Dead in the Water

Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838952549
• Print ISBN:
  9781838952525
• Subtopic: Business General

Winner of the True Crime Awards Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.

***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick***

A Financial Times, The Times and The Economist Book of the Year

'Gripping... A startling tale of fraud and impunity. ' The Economist

'I read it in one sitting, and I know it'll stay with me for a long time.' Oliver Bullough, Sunday Times bestselling author of Moneyland

Inside the corrupt and secret business of global shipping, the explosive true story of a notorious international fraud and murder

In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered.

Dead in the Water is a shocking expose of the criminal inner-workings of international shipping, an old-world industry at the backbone of our global economy. Through first-hand accounts of those who lived the hijacking - from members of the ship's crew and witnesses to the attacks, to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett's murder - award-winning reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the astounding truth behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history.

CHAPTER 1

A LUCKY LAND

In the middle of a spring night in 2011, Cynthia Mockett woke to the sound of gunshots. The rattle of automatic rifle fire was something she’d learned to tolerate over the years. But this sounded close, just outside her bedroom. Cynthia was sixty-four years old, a small, forceful woman with silvery hair and intense eyes. Her husband, David, was still asleep as she slid out of bed and crept over to the window. She could see the outlines of the old city of Aden laid out before her, its neat white buildings clinging to the rocky slopes of an extinct volcano, illuminated by the lights of the harbor beyond.

The villa that she and David had rented for several years in Yemen was situated a few blocks back from the ocean in Mualla, a district built by the British for colonial officials and soldiers, half a century before. As she knelt at the window, Cynthia breathed in the acrid smell of burning tires. Below her, crowds of young men were running through the darkness, yelling and shooting out streetlights, the muzzles of their rifles flashing with each report. It wasn’t clear if they were pursuing or being pursued. Suddenly, she heard David’s voice, bellowing at her from across the room. “What the bloody hell are you doing, Cynth? Get away from there!” She climbed back in bed and lay awake until the sky began to lighten, listening to the gunfire and, farther away, the claps of artillery echoing off the hillsides.

A little before eight o’clock, Cynthia opened the villa’s cast-iron gates and David eased his Lexus sport-utility vehicle into the pitted street, giving her a wave as he set out for his office near the Aden port. She looked around as he drove off. Children were playing amid the broken glass and vendors were hawking fruit, like nothing had happened the night before. At first Cynthia felt foolish, as if she’d imagined it all. But she couldn’t escape a feeling of unease. David had lived and worked in Yemen for more than a decade, a period in which Cynthia had shuttled regularly between the Arabian Peninsula and their home in England. Never an easy place, Aden had been noticeably disintegrating for months. They’d begun to talk about David’s plans for retirement, and spending more time with their grandchildren. Maybe now was the moment, Cynthia thought, for him to move back permanently.

The Mocketts had spent most of their forty-three years together in hot, dangerous places. They met when Cynthia was fifteen, living in a small town in Devon, a pastoral county in southwest England that’s also home to Europe’s largest naval base. He was a year younger, the friend of a cousin, and introduced himself by wolf-whistling in her direction. “Cheeky devil,” she said to herself. Later, he turned up at her bedroom window, refusing to leave until she agreed to go to the movies with him. Just before Christmas 1968, David put on a tie and Cynthia her best dress, and they hitched a ride to the registry office in a relative’s delivery van, sitting atop a pile of cabbages on their way to be married. David was a strapping six feet four, with a thunderous laugh and a way of dominating any room he walked into. In black-and-white photographs from the time, he looks like a young Sean Connery, broad-shouldered with a thick brow. His father worked for the Admiralty, the government department responsible for the Royal Navy, and he’d lived as a child in Sri Lanka and Gibraltar, gaining a taste for adventure that never left him. Cynthia thought he was the most exciting man she’d ever met. She still thought so four decades later, after he’d lost most of his hair and thickened around the middle.

