Kit10Phish Explains It All: Yacht Crimes (2010-2015)

Sept 2010

Turkey's government has seized the 446 ft state yacht, named Savarona, following media reports that a vice ring had used the vessel to throw sex parties with prostitutes. Further published reports state that a high-ranking Kazakh official and Tevfik Arif, an American real estate magnate, were aboard during the raid.

Turkey bought the Savarona in 1938, as a gift for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army officer and war hero, who built up Turkey from the ashes of the defeated Ottoman empire. Atatürk spent six weeks on the MV Savarona, where he chaired Cabinet meetings and hosted some foreign dignitaries before dying later that year. Though Savarona remained (and still remains) government property. Starting in 1989, the superyacht began operating as a charter yacht under a 49-year lease extended by the Turkish government to a company operated by Kahraman Sadıkoğlu, a Turkish businessman. After the raid, the lease was ordered canceled by Turkey’s finance minister, Mehmet Simsek. According to Reuters, Simsek also stated, “If the company does not agree on the cancellation of the ship’s license, we will take the case to court and make the effort to have it annulled by a court ruling.”

The agency report said the indictment alleges that Arif bankrolled the party aboard the yacht, which has 17 luxurious suites in addition to the master suite. Leaders of the sex ring allegedly charged clients between $3,000 (£1,900) and $10,000 for a night with the prostitutes, who were said to have originated from Russia and Ukraine. According to Reuters and other published reports, more than a dozen people, including foreign businessmen and two underage girls, were detained after the raid. Two underage girls and nine women, all said to be prostitutes, were taken for health checks then deported from the country after authorities in the southern city of Antalya confiscated the yacht, the state-run Anatolian news agency reported.

Prosecutors have alleged that Arif organized the parties for prominent foreign businessmen in Turkey to secure business deals for his property investment and development firm. His website lists the Trump Organisation, owned by the US tycoon Donald Trump, as a partner in the group's SoHo Hotel Condominium in New York and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Arif, who said he had partnerships in the United States, Britain and Turkey, called the charges "imaginary". He was released pending trial along with four other suspects.

They face charges including human smuggling, encouraging prostitution and establishing a crime ring. Statues and portraits of the revered statesman are ubiquitous in the country and insults to his memory can be punished with a jail sentence. Meaning, Sadıkoğlu could face additional jail time if charged and convicted of crimes related to the alleged prostitution ring.

Nov 2014

Police in the Dominican Republic raided 40.8 meter luxury yacht The Kingdom on November 11, 2015 finding 54 bricks of a substance believed to be cocaine or heroin. The raid was performed as part of an on-going investigation into Efrain Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, the godson and nephew of Venezuelan first lady Cilia Flores respectively, who were caught trying to make a drugs deal with an undercover agent in New York. All six suspects arrested were found to have connections to the pair.

May 2015

Google executive Forrest Timothy Hayes was found dead on his yacht, Escape, in November 2013 in Santa Cruz Harbor in California. Thanks to surveillance cameras installed on board, what happened to Hayes wasn’t left a mystery.

Video footage captured on the yacht showed Alix Tichelman, a call girl Hayes had hired several times previously, casually gathering her things, finishing a glass of wine and stepping over the motionless Hayes before lowering the blinds and leaving the yacht. According to authorities, Tichelman injected the Google exec with heroin, then left Forrest Timothy Hayes alone without seeking help when he passed out from an apparent drug overdose.

Tichelman was arrested eight months later, and on May 19, 2015, she pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and administering drugs.

Alix Tichelman’s defense attorney, Larry Biggman, says, “It was an accidental overdose between two consenting adults”, and expects to have her sentence reduced to only three years, with a year credited for time served. A Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge has sentenced her to six years in prison.

Oct 2015

Even from his earliest years growing up in Bambaroo, a sleepy sugar-cane farming settlement in Far North Queensland, Gino Stocco was known as a mischief-maker. His father Peter said. "The teachers told us he was smart, but he didn't want to be told." He admits his son caused problems– "He wouldn't listen to me. I would try and tell him how but he knew," Peter doesn't want to go into detail other than to confirm he tried to take Gino to a psychiatrist when he was young but Gino refused to go.

