380: Captain Phillips with Brian Beckcom

00:00:02:01 – 00:00:23:27
Dan LeFebvre
Hello and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies with history. Today, we’ll be learning about the 2013 movie directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks, that simply called Captain Phillips. I’m sure you’ve seen it, but the movie did come out a while ago, so let’s refresh our memory with a quick synopsis.

00:00:24:00 – 00:00:50:02
Dan LeFebvre
The movie is named after Captain Richard Phillips, who was the commander of a container ship called the Maersk Alabama. It was on a typical route along the coast of Africa in 2009. The catch, though, was that route also included traveling through pirate infested waters near the country of Somalia. Despite receiving warnings of heightened pirate activity, Captain Phillips decides to take a shortcut closer to the Somali coast to save time and fuel.

00:00:50:04 – 00:01:15:26
Dan LeFebvre
This decision proves fateful. Two skiffs carrying Somali pirates attack the Maersk Alabama, and the crew executes security protocols by attempting to repel the attackers using fire hoses and evasive maneuvers. And at first it works, but then the pirates return in a stronger boat and they manage to successfully board the vessel. Phillips remains on the bridge and is captured while the crew retreats to the engine room.

00:01:15:28 – 00:01:41:25
Dan LeFebvre
Eventually, the pirates evacuate to a small lifeboat and take Captain Phillips hostage, along with $30,000 in ransom money. The U.S. Navy intercedes with multiple warships, including USS Bainbridge and Navy Seal teams. After intense negotiations and tactical positioning, Navy Seals execute a precise rescue operation, convincing one of the pirates to board their ship and then eliminating the three remaining pirates and freeing Captain Phillips.

00:01:41:28 – 00:02:02:24
Dan LeFebvre
The movie ends with Phillips being rescued and receiving medical treatment aboard the Navy destroyer. How much of that really happened? Today we’ll be joined by none other than Bryan Beckham, the trial lawyer who represented the crew of the Maersk Alabama. In the wake of the events that we see in the movie. So through his work on the trial, he knows the ins and outs of exactly what happened.

00:02:02:28 – 00:02:25:28
Dan LeFebvre
And he’s here today to help us separate fact from fiction in the movie. Bryan is also a podcaster whose wonderful podcast shares insights from a wide range of inspiring leaders. So just do a search for Brian’s podcast called lessons from Leaders with Bryan Beckham, or hop in the show notes for a direct link. Before we get started with Bryan’s breakdown of Captain Phillips, though, let’s set up our game for today’s episode.

00:02:26:01 – 00:02:41:13
Dan LeFebvre
Now, if you’re new to the show since based on a true story, it’s all about separating fact from fiction in the movies, you’ll get to practice your skills at separating fact from fiction in this podcast episode with a game of two truths and a lie. So I’m about to give you three things that we’re going to talk about in this episode.

00:02:41:15 – 00:03:09:12
Dan LeFebvre
Two of those are true, and that means one of them is just an all out lie. Are you ready? Okay, here they are. Number one, Maersk Alabama sailed within the range of known Somali pirates. Number two, the $30,000 on Maersk Alabama was intended as ransom money. Number three, Captain Phillips tried to escape from the pirates at the first chance he got.

00:03:09:15 – 00:03:23:07
Dan LeFebvre
Got him. Okay, now, as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those is a lie. And if you’re watching the video version of this, you’ll see I’m holding up now. This has the answer inside. We’re going to open this up at the end to see if you got the answer right.

00:03:23:10 – 00:03:38:05
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Now it’s time to connect with Bryan Beckham about the true story behind Captain Phillips.

00:03:38:07 – 00:03:55:13
Dan LeFebvre
Even though no one expects movies to be entirely accurate, each movie takes different creative liberties to tell the story. So before we dig into some of the details, if you were to take a step back and give Captain Phillips an overall letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

00:03:55:15 – 00:03:56:14
Brian Beckcom
C minus.

00:03:56:14 – 00:03:59:14
Dan LeFebvre
C minus.

00:03:59:16 – 00:04:18:16
Brian Beckcom
You know, it’s funny Dan here people. When the movie premiered, people were asking me like, what did you think of the movie? What did you think of the movie? I mean, I went I was there opening night. I mean, it was packed. And I said, just like Forrest Gump, it’s a fantastic movie starring Tom Hanks. But none of it’s true.

00:04:18:18 – 00:04:36:14
Brian Beckcom
It is actually so. And in reality, here’s what’s true about the movie. There was an American ship called the Maersk Alabama. It was attacked by Somali pirates. The captain’s name was Captain Phillips. And everything after that is basically made up.

00:04:36:17 – 00:04:59:26
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, well, we’re going to dig into some of the details. According to the movie, at least, and at the beginning of the movie, we’re introduced to Tom Hanks version of Captain Richard Phillips as he takes command of a container ship named Maersk Alabama. And in the movie, his job is to sail it from Oman to Mombasa, Kenya. And for some geographical context, that path takes it around the east coast of Africa, past Yemen and Somalia before reaching Kenya.