As a sailor in the merchant navy, David went to sea for months at a time, which was hard on Cynthia, even if she knew the life she’d married into. It was unusual, especially in the 1970s, but David would invite her to join him on voyages whenever he could. She sailed with him once on a cargo ship carrying iron ore from India to Japan, spending much of the trip cleaning rust-colored dust out of their cabin. Some of the crew objected to the presence of a woman on board, but Cynthia didn’t much care. She had a quiet manner that masked a steely streak. She laughed easily, even at the bawdy humor of the young sailors, who treated her as a kind of surrogate mother. When the captain wasn’t on the bridge, David liked to let her steer the ship.

Money got tight when the Mocketts’ two daughters, Sarah and Rachael, were born, and in 1977 David took the offer of a well-paid job on land, as a port superintendent in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the midst of the oil boom. By then he’d earned a master mariner’s certificate, qualifying him to skipper a vessel. Though he went ashore before being given his own command, he was still known thereafter as Captain Mockett.

Initially, Cynthia and the girls lived with him in a secure development for Westerners, insulated from the conservative strictures being enforced by Saudi religious police. But after a few years, Cynthia suspected she’d go mad with boredom if she had to spend many more days drinking gin and tonics with the other wives inside the walls of the compound. And she wanted their daughters to have a proper British education. She and the girls moved back to Devon, into a rambling stone cottage that everyone called the Vicarage. David stayed in the Middle East. He loved the people, and the rugged beauty of the coasts. Besides, the pay was good, and maintaining the Vicarage wasn’t cheap. When he was back in England, he would relax with a jigsaw puzzle and tell Cynthia about his adventures, like the time the Saudi king’s camels escaped and rampaged through the port. Some of them had to be retrieved thirty miles away.

In 1998, David took a position as a marine surveyor in Yemen. Surveyors play a vital, unsung role in seaborne trade, providing independent analyses of marine mishaps, helping to pinpoint their cause and informing decisions on compensation. It would be Mockett’s job to inspect vessels and cargo passing through Yemeni waters, on behalf of the various merchants, traders, bankers, shipowners, and insurance companies who required his services. One day he might cast his expert eye over a tanker with engine trouble carrying oil from Kuwait to Texas; the next a damaged consignment of steel rebar bound for Rotterdam. Even in an age of largely automated container vessels and real-time satellite navigation, such incidents occurred at sea constantly, and with a shortage of skilled surveyors in the region there was good money to be made.

Yet moving to the poorest nation in the Middle East was a daunting proposition. Then as now, Yemen could make a strong claim to being the least governable place on earth. And many have tried to govern it, since the country sits on an important geopolitical choke point between Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa, abutting the main shipping route from Asia to Europe. The Ottoman Turks came in the sixteenth century, trying to bribe the local sheikhs into loyalty, only to be beaten back again and again by fierce highland tribes. One Turkish official described mountains that “pierce the clouds, a place where there was only pain.” Legend has it that Ottoman troops had to be chained to their ships to force them into service in Yemen’s battlegrounds.

Next came the British, who set their sights on Aden as a way station for ships sailing to and from the Indian colonies. In 1837, an attack on a Britishflagged vessel provided a pretext for the East India Company to seize what was then a fishing village. British investment helped bring a degree of prosperity to southern Yemen, especially after the Suez Canal opened up the trade route through Egypt, and Aden became one of the most important ports in the Empire, a gateway between East and West. Colonial administrators installed a clocktower known as “Little Ben,” a statue of Queen Victoria, and a Western-style bureaucracy. Once again, though, the region’s inhabitants vigorously asserted their independence. Aden was so rough that it became a punishment posting for army regiments that had fallen into disgrace. A Scottish officer stationed there in the 1850s complained about the prickly heat, the howling of wild dogs, and an “aspect of desolation which pervades the place.”

In the 1960s, as the British were being driven out by militants armed with grenades and machine guns, Egyptian troops were embroiled in a bloody campaign in the north of Yemen, in what Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser called “my Vietnam.” After the British left, a Kremlin-backed socialist regime took control of the south, which nearly came apart in a bloody civil conflict in the 1980s. Russians stationed in Aden were forced to flee the slaughter, ignominiously, on the royal yacht Britannia, which had been sailing nearby. Even fellow Marxists found the violence excessive. “When are you people going to stop killing each other?” Cuban leader Fidel Castro grumbled to a local counterpart.

