Carefree Cruise or Pirate Ship?

Carnival Celebrates 50 Years…of What, Exactly?

Carnival Cruise Lines recently celebrated its 50th anniversary of presenting itself as an affordable, carefree kind of experience for the masses. But Jim Walker, a former cruise line defense attorney — who switched sides to represent cruise ship crime victims (including 125 rape/sexual assault victims) after being asked to defend against a rape lawsuit — sees a much darker legacy. He sees Carnival as more like a pirate ship line, deliberately intended to evade the law as much as humanly possible — be it U.S. labor law, or tax law, criminal protections for victims of rape, sexual assault or molestation, or environmental law protecting the seas it travels. Its corporate parent, Carnival corporation, owns nine cruise lines — all of which “committed criminal environmental violations from 2017-2021” according to Friends of the Earth’s 2021 “Cruise Ship Report Card” — with nearly 100 ships. One line, Princess, sails out of the Port of Los Angeles, while Carnival sails out of Long Beach, home to the Queen Mary, retired from the Cunard line, also now Carnival-owned. Random Lengths News interviewed Walker to shed light on Carnival’s record of lawlessness, from how it started to where it stands today.

Ted Arison, father of the current chairman, Micky Arison, started Carnival Cruise Lines in 1972. “He had a vision of having what I characterize as like a Walmart on the seas, a mass, family-oriented, funship. They’re still using the funship mantra in their marketing,” Walker said.

“To do so he was the first to perfect the model of basing their companies in foreign ports, foreign incorporation,” he explained. “Carnival Cruise Lines is not an American-based company. It’s registered and incorporated in Panama. Why Panama? Because it lets Carnival do whatever they want to do. It’s not a country that cares about minimum wage or overtime laws, or the issue of pollution, employment rights or safety and security. So he created a cruise corporation, in the eyes of a businessman, without any of the limitations of the American government that has wage and labor laws.”

It also avoided U.S. income taxes, “Which is considerable, considering that Carnival in the first year before COVID-19, collected over $20 billion and had profits of over $3 billion,” Walker added.

But there’s more involved than just saving Carnival money. “It’s always considered itself its own entity and its own government, so to speak. When a crime occurs there’s no U.S. police forces on the ships,” Walker said. As a law firm that only handles cases against cruise lines, “We see the side of this corporation that does everything it can to insulate itself from legal exposure,” he explained. “Some of the ways it does that are perfectly legal, but they’re on the edge of legality and they really pride themselves in not showing responsibility. This is a corporate culture that has very little regard for the safety and security of their guests and their passengers.”

How Carnival operates illustrates a larger worldwide problem — certain areas are well governed, but there are cracks where it isn’t. “This is a corporation that you could say exists in the cracks, it was grown in the cracks. It is not a corporation that values light in the organization. There’s very little sunshine shining on this corporation,” Walker said. Crime occurs, but it’s hidden, of necessity.

“To promote an image of a fun family vacation, you can’t admit the fact that you have a shipboard problem with crime, and in particular, rape and sexual abuse and sexual assaults against the female passengers, and against the children,” Walker noted. But there was no crime reporting before Congress passed the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Law of 2010, which “came about through the efforts of many of our clients who testified before Congress.” As a result, “You can actually go online and find which ships in which companies have the worst records as far as shipboard rape. And you’ll find Carnival at the top of the list.” In fact, “Carnival Cruise Lines has more rapes per capita then half the states in the United States of America, including California, New York, New Jersey and in a dozen or so other states.”

Of course, crime occurs everywhere, “But a crime on a Carnival Cruise Ship is not going to be solved it’s not going to be prosecuted, because the culture on the ships is to blame the passenger, to blame the woman who gets raped or to suggest that they did something wrong. They drank too much,” Walker says, even though “This is an industry that prides itself in selling many millions and millions of dollars of booze every year.” Carnival sells all-you-can-drink drink packages, and “There’s a direct correlation between shipboard violence, including rape, and the amount of alcohol.”

Bartenders and bar servers aren’t paid anything by Carnival — they work exclusively for tips and gratuities, which is strictly illegal under U.S. labor law. “So the bartenders and the bar servers push alcohol very aggressively. The statistics show that in many rape cases — in cases of one guest assaulting another guests — both being intoxicated with as many as 15 or 20 drinks. It’s really quite extraordinary,” Walker remarked.