00:04:59:29 – 00:05:19:21
Dan LeFebvre
And even though Captain Phillips receives warning of pirate activity in the waters off Somalia, he decides to save time by going like 350. I’m sorry, 250 or 300 miles instead of the recommended 600 miles. This is all according to the movie. How well does the movie do? Setting up the situation with Captain Phillips and the Marshall, Alabama.

00:05:19:24 – 00:05:45:13
Brian Beckcom
Fairly good. Fairly good job of that. And you know what? The movie. What I wish the movie did a little better job of at the beginning in terms of the setup, is putting in context how dangerous these waters were at the time. I mean, we’re talking about I don’t know the exact number, but I want to say like tens and tens, if not hundreds of pirate attacks on both commercial and noncommercial vessels.

00:05:45:13 – 00:06:02:27
Brian Beckcom
In fact, I think there was a naval vessel from Yemen or something that was attacked by pirates. And, you know, the other thing is we got to I don’t know if the movie does a good job of this or not, but this is at the at the time we’re dealing with Somalia or off the east coast of Africa.

00:06:03:03 – 00:06:30:28
Brian Beckcom
Somalia, for all intents and purposes, is a failed country. They have no economy that, you know, they have no really functioning government, and they have a bunch of people there have to eat. And so the people that were, going out and taking these people off of these, ships, either taking them, for ransom, taking them back to Somalia or a lot of these ships carried cash specifically to pay off, quote, pirates.

00:06:31:00 – 00:07:10:21
Brian Beckcom
What what we got to keep in mind is these are not, like, highly trained military style pirates. These are fishermen. I mean, these are Somali fishermen that some of whom are teenagers, who realized that if these commercial ships got within a certain range of the Somalian coast, they had no self-defense and they were easy pickings. And so if you were in that situation, I mean, I don’t blame these Somalians in many respects, like if you are in a failed country and you had to feed your family and you have the choice of going out catching fish all day long and selling them for nothing, or you could go out and make a quick score off

00:07:10:21 – 00:07:34:28
Brian Beckcom
an unprotected American vessel where they basically carry money specifically to pay you. I mean, what would you do? So and that was what, in my opinion, kind of made it worse is not only did they know that at the time this these were literally the most dangerous waters in the world. I mean, maybe 1 or 2 other areas you could compare two, but certainly top 2 or 3.

00:07:35:01 – 00:07:54:03
Brian Beckcom
And everybody knew nobody had any weapons. Right? Nobody had, you know, nobody had any self-defense and everybody knew it. So it’s kind of like, you know, you walk into a really crappy part of town and you hold up your $20,000 Rolex and you start waving at everybody. I mean, what do you expect going to happen? Right?

00:07:54:05 – 00:08:18:00
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, knowing that the movie focuses more on the ship itself, it doesn’t really talk much about what’s going on in Somalia at the time. But I like that context that you gave because it’s it makes a lot more sense why it was happening. But also like even in the beginning of the movie when before the pirates go out, it almost looks I mean, there’s a bunch of them around, almost like, you know, they’re looking for a job for that day.

00:08:18:06 – 00:08:23:01
Dan LeFebvre
And, you know, they’re they’re wanting to feed their families.

00:08:23:03 – 00:08:46:10
Brian Beckcom
Absolutely. Like it’s like in America, sometimes you go to Home Depot and there’s a bunch people outside waiting to get hired, like, do you blame them? Do you blame, where do you fall politically on the immigration issue? If you lived in Mexico and your family was getting threatened by drug cartels, if you were in that violent circumstance, what would you do?

00:08:46:13 – 00:09:12:18
Brian Beckcom
Like, you know, so so in a way, it’s really hard to blame these poor fishermen from Somalia for doing what they do, for doing what they did, especially when we were just basically kind of you know, attempting them, just tempting them to do it, just saying, here’s a bunch of money, here’s a ship with that carries $30,000 in petty cash for every one of these trips that they’ll just give to you.

00:09:12:21 – 00:09:38:12
Brian Beckcom
What do you expect? And by the way, after this case, one of the things that I’m most proud about this case is there hasn’t been a single successful pirate attack on an American, commercial vessel since my case. And there’s a good reason for that. All of the ships are armed. Now, I don’t know if you’re curious to know why they weren’t armed before, and they’re arm now, but there’s a there’s actually a pretty simple explanation for this.

00:09:38:14 – 00:09:45:24
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I mean, I am curious because there was going to be one of my question too, because they, there’s they don’t have any weapons on the ship.

00:09:45:24 – 00:10:16:22
Brian Beckcom
None. Zero. Like no, no weapons at all. And now they do by the way. But the so when I filed this case, one of the things I said was, if you are going to require these sailors to go into these pirate infested waters, you should let them defend themselves with weapons. All these ships, for the most part, are insured by, London based insurance companies or insurance syndicates or similar type of insurance syndicates.

00:10:16:24 – 00:10:45:23
Brian Beckcom
And they went the insurance syndicates went crazy when I filed this case and said, you need to arm these guys because what they’re worried about, guess what? Big surprise. They worried about sailors. They’re worried about what’s on the ships making the money. Right. And what they were saying was they were saying, look, if we provide seamen with pistols or other sorts of weapons to protect, to protect themselves, they might kill each other or they might blow up our cargo.

