Originalmente publicado por caribdis
A mother screams for help as she fights to keep her baby’s head above the waves, but in the pitch black all she can hear are the screams of others.
“Darkness,” Fabio Genco, an emergency doctor, would subsequently relate. It was the one word the survivors kept repeating. “Darkness, the darkness they experienced during the shipwreck.”
A red flare arcs into the night above a sea that is now eerily quiet. Some time later there is the flimsy wave of a handheld torch. Both are spotted by the crew of a chartered diving ship moored nearby, an old converted tugboat from East Germany.
Rattled but intact, they have spent much of the last hour staring in disbelief as, illuminated by intermittent lightning, a vessel infinitely more advanced and coveted than their own is enveloped in a tempest of perverse violence.
By the time the storm has eased, it has disappeared altogether.
Six souls are trapped within the aluminium hull, now sinking inexorably towards the seabed 50 metres deep. Another is missing in the water.
Also within the hull, locked in a watertight safe, are believed to be hard drives containing codes of concern to intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Within the boat’s Automatic Identification System, the so-called “black box” recorder, there are secrets of a different sort.
As the sun rises, loved-ones in at least three countries are about to receive news that will shatter their worlds. Across Europe, reporters and TV crews are racing to the nearest airport.
Meanwhile an industry sustained by unimaginable wealth, but sensitive to the glare of outside scrutiny, gears up to defend itself. In hospital, experienced mariners sit dazed and battered, trying to process what just happened.
The more savvy among them will surely know they are about to be visited by a different kind of storm, a new and longer-lasting tempest, driven by a single word.
How?
Henry Bodkin
Senior reporter
27 December 2024 1:00pm GMT
526
The date was 18 August 2024, a Sunday; the location 38°05.111 north, 13°33.017 east, roughly half a mile off the fishing village of Porticello on the north Sicilian coast. At anchor was Bayesian, a £30 million 56-metre single-masted luxury sailing yacht with 12 passengers on board, plus a crew of 10 to look after them and operate the vessel.
Legally, the boat was the property of Angela Bacares, the wife of Mike Lynch, 59, Britain’s first technology billionaire. Born in east London to Irish parents and raised in Essex, the gifted computer scientist made a fortune several times over from the 1990s onwards by using statistical theory to design highly sought-after search tools. Described as the British Bill Gates, he was a leading force in the development of so-called Silicon Fen, the cluster of hi-tech businesses centred around Cambridge. Autonomy, which provided pattern recognition software based on Bayesian inference, was his crowning success. As CEO, he led its charge into the UK’s top 100 public companies, and its 2011 sale to the US giant Hewlett-Packard personally netted him an estimated $800 million. He named his conference rooms after Bond villains and drove an Aston Martin. But these indulgences aside, Lynch’s style was never that of a brash plutocrat, and certainly not a Californian tech bro. Well mannered and soberly dressed, he never wholly shed the air of computer geekdom that was the foundation of his vast success. He was devoted to his wife Angela, 57, and two daughters, Esme, 21, and Hannah, 18. With a place waiting for her to read English Literature at Oxford, Hannah was with her parents as Bayesian anchored for the night off Porticello.
It was no ordinary holiday. In fact, in Lynch’s own words, he was starting a “second life” last summer, having recently emerged from an ordeal that threatened to all but end it. Shortly after the 2011 Autonomy deal, Hewlett-Packard cried foul, claiming the company was far less valuable than they had been led to believe. They went on to accuse Lynch and others of artificially inflating the firm’s revenues and profits in order to increase its value at sale. In 2018, US prosecutors agreed, indicting him and the former Autonomy vice-president Stephen Chamberlain for fraud. A lengthy and bruising extradition battle ensued, but despite the support of five former cabinet ministers and claims of American overreach, in May 2023 Lynch was flown to California under the guard of US Marshals and confined to house arrest ahead of trial. If found guilty, he faced 25 years in jail. “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back,” he said. Just 0.5 per cent of federal criminal cases result in an acquittal – the system is engineered to intimidate defendants, particularly those of limited means, into pleading guilty in the hope of shorter sentences. But Lynch – armed, as he later acknowledged, with the luxury of great wealth – fought hard, winning over the jury with his calm and humane testimony that punctured the prosecution’s attempt to portray him as an arrogant, domineering boss. On 6 June this year, after 12 weeks at trial, he was acquitted of all charges.
