A Fugitive Businessman, Done In by One Law He Couldn’t Dodge
The New York Times
Fleeing fraud charges, Samuele Landi evaded extradition treaties, dabbled in crypto, procured diplomatic credentials and took advantage of all the offshore world has to offer.
Around midday on Feb. 2, a large wave began its slow rumble toward the Aisland 1, an 800-ton deck barge floating in the waters between Dubai and Iran. On board the vessel were its residents of more than a year: a 58-year-old Italian businessman named Samuele Landi, three sailors, a cook and five cats.
Landi — the ship’s captain — was a gifted computer programmer who in a previous life had been the chief executive of Eutelia, a telecommunications company. He fancied himself an Italian Steve Jobs, though John McAfee, the cybersecurity entrepreneur turned tax fugitive, might have been a more fitting comparison. An avid skydiver and motorcycle racer, Landi liked to live on the edge: of the world, of the law and of life itself. He had made a career of exotic offshore financial schemes; now, adrift, he had become one with them.
“I will die at sea for sure,” he told Oswald Horowitz, a filmmaker who had visited him the previous December. “I’m not going back.”
The barge was Landi’s biggest adventure yet. A rusting rectangular hulk with the footprint of a large commercial aircraft, the Aisland had a deck fitted with six blue shipping containers bolted in place. These were the living quarters, equipped with solar-powered air-conditioners and a desalination system. The barge was otherwise littered with equipment: ropes, crates, fans, tanks of oil and water, a freezer containing pounds of red meat, and a sack of reinforced concrete mix for repairs. A Liberian flag flapped in the breeze.
The story of how Landi ended up living on a leaky barge some 30 miles off the shore of Dubai is a tale of self-preservation. For over a decade, Landi had been a man on the lam. He wasn’t a violent criminal; nor was he a particularly wanted individual, in the grand scheme of things. But since Eutelia was declared bankrupt in 2010 and some of its executives, including Landi, were very publicly tried and convicted of bankruptcy fraud, Landi has been a fugitive from Italian justice — and on land, his options had all but run out.
