Boca del Inferno, Puerto Rico, March 5th, 1825.

They called it the mouth of hell, and on this morning it swallowed a pirate hole.

The passage off Bahaia de Hobos was narrow, shallow, and treacherous, a gap between coral reefs on Puerto Rico's

southern coast, where only small draft vessels dared to thread. For two years, Roberto

C. had used that geography to his advantage, ducking warships from six different nations the way a

rabbit uses a briar patch. But the rabbit's luck runs out the day the hunter learns the warren.

On this particular morning, a merchant sloop sat anchored near the passage, fat and tempting.

Kofrasi, aboard his flagship Anne, a fast six-gun sloop he'd stolen from a Danish captain three weeks earlier, sailed toward

it with a dozen armed men. He had no way of knowing that the merchant was bait, that the USS

Grampus and two armed Spanish sloops were lurking just out of sight, or that the trap had

been set by an alliance of three nations who had finally agreed on one thing.

Roberto Cofrasi had to go. The man they wanted dead was 33 years old, five feet in change,

and had the most famous name in the Caribbean. Governor Miguel de la Torre himself had declared that

neither the tranquil neighbor, the laborious merchant, nor the honest

farmer, felt safe from his claws. That was the official version. The unofficial version, the one

whispered in the shanty towns of Cabo Rojo and the salt harvesting camps along the coast,

was something different. To the poor Criolos of Puerto Rico, El Pirata

Coffresi was something closer to a saint. The truth, as usual, lived somewhere between the

warrant and the legend. Roberto Coffresi and Ramirez de Arellano was born in June 1791 in Cabo Rojo, a harbor town on Puerto Rico's southwestern tip.

His pedigree read like a European novel.

His father, Francesco Giuseppe Fortunato von Kupershershine, was an Austrian nobleman from Trieste,

who had killed a man, stabbed one Josephus Stefani, possibly over a duel, possibly over something dirtier,

...