The millionaire who rescues migrants at sea
by Giles Tremlett
In late June 2013, Christopher Catrambone, a garrulous 31-year-old American entrepreneur who had spent almost a decade travelling the world to build a multimillion-dollar company, decided to take a break. Tangiers Group, which Catrambone runs with his Italian wife Regina, provides insurance in conflict zones to US military subcontractors, NGO workers, journalists and missionaries, among others. The business, rooted in such war-wrecked countries as Iraq and Afghanistan, was flourishing. But that summer, Catrambone decided, the company could take care of itself for three weeks.
Catrambone and Regina, along with Reginas teenage daughter Maria Luisa, set off from their home on the Mediterranean island of Malta, aboard a glistening white 24-metre chartered motor yacht with Burmese teak decking and varnished Tanganyika walnut joinery. As they motored out of Valettas spectacular Grand Harbour past the Che Guevara 2, a sleek 30-metre super-yacht that belonged to the family of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi a Maltese armed forces veteran, Marco Cauchi, was at the wheel, and an old friend of Catrambones, the Texan chef Simon Templer, was there to cook and have a holiday. I love going out on these yearly cruises with my family, Catrambone said. We cant escape each other and get on our iPhones.
Malta, one of the European Unions most southerly points, was an ideal starting place for a three-week cruise to Tunisia and along the coast of Sicily, not far from Calabria, the southern toe of Italy. This is where Catrambone met Regina nine years ago. He had gone to search for his family roots in the place his great-grandfather left for America in the early 19th century, and ended up living down the road from Reginas mother.
On 7 July, they sailed away from Lampedusa, a small Italian island south-west of Malta that lies even closer to North Africa. A business meeting in Tunisia prevented them staying to see Pope Francis celebrate a mass on the island, devoted to the migrants who made the dangerous crossing to southern Europe from Libya in cheap inflatable motorboats and rickety fishing vessels. Some 500 had drowned en route in 2012 alone. Pope Francis lambasted the rich world for its indifference to other peoples suffering: It doesnt affect us. It doesnt interest us. Its not our business.
As they headed south, Regina spotted a beige winter jacket bobbing in the water. Cauchi, who had once run Maltas maritime search and rescue operations, told her it may have come from a sunken migrant boat. Such tragedies were not new, and only a few months later, the popes warnings would be confirmed yet again, when 380 refugees many from Syria and Eritrea drowned over the course of only eight days, most within a quarter-mile of Lampedusa. Migrant deaths became an obsessive topic of conversation on the yacht, and Catrambone, typically, found himself looking for a solution. It makes you think like: Wow! Look at me out here cruising on my boat, at the same time people are out there dying, he said. So our heaven is their hell, right? Our paradise is their hell.
Catrambones business includes, he says, both caring for heroic wounded conflict-zone workers (including multiple amputees) and being part of the financial arm of war. He is coy about his worth, but Bloomberg reports he made his first $10m by the age of 30. His company covers everything from healthcare to emergency evacuations to kidnapping, while Catrambone styles himself a humanitarian, entrepreneur and adventurer. Friends describe him as a compulsive, energetic and tenacious producer of ideas and solutions, who enjoys the drama and challenge of working in some of the worlds toughest spots. A former Roman Catholic altar boy in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Catrambone once considered becoming a priest. Growing up, he tracked natural disasters, coups and the movements of his oil engineer father on a large world map pinned to his bedroom wall. After graduating from a local university, McNeese State, at the age of 20, he was hired and trained by a company that investigated insurance claims. By 26, he had worked as a private eye, a political campaign manager for a Louisiana court official, as an aide in Congress, and as the co-owner of a Cajun riverboat bar serving high-octane bloody marys, jambalaya and gumbo in the US Virgin Islands.
On the yacht, Cauchi an amiable, stocky, sun-weathered 48-year-old told Catrambone stories of rescues. Bodies fished out of the sea can haunt you. Martin Xuereb a former brigadier who had been Cauchis boss as head of Maltas armed services, and would later work with the Catrambones still recalls watching a body bag being unzipped on a patrol boat several years ago. It was this child, maybe seven or eight, with his fists clenched next to his face and his eyes wide open, he told me. But what could one individual, or one wealthy family, do? Money buys many things, but can it stop people drowning in their hundreds and thousands?
