At the height of the Somali piracy crisis, with twenty navies patrolling the coast, a Tokyo restaurant owner flew in with four fishing boats and a promise to buy whatever they caught. The attacks collapsed. Who deserves the credit is still argued.
They were operating hundreds of miles out into the Indian Ocean from motherships, boarding tankers and bulk carriers with ladders and rifles, and sailing them back to anchor off the Somali coast. At any given time they were holding several hundred sailors hostage, sometimes for years, waiting for ransoms that ran into the millions.
Most of the world knew the problem from one incident two years earlier: the April 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the capture of its American captain, Richard Phillips, which ended with Navy SEAL snipers firing from the fantail of a destroyer and became a Tom Hanks film.