00:10:45:26 – 00:11:07:20
Brian Beckcom
That was their excuse. Okay, I know it’s hard to believe and I was like, I just don’t think that’s true. And have you seen a single report of a U.S. ship blowing up because they had pistols on the ship? Or have you seen any of those reports? Of course you haven’t. And because it was a bad it was a really bad idea.

00:11:07:20 – 00:11:32:27
Brian Beckcom
So anyway, it was a it was interesting to see because at the time, again, remember the context. I mean, we’re talking about pirate attack after pirate attack. I mean, we’re talking about almost on a weekly basis. And so it was super dangerous. And we also knew by the way, you know, these nautical miles staying a certain number of nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, that was extremely specific.

00:11:32:27 – 00:12:09:27
Brian Beckcom
There’s a very specific reason for that. And that is, by and large, these fishermen are fishing boats, and they cannot go out past a certain, distance. And so, like there’s it would be impossible for any of these ships to have gotten attacked past a certain distance by these fishing vessels because they can’t get out that far. What Phillips decided to do, literally, in the face of countless international security warnings, was he basically decided to take a shortcut and go twice as close as he was told to go to save fuel.

00:12:10:04 – 00:12:12:14
Brian Beckcom
That was basically what happened.

00:12:12:17 – 00:12:17:09
Dan LeFebvre
So it was to save time. And money basically was the reason for it, despite the obvious risks.

00:12:17:12 – 00:12:42:26
Brian Beckcom
That’s exactly what it was. That’s, absolutely, exactly what it was. And, you know, people often ask me, how do you get this case back? I’m like, like, how does a lawyer even get this case? And there’s real specific reason for that, too. So this is long before anybody this was international news when it happened. But at the at the beginning, nobody had any idea there was going to be a movie starring Tom Hanks.

00:12:42:28 – 00:13:09:03
Brian Beckcom
So Phillips basically causes the problem. He’s the captain. He’s in charge. He makes the decisions that lead to his crew getting captured. And then what happens afterwards? They all come back to America. The crew gets together with Phillips and says, we want to write a book and maybe do a story about our experience. And Captain Phillips tells tells them, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.

00:13:09:03 – 00:13:28:10
Brian Beckcom
I’m going to write my own book. And they were like, well, hold on a second. You were the one that caught your it was your fault that we did this. So they were like, if he’s going to write a book trying to whitewash all the screw ups that he made, we need to make sure people really know about it.

00:13:28:13 – 00:13:50:22
Brian Beckcom
And so that’s what generated initially, at least the desire of the crew to make sure the true story got out. And, you know, I’ll give you an idea. I can give you an example after example. But there were four pirates. Three of them got killed by Navy Seals. One of them was captured. That pirate is now Fort Wayne, Indiana federal prison.

00:13:50:24 – 00:14:16:17
Brian Beckcom
As the only prisoner in the United States that’s been convicted of piracy in the last 100 years, there’s a question about whether, when he was convicted, whether he was even an adult, because, not surprisingly, the birth records in Somalia are horrible. So it was really hard to figure out his age. But some of your listeners may remember the perp walk when the prisoner was walking down the stairs of federal courthouse.

00:14:16:17 – 00:14:44:04
Brian Beckcom
He had a big eyepatch on like a medical eyepatch, and that was because my unarmed crew took utensils out of the kitchen, and one of my clients stabbed one of that pirate in the eye with a spoon. And so it really, truly was, the crew that was heroic. And the Catholic captain that was the numskull that kind of led these guys into this situation to begin with.

00:14:44:06 – 00:14:55:24
Dan LeFebvre
I can understand, I guess, from his perspective, from the captain’s perspective, then why he would want to write the book that told his version of, you know, to kind of make himself seem better.

00:14:55:26 – 00:15:13:16
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. I, you know, that’s human nature. I think we’ve seen that so many, you know, throughout history, we see that again and again. You know, Winston Churchill, one of my heroes, has a great saying. They said one time they said, what do you think history’s going to say about you, Mr. Churchill? He said, history is going to treat me well because I’m going to write it.

00:15:13:23 – 00:15:15:17
Brian Beckcom
Yeah.

00:15:15:19 – 00:15:17:14
Dan LeFebvre
And I’ll say whatever I want it to say.

00:15:17:16 – 00:15:25:18
Brian Beckcom
Right. History, like history is a story of the victors perspective. Yeah. Pretty much. Right. Yeah.

00:15:25:20 – 00:15:45:11
Dan LeFebvre
So one thing we see in the movie, after Captain Phillips gets the warnings of pirate activity, he runs the crew through some security drills that include exercises for what to do if they encounter pirates. That drills like attaching fire hoses to shoot high pressure water, the attackers making sure cages and doors to sensitive areas are locked, things like that.

00:15:45:13 – 00:16:03:18
Dan LeFebvre
But then, while they’re running through the drills, Tom Hanks version of Captain Phillips notices something approaching on the radar. And they’re actually two small boats approaching not to get too far ahead of the movie’s timeline, but we all know what happens in the movie. So obviously those security drills didn’t seem to work. Can you unravel the security drills on Maersk Alabama?

00:16:03:18 – 00:16:08:02
Dan LeFebvre
What were they supposed to be, and did the movie accurately show it to us?

