NERD RAGE! how I got a Russian oligarch's yacht kicked out of a port in Turkey

…raised hell, struck a blow for Ukraine, got seen more than a million times plus irritated a bunch of powerful people using this one weird old trick — a true story

So the TL;DR is down at the bottom. But if you want to #DisruptLinkedIn, then walk with me. This was next-level crazy: the biggest story I ever accidentally wrote. I knew it would get seen.

I didn't know it would get seen roughly 1 million times on the low end, raise hell for a bunch of powerful people, strike a small blow for Ukraine, and in all likelihood end up costing a Russian oligarch plus the British harbor operator Global Ports Holding, about...

meh. $13K.

But it's not about the ones and zeroes! It's about the Fourth Estate, what it was meant to do, what it still can do, when writers write for passion not for profit. We can still comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable using this one weird old trick, and here's how that went down,

In three

in two

in one and a half

in one and two thirds

in back to one and a half again

In early 2022 I was scared and angry.

Scared because I'd just pulled off yet another head-snapping career pivot, and now I had to own it. Scared because, on 24 February, Russia's national government assaulted a sovereign nation and launched what was said to be the first major land war in Europe in more than 70 years. Of course America had launched three or four land wars in that space of time. With disastrous results. Don't be that guy. And now people were talking about nukes. It felt like the world was coming unglued.

Kremlin propaganda was so hack and so disgusting. The unapologetic greed, punch-drunk cruelty, transparent male inadequacy and aggression. I'm not trying to sound all p'gressive here, but to quote '90s Tori Amos, the man with the loaded gun thinks he knows so much.

But what could I do about it? A poor scribbler. A longtime expat-slash-digital nomad living in the tiny midatlantic nation of #Bermuda, one of his majesty's British Overseas Territories, 800 miles due east of anywhere. Cloudbeds, my new (and now former) employer had dozens of workers in Ukraine. The cruel irony of the thing was the fact that Ukraine's people weren't just defending their homeland; they were defending mine. They were forced to be the buffer between East and West in a stupid struggle that dates from back when Kyiv was a viking outpost.

There's a Zoom call I'll never forget. The look on this Ukrainian colleague's face. A run-of-the-mill weekly staff meeting was just getting started. There we were, all arrayed in our little tiles on my screen, Americans shooting the breeze before they got down to business, random chatter.

Then the Ukrainian joins.

I'll call him/her "Sasha." Unisex nickname. So then Sasha joins.

Black background.

Not a black virtual background. Not a dev trying to save their eyesight from the ravages of coding. I'd seen Sasha in this meeting several times before. But this time Sasha was working in total darkness; face dimly lit by the glow of a laptop screen. Softly, in a breaking voice, Sasha told us that the Russian army had already surged past the town, as Ukraine's forces fell back to better defensive positions. Yesterday Sasha was living in Ukraine. Today Sasha was living in Russia.

Lemme add an adjective: scared, angry, guilty. I felt guilty for being safe. I felt guilty for being scared. Here we were, living out our unruffled lives so many thousands of miles away, talking about white-collar problems, and then in walks a human being who'd just had greatness thrust upon them. I felt like half a man, and it made me want to join Sasha's army, though I'm too old and I knew I didn't have the stones.

I can use an AK, I thought. That's just an AR that doesn't feel like a toy.

See 'Tori Amos' supra, I guess, but in early March, as the horror unfolded, I was riding along Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda atop Cricket, my little PGO motor scooter. Cricket is cute, shiny black. Rearview mirrors that pop out of her buggy little noggin like two antennae, and Bermuda's one and only Idaho bumper sticker on back. It was chilly but dry. Bermuda lies at almost precisely the same latitude as Savannah, Georgia. Spring comes with a lot of sideways rain, but not that day. So I saddled up ol' Cricket and took 'er slow, pondering these imponderables.

From Russia with Lyubov

Glancing gingerly at the harbour, I remembered this megayacht that used to dock there for a week or two each summer, reputedly owned by a Russian. Yachts are like Bermuda's third migration. February: longtails. March-April: humpback whales. May-September: hurricanes and boys playing with some of the world's most expensive toys. A lot of these yachts fly the Bermuda flag, but that doesn't tell you where they're actually from, or who owns them. Flagging a vessel is kind of like domiciling a company. "Amarillo Bill's Lonestar Barbecue & Honky Tonk, a Delaware corporation." Business entities and big-ass toys pick their flag for tax reasons, for regulatory reasons, to take advantage of maritime treaties and/or to conceal ownership.

