both from an operational and a financial standpoint. But can we trust his information? “Pirate math” frequently does not add up, so I will subject it to an external audit.
The first step is to establish the full size of the gang. Former hostages Traian Mihai and Matei Levenescu both stated that there were usually twenty pirates on board the Victoria on a given day, but provided two different figures for the number who congregated on the days leading up to the ransom delivery: thirty-two, according to Mihai, and thirty-eight, according to Levenescu. If, as Hersi said, each member of the operation was required to be on board the ship in order to receive his share (and it is hard to imagine any gang member would not want to be present for the big day), then thirty-two to thirty-eight individuals represented the total membership of the gang; I have averaged the two estimates to reach a figure of thirty-five. Of these, Hersi’s and Levenescu’s testimonies account for fifteen: Computer, Loyan the interpreter, Mustuku the accountant, the “commander of the khat,” nine attackers,1 and two cooks. Presumably, the remaining twenty men were the “holders” who guarded the ship and crew, in rotating shifts, once it had been brought to Eyl.
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Hersi supplied some detailed—though incomplete—payroll figures, including the salaries of Computer ($1.5 million), the nine attackers ($140,000 each), the twenty holders ($20,000 each), and the two cooks ($15,000 each). However, Hersi’s estimates assumed a $3 million ransom, while the actual amount turned out to be only $1.8 million. To reflect the reduced total, I have scaled down each of Hersi’s numbers by 40 per cent: Computer would have received $900,000, each attacker $84,000, each holder $12,000, and each cook $9,000. Regrettably, Hersi did not provide the incomes for the interpreter, the accountant, or the commander of the khat.
Unfortunately, these numbers sum to significantly more than $1.8 million even before including Loyan, Mustuku, and the commander of the khat, all of whom presumably