They stole more than forty sailboats in the Mediterranean. This is how they did it

A real criminal gang composed of a dozen people, highly organized and led by a pair of naval officers, one Ukrainian and the other Russian brought several charterers in the Mediterranean and Turkey to their knees, stealing more than forty sailboats and making them disappear, probably in South America and the Caribbean. It sounds like the plot of a state-of-the-art TV series, but it’s all true.

It was Turkish police who requested help from Interpol, now an alleged thief, Corriere della Sera reports, has been arrested in Moscow.

Stealing a boat is no simple affair: here, in a nutshell, is how the gang acted. First and foremost, according to investigators, the thieves took orders from “customers” with ample funds, preparing ad hoc “missions” after painstaking reconnaissance work on the papable boats. None of this would have been possible, of course, without an international network of skippers, shippers, and accomplices capable of transferring the vessel by circumventing controls and with a good knowledge of safe areas where they could possibly hide.

The pattern of blows was well-rehearsed, with the gang dividing into two teams: the first were the “hook.” A couple, consisting of he and she, playing the role of wealthy cruise passengers seeking relaxation, would show up at ports in the southern Mediterranean, contacting charter companies and renting luxury sailboats. They paid the deposit (about 3,000 euros) and waited for the arrival of the second team, in charge of taking the yacht away, composed of people with fake passports and counterfeit boat licenses. The thieves would galley and set sail, then leave the first team at the hotel to act as cover in case anyone asked questions.

Once departed, the bandits would uninstall the on-board GPS by placing it on the tender, which would then be left adrift (or even anchored in a roadstead), effectively eliminating the possibility of being tracked by charter companies and confusing any verification by the Coast Guard. The figures show 24 boats stolen in Italy, 14 in Greece and 6 in Croatia, plus those in Turkey.

According to Turkish sources, many of the boats would stop in Lebanon and then be loaded onto freighters bound for South America. The investigative hypothesis, writes the Courier, is that the buyers live on the other side of the Ocean, characters with good assets and capable then of laundering the “goods”: selling them again or renting them out using bogus papers. Police are combing through companies that allegedly allowed the transfers.
The boats may have been “passed on” to formations involved in smuggling in the Caribbean or in our waters. Other boats are estimated to have remained in the Mediterranean, under another name and modified, or ended up who knows where. To date, only six boats have been recovered. A very meager haul.

(photo is purely indicative and does not refer to the reported facts)

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