Malacca Strait Pirates
October 2007
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Malacca Strait Pirates
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By Peter Gwin
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He estimated that 75 percent of heisted cargoes were inside jobs involving the ship’s crew, often the captain. “That’s why most are not reported,” he said, explaining that shipping companies often write off these losses rather than suffer bad press and risk losing their insurance.
It works like this, he said. A ship broker would call him and say there’s a customer who needs diesel fuel. “I know a crewman on a tanker,” Jhonny says. “I call his hand phone and ask him if he is happy. If he says yes, no problem. But if he says no, I tell him I make him happy, and then we make a plan.” But the crewman won’t work legitimately again, I said. He laughed. “Seamen have lots of names. Some have three or four passports. No problem.”
Over two weeks, I interviewed several of Jhonny’s former crewmen spread among the Riau Archipelago and a captain who knew him in Hong Kong. All corroborated what Jhonny told me. One sailor said he trusted Jhonny because “he never lies. He always pays what he says he will pay. Sometimes the legal ships don’t do that.”
In my hotel room, we laid a map of the Malacca Strait on the bed. Jhonny’s thick fingers traced the coastlines with practiced familiarity. He pointed to places with obscured shoals and noted currents and unmapped islands. “This area,” he drew his finger around Batam and Singapore, “too many patrols now.” He moved his finger to a spot south of the strait, “now the best place for shopping is here.”
“Shopping,” Batam argot for the lowest level of piracy, is roughly equivalent to robbing a liquor store. Even the smallest cargo ships and tankers carry sizable amounts of cash, used to buy supplies in port and to pay the crew. Often these ships are older and have less security than newer, larger ships. Sometimes, Jhonny says, the captains are running their own scams, conserving fuel by going slow, then selling the excess to passing ships and pocketing the cash. He explained that shopping trips are carried out by teams of “jumping squirrels,” pirates who use wooden boats called pancungs, rigged with powerful engines, to stalk the ships at night and climb up the sides and rob the crew. I tell him I would like to meet a jumping squirrel. “It’s possible,” he said, and dialed a number.
Bulletproof Jumping Squirrels
It was dark when a slender young man with bleached highlights in his short dark hair and a small silver hoop in his left ear knocked on the door. He looked stunned to be greeted by a foreigner and grinned nervously at Jhonny, his smile marked by the black, ragged edge of a rotted front tooth. “Is this dangerous?” he asked.
Jhonny introduced him as Beach Boy. With his bronze skin, athletic physique, and large waterproof watch, he looked the part. Just ten months out of an Indonesian prison, Beach Boy had served two years for his role in hijacking a barge carrying more than a million dollars’ worth of crude palm oil. After making off with the cargo, his gang scattered. But Beach Boy’s accomplices betrayed him to the police. Once in custody, he says he was interrogated, beaten, and shot in the leg. He rolled up his left pant leg to reveal a fist-size scar on his calf. “The bullet is still in there,” he said. Yet the most painful consequence of his prison term, he said, was the loss of his family. His wife wrote him in prison that she had left him for another man.
I asked Beach Boy why he had become a pirate. “I can’t get work,” he said. Jhonny explained that Indonesian sailors often lacked the maritime certifications required to work on commercial ships. For years, young men like Beach Boy relied on older seamen to teach them the trade and then obtained counterfeit credentials to avoid the expensive training needed to become legally licensed seamen. But in recent years the international shipping community had clamped down on such practices, leaving many experienced Batam sailors unemployed.
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