Murder, Slavery, A Harrowing Chase: Behind the Journalism Series That's Changing the Oceans

New York Times reporter Ian Urbina was in the Southern Atlantic Ocean 150 miles off the coast of Ghana in 10-foot swells and pitch-black darkness when the boat he was on lost all electrical power. The vessel had no lights or navigational system and, to make matters worse, the compass was broken. In the darkness, the horizon was indistinguishable from the sky, and with no one aboard capable of navigating by the stars, the captain had no way of knowing which way was home.

“That was the moment when I had the thought, ‘What a way to go,’” Urbina said last week.

It had already been a nightmarish day. As part of his reporting for The Times’ series “The Outlaw Ocean,” Urbina was trying to rendezvous 200 miles offshore with the Bob Barker, a vessel owned by the environmental activist group Sea Shepherd, to chronicle its pursuit of one of the world’s most infamous illegal fishing trawlers. To get to the rendezvous point, Urbina had hired a vessel run by a dozen port police in Ghana, only one of whom had ever ventured past the country’s maritime border, 12 miles offshore.

The boat made it to the rendezvous point, but there was no sign yet of the Bob Barker. Seas began to build, and to keep the boat upright, the captain had to keep the engines running to ensure his bow took the waves. Soon, the crew on the police boat began to panic, fearing they’d run out of fuel before they got back to shore. Eventually, they turned on their captain in what Urbina called a “near-mutiny” and demanded the vessel head back. They were about a quarter of the way home when the power went out, along with Urbina’s satellite phone. In the darkness, a small error in course heading could send them not back to shore, but to open water.

“I was scared,” Urbina said last week in an interview with Patch. “And I was kind of embarrassed.”

Five hours later, a fishing trawler came close enough to the vessel to relay vital navigational instructions, and to point the crew home. Urbina eventually caught up with the Bob Barker, and his reporting on the ship’s pursuit of the illegal fishing vessel, The Thunder, led to a riveting multi-media feature in the Times called “A Renegade Trawler, Hunted for 10,000 Miles by Vigilantes,” one of six — soon to be seven — feature stories Urbina has written as part of the series.

On Sunday evening, Urbina, who lives in the Patch town of Chevy Chase, was announced as a winner of the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors, for the series, which revealed frightening lawlessness on the globe’s high seas. In its announcement, the Polk award committee praised Urbina for “chronicling a diversity of crimes offshore, including murder of stowaways, intentional dumping, illegal fishing, stealing of ships, stranding of crews and murder with impunity.”

Reporting on the series took Urbina 18 months — much of that time spent on boats out at sea — and led him to six seas and 14 countries. And the logistics, let alone what Urbina saw at sea, were unlike anything he’d encountered in his 15-plus-year career as a journalist.

“Every one of these stories had this grind period where you had to surmount hurdle after hurdle just to get to the story,” Urbina said. “Then when you were there, the ‘there’ was pretty brutal. And the reporting is just starting.”

Michele Kuruc, vice president for ocean policy for the World Wildlife Fund, knows just how hard telling stories like this can be.

“Some of the reporting that Ian did in this series — it’s amazing he came out alive,” Kuruc, told Patch. “A lot of the people he had to deal with to get the stories that he did wouldn’t think twice about somebody who ‘fell overboard.’”

Urbina’s series shed light on a number of shocking practices on the high seas. He found workers who were brought on to boats and treated essentially as slaves, subjected to brutal violence, harsh working conditions and little to no pay. He outed illegal employment agencies that promised workers high pay for jobs at sea but instead sent them to boats notorious for mistreating workers.

Aboard the Bob Barker, Urbina also chronicled the dogged attempts of activists seeking to stop illegal fishing that the world’s governments allow to proceed unimpeded.

And Urbina uncovered a shocking video of four men getting shot clinging to wooden wreckage in the middle of the ocean, while crew from other vessels watched. No one was ever investigated or prosecuted for the murders witnessed by many.

The Times series has led to several convictions of fishermen and calls for change from U.S. and international lawmakers, who want tougher regulations for inspecting, identifying and prosecuting crime from ports and into remote international waters, where officials say the rule of law is nearly nonexistent. When President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry announced a plan to fight illegal fishing and crimes at sea, Kerry cited Urbina’s work, saying he “hadn’t put two and two together in the network in terms of the trafficking piece and the illegal fishing piece.”

