Although it required years of technical preparation, Proksch’s plan was brazenly simple. It went like this: charter a merchant vessel to carry your costly cargo to a non-specified Far East location; insure the cargo for 31 million Swiss francs (about $18.5 million) with an insurance company carefully selected so as not to question your claim; instead of the expensive uranium processing plant documented on the manifest, load the vessel with 288 tons of antiquated coal-mining and repainted wheat-mill equipment along with other worthless cargo; while supervising the loading of this fraudulent cargo secretly take on board a time bomb packed with enough explosives to completely obliterate Lucona’s steel hull; carefully set the bomb’s timer so that it explodes weeks into the vessel’s voyage when the ship is far from land and in very deep water, ensuring the crew has no chance of survival; and finally, after the bomb explodes and the ship’s shattered hull has plunged to the bottom of the Arabian Sea, entombing everyone on board in a steel coffin, submit your claim to the cargo insurers for reimbursement of your $18.5 million financial loss.

The Lucona affair kept the chattering classes of Vienna entertained for years with tabloid stories of espionage, corruption and murder, culminating in the most sensational criminal trial Austria has ever seen, which claimed the careers and freedom of numerous conspirators and accomplices. The political fallout from the scandal was just as damaging, leading to the 1986 downfall of Udo Proksch’s beloved socialist party and the subsequent resignation of key government ministers connected to Proksch. In a country accustomed to scandal, the Lucona affair is considered to be the scandal of the century.

Through the story’s various twists and turns, the one constant was that Proksch was strongly suspected of foul play right from the start, and his accusers and the authorities were determined not to give up on bringing him to justice. It may have taken thirteen years, but finally, in January of 1990, Proksch found himself on trial for six counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, aggravated insurance fraud and wilful endangerment with explosives. His political connections, which he had counted on for intervention in the past, were now out of power and thus unable to help. For once in his life, he was on his own.

‘Where is this ship? If it’s sunk, it must have hit a mine or been sent to the bottom by a submarine. I don’t think the ship is lying on the bottom of the ocean. Find the Lucona!’

Without this physical proof, the chance that Proksch could slip off the hook was very real. His defence was that the Lucona could have been lost in a number of different ways, all plausible and completely unconnected to him. It was even possible that the ship had been taken by pirates and was still in use, sailing around the world with a new crew and a different name. All these scenarios were designed to complicate the trial and introduce doubts that made it impossible for the state to prove its case without first finding the wreck and examining it. This probably explains why Proksch was so confident about standing up in court and virtually challenging the judge to find the Lucona. He could never have imagined it was a challenge that would be taken seriously.

What Proksch and his defence team hadn’t counted on was the independent and slightly eccentric nature of the presiding judge, Hans Christian Leiningen-Westerburg, who decided that actually finding the Lucona was the only way to guarantee a fair trial. Many people in the Ministry of Justice opposed a search for the wreck, but Leiningen-Westerburg stuck to his guns and initiated an international request for tenders for the search. Although only a handful of companies around the world had experience of working in the extreme depths (over 4,000 metres) in which the Lucona had supposedly sunk, a remarkable twenty-two bids were received by the court.

At the time, although Eastport was internationally known for its record-setting aircraft recovery work, mainly on behalf of the US Navy SUPSALV office, we owned none of the deep-water equipment needed to find and film the Lucona. Despite this, my bosses submitted a bold and highly speculative bid based on building or buying every single piece of equipment required and hoping to have it ready to start the search barely five months later, in early January 1991, as per the court’s timeline for the trial.

Whilst we certainly had a better chance than most of the other bidders, Eastport were by no means favourite for the contract. Even when the list of bidders was reduced to thirteen and finally to a shortlist of three, we still figured we were only third best on the grounds of having no real track record of finding shipwrecks in such deep waters. In the deep ocean, experience is all-important, and there is no easy way to fill that void if it is missing from your team. Our guess was that our fiercest rival and competitor, Oceaneering International, a NASDAQ-listed company that could have bought us ten times over (and ultimately did three years later), was in pole position. So when a fax from Judge Leiningen-Westerburg arrived in late July 1990 naming Eastport as the court’s chosen search contractor and inviting our president Craig Mullen and vice president of operations Don Dean to Vienna for technical discussions, we were delighted and surprised in equal measure.

Even if the names Udo Proksch and Lucona were largely unknown outside Austria, there was no doubt that this case, and the search, was going to generate a great deal of news coverage and public interest around the world. Solving the mystery of a high-seas mass murder by finding the wreckage of a ship destroyed by a time bomb could transform the fortunes of a company like ours virtually overnight, but only if we could deliver a successful outcome. With so much at stake, failing to find the Lucona would be disastrous for both the court and Eastport, with potential lifelong damage for the reputation of everyone involved.

As Craig and Don set off for Vienna, it was still too early to know what my exact role in the project would be, but as the designated side-scan sonar and search expert in Eastport’s bid, I knew I would be a key figure whatever the case. Strangely, that question was answered by Judge Leiningen-Westerburg himself.