00:16:08:04 – 00:16:44:16
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. So every single ship that sails internationally like that is supposed to have something called a VSP. VSP Victor, I forget what SS VSP stands for Vessel Security Protocol, and in fact they have to file that with certain international agencies. And those are top secret. And I’m not going to get into the details of any of those, because when I have cases with vessel security plans, I usually have an agreement with the vessel owner that we’re going to keep this confidential because it’s important for the safety of the sailors.

00:16:44:19 – 00:17:08:14
Brian Beckcom
We wouldn’t want that information getting that public. But every single I can talk about it in general terms, every single vessel then and now has a VSP, and they have to execute and practice that VSP on a regular basis. The problem was at the time the security protocols were basically worthless. I mean, like those water cannons you saw on the movie, not they didn’t exist.

00:17:08:16 – 00:17:29:29
Brian Beckcom
There was. And there are a lot of different. I mean, again, think about what we’re talking about. These are these are fishermen, okay? They’re not highly trained pirates. I did a pirate case off the coast of West Africa, where an American marine who was retired, but he was captaining a bow, got got kidnaped by mercenaries from Boko Haram.

00:17:30:06 – 00:17:57:28
Brian Beckcom
Those guys are dead. Those guys are bad news. Like you could be armed and the Boko Haram guys could still get you one weapon. One pistol against these fishermen is enough to make them go to the next vessel because they’re they’re looking at they’re looking for targets of opportunity. They’re looking for the softest targets. But they certainly, in every vessel, including this one, had security practices, security protocols.

00:17:57:28 – 00:18:07:29
Brian Beckcom
They have security drills. The problem is, when you’re drilling something that doesn’t stop anybody, you’re just wasting your time, if that makes sense.

00:18:08:02 – 00:18:15:17
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. No, that that makes a lot of sense. And it goes back to would really help if they were armed.

00:18:15:19 – 00:18:37:15
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. Well they are now like I said like I said they are now. And it’s really made a dramatic difference. I mean have you seen any story you remember back then there were Italian ships, you know, ships from all these different kind of German cruise ships, all these ships getting attacked and boarded, and that just doesn’t happen anymore, at least off the coast of East Africa.

00:18:37:17 – 00:18:57:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movies version of events, the security drills turn into real world. When the crew on Maersk Alabama see those boats approaching, and they know there’s no way that a huge container ship can outrun the two smaller pirates skiffs. So Captain Phillips tries a few tactics to try to discourage the pirates. At first he tries the US maritime emergency line, but there’s no answer there.

00:18:57:27 – 00:19:15:16
Dan LeFebvre
He reaches out to the UK maritime trade operations to let them know what’s going on. They think, yeah, it’s probably just some fishermen so they’re not really much help. So then Captain Phillips pretends like he’s talking to the US Navy on the radio, requesting air support, knowing that the pirates are close enough to be listening to their radio traffic.

00:19:15:18 – 00:19:34:02
Dan LeFebvre
And that seems to work according to the movie. It movie shows one of the two boats turning around because of the radio communications, but then the other boat keeps coming and so Captain Phillips orders the limit on the engine was removed, and the huge ship starts kind of zigzagging so that they can make big waves for the tiny pirate boat to try to overcome.

00:19:34:05 – 00:19:42:00
Dan LeFebvre
And then after a while, that seems to work too, because the single engine on the tiny pirate skiff just loses power and dies. How much of that actually happened?

00:19:42:02 – 00:20:10:25
Brian Beckcom
Not much. Not much. I mean, it is. It is. That movie is highly dramatized. And, you know, to be clear, I’m not complaining about that. Like, that’s what Hollywood does. I mean, they tell stories and sometimes actually all the time they dramatize those stories. So, most of that stuff is either never happened in real life or it happened, but it’s but it’s highly, highly dramatized.

00:20:10:25 – 00:20:33:14
Brian Beckcom
Like, I don’t know if you remember that scene in the movie where Captain Phillips basically gives himself up to the kidnapers that didn’t happen. That. I mean, you like like he he basically went kicking and screaming, like in the movie, they make it sound like he’s heroic and he’s like, I’m giving myself up for the crew. It was actually the opposite.

00:20:33:14 – 00:20:52:11
Brian Beckcom
The crew was the one who was fighting back. He was hiding, trying to figure out a way to get out of this and save his skin. And the pirates just took him. And I tell you something else, it’s really strange about this. And if any of your listeners know the answer to this, please call me, because I still haven’t figured this out.

00:20:52:14 – 00:20:58:05
Brian Beckcom
The $30,000 in bounty money that was on that ship has never been found.

00:20:58:07 – 00:21:06:27
Dan LeFebvre
Did they? I mean, in the movie, I think they give it to the pirates. Did they not do that or do we not know what happened to it? Just kind of disappeared.

00:21:06:29 – 00:21:25:18
Brian Beckcom
We don’t know that there were theories that the Navy Seals took it. There were there were theories that, the pirates got it. There were theories. Maybe Captain Phillips knows what happens to it, but I don’t know. That’s the point. Like nobody ever figured that out. Quite frankly, if the Navy Seals took it, I’m like, I don’t care.