Gino's disregard for authority remained undaunted to the point at which he and his son, Mark, ended up on top of Australia's most-wanted list. After a life of petty crime things escalated. In 2006, they bought a yacht called the Kiwarrak, using the proceeds of Gino's divorce settlement. Over the course of a year, the pirate-like pair sailed from NSW down the coast of Victoria, over to Tasmania and then back to South Australia, leaving a trail of fraud victims in their wake as they visited Adelaide, Tasmania's Huon River, Kangaroo Island, Port Fairy and Apollo Bay.

For the past eight years, the 57-year-old former cane cutter has allegedly, along with 36-year-old Mark, a failed engineering university student and AWOL army recruit, been able to mount a two-man crime wave through the backblocks of Australia's eastern states, committing robberies, arson attacks and assaults and taking payback vandalism to a scale never before seen.

Exploiting the kindness and openness of country residents, the two, who often masquerade as caretakers, defrauded employers for the smallest of slights or rejection of one of their strange requests. Aside from stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, they are accused of flooding houses, destroying sheds, using a battery-operated drill to puncture nearly 100 vehicle tires, emptying troughs, tanks, pesticide containers and fuel drums, making holes in water pipes and destroying pumps, starving stock, and contaminating feed to get back at their employers.

They had escaped police chases, allegedly bashing at least one police officer and, in recent months, shooting at and ramming police cars in broad daylight like modern-day bushrangers while eluding paramilitary law enforcement squads, helicopter patrols, detective taskforces and local vigilantes.

In mid-December in 2006, the Stoccos sailed into Port Fairy and moored in the river. They were seen moving about the boat but kept to themselves. On December 21, the harbor authorities noted the yacht's departure without any mooring fees having been paid and it coincided with about $3000 having gone missing from a break-in at the Port Fairy yacht club. In 2007, their nautical adventures came to an end after authorities caught up with them in Apollo Bay in south-western Victoria.

Former fugitives Gino and Mark Stocco have both been sentenced to 40 years in prison for a crime spree that included the “cold-blooded” murder of 68-year-old Rosario Cimone. The court heard Gino Stocco shot the property caretaker in the stomach with a pump-action shotgun at his son’s urging. The pair dumped the grandfather’s body in scrub, burning his clothes and stealing some money and his boots. The murder occurred at a remote Elong Elong property in central west NSW which was being used to cultivate a multimillion-dollar marijuana crop. The Stoccos had been working and hiding out at the property after spending the previous eight years on the run from police for property offenses and other crimes.

The men showed little emotion when they were sentenced by Justice David Davies. They face an additional 33 charges between them, including obtaining property by deception, and discharging a firearm with intent to resist arrest.

Sources:

https://www.boatinternational.com/luxury-yacht-life/people-parties/biggest-scandals-at-sea--25615

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/prison-escapees-charged-murder-deaths-american-couple-presumed-dead-ya-rcna142414

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/grenada-fugitives-couple-murder-yacht-b2509554.html

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/24/italy-opens-murder-and-manslaughter-case-after-superyacht-sinking

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mike-lynch-drowned-sicily-superyacht-102730570.html

https://www.eonline.com/news/1406623/sicily-yacht-tragedy-hannah-lynchs-sister-breaks-silence-on-angel-teens-death

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/08/19/who-is-mike-lynch-tech-entrepreneur-and-daughter-hannah-lynch-missing-after-yacht-sinks-near-sicily/

https://orangecoast.com/feature/should-california-taxpayers-pay-for-a-killers-sex-change

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Thomas_and_Jackie_Hawks

https://www.smh.com.au/national/gino-and-mark-stocco-like-modernday-bushrangers-20151029-gkm9jq.html

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/mar/31/fugitives-gino-and-mark-stocco-each-sentenced-to-40-years-jail