By the time David Mockett settled there in the late 1990s, Yemen’s southern and northern halves were united under a lavishly corrupt military ruler called Ali Abdullah Saleh. The country was still roiling and chaotic, overflowing with Russian firearms, aggressive tribal militias, and, increasingly, Islamic extremists. The president’s security forces offered a haven to jihadis returning from Afghanistan, including associates of Osama Bin Laden and his growing Al Qaeda network, even as Saleh tried to persuade the outside world that he was a willing partner, deserving of foreign aid. Traveling outside the major cities often required an armed escort from police who, along with roughly three-quarters of the male population, spent every late afternoon chewing qat, a mildly narcotic leaf that produces a high said to be somewhere between a strong cup of coffee and a line of cocaine.

Despite it all, Mockett was intoxicated by Yemen. He’d tried a spell in Dubai and hated it. It was like living in Disneyland, he told friends. In Yemen, he found the Arabia of One Thousand and One Nights, untainted by money and modernity, home to some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. In the northern capital, Sana’a, thousands of stained-glass windows twinkled like jewels above qat sellers working by lamplight. In Hadhramaut, mud palaces painted in pastel shades were carved out of desert cliffs, unchanged since the time of the Romans, who called Yemen “Arabia Felix,” the lucky land, a fertile territory where camel caravans stopped to rest and relax.

Mockett thought Yemen’s dangers were mostly hype. As long as you’re respectful, he told Cynthia, it’s perfectly safe. He was quite happy eating breakfast on the street with regular Yemenis, using his hands as they did and making small talk in his limited Arabic. On long drives through sun-blasted mountain ranges, he and Cynthia could hear the echoing shouts of herdsmen communicating across valleys. Cynthia thought they sounded angry. “They’re just talking to each other,” David said. “That’s the way they do it.” Those peaks had a harsh beauty that appealed to him, just as they had to the interwar explorer Freya Stark, who wondered at “the high-shouldered mountains of Yemen . . . smoldering and dusky, as if the black volcanic points were coated with desert sand, and the red sandstones subdued by ashes of volcanoes.”

Not even a brush with death could change his mind about his adopted home. It happened in March 2002. At the time Mockett was living in Hodeida, a port town up the coast from Aden. Returning from work one evening, he was locking his car when he noticed two men on a motorbike, stopped outside the front of his house. One of them had turned to face Mockett, raising an object to his shoulder that looked very much like a rifle. Before he could fully comprehend what was happening, Mockett heard a crack, and then felt a searing pain in his neck. “Naturally, I clapped my hand to the area and then, to developing horror, saw blood!” he wrote in a report for the police. “I dropped my keys and the phone and clipboard and RAN.”

It turned out the bullet had ricocheted off Mockett’s car and passed through his neck, just missing an artery. Like a good surveyor, he made sure he collected the round, as evidence, before calling a friend to drive him to the hospital. He told Cynthia about the shooting over the phone, a few days after it happened. They were in the middle of doing a crossword together—David in his Yemeni villa, Cynthia at the Vicarage, when he interrupted. “Cynth, I’ve been shot,” he said curtly. She was shocked, although she tried not to show it; her immediate response was “How did you manage that?” Mockett never found out who targeted him or why. The local cops told him, improbably, that he’d been hit by a stray bullet fired in celebration from a nearby wedding. Later, Cynthia would come to suspect that a local businessman was behind the attempt on her husband’s life, perhaps someone who’d lost money because David refused to participate in a cargo scam.

Dozens of visitors came to see the injured surveyor in hospital, including the regional governor, which Mockett took as evidence that most Yemenis wanted him around. He took the bloodstained bullet home as a souvenir and added the incident to his repertoire of stories. Whenever he told it, he mock-lamented that the doctors had done such a good job that he didn’t even have a proper scar to show off, just a tiny pale dash. “No badge of honor!” he complained.