00:21:25:18 – 00:21:45:12
Brian Beckcom
I hope those guys spend it on fun stuff because of what I mean, what they did was, was remarkable. The, the scene where they show, like, as I recall the movie, it’s like boom, boom, boom and the pirates are dead kind of thing. It was more like.

00:21:45:15 – 00:21:46:17
Brian Beckcom
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:21:46:19 – 00:22:10:06
Brian Beckcom
You mean it was more like there was a lot more? It wasn’t quite as precise as it’s depicted in the movie, but but again, you’re not going to the movie, to learn history. You going to movie to be entertained. So I’m not faulting Hollywood or Tom Hanks or anybody for dramatizing a dramatic movie. But when you’re in the courthouse, in fact, I’ll tell you a good story about that stand.

00:22:10:06 – 00:22:31:00
Brian Beckcom
Once I found out there was a movie, then Tom Hanks was going to play. Captain Phillips immediately went to the court. I went to the judge. I said, hey, judge, this is a real problem. Everybody loves Tom Hanks. Like, and it’s going to prejudice my clients because truly, the person that made the most mistakes in this case was Phillips.

00:22:31:02 – 00:22:51:00
Brian Beckcom
Everybody’s going to associate him with Tom Hanks and it’s going to really hurt my client. So would it be okay, judge, if we went to trial before the movie came out? So Maersk lawyers come up. Oh no, no, no, we can be told we can make sure that we get fair jurors and they won’t let any of that stuff influence their decision.

00:22:51:00 – 00:23:14:28
Brian Beckcom
And we need a lot of time. So anyway, the point is that the judge listened to the defense lawyers and not me, and he didn’t let me go to trial early. And then the movie comes out and all of a sudden I got 5 to $10 million of free marketing publicity. And I still get it. I mean, even today I’m on a podcast 15 plus years later talking about this case.

00:23:15:00 – 00:23:38:06
Brian Beckcom
I get something like 16,000 website views a month, 15 years after the fact. And I tell people I’m like, sometimes it’s good not to get what you want, because the fact that I lost that request ended up being way better for my clients and my firm.

00:23:38:09 – 00:23:53:08
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I mean, everybody loves Tom Hanks, though, so I understand that that I mean, I don’t know how you not be have some a little bit of bias, I guess, if you never even saw it. But I mean, it’s a Tom Hanks movie. He’s he’s not going to want to see that.

00:23:53:11 – 00:23:54:05
Brian Beckcom
He doesn’t like Tom.

00:23:54:05 – 00:23:55:08
Brian Beckcom
Hanks.

00:23:55:10 – 00:24:10:00
Brian Beckcom
And I and I by the way, I took Captain Phillips deposition for two days and up in the northeast, that’s it’s confidential, sealed and stuff like that. But let me just let me just put it this way. He ain’t Tom Hanks.

00:24:10:02 – 00:24:10:27
Brian Beckcom
Well.

00:24:11:00 – 00:24:14:01
Dan LeFebvre
To be fair, none of us are. There’s only one Tom Hanks.

00:24:14:03 – 00:24:25:04
Brian Beckcom
That’s true, that’s true. But but but again, I don’t think any of us are comparing our. So if true Tom Hanks maybe playing me in a movie. He ain’t playing you in a movie.

00:24:25:06 – 00:24:43:27
Dan LeFebvre
Fair point, fair point. Well, if we go back to the movie, speaking of, despite failing the first time around, the next day the Pirates try again and the leader of Douala, Musa, returns with a more powerful boat. This time the crew on Maersk Alabama. They try basically the same thing. They try increasing the engine power, doing the hard turns.

00:24:43:27 – 00:25:01:05
Dan LeFebvre
That seemed to work last time, but this time it doesn’t because the Pirates have a slightly bigger boat the movie focuses on. It has two engines instead of one, and then the only other manner of defense are the fire hoses that we talked about earlier, that the crew on Alabama run around the whole ship, making it hard for the pirates to get close.

00:25:01:05 – 00:25:21:08
Dan LeFebvre
You have the water shooting out, but then one of the hoses slips. So we see, I think his name was Shane Murphy. Going to fix it. One of the crew and the Pirates start shooting at him. So then Phillips orders him to get to safety. And that’s how the Pirates managed to attach a ladder to the side of the ship, climb up, and then take over the boat.

00:25:21:10 – 00:25:36:24
Dan LeFebvre
And from Captain Phillips perspective, according to the movie, he knows that his men don’t have the firepower to defend against the pirates. Again, no guns on the ship, so he orders Shane to go down to the engine room with most of the crew to hide where they can lock themselves in, and then cut the power to the ship so the pirates can’t move it.

00:25:36:27 – 00:25:47:14
Dan LeFebvre
And then Captain Phillips and two other crew members stay on the bridge, where they’re captured by the four Somali pirates. Was that ultimately how the pirates were able to take control of Maersk Alabama?

00:25:47:16 – 00:25:50:29
Brian Beckcom
No. No. And,

00:25:51:02 – 00:25:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
I had a feeling it would be something like that.

00:25:53:00 – 00:26:06:12
Brian Beckcom
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, that’s not really what happened. Although I will say this, one of the ways that the Pirates figured out how to get some more distance from the coast is to use kind of a bigger mothership.