The last word in sea-borne luxury
Lynch returned home with his future restored, full of plans to help those less wealthy than himself and to carve out a meaningful next chapter of his life. But the immediate priority was to celebrate with his family – and to thank those instrumental to his success. As such, also on board Bayesian that night were Chris Morvillo, the Clifford Chance lawyer who helped lead Lynch’s legal team, and his wife Neda; Jonathan Bloomer, a trusted advisor and the chairman of Morgan Stanley International bank, and his wife Judy, a psychotherapist and prominent philanthropist. Ayla Ronald, another of Lynch’s lawyers, is also there along with her partner Matthew Fletcher. Charlotte Golunski, a colleague at Lynch’s venture capital firm Invoke Capital, is on board too, with her husband James Emslie and their one-year-old daughter. It was nothing less than a freedom party – and Bayesian was the perfect venue.
The interior of the Bayesian. tgcom24
The interior of the Bayesian
Delivered from the Perini Navi shipyard in Tuscany 2008, the Ron Holland-designed yacht had originally been ordered for a previous owner, Eric Jelgersma. However, he sold it to the Dutch property tycoon John Groenewoud before it was even completed. Groenewoud sailed the yacht for six years under the name Salute, before selling it on in 2014 to an Isle of Man-registered company owned by Bacares. With a beam of 11.5 metres at its widest, the renamed vessel had expansive teak decks, parts of them sunken, and sweeping saloon windows. Its six staterooms were the last word in sea-borne luxury. But arguably Bayesian’s most distinctive feature – unusual for a craft of these characteristics – was her single 72-metre mast, the second highest in the world. It gave the yacht an elegant simplicity of appearance that offset its majestic size, making it, to some eyes at least, one of most distinctive and beautiful vessels in the world.
Lynch and his family simply adored it. Facing ruination in the States, the tycoon had put it up for sale in March, but swiftly took it off the market upon his acquittal. “He had a miniature model and photos of it on the water in the hallway of his Chelsea home,” a staff member is reported to have said. “He told me how much his family loved spending time on it.”
In doing so, the couple had become members of an even more exclusive club than mere superyacht owners. For among the ranks of the classiest billionaires, owning a sailing superyacht is, if not yet de rigueur, then at least increasingly fashionable. Just ask Jeff Bezos, Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Jim Clark or King Mohammed VI of Morocco. According to Giovanni Costantino, CEO of The Italian Sea Group (TISG), now Perini Navi’s parent company, sailing vessels require more maintenance compared to motor yachts. “They’re also more expensive in terms of size ratio, costing 30 per cent more with 25 per cent less space,” he said in an interview last April. “Additionally, the crew must be highly qualified.”
The heart of the mystery
Having worked at sea since he was a teenager, James Cutfield, Bayesian’s 51-year-old New Zealander skipper, fitted the bill. And 56-year-old British chief engineer Tim Parker Eaton had served on the yacht since 2013. As the guests settled in for an evening celebrating their host’s remarkable reprieve, these senior sailors were almost certainly aware of the stormy weather forecast for the wider region that night. In common with Karsten Börner, master of the diving yacht Sir Robert Baden Powell, it could well be the reason Cutfield decided to drop anchor off Porticello, where the bay is protected from the open sea to the north and west. Additionally they were likely to be aware of just how high the Mediterranean sea temperature has been for several weeks up to that point and the consequent potential for rough weather. As the sun went down, they might also have noticed that the local fishermen were staying in port.
Members of the crew included James Cutfield, the captain of the ship, and the ship's cook Recaldo Thomas
What happened between then and sunrise the following day may never fully be understood. It certainly hasn’t been yet. Key participants are keeping their counsel for fear of criminal proceedings or because they remain too traumatised to talk. Adding to the confusion in those early days was the habit among elements of the Italian media of taking second or even third-hand survivor accounts, for example via a doctor or lawyer, and then presenting them in direct quotes as if they had interviewed the person themselves. It gave the appearance that those at the heart of the mystery were able and willing to talk, when in fact they were anything but. Nevertheless, a patchy yet reasonably coherent picture of the disaster has emerged.