Among the other fallout from the series:

• The U.S. Senate passed a federal law giving port authorities more power to investigate violations on ships.
• Mars, Nestle and Hershey were hit with class-action lawsuits for failing to disclose the role forced labor plays in production of their pet food.
• Internationally, the attorney general of São Tomé and Príncipe hailed Urbina’s story, saying it led to convictions against three crew members from the Thunder.
• A UN official resigned for his links to a fishing boat connected with the four people murdered at sea.
• A major Thai seafood company said it would stop buying from ships engaging in illegal labor practices.

“I can tell you that I’ve worked in this field for now more than 30 years,” Kuruc said. “It’s unprecedented to see this kind of coverage for these issues.”

Urbina grew up in Washington and earned a bachelor’s in history from the University of Chicago and a master’s in history from Georgetown University. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and Harper’s. Urbina joined The New York Times in 2003 and became one of the paper’s investigative reporters in 2010.

He’s always been fascinated by what he called “the blue on the globe,” after he took time off during graduate school to work on a ship in Singapore. He always wanted to write about life in the remote ocean, and his editor at the Times, Rebecca Corbett, was sold on the idea.

“It’s not all that often that someone writes a story and everyone, including readers, go, ‘I never knew anything about this,’” Corbett said.

The goal was to spend actual time on ships and not just in harbors and libraries doing interviews and sifting through documents, though there was plenty of that, too.

Urbina’s reporting took him to parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, where ship captains were surprisingly willing to let him and photographers aboard ships with workers kept in horrific conditions.

“We would be straight with (the ship captains), but not specific,” he said. “‘We want to document life on this ship.’”

Getting out to the boats, Urbina said, was more “hopscotch,” than a straight trip. The hardest part, he said, was getting someone to initially take him and a photographer out to sea, where they would meet up with another boat that would take them farther to another boat, and so on, until they reached their target.

The farther away from shore they got, the easier it was to convince people to take them on in remote waters, as long as they had money and promised not to interfere with the ship’s business, he said.

“Some boats wouldn’t let us on. It took a lot of tries,” Urbina said. “But other boats, ‘Why would you want to get here? Why would you want to get on this boat?’ But they said, ‘Fine, you could come on. But a couple clear rules. You do what I say, stay out of my guys’ way and don’t photograph me, the captain or our license plates.’”

The activist group Sea Shepherd’s pursuit of the rogue fishing vessel The Thunder provided the most riveting narrative in the series. Readers were taken on a gripping, 110-day pursuit through three oceans — off the coast of Antarctica, around the southern tip of Africa and into the South Atlantic. The Thunder was laying miles of illegal nets and indiscriminately killing a mass of sea life, in violation of international treaties.

Urbina joined Sea Shepherd for a week toward the end of the chase just before the Thunder eventually sank, possibly scuttled by its own crew in an attempt to hide evidence of their crimes.

“I got a call as I was flying back (to the United States) that said, ‘You’re not going to believe what just happened,’” he said, recalling the moment he was told that the ship was sinking.

“I remember looking up at the board to see if there was any flight that could get me back to Ghana. And I was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ It took so much time and effort to get on the boat in the first place, there’s no way I could get back before it sunk.”

Urbina pieced together the rest of the narrative using radio transcripts, ship logs and interviews with crew members. His tireless reporting was rewarded with one of the top prizes in journalism.

The Polk Award winners will be honored with an April ceremony in New York City.

“The reporting for this series was harder than any I’ve ever done,” Urbina said. “For each story I found myself wondering if anyone would even notice or care about the types of crimes I was finding out there. That the Polk judges noticed and thought the effort was worth it was validating.”

Urbina isn’t finished. He still has at least one more piece in the series coming, he says. And in the meantime, he continues to write follow-up stories on the fallout from his reporting. On Monday, he published a story about a new U.S. law that will ban seafood imports from ships that use forced labor.

“This one feels too important right now to put down,” he said.

Photo courtesy Ian Urbina