00:26:06:15 – 00:26:07:26
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. We see that in the movie. Yeah.

00:26:07:28 – 00:26:34:21
Brian Beckcom
Right. Yeah. They would have these, they would have these larger fishing vessels that could actually get out farther and then they would deploy smaller vessels once they got out to where they wanted to go. So that part of it’s true. And again, it’s, it’s like I don’t know how to put this, but it’s like there’s enough truth in the movie for it not to be like a completely fictional story, but everything is.

00:26:34:21 – 00:27:08:22
Brian Beckcom
So, I keep saying the word dramatized, exaggerated as to as to basically be not true, if that makes sense. Like the idea they were, you know, they’re doing. So I mean, it reminds me of Star Wars when like, Luke Skywalker is being chased and an X-Wing fighter and he’s doing all these crazy dodges and he’s, you know, the idea that they were around, they had this giant fishing or this giant commercial vessel in the middle of the ocean doing these, crazy evasive maneuvers while they’re shooting water cannons out the back.

00:27:08:22 – 00:27:44:03
Brian Beckcom
And Captain Phillips is standing there like George Washington crossing the, what was the river? He crossed the Brandywine or whatever on the front of the boat is. I mean, it’s just it’s Hollywood. That’s what it is. And, enough of that happened to where you can say, well, they didn’t totally make it up. But the timing, the sequence, the substance, the procedure is, is, is, by and large, so, so overly exaggerated and overly dramatized as you could, it is to say that that that’s not the way it happened.

00:27:44:07 – 00:27:47:19
Brian Beckcom
I mean, you could probably confidently say that.

00:27:47:21 – 00:27:57:06
Dan LeFebvre
Did they end up, splitting like the movie shows where there were some in the bridge and then some of the crew in the engine room kind of separated like that?

00:27:57:09 – 00:28:20:21
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. You know, that’s an interesting piece of the case. So the crew actually, evacuated as, as they were supposed to to it’s essentially a safe room and, and bolted themselves. And that was one of the, and this didn’t apply just to Maersk Alabama. But generally speaking, in the maritime world, there are rooms that you can seal.

00:28:20:21 – 00:28:53:11
Brian Beckcom
And like if you’re getting attacked, you can use them as safe rooms. In fact, that’s what happened in my marine west coast of Africa case. He went into a room with his crew, bolted themselves. And the problem is that those pirates had, saws that could, like, literally cut through the steel. And then once they made a little hole, they stuck their machine guns through the hole and said, we’re going to start firing this thing into this room, and bullets are going, I mean, everybody’s going to be dead within 10s, right?

00:28:53:13 – 00:29:11:09
Brian Beckcom
Well, so my crew ended up evacuating and they, they they stayed in that room. The pirates locked them in this room for like 18 hours. I think it was 120 degrees the whole time. They had no water and food. So it was it was a it was a pretty bad situation.

00:29:11:12 – 00:29:12:27
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Wow. Yeah.

00:29:12:27 – 00:29:36:17
Brian Beckcom
That’s they do have safe rooms is the point though. Like on these boats, one of the things I’ll often do is say everybody because think about it. On these boats you’ve seen these like they have doors that they can and seal shed. Like if you’re in super bad weather and you need to make the ship at least parts of the parts of the ship watertight, you can go into these rooms that you can you can really, really seal tight.

00:29:36:17 – 00:30:02:24
Brian Beckcom
So that that is a pretty common, defense mechanism. And then what you do is the idea is you get in there and you buy enough time to where the posse can come get you, right? Like you don’t have to stay in there for a week. You just get in there, you send out a distress signal, you get in that room, you seal yourself in, and you hope that the posse will be there within two, three, 4 or 5 hours, something like that.

00:30:02:27 – 00:30:18:21
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie, the pirates start searching the ship to try to find the rest of the crew, and Captain Phillips is trying to get the pirates to look in the cargo deck. But the Pirates leader, Musa knows that there’s a problem with the ship’s power, so he wants to go to the engine room.

00:30:18:24 – 00:30:37:09
Dan LeFebvre
Meanwhile, the crew’s hiding away in the engine room and they devise a plan to fight back against the pirates. As Phillips is leading the pirates around the ship, he’s kind of giving little hints here and there. He’d say things like, well, we better hope the emergency power stays on, because if it won’t, then we’re not gonna be able to see anything if it goes off.

00:30:37:11 – 00:30:54:03
Dan LeFebvre
And things like be careful in here with bare feet because you can climb on almost anything. And then over the radio, the crew kind of picks up on some of these. They break some glass to lay a trap for the barefooted pirates. And that works when one of the pirates, a guy named Bilal, I believe it gets badly cut.

00:30:54:05 – 00:30:58:22
Dan LeFebvre
Did the Maersk Alabama crew try to fight back against the pirates like the movie shows?

00:30:58:24 – 00:31:24:19
Brian Beckcom
Absolutely they did. In fact, what I was mentioning earlier is they grabbed utensils and were using those as weapons. And in fact, the one pirate that survived got stabbed in the eye with a spoon. And that’s why he had an eyepatch on. That was one of my clients that did that. I would actually, the way I would say, if you want to be as close to the truth as possible, once the pirates got on the ship, the crew pretty much did exactly what they were trained to do.