Local rumor had it thee yacht - The Meg - belonged to a Russian billionaire. That sucker was certainly oligarch-grade. Easily over 200 ft., and they run about $20M new, depending on what's inside. Nobody had a clue what was inside that one. But if you got too close, you'd see what was always on the outside: these big, scary, no-neck security dudes lumbering around. Must've been a boring job, being a human billboard that reads Don't Touch My Yacht.

But whose yacht? I wondered.

And I wondered how many of Russia's (and Ukraine's) fortunate sons were out amusing themselves with superyachts and supercars and supermodels while their poorer brethren dug trenches. I say "fortunate sons" because Americans were doing the exact same thing during our last war of mass conscription: Vietnam. I mean, hell, my dad's family were Air Force, but he certainly wasn't going to 'Nam. Instead my old man went to a state school (UC Berkeley) and he got married pretty young. It was love, but it was also a loophole. When one draft-deferment loophole closed, another opened. My parents taught high school. They joined the Leprechaun Army a/k/a the Two-Year Vacation a/k/a the U.S. Peace Corps. These were exemption strategies that spared middle class kids from going Full Metal Jacket.

I'm not as dumb as I sound. I'm not conflating Vietnam with Ukraine: two patently different tragedies, widely separated by time and geography, neither of which I'll ever be capable of understanding. What I do understand is: the American mindset can be shockingly provincial sometimes. 12 years marooned on a rock midway between the U.S. and "the rest of the world" (that quintessentially American phrase) will teach even an Idaho farm boy that much.

As Offshore as it gets

If the Meg wasn't linked to an oligarch, other yachts that came to town definitely were. Ownership of these oceangoing RVs is notoriously hard to trace. But the Russian-Israeli billionaire-slash-Putin crony Roman Abramovich, for one, was transparent about two superyachts he owned: Eclipse and MY Solaris (yeah, the "my" is all caps; think Bill Lumbergh's vanity plate in Office Space). Both yachts were Bermuda-flagged.

As Putin cronies go, Abramovich is an outlier. He could afford the third- and fifteenth-biggest loveboats in the world because Putin’s predecessor gave him big chunks of Russia’s assets at sweetheart prices. For more than a decade Abramovich had been Putin’s loyal henchman during the dictator’s three uncontested terms in office. Along with the two Bermudian-registered yachts and the rest of his $12 billion-plus net worth, Abramovich achieved every Russian or Chinese oligarch’s dream in 2003: owning an English football club. No less than Chelsea F.C.

Said Floyd, "think I'll buy me a football team."

But Bram was different. Almost (dare I say) normal. Crazy-billionaire normal, sure, but he wasn't Putin's Chef. He wasn't some barbarian in the shadows. It looked like Bram wanted to Godfather 2 himself. Tread the boards of the world stage. Become a legitimate businessman. Eclipse alone cost Roman Abramovich almost $400 million to the best of my research; Solaris, likely $600 million. Bermuda’s quick and cost-effective ship registry (often called a “flag of convenience”) allows yacht owners such as Abramovich to fly a national flag, as required by maritime law, without actually being residents or nationals of Bermuda — thus avoiding the higher taxes and stricter regulations they could encounter elsewhere. Bermuda’s status as a member of the British-affiliated Red Ensign Group means Bermudian-registered yachts can dock pretty much anywhere in the world. That's useful when the geopolitical sitch gives you the travel itch, or you just want to lie low for a while

So Bram was different, but not different enough. Definitely a top-20 Putin enabler, at least before the war. Eight days prior to the invasion Abramovich conveniently pulled out his shares in a steel company that was a major supplier for Putin’s tanks. His dictator boss was using those tanks to literally break Bermudian law, because Bermuda participates in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCP), ratified in 1976.

Suddenly it came to me. The angle!

The hook. The spin of all spins. The Message which the angel of creativity would have your humble scrivener plant upon this rock.

Touched by an Angle

I read about you in the paper!

I was at the dentist, about to get my teeth cleaned. The hygienist was an old friend. Scottish woman, delightful person, I'll call her "Isla."

Yeah, Isla - Ha ha! - I just can't stay out of the Gazette.