By the end of the cruise, Catrambone had decided to set up his own search and rescue operation. I said: Chris, this cannot be done. This is impossible, Cauchi recalled. But he kept persisting. As Catrambone saw it, he was already in the business of saving lives in conflict zones: I rescue people for money in my other job, he told me. I know what to do. His Tangiers Group is privately owned, making it hard to check his claim that it gives the best medical treatment in the world; he brushed off questions regarding a few old complaints I had found on the internet from employees of US defence contractors about his companys investigative methods, citing confidentiality.
But there is certainly nothing phoney about Catrambones passion for saving migrants. He, too, once lost a home in a natural disaster, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans Ninth Ward in 2005, flooding the building beside the St Charles Avenue tram line where both he and Templer lived. (The two men used their compensation money to open the Cajun riverboat bar, but Catrambone still laments the disappearance of the bohemian, racially mixed lifestyle he once enjoyed in his old neighbourhood.)
If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you dont even belong in our community
Catrambone saw the migrants as either desperate, entrepreneurial, or both not too different from his own great-grandfather. He also knew many of the places they were escaping from. Every major economy has had their hands in Africa, and they have had their hands in the Middle East as well, he told me. Our policies have an equal and opposite reaction. You go in. And now they come in. But Catrambone is not interested in politics or advocacy. For him, the problem is saving lives, based on a simple and typically candid analysis. If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you dont even belong in our community. If you allow your neighbour to die in your backyard, then you are responsible for that death.
On a warm afternoon in June 2014, Cauchi steered a 40-metre, steel-hulled boat called Phoenix out of Portsmouth, Virginia, for his first ever Atlantic crossing. Built in 1973 to pull trawler nets off the coast of Canada, it had been chartered as a US military training vessel, but for the previous 18 months it had been laid up and colonised by rats. (Someone had left food in the ships freezers.) The vessel needed a major overhaul, which would be finished off in Malta. Catrambone was on board for the rough crossing: as Atlantic gales stirred up the ocean, the Phoenix proved how tough it was, even surviving a collision with an unidentified object that took a chunk out of its propeller.
Catrambone was determined to start rescuing people in 2014 and had set a hectic repair schedule. It cost a crazy amount of money, said Cauchi. The boat was bought and repaired, for a total of $5.2m, by the Tangiers Group (and still sits on the companys books) but would be operated by a foundation Catrambone named Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas). He hired Martin Xuereb as director in February 2014, after cold calling to invite him for coffee. I am not in the habit of meeting for coffee with someone I dont know, Xuereb, now 47, told me, but he and Catrambone ended up talking for five hours. I wasnt expecting him to be so young. What hits you straight away is his vision, his perseverance and his determination. No volunteers had done anything similar since 1979, when a group of Germans chartered a freighter named Cap Anamur to rescue migrants fleeing Vietnam. An attempt by the same group to rescue 37 people off Italy in 2003 ended with crew members put on trial for facilitating illegal entry into the country; they were found not guilty, and the migrants were deported.
As he attempted to raise funds for Moas, Catrambone found donors sceptical. The Italian navy had launched the Mare Nostrum operation, at a cost of 9m per month, after the October 2013 shipwrecks, to pick up migrants as they left Libyan waters. (Italians are frickin heroes, man, Catrambone told me.) This, at least, made it unlikely that Catrambone would be prosecuted for doing the same. Still, no NGO had become involved at sea, and many European governments complained rescue operations were a pull factor that would increase both migration attempts and deaths. Setting up Moas was not cheap, with monthly operating costs of up to 600,000. Two rigid-hulled inflatable speedboats with twin 70-horsepower engines were bought to ferry migrants to the Phoenix. Catrambone hired an experienced search and rescue crew as well as leasing two helicopter drones and their operators from the Austrian company Schiebel. He was determined to get out to sea, however, and Regina agreed that they could cover the 10-week operation in 2014 with a further $2.3m of their own money.
With Catrambone on board, the Phoenix left on its first mission late in August 2014, heading for international waters close to Libya. The migrant crisis was continuing to intensify. That year, mostly during the migration high season that runs from March to October, 100,000 people squeezed into the overcrowded vessels that pushed off almost daily from the shores of Libya; at least 3,419 died en route.