00:31:24:21 – 00:31:47:19
Brian Beckcom
Captain Phillips, on the other hand, did not get to where he was supposed to get to, and what ended up happening? It ended up causing the entire security protocol to get thrown off kilter, because now all of a sudden, the Pirates have access to Phillips and all his knowledge, plus the money, and they can use that to leverage what they want to leverage against the crew.

00:31:47:20 – 00:32:10:15
Brian Beckcom
Had the captain come in there like he was supposed to and executed a security plan. You don’t have all these other, outstanding issues that the Pirates can basically use a captain as a as a negotiating, piece. Like, you don’t want to do that like my cam and my, like, again, my, it’s funny because in this case, not funny how it funny ironic.

00:32:10:15 – 00:32:41:10
Brian Beckcom
It’s funny because in this case, the the the person that screwed up was the captain like Phillips, there is no question at all that the reason that these men got kidnaped and taken hostage and put in a room there was 120 plus degrees for more than 18 hours, no food and water. The reason is Captain Phillips and then also the company for letting him deviate so, so wildly from the recommendations.

00:32:41:12 – 00:33:04:28
Brian Beckcom
But in my in my West Coast pirate case, I represented the captain like the captain did everything he was supposed to do. Like, you know, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom made the distress call that Boko Haram pirates coming, highly trained, highly armed, gets all his crew into the safe room, locks it up, does everything precisely right. And, and he’s.

00:33:05:00 – 00:33:29:23
Brian Beckcom
And by the way, like I said, they drilled a hole to the steel door, put the gun in there and so that he basically he had to say, look, I’m coming out, leave my crew alone, I’ll come out. And so he actually came out, gave himself up to the pirates and was taken into the jungles of West Africa for 18 days and then ultimately released after some really bad stuff happened to them.

00:33:29:25 – 00:33:40:21
Brian Beckcom
But my point is, he did everything right. He still got taken, but he did everything he was supposed to do. Captain Phillips basically didn’t do anything he was supposed to do.

00:33:40:24 – 00:33:52:15
Dan LeFebvre
If he had followed protocol, if Phillips had followed protocol instead of staying up on the bridge, he should have gone down in the room, basically with the rest of the crucial. The entire crew was in there after sending out the signal. Is that right?

00:33:52:17 – 00:34:02:03
Brian Beckcom
Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, and there was multiple different areas on the ship where you could use as a secure location. He should have been in one of those.

00:34:02:11 – 00:34:05:08
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So not necessarily with the crew depending on what he could get to.

00:34:05:08 – 00:34:10:10
Brian Beckcom
But yeah, depending on where he was at the time. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay okay.

00:34:10:13 – 00:34:29:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well in the movie Musa gets captured by the crew down below. And in particular the movie focuses on, I think it’s the chief engineer, Mike Perry, who subdues him with a pocket knife. So the movie kind of sets up this tension of the pirates holding crew hostage on the bridge, including Captain Phillips. And then they have their own injured leader held hostage down below.

00:34:29:05 – 00:34:52:05
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s when we see Tom Hanks version of Captain Phillips offer the Pirates $30,000 in the ship’s chief in exchange for them leaving on one of the Maersk Alabama lifeboats. And ultimately, that’s what they agree on. So the plan is for the crew to get Captain Phillips back while the Pirates get their leader back. Musa. So then they can leave with the money, and we’ll talk about what happens with that deal in a moment.

00:34:52:05 – 00:34:58:09
Dan LeFebvre
But was the movie correct to show that there was this deal between the Pirates and the crew.

00:34:58:12 – 00:35:20:13
Brian Beckcom
Now and again? Like I said, nobody knows what happened to that money. Like like nobody knows. I mean, I’d love for somebody to call me up and say, I figured out what happened. In fact, there was something really strange that happened a few years afterwards. Two Navy Seals were on, as I recall, was the same vessel and died of a drug overdose.

00:35:20:13 – 00:35:39:13
Brian Beckcom
And there was all sorts of questions about, first of all, why were there two Navy Seals on that vessel? Why was there heroin on that? There was some really weird stuff going on. Where was the where was the ransom money? My period, a name I haven’t heard in quite some time. So he was one of the few crew members that decided not to join the case.

00:35:39:13 – 00:35:46:10
Brian Beckcom
So he was aligned with Captain Phillips. He is, as I recall, was he the first mate?

00:35:46:13 – 00:35:50:00
Dan LeFebvre
I think they mentioned him being the, word chief engineer.

00:35:50:00 – 00:36:07:04
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. So chief engineer is a is a high ranking position on those ships that would put you, you know, depending on how it staff that would that that was certainly put you in that chain of command at least. I mean you’re probably the number one guy on most ships in the engine room. Plus you’re usually an officer.

00:36:07:04 – 00:36:21:27
Brian Beckcom
So he was a real high ranking person. What I found then, and I think most of your listeners that this won’t surprise him is when when company management screws up, company management circles the wagons.

00:36:21:27 – 00:36:26:15
Brian Beckcom
Yeah, you know what I mean? So, yeah, I mean.

