Welcome back to bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and we have a fascinating guest today.

He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times,

and we're talking today about his excellent series on the Outlaw Ocean,

and its exhaustive research uncovering lawlessness on the high seas.

Ian Urbina, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

For a financial crime podcast, your series has something for everybody.

There's obscured ownership, trafficked labor, bribery, of course, environmental crimes,

and just general contempt for the law of the sea. For purposes of today's podcast, we're going to

focus on some of these labor issues. Can you set the scene for us a little bit on that, what that means?

We've heard previously from Martina Vandenberg,

who's a real expert on trafficked labor, but it manifests in a fairly unique way, I think,

in the fishing industry, in part because of the extreme isolation of these people. But what prompted

you to start the investigation and tell us what you found. This is part of a larger series

called The Outlaw Ocean, which looks at sort of lawlessness at sea in all its forms. And what

prompted me to start looking into the area was having worked on ships in graduate school.

I was sort of fascinated by the diaspora tribe that is seafarers and the people

that work out there on two-thirds of the planet's surface for which there's very little, you know,

journalism and attention paid. And it just struck me as sort of a ripe territory for

storytelling and investigation.

I do think you're right that the type of trafficking, the type of labor crimes that occur out there

...