We had barely five months’ lead time to specify, acquire, design, build, assemble, integrate and test approximately sixty tons of equipment. It was an insanely ambitious schedule driven by the court’s procedural requirements, which meant that the first time all this new equipment would be together in the same location was when it arrived on the loading dock in Singapore, where it was to be mobilized on board an offshore vessel hired to support the search. Integration and testing would therefore have to occur in the field, which, though completely contrary to best engineering practice, was the only way we could meet the schedule dictated by Leiningen-Westerburg. That it placed an inordinate amount of responsibility on me and my small team to deal with any technical problems that arose was something we simply had to accept.

During the five-month build period, my main responsibility was to assemble the integrated navigation system we would be using and look after the purchase of the side-scan sonar search system, which was being built to my specifications by a small Seattle-based company. Judge Leiningen-Westerburg also visited our offices in Maryland, along with one of his technical experts, the naval architect Dr Gerhard Strasser, to check on our progress. Because of his technical training and better command of English, Dr Strasser did most of the talking, although he would often confer with Leiningen-Westerburg in German. This led me to assume that it would be Strasser who would be joining us during the search, so I was quite taken aback when he told me that the judge would also be coming to sea with us, in addition to two other explosives experts. I could already imagine just how cramped the small vessel we had hired was going to be.

The final surprise came when Leiningen-Westerburg swore me in as an official expert witness to the court. I had been warned that this might be required, but it still caught me a little off guard. Other than being responsible for directing the search operation and collecting evidence for the trial, I had no idea what else might be expected of me. Would I have to give evidence in court? At this point nobody, including the judge, seemed to know the answer to that.

Prior to this I had given little thought to Udo Proksch and the crimes he had allegedly committed. My sole focus was what it would take to find and film Lucona’s wreck. Now, however, I thought I had better start reading up on Herr Proksch and his controversial life.

Born in Rostock, East Germany, in 1934, to a family of Nazi loyalists, Udo Proksch was sent by his father to study at one of the National Political Institutes of Education – otherwise known as NAPOLA – secondary boarding schools for the production of future SS officers and members of the Nazi armed forces. In spite of his small size, he ultimately became one of the elite boys in his class, helped in part by a visit from Heinrich Himmler himself, bearing greetings to Udo from his father. It is believed that NAPOLA is where the young Udo acquired his love of the military and his lifelong taste for the use of explosives. His view of the intrinsic human penchant for war was encapsulated in his declaration that ‘War is the father of all things. We will continue to fight and kill, this is what is inside us.’

Proksch’s first jobs in East and West Germany were menial positions – he was a swineherd, a coal miner and a corpse washer – that gave no indication of the ruthless flair for making money that became apparent when he moved to Austria. He always worked with partners or close friends in his business dealings, which were generally characterized as being secretive and dubious, if not outright illegal. Unusually for an avowed warrior, he went on to study industrial design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and became an award-winning designer and art director for an eyewear company, where through the 1960s, under the alias Serge Kirchhofer, he designed the famous Carrera and Porsche lines of sunglasses.

In 1972, with the fortune he had amassed from his design work and other business ventures, Proksch acquired Der Demel directly from the Demel family, who had owned and run the business since 1857. Despite its grand history (it was first established in 1786) and status, his real interest appeared to be the third-floor suite of mirrored and chandeliered rooms above the pastry shop. There, with the urging of his close friend Leopold Gratz, who was mayor of Vienna and later Austria’s foreign minister, he formed the infamous Club 45, whose elite members from business, the arts, law, science, media and politics would meet in private, engage in debauched parties and hatch illicit money-making schemes.

Everyone who was anyone in the Social Democratic Party (SDP) or the nation’s socialist elite was a member of Club 45. In addition to the founders, Proksch, Gratz and Austria’s finance minister Hannes Androsch, this included such leading government figures as interior minister Karl Blecha, defence minister Karl Lütgendorf, justice minister Harald Ofner and science minister Heinz Fischer. Proksch could count on all of them for favours and political protection when needed. He viewed Club 45 as his personal tool to gain control over its members by having intimate knowledge of their weaknesses and vices: ‘Now the proles have taken over the rudder, I’ll give them what they don’t have: a place where they can dance, gorge themselves and booze it up – but they’ll dance to my tune.’

His connections were not confined to Austria, however. He claimed to be a friend of Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev, King Hussein of Jordan and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. He was alleged to be a spy, either for the KGB or the East German secret service, and was also suspected of being the middleman in various illegal high-tech exports and weapon sales to the Soviet bloc. But it was within the smoke-filled rooms of Club 45 that he hatched what he thought would be his biggest and surest money-making scheme. It depended on a ship called the Lucona not reaching its intended destination.

The Lucona had safely navigated the Adriatic, Mediterranean and Red seas and was now crossing the Arabian Sea, heading for the eight-degree channel marked by Minicoy, an Indian atoll north of the Maldive Islands. It was 23 January 1977, the seventeenth day of what had so far been an uneventful voyage for Jacob Puister, Lucona’s Dutch master. Although he had never sailed this route before, Puister had little to be concerned about, as his ship was making good progress in near-perfect weather conditions. On board with him were his wife, ten ship’s crew and the fiancée of the chief engineer.

His watch having ended at noon, Puister handed over to the chief mate, Jacobus van Beckum, and then attended to some paperwork in his office before heading off to bed for a rest. The Arabian Sea in January is still very warm, so Puister, like most of the crew, had ta...