Modern-Day Buccaneers Scourge the High Seas With Looting, Murder

LIVERPOOL, England — John Dalby chases pirates for a living.

Real ones. The kind who commandeer ships and steal cargo and dump crews overboard.

Dalby and his team track them down with the same swashbuckling style and tried-and-true tactics that pirates themselves have used for centuries: with weapons, speed and cunning.

"We once shanghaied a ship in Shanghai," Dalby boasts, merrily describing how his band of heavies, ex-military types, "exercised our charm and our left boot" to retake a Greek bulk carrier off the coast of Shanghai and deliver it to its owners.

Business is good, says the 51-year-old ex-sea captain, hunched over his computer on the top floor of his elegant Georgian home. The screen shows a map of the world, dotted with tiny red ships--vessels on which Dalby's company, Marine Risk Management S.A., has secretly installed satellite-tracking devices. "Magic boxes," Dalby calls them. They alert owners when a ship is off course. And if a ship is off course, it may well have been hijacked by pirates.

Gone are cutlasses, parrots and bottles of rum. Modern-day buccaneers wear ski masks, not eye patches. They carry rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, long knives and machetes. They commandeer luxury yachts off the coast of Greece, storm oil tankers off Singapore, creep up the hulls of cargo ships off Africa.

Like pirates of yore, they can be ruthless. In 1998, pirates killed 23 crew members of a bulk carrier in the South China Sea, weighting their bodies before throwing them overboard. In 1996, bandits murdered a British tourist on his yacht off the island of Corfu. Earlier this year, Somali gunmen hijacked a German yacht en route from New Zealand to a tourist island in the Indian Ocean, taking four hostages and demanding $50,000 in ransom.

There have even been reports of modern-day pirates forcing victims to walk the plank.

"There is nothing romantic about the modern pirate. The modern pirate is a violent seaman gone bad," says Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London, a nonprofit division of the International Chamber of Commerce. The IMB compiles annual reports on piracy around the world.

The bureau estimates that at least $1 billion is lost to piracy every year. Although it has no statistics on injuries or lives lost, the reports make clear that murder and mayhem are rampant on the high seas, affecting ships and sailors from every seafaring nation.