One of the essential witnesses is Börner. He watched from the deck of his 1957-built steel-hulled schooner as the superyacht motored into the cove and dropped anchor at about 9.35pm. At 11, he took a final look at Bayesian’s towering illuminated mast, its reflection glowing in the calm sea, before turning in for some sleep. By 3am, the 69-year-old was on deck again, preparing to transfer some passengers ashore for an early flight. But as the wind picked up, he abandoned that idea. Instead he ordered his crew to prepare Sir Robert Baden Powell for rough weather, shutting windows and skylights, starting the engine to manoeuvre away from a side-on wind.
A perilous scenario
We know all this because Börner spoke directly to several reputable media outlets. By contrast, the most illuminating human evidence we have from onboard Bayesian itself is that of 22-year-old British crew member Matthew Griffiths. However, his story was briefed to Italian journalists by local prosecutors, an authority which, incidentally, would go on to formally investigate the sailor. Various quotes have been published that are attributed to him, but they seem somehow odd, summarised – unlikely to have been Griffiths’ actual words.
Their thrust, however, is that Griffiths woke his captain once the wind reached 20 knots. Cutfield then told him to wake the rest of the crew. We don’t know exactly when this took place. What we do know from Bayesian’s data transmitter is that at 3.51am the vessel started to drift violently, roughly 80 metres in one direction and then 80 metres in the other. Maritime experts have suggested this indicates Bayesian was still at anchor and was being dragged on its chain by a capriciously changing wind, a perilous scenario for any ship. However, this has not been confirmed; nor whether Bayesian’s engines were ever started. At some point Lynch and Bacares were woken up in their cabin, according to a doctor who then spoke to La Repubblica newspaper. Bacares had been frightened by the sound of broken glass, it was said, and rushed on deck to see what was happening, cutting her feet in the process. Lynch stayed below. Golunski, the 36-year-old mother, was already on deck, it was reported elsewhere, having chosen to sleep there with her baby.
The lights blinked out
As the top of the hour approached, the wind and rain was barrelling both down and horizontally with such voluminous force that the crew of Sir Robert Baden Powell were finding it difficult to breathe. But it seemed to be even worse around Bayesian. Despite the superyacht being only a short distance away, and with the aid of occasional lightning, the neighbouring crew were beginning to lose sight of her in the gale. Then the lights on that giant mast blinked out.
A picture of the Bayesian posted to X, formerly Twitter, in a days before it sank, showing the illuminated 72mmast.
A picture of the Bayesian posted to X, formerly Twitter, in the days before it sank, showing the illuminated 72m mast.
When Sir Robert Baden Powell’s crew next caught sight of Bayesian, probably just after 4am, they could barely comprehend what they were seeing. In fact, some of them initially thought the strangely shaped dark object, just about discernable in the howling rain, was a reef. “But I knew there was no reef,” said Börner. “In the lightning I saw this big black triangle – this might have been the moment the ship capsized and sunk.” Later he added: “We were looking with binoculars and watching the radar and she was gone. My first mate said, ‘She’s gone, she’s sunk,’ and I laughed at him, saying such a big thing doesn’t disappear in a minute.”
What is now reasonably clear – and this probably accounts for Börner and his shipmates’ disbelief – is that in the minutes leading up to 4.06am, when Bayesian’s location signal cut out, the storm did something unusual. It seemed to focus its violence in a spitefully localised manner: right on top of the superyacht. Griffiths was reported as saying the vessel “tilted”, throwing those on deck into the water. “We managed to get back up and tried to rescue those we could”, the quotes read.
“Tilted”. Is this the moment Bayesian capsized? It appears so. “We somehow got back on the bridge and tried to make a human chain to rescue those who could get to the opening from the accommodation deck… they were walking up the walls because the boat was lying in the water.” Finally: “The first one in the chain was the captain who reached down. He helped everybody, the women, the mum with the little girl… But we were sinking, and unfortunately some didn’t make it.”