Moas was planning to act under the instructions of the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome, which covers the zone crossed by migrant boats from Libya and can order any vessel to undertake a rescue. Given how well suited to the task the Phoenix was, it was inevitable that MRCC would eventually ask it to help. Cauchi was a recognised search and rescue expert, and the Phoenixs 1.2-metre freeboard (the space from the waterline to the open deck) made it a far safer vessel to scramble on to than the lumbering tankers and cargo carriers that sometimes lower long rope ladders to already exhausted migrants, some of whom are pregnant or too young to even walk. A doctor was on board and the vessel was equipped to look after 400 people.
Moas rescuers throw bottles of water to refugees in a rubber raft near Malta in August 2014.
The first call came through after four days, on 30 August. The Moas team quickly found itself involved in the simultaneous rescue of two migrant boats, including a wooden fishing vessel with 350 people many of them families from Syria that was slowly sinking. By the end of the rescue, water was flooding onto the main deck of the fishing boat, and many of the migrants were in the sea. So many small children were rescued that the Phoenix almost ran out of baby formula. That was a shock for most of the crew, Catrambone recalled. We were a bit overwhelmed with the thought that this was really happening. These children and mothers were at the hands of the sea, at the hands of death.
The Phoenix rescued 1,462 people in 10 weeks and helped a further 1,500 onto Italian navy vessels. (There were also lulls when the crew fished for bluefin tuna.) The Phoenix operates in international waters that start just 12 nautical miles from the shores of Libya now one of the worlds most violent places, where two separate governments have only tenuous control over their territories. An American consultant hired to advise on security fretted that the ships unarmed crew was too close to Libyan waters, but Catrambone decided he was overreacting after long periods working in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a narrow brush with death during a missile strike in Israel), Catrambone felt he knew how to calibrate risk; the success of his own business, he says, is based in part on the tendency of others to exaggerate danger. We are not afraid to go where others are [afraid], he told me. We dont need a military convoy to take us.
While Catrambone joined the speedboat crew on rescue missions, Regina and her daughter Maria Luisa helped care for the migrants when they arrived on the Phoenix. One night Maria Luisa found herself talking to a fellow 18-year-old a cultured, English-speaking Syrian girl named Rasha, who was travelling on her own after both her parents were killed. I looked at her and I looked at me, and I said: What if I was Rasha? What if I had to see people being killed by snipers every day, seeing my parents killed right before my eyes? I would want to leave, she explained. She was so brave. She travels, she gets on a boat. And she says: Either I am going to make it, or I am going to die trying. The more the rescues went on, and the more stories they heard, the deeper the family and crew found themselves bound to the mission. You might not get on the Phoenix as a humanitarian, Catrambone said. But you are one when you get off.
In October, a few days after their final mission of 2014, I met Catrambone at a small restaurant in Malta. He appeared on a Vespa scooter, looking distinctly unlike a millionaire. (There are expensive cars in his driveway, I later found, but he is still taken to the airport in a tiny old Peugeot 106 by a retired Maltese taxi driver named Charlie.) In the photographs I had seen, Catrambone sported a spivs moustache, though he was starting to add what would become a thick, tightly curled beard. Passionate, single-minded, and slightly unnerved by the press attention Moas had just begun to receive, Catrambone talked up his business but was disarmingly modest. (He says he is the thinker, and I am the doer, Regina told me later. Everything that we have done together has been successful, he added.) He larded his conversation with colourful Louisiana slang, which he then apologised for. He delivered riffs about the millennial generation being tired of huge corporations, excess and greed. He worried that capitalism had lost its soul by eliminating trust. Wealth can be very short-term, he said. We are not trying to be crusaders. Were just being humans, keeping hold of our dignity.
At the time, Catrambone was worried that the pull factor lobbyists had won the argument over European migrant policy. Italy, under pressure from the rest of Europe, had announced the end of Mare Nostrum. Yet the pressures pushing people out of places such as Syria and Eritrea had not disappeared, while Libya remained a perfect operating base for smugglers. When the winter winds settled in the spring, and the sea calmed, migrants would set out once more, he told me; on fine days, that would mean more than a thousand people in numerous boats. The Phoenix, with space for just 400, was set to be the only dedicated rescue vessel.