In effect you have one crime — or should-be crime — (wage theft) contributing to another (rape or sexual assault). “They’re not violating the law because there are no laws that apply to Carnival Cruise ships,” Walker points out, “even though it sails from the United States.”

The Great Pretender 

Carnival pretends to be American. “For the longest time there were advertisements which showed Carnival Cruise ships with an American flag flying at the stern, going across the TV screen,” but “There are no American flag Carnival cruise ships sailing, whatsoever,” Walker flatly stated. “They create this illusion, this is part of America. Their current CEO coined the term ‘America’s cruise line,’ which is like, ‘What does America have to do with it?’ The only connection to the United States is their executives are living here in waterfront properties in Miami.” Walker estimates, “Maybe 3% of their crew members are U.S. citizens. Those are typically say the cruise director, some of the singers, dancers and entertainers,” but “Most of the fleet consists of crew members from the Philippines, Indonesia, India and what is commonly referred to as Eastern Europe.”

When rapes or other crimes are reported, Carnival routinely lets crew members return to their homelands, thwarting investigations. “You’ll never see the FBI taking a crew member off the ship and leading them down the gangway with the call ahead to the press telling them that we got a rapist on a cruise ship,” Walker said. It never comes to that.

But rapes and sexual assaults aren’t the only problems. Thefts are also a concern. “The cruise industry fought the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Law Act that I mentioned. They really fought to limit the types of crimes that needed to be reported. They were successful in limiting the language only to thefts involving over $10,000,” Walker explained.

Carnival also protects itself against civil liability. “All the cruise tickets limit liability for any type of personal items that are left that are lost or stolen on the ship,” Walker explained. “You don’t realize it, it’s in fine print, but most cruise lines, Carnival limits their liability to $100 for anything that is left lying around the cabin, that’s the term they use. So if you have your jewelry, take jewelry off — priceless jewelry that your grandmother gave your wife, some story like that — they’ll give you a check for a hundred bucks.”

Even the high rate of reported rapes is probably an undercount, given the lack of support for victims — rape crisis centers, support groups, etc. Walker cites the example of Laurie Dishman, a client who testified before Congress about her experience. “She was raped by a shipboard security officer, and she was faced with the dilemma of having to report the crime and she initially reported it to what’s called the front desk, where the purser and customer relations are, and they said you have to talk to the security,” Walker explained. “So she was faced with this issue. Do I really want to report a crime involving a member of the security detail to the security department? It’s like being raped by a police officer and having to go to the police department to report the rape.”

That might be a worst-case scenario, but it’s part of a broader pattern. “Probably of the 125 women that we’ve represented — we also represent parents whose children have been molested on ships — probably 25% of those women don’t report the crime until they get off the ship, come to their senses, gain some stability and support from their family, and then report it,” Walker estimates. “A good portion of the people who are victims of crime decide not to report the crime simply because there’s no vehicle to report it. The ships of course begin building a case against the victim even before the victim gets off ship.

“So they decided not to solve the problem by making an example of a bad apple, by showing that we take this very seriously and were going to prosecute criminals on our ships. They take the other attitude, they begin attacking the victim and minimizing the victim. So I think that the reporting statistics certainly do not include those women that don’t report the rape on the ship.”

The free flow of alcohol and lack of a supporting environment aren’t the only risk factors involved. “One of the major problems that we’ve seen over the years is that many of the rapes are committed by the cabin attendants,” as well as child molestations. These tend to happen the last day of a cruise, after attendants have ingratiated themselves. “The cabin attendant, typically on the last night of the cruise, after they become familiar with the family, come back into the cabin, see that mom and dad are not there … and there’s a sexual molestation that occurs,” Walker said. “Cruise lines know it, they absolutely know it. They could take their key cards away, they could deactivate the key cards outside of business hours. They don’t do that for reasons I don’t quite understand.”

Although Walker’s firm doesn’t deal with it, he calls pollution Carnival’s biggest and most consistent crime. It’s had multiple multi-million dollar fines for long-running violations, but given Carnival’s multi-billion dollar revenues, these are mere slaps on the wrist. “In 2002 Carnival pled guilty to widespread pollution that led to this $18 million fine and they had a five year probation,” Walker said.

