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A fellow buccaneer, the captain of one of the replacement crews, first turned to piracy in the late 1970s and reckons he has taken 20 ships since. He and his crew are from the coastal villages of the Sangir Islands, thousands of kilometers east of Babi near the southern tip of the Philippines. Like Palembang, Sangir is renowned in the piracy world for producing Indonesia's best sailors. The squat 54-year-old captain has been arrested twice, once in Malaysia when he was busted for smuggling bales of Cambodian marijuana, and once in China. Both times he was released after his bosses bribed the authorities, but he suspects his employers arranged both arrests so they could cut his fee, a common ruse. Choosing a boss is a delicate business, he says: "But sometimes we just take the front money and disappear, so it works both ways."
As he waits for his next sortie, he tells the story of his last raid in February. A crew member on a Thai palm-oil tanker gave him the layout of the ship and an exact time and place to meet in the Malacca Strait. The captain contacted the boss of a Hong Kong triad who agreed to pay the captain and his crew $9,000 upfront and another $50,000 on delivery. The triad also hired a crew of bajing loncat and arranged fake papers for the ship under a new name. On the agreed night, two speedboats raced west out of Babi. After an hour or two, they cut the engines and waited, bobbing in the swell of passing carriers. In the first boat, the boarders assembled their satang, lashing together lengths of bamboo; the remaining twine they used for sword belts and handcuffs. In the early hours, the Thai tanker appeared as a collection of bright lights on the horizon. The two teams waited for it to pass, slipping on their balaclavas before firing up the outboards and circling around behind. As they approached, crashing over the bow wave and skidding on the bubbling sea, thrown up by the tanker's immense screws, two men from the first team stood and lifted their poles as though for a joust. As soon as they could hook the side of the ship, they began climbing, the pilot accelerating in short bursts to keep the boat steady. In seven seconds, the first man was over the side and crouching by the rail, keeping watch. Five men followed and headed straight to the bridge where they took the captain and pilot hostage and cut the ship's communications before assembling the rest of the crew. The sailors' hands were slipped behind their backs into the handcuffs, which were then looped around their necks, rigged to tighten in a struggle. The ship captain's hands were tied in front so he could open the safe. The boarders communicated in rudimentary English to disguise their origins. "Those guys are the pirate experts. We call them the Kopassus," says the captain, using the name for Indonesian army commandos. "They signal to us that it's O.K. and we take over."
At daybreak, long after the Kopassus sped off, the new crew dropped the hostages with food and water on a deserted island off the east Sumatran coast near Kualatungkal. They also left the inside man so as not to arouse suspicion. Then they headed northwest, back past Singapore, skirting Melaka and Medan. Over the next seven days, while the captain sailed, the crew of 14 worked, repainting the entire ship and plastering a new English name over the Thai lettering on the bow. Off the Maldives, they rendezvoused with another tanker and the Hong Kong crime lord. The palm oil was pumped into the second boat and the first one auctioned, a Filipino outbidding a Thai buyer with an offer of $100,000. Their work over, the captain and his crew collected their payoff and caught a ride to Manila with the new Filipino owner. From there, they flew to Jakarta and split up, laying low in Sangir for a year before returning to Batam, an island city neighboring Babi. The captain has no idea where the palm oil was sold, but says shipowners often organize pirate attacks as part of an insurance fraud. Only the Chinese bosses know all the details, he says.
The pirates' open and unpunished presence has led to accusations of complicity with the Indonesian security forces. "I don't think there is much doubt that they are involved," says ship security expert Trevor Hollingsbee. Arthur Bowring, director of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, has a different analysis. "Some small- scale military people may be involved. But there is a theory that the Indonesian government is tolerating or encouraging piracy to get aid for better boats and equipment," he says. "Certainly they don't seem to be doing anything to stop it." He proposes a draconian solution: sanctions against Jakarta. Meanwhile, Indonesian patrolmen blame Singapore for what they say is a total lack of cooperation. Despite its squeaky clean reputation, they say, Singapore's patrols never follow up on their alerts when a pirate they are pursuing slips into Singaporean waters. They add that the city-state is a hub for smuggling — oil, wood, rattan. But all agree that the dire state of the Indonesian economy — and the accompanying erosion of law and order — has pushed piracy to such unprecedented levels. "The salaries for sailors have gotten lower and lower," says the captain. "And it's getting more and more difficult to get legal work. It's very hard to refuse this sort of job."
The survival of sword-wielding pirates in island lairs has as much to do with custom as desperation. The captain sees his life as traditionally Sangir. "For us the sea is a huge source, for fish, but also for life," he says. "It's the way our people have always lived. My grandfather and great-grandfather before him, and my son, too." The pirate king half-heartedly claims he was forced into crime by poverty. But he admits to "throwing a lot around" on women and booze after a raid: "We never count our money, we just take it out of our pockets and give it out." He also takes an obvious joy in flouting authority. Except for 1992 when a raid on a tanker belonging to former President Suharto's wife prompted mass arrests, he has successfully evaded his pursuers for 25 years. Says the pirate king: "Our culture is a water culture and there have been pirates here since the 12th or 13th century. You have to have courage and spiritual strength to be a pirate and Palembang men have it." And discipline? The pirate king almost chokes laughing.