I thought Isla was referring to Bermuda's Royal Gazette, basically the only newspaper on the Rock. The Gazette is a dignified old rag. The sort of last-gen local newser with a vibrant print (yes, print!) subscription that you'd expect to find lost in the Bermuda Triangle. They'd published something fairly unflattering about me long before, but I'd gone back to that well to plant my Message: the first (and ultimately the only) step in my plan to strike a blow for Ukraine.

The angle was simple: de-flag Russian yachts! The entire West were wringing their hands and rattling their sabres and crying "Sanctions! Sanctions!" It wasn't making a damn bit of difference — but why should Russian oligarchs be flying British colours? Why not just kick them out of the Red Ensign club, for staters? How hard could it be? Hell if I knew, but someone had to know, and that someone could at least pony up a counterargument.

So I'd spent an entire Saturday afternoon penning an unsolicited letter to the editor of the Gazette's opinion column, using my finest angry-old-man-from-Paget voice. Nobody assumes a guy named Frank is younger than 80, and I'd been reading RG for a decade. I knew what would play well with their audience.

Isla scoffed.

Not the Gazette! The tabloid!

me like "Whaaaa??? 🤯 🤯 🤯"

Quo Fata Ferunt

By "the tabloid" Isla meant no less than Mail Online: the most-read English-language newspaper website worldwide, boasting more than 240 million unique visitors globally.

I learned this by googling myself in quotes and scrolling past all the Wizard of Oz pages.

Yes, Frank Morgan was the actor who played the Wiz in the beloved Judy Garland musical. But here was a different Frank Morgan singing a different tune: Mail Online had stolen my idea to the tune of 400K–500K reads, easy.

I was elated.

Later, I was worried.

A weird hit

Over the ensuing weeks, weird hits kept showing up on one of my social media accounts. I'm a nonentity. But some of the good folks at ye olde Bermuda Shipping & Maritime Authority had taken the trouble to, no joke, google "Frank Morgan" in quotes and scroll past all the Wizard of Oz fanfolk. That was the only way you could find me. It was surreal.

Governments big and small make this reporter nervous. It wasn't the kind of visibility I wanted less than three months into a new job, so I quickly blocked any public servant who'd favored me with a visit, plus any others in the ballpark.

But it wasn't because they were reading my humble Letter to the Editor repeatedly over the weeks. That seminal message might've gotten 4,500 reads, by my estimates. But the Gazette, to their credit, were gleefully afflicting Her Majesty's little outpost with my oligarch-yacht idea. Nobody had said "de-flag the Russians" before I did. But now:

And from Mail Online, with another nod to yours truly:

Then came the two weirdest visitors of all.

Yacht linked to Russia's Abramovich leaves Bodrum cruise port — that was from Reuters. Abramovich's Solaris had been asked to move on from a port in Turkey. Friendlier waters than, say, Marseille — and Bodrum isn't exactly a luxury stop — it's the low-key sort of port where you'd expect an oligarch to keep a low profile. But I guess the Ukrainian child protesters in the rubber rafts was just too much. Even in Bodrum, people (a) had their qualms about the optics of Solaris docking there, and (b) were googling Frank Morgan, and scrolling past the Wiz. I literally can't make this stuff up. It was high time people paid no further attention to that man behind the curtain. I thought I was gonna get doxxed. I went dark on social media.

TL;DR: this weird old trick

Looking back, my GPT and I can crunch the engagement numbers and laugh about all this. It didn't exactly stop the war. That human tragedy started when Napoleon invaded the Land of Rus in winter. Or when the Goths started trading enslaved people down the Dnipro. Or when Cain slew Abel. It's always brothers killing brothers. Wars never end, but the Butterfly Effect is real. Consider:

My point: writers, artists, content creators flap their mouths — sorry, their wings — rather a lot. And we should!

There's no knowing how far an idea will go, so I say screw attribution! Props to Mail Online for at least dropping my name, but forget credit. Let's stick our necks out. Let our freak flags fly.

Any state of things is an effect with endless causes. As creators, our grand Cause, like Prometheus, is to bring the divine fire to mortals. To get touched by the angle, then act. Who knows?

Maybe you'll touch off a hurricane in Bermuda...

Frank T. Morgan is an obscure writer living in Bermuda and the great state of Idaho. Morgan is now the founding Head of Content Marketing & Strategy at Emma Advisor: the next big thing in higher education tech. https://www.emmaadvisor.ai Emma Advisor