Screaming in the dark
Here there is ambiguity; inconsistencies, perhaps. For example, Griffiths’ second-hand account makes it sound as if Cutfield rescued Golunski and her baby daughter from the yacht itself. However, Domenico Cipolla, the doctor who treated her in Palermo, said that having lost her baby for several seconds in the water before miraculously grabbing hold of her again, Golunski was pulled from the sea directly into the inflatable life raft that deployed as the yacht went down. Was she rescued twice, first from somewhere within the yacht itself, then later from the open sea where she had been screaming in the dark? We don’t know. With her feet badly hurt by the glass, how did Bacares get to the safety of the life raft? There are rumours that she was a poor swimmer; did Cutfield save her too? We don’t know. Despite this, we have the picture of a massive vessel now on its side, probably in near total darkness, and a horrified crew aware that numerous guests remain below decks. Those still in bed when the great yacht went over will have woken to a nightmarishly disorientating situation – the stateroom door, their only means of escape, now on the floor for those on Bayesian’s port side and on the ceiling for those to starboard. Between them and the upper deck was a spiral staircase resembling a horizontal corkscrew. It is not yet known whether anyone who was on the lower deck when the boat capsized got out in the short amount of time before it sank.
The passengers aboard The Bayesian that night included Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah, Chris and Neda Morvillo, Jonathan and Judy Bloomer, and Charlotte Golunski
Then, just as the storm arrived, it left. The red flare launched from Bayesian’s life raft at 4.34am was captured in a photograph taken on land by Francesco Lo Coco. It shows the distress signal reflecting on a surface of millpond tranquillity. Behind it, to the south, the lights of Solanto twinkle in the newly fresh night. The flare prompted Börner to dispatch a tender from Sir Robert Baden Powell. As they motored away from their ship, cushions and other flotsam surrounded them in the water. Then they saw the flashing torch which led them to the life raft. On board were 15 people, some of them injured, all in a state of shock. “I was the captain of this,” said one. Another said the boat “sank in two minutes”. As they transferred the survivors into the tender, a woman pleaded with Börner not to return to his ship but to continue the search for the others. Later, as she sat wrapped in blankets on Sir Robert Baden Powell’s deck, Börner asked her if she was OK. It was Angela Bacares. Her husband, Mike Lynch, and daughter Hannah were among the seven people missing. “No,” she replied. “I’m not OK at all.”
One tragic discovery after another
How does a superyacht sink? If your name is Giovanni Costantino, then the answer is simple: it was the crew’s fault. Before the final body had been recovered, the one-time furniture mogul turned nautical supremo had begun a series of public statements expressing incredulity that the disaster could have been the result of anything but the grossest incompetence. Perini Navi ships are “unsinkable”, he declared, the safest in the world. “The boat suffered a series of indescribable, unreasonable errors,” he alleged. Costantino questioned why the crew were not in a state of alert, given the storm warnings. He pointed to the fishermen. If they could take the hint, why not Bayesian? Why, he asked, had all the passengers not been woken and assembled in the main lounge. Perhaps most damningly, he claimed a hatch in the hull must have been left open, “otherwise Bayesian cannot sink”.
Meanwhile, rescue divers were working around the clock to access the stricken vessel under the ravenous but inexpert gaze of the international press. Bayesian was now resting on its starboard side at 50 metres’ depth. Hope swirled that those missing might have found an air pocket. But for the men of the Italian Navy’s elite COMSUBIN unit, it was painstaking, hazardous work. Operating in pairs, they had just 20 minutes’ oxygen for each dive. They were forced to move slowly to avoid worsening the already poor visibility by disturbing sediment. A local blacksmith was summoned to provide jacks to prize open the glass doors to the lounge. Eventually, one tragic discovery after another was made; the bodies carefully recovered.
In the wake of Costantino’s comments, investigators announced they were considering potential crimes, namely shipwreck and manslaughter. Ambrogio Cartosio, chief prosecutor for the nearby town of Termini Imerese, stressed that it was early days, but nevertheless told journalists it was “probable that offences were committed”. By the end of August, Cutfield, Parker Eaton and Griffiths had all been placed under formal investigation. Under the Italian legal system, this does not imply guilt and does not necessarily mean charges will be brought. Four thousand miles away, however, among a somewhat different type of maritime community, it set alarm bells ringing.
Blowing the debate wide open
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