During that probation — beginning in 2005, four or five Princess cruise ships began using “magic pipes” used to bypass the ship’s oily water separator and make untreated bilge water “magically disappear.”  This came to light in 2013, when a newly-hired engineer on the Caribbean Princess took pictures of the “magic pipe” in use and then when it was removed before a mandatory inspection. A wide-ranging investigation resulted in a record $40 million settlement in 2016.

But it didn’t go far enough. “They stopped short of really tracking it from the shipboard employees, the engineers, to the shoreside managers and then all the way up the chain to the executives,” Walker pointed out. “Certainly the executives knew that no one was incurring any waste disposal expenses at all for a period of time.”

Walker contrasts the $40 million fine with their $20 billion revenue. “So what is $40 million as a percent?” he asks. “Is it like a traffic court fine? A parking violation to you or me? Maybe. It’s just the cost of doing business with them. They don’t care about the water and the air, they don’t care about their employees.” In fact, “They were fined another $20 million in 2019,” for violating their origin settlement agreement with further violations, including the dumping of plastic mixed with food waste in Bahamian waters, as well as deceptively evading compliance provisions, which have been tracked in a series of annual reports. “And the fact is they continued to violate, and a couple months ago in January this year, 2022, they were fined another $1 million.” Combined with fines on their other subsidiaries, Walker sets their total fines at roughly $82 million.

The 2016 probation was overseen by Judge Patricia Seitz, who at one point seemed to have had enough, according to Walker. “She said this: ‘We have a program [for] recidivist criminals that are likely to commit their crimes again, and it seems to me that Carnival is one of those recidivist criminals. They happen to be a corporation but they’re a corporate felon, they’re likely to do it again.’ She seemed to have a real understanding of what was before her, this mess that was before her, and she said, ‘It seems to me that nothing’s really going to change until I do something more serious, until I either block all Carnival Cruise ships from ever calling in a U.S. port, or we have prison time for their executives and their board of directors.’ And man did Carnival freak out.”

And yet, “The next time they violated the probation, nothing happened. She didn’t call the marshals in. No one left the court in handcuffs. Micky Arison’s still worth $10 billion. None of this comes out of his pocket. He has his yachts that he lives on. He enjoys his lifestyle, he’s not affected by it.”

Adding insult to injury, the $20 million settlement was entered without hearing from victims. “They found evidence, while Carnival was on probation, that Carnival had dumped 500,000 gallons of trash and plastic items” throughout the Bahamas, Wright said. “There were Bahamian environmental organizations that were affected, and claimed damage due to Carnival’s criminal conduct, who wanted to testify. And there is a federal statute that permits victims of crime to testify regarding the court’s treatment of the criminal that committed the crime,” but Seitz refused to let them be heard. “It was a real lost opportunity … for the court to really open the proceeding up, and to get to the bottom of it, and to really try to make real change.”

The final, fifth annual probation report, issued on Feb. 16, credited Carnival with “important work toward building a sustainable compliance culture,” in contrast to its earlier intransigence, but noted “remaining barriers,” such as a “blame culture,” an “anti-learning leadership mindset,” and “prioritizing guest experience and revenue generation over ship operational and compliance needs.”

The blame culture is deeply entrenched, Walker noted. When “magic pipes” were exposed, “They blamed the subordinate crew members, what they called the ‘rogue engineers.’” But “All those activities of storing waste, whether it’s waste oil, sewage, or plastics, and disposing of it, cost a lot of money — hundreds of thousands of dollars per ship.” When it’s not being done, to cut costs, upper management has to know it — if not bring pressure to cause it in the first place.

As things stand now, “That five year probation that was started in 2016 is scheduled to end next month. Quite frankly, then this is going to be the Wild Wild West again,” Walker lamented.

So what would it take to really make Carnival and other cruise lines change? Judge Seitz had the right idea, but failed to follow through, in Walker’s view. “We’re not going to see any changes until someone from Carnival corporation board of directors, some of the chief executives, maybe the chairman of the board goes to jail,” he said. But then added, “I think quite frankly that the prospects of that are slim and none.”