Mockett decided to stay in Yemen, later relocating to Aden, the country’s primary port. As a former outpost of the Empire, it could offer comforts that were hard to find elsewhere. There was a decent hotel, the Sheraton, which had a metal detector in the lobby and a sign saying “NO GUNS OR DAGGERS.” There was an Anglican church, a smattering of eccentric British expats to hang out with, and even places where they could order beer. It was Yemen’s most outward-looking city, a place where people from all over the country could let their hair down, relatively speaking. Once their daughters were grown, Cynthia never turned down a chance to visit and spend some time with her husband. She’d envisaged her 2011 trip as a vacation, though the nocturnal gunfire punctured any notion that it would be a carefree break. Not much of a holiday, she thought the next morning, as she surveyed the damage outside their villa.

In the days that followed, street protests broke out all over Aden. It was the dawn of the Arab Spring, a wave of demonstrations against oppressive regimes that had spread from Tunisia across the region. President Saleh’s government was as corrupt and unscrupulous as its neighbors, and money from the country’s few oil fields, which he’d previously used to placate would-be opponents, was running out. Yemeni security forces responded to calls for change by attacking unarmed protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition, killing hundreds, while Saleh’s image—slick hair and a prototypical despot’s mustache—looked on reproachfully from billboards and murals.

One morning, the Yemeni woman the Mocketts employed as a housekeeper and cook approached Cynthia. “You need to go home, madam,” she said. Cynthia nodded. “No, not on your own. You need to go home with Mr. David.” Cynthia went to a meeting of expats at the Anglican church, where many of those present suggested the same thing. “I think I’ll wait,” she told them. Shortly afterward, the vicar fled.

But when Cynthia tried to talk to David about the situation, he told her that people were being hysterical. He refused to hire a driver or bodyguard and continued driving himself to work as usual. If there was a protest blocking the road, he simply took another route. Following his instructions, Cynthia stayed inside during the day, keeping toward the center of the house, where she passed the time reading and knitting. Otherwise, she would join him as he pored over maritime reports in his office by the port. The Yemeni employees there called her “Mrs. David.”

There were things about her husband’s professional life that had always been mysterious to Cynthia. She suspected he was holding information back, to stop her worrying about his safety. Every week, he would take her down to watch ships come and go at Steamer Point, where Queen Elizabeth had once disembarked. Aden’s port had faded considerably since its British days—the paint on the oil pipes fueling the ships was peeling, and rubbish was strewn around in shoulder-high piles—but there was always something to see. There were hulking tankers and container ships the size of floating towns, jostling with motorboats and slender-sailed Arab dhows. There was sometimes a half-submerged wreck in the harbor, the ragged carcass of an earlier “casualty,” as people in the maritime trade called broken vessels. David always watched the tugboats off-loading passengers. Cynthia often felt he was looking for something or someone, but if he was, he kept it to himself.

Anxiety was growing in Aden’s tiny expatriate community. The Mocketts had hosted a security meeting with staff from the British embassy at the villa, and the UK government had advised citizens to leave Yemen as soon as possible. David and Cynthia bought a rolling airline ticket in case they needed to get out in a hurry; at the end of each day, it automatically renewed for the next available flight. One of their friends had mentioned a slightly out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Lucky Land
• 2. The Gate Of Tears
• 3. Intruders
• 4. Distress Signals
• 5. A Braver World
• 6. The Tallest Man In Yemen
• 7. Evidence, Dear Boy
• 8. Shock Waves
• 9. An Upstanding Constable
• 10. For Those In Peril On The Sea
• 11. No Cure, No Pay
• 12. Hot Frogs
• 13. Below The Surface
• 14. War Risks
• 15. Metal Mickey
• 16. Circumstantial Evidence
• 17. Marked
• 18. Super Mario
• 19. An Unreliable Witness
• 20. Bearing Gifts
• 21. I’M Not Afraid
• 22. Zulu 2
• 23. Two Greek Guys
• 24. The Job
• 25. Don’T Leave The House
• 26. Judgment
• 27. The Captain
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Insert Photo Credits
• Notes
• Index
• Picture Section