It took the Mediterraneans worst modern marine disaster, and some 850 deaths, to finally discredit the pull factor theory. On 18 April, as the Catrambones were preparing Phoenix to sail again in May, a large Portuguese cargo boat called the King Jacob was sent to rescue a smaller, steel-hulled cargo vessel carrying up to 900 migrants about 17 miles off Libya. The King Jacob stopped 100 metres from the marooned boat, whose captain believed to be a Tunisian manoeuvred clumsily in the dark, ramming the Portuguese boat. The migrant vessel rapidly sank, taking those below decks with it and tipping the rest into the black night sea. Only 28 people survived. The two dozen corpses pulled from the sea were sent to Malta, where on 23 April, the Catrambones sat at an interfaith funeral before rows of dark wooden caskets, and a single white childs coffin marked Body No 132. Within days, a few wilted flowers on an anonymous common grave at the Addolorata cemetery were the only sign that the dead had ever existed.
A few days later, I sat with Catrambone on the quay in Marsa, Malta as the Phoenix was loaded for its first mission of this year. Individual bags of emergency rations and basic clothing were being prepared by their new partners from the Dutch branch of Doctors without Borders, who would care for the migrants on board. One cardboard box was marked body bags. Catrambone was angry about the King Jacob tragedy, but it had shamed Europes politicians and he was hopeful that something was changing. Naval vessels, including the Royal Navys HMS Bulwark, were on their way. He had even heard Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rabidly anti-immigrant founder of Frances Front National, praise the Phoenixs work. Some still disagreed. We will only encourage more and more people to set sail in upturned bath-tubs and patched-up lilos, Rod Liddle wrote in the Spectator a few weeks later. Among them will be maniacal jihadis and assorted criminals, all expecting to be rescued by the countries which, in some cases, they wish to destroy.
Catrambone fretted that Moas was overstretching family resources both time and money and, with only 1m pledged, he could not understand why there had been so few donations from rich individuals, especially in the Middle East. It is mostly Muslims who are coming, and there should be help from these rich Arab people that are sitting there, that dont know what to do, he said. But separating politics from rescuing migrants is tough: after announcing they would join the Phoenix this year, Doctors Without Borders in Holland lost some of its donors, who were apparently happy to help mitigate damage from war, famine, or Ebola, but did not want their money spent on rescuing people heading for Europe.
By the time I stepped on board the Phoenix to join a weeks mission on 14 June, it looked like 2015 was set to be another record-breaking year for Mediterranean migration. We sailed out past the ancient forts overlooking Vallettas Grand Harbour and into a two to three-metre swell that pushed the short, sharp Mediterranean waves above the height of a man. It was hard to imagine any migrant boat daring to launch in such conditions. But several days of bad weather, when the smugglers rest, were coming to an end.
That same evening, as we were heading south towards Africa, Robel Buzuneh and Misgina Tsigay sat in a warehouse, in what they believed was the Libyan navys dockyard in Misrata a space shared by two smuggling gangs. Like them, most of the 620 people there were Eritreans fleeing a 20-year-old dictatorship known for torture, extrajudicial killings, and forced military service. Buzuneh, a 27-year-old former business student, and Tsigay, 30, were both deserters and, for different reasons, traumatised by the trip. Buzuneh thought he would die in the desert after having been abandoned by his traffickers and running out of food and water. Tsigay had witnessed two of his party, and three Libyan drivers, being shot by an Egyptian border patrol. In the warehouse they ate a monotonous diet of pasta, while men with guns watched over them.
As the Phoenixs reinforced steel bow ploughed through the swell towards the Libyan coast, the Eritreans were shepherded into groups of 50 to 100 and put into motor skiffs that carried them through the dark towards two fishing boats that, to their dismay, were both very old and very small. We did not know the captain and did not know what the boat would be like, Buzuneh said. The Libyans distributed them around the boat, trying to keep it even. Buzuneh ended up stuffed his knees against his ears in a space below deck that was just over a metre high.
Further along the coast, Bakory Jobe, a 20-year-old from Gambia, in west Africa, was part of a group of 109 who took turns carrying a large inflatable boat with a Libyan smuggler sat atop, like on a throne. Fifty minutes after setting out from a forest clearing where several hundred sub-Saharan Africans were gathered, they reached the sea and pushed off in the packed rubber vessel, heading for international waters where they expected to be rescued. My legs were trembling and I was praying the whole night, Jobe said.
(To be Continued)