00:36:26:17 – 00:36:44:10
Brian Beckcom
What I, when I like when I want to know the truth about what happened. I’m not asking the CEO or the CEO like I want to ask the line level workers. Hey, guys. What happened there? So Perry Perry was one of the he was very vocal in not wanting to join the case. Totally his decision. And totally, totally fine with that.

00:36:44:10 – 00:37:13:09
Brian Beckcom
But not surprising considering he was he was at the at the level, the managerial level where where you might be able to start saying, well, what were you doing, Mike? Like I what why, why, why did he why didn’t you stop, captain? I mean, again, a lot of this stuff is confidential, but there’s internal communications from Phillips and other people that talk about the decision to go to to go more than twice as close as was recommended.

00:37:13:11 – 00:37:19:20
Brian Beckcom
And I’ll just I’ll just put it this way. There’s a reason that Mercer doesn’t want this released.

00:37:19:23 – 00:37:21:11
Brian Beckcom
I mean, that’s fair.

00:37:21:13 – 00:37:22:08
Brian Beckcom
Yeah.

00:37:22:10 – 00:37:33:08
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you talked about the the 30,000. Was that something that they had as specifically for pirates like you were talking about earlier on Alabama? That was specifically for pirates?

00:37:33:11 – 00:38:12:28
Brian Beckcom
Yeah, absolutely. And that, that that is that is and I actually I don’t know if that’s true or not, I, I have a strong suspicion that they carry that kind of money on ships. Now, the back at the time, it was why that was a widespread practice. And, you know, it’s it’s interesting because it’s really there’s something called a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in America which prohibits, among other things, American companies from negotiating, ransoms like or paying bribes or, you know, things like that.

00:38:12:28 – 00:38:41:24
Brian Beckcom
So it’s really close to the line when you’re talking about and of course, the idea is, you know, the whole we don’t negotiate with terrorists idea like, because that’ll encourage more terrorism. That’s the idea. Like, we don’t want companies paying bribes because encourage more bribery. We don’t want ransoms because paying ransoms is going to encourage more kidnapings. And so it’s you got to be super careful as an American company about how you deal with those situations.

00:38:41:24 – 00:39:17:27
Brian Beckcom
In fact, like in my West Coast case, you date the the captain was ransomed from the pirates, but he was not ransom by the American company like, they go through, intermediaries usually located in the UK in places like that, that then go through intermediaries that then take care of what they need to take care of. There’s in fact, there was a movie, I think, called Proof of Life or something like that, which kind of depicts some of these specialist kidnaping, a ransom, companies that will go in and take care.

00:39:18:00 – 00:39:41:18
Brian Beckcom
But the problem is, is like Exxon, let’s say they have an employee off the coast of, West Africa that gets kidnaped. Exxon can’t they’re it’s illegal for them to pay ransoms. It’s a legal for them to negotiate with terrorists like that. That is explicitly illegal under United States also. So they got to be real careful about how they do it, you know?

00:39:41:21 – 00:39:56:09
Brian Beckcom
But on the other hand, they want take care of their employees if they can like and good for that. I hope they figure out a way to do that. I mean, if you got billions of dollars, you should you should spend some of that on your on your people.

00:39:56:12 – 00:40:13:10
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I mean, in, in that context, you know, you know, in this particular case, you know, like $30,000 for the Alabama and the crew, I mean, it’s it’s worth 30,000. Like, I mean, to for their safety.

00:40:13:13 – 00:40:14:23
Brian Beckcom
Yeah.

00:40:14:25 – 00:40:35:01
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned the ransom. And if we head back into the movie, the exchange of, Captain Phillips and Mousa doesn’t go as well. It doesn’t go as planned. I should say. And instead, as the pirates are leaving the ship, they don’t let Phillips leave the lifeboat. He was in there kind of showing them how it works. And then the lifeboat is launched from Maersk Alabama with all the pirates inside and Captain Phillips as their hostage.

00:40:35:03 – 00:40:44:10
Dan LeFebvre
And the movie suggests that the pirates weren’t happy with the $30,000 from the safe, so they wanted to ransom Phillips for even more money. Did that happen the way the movie shows it?

00:40:44:12 – 00:41:10:02
Brian Beckcom
Not really. And again, there was some really strange questions about. So the money, far as everybody knows, that the cash went on to that, lifeboat with Phillips and with the, with the pirates. Now the pirate that didn’t get killed wasn’t on the lifeboat. He stayed on board. But that money was on that lifeboat and was has never been found.

00:41:10:02 – 00:41:40:11
Brian Beckcom
There’s there’s theories that the Navy Seals did something with it. The precision of the operation that’s depicted in the movie was not how quite as precise as that in real life. Like there was a lot more stuff going on, but but look, I mean, again, Phillips was taken out alive, but he didn’t give himself up. He was taken against his will, basically kicking and screaming for all practical purposes.

00:41:40:14 – 00:42:01:29
Brian Beckcom
And the Navy Seals did come in there and the Navy Seals did it. Badass job getting them back. So all that stuff is true. But again, the details are. So I’m just kind of like, what’s the movie? Saving Private Ryan? Remember, the beginning scene is Saving Private Ryan. Like, how intense that was. That is so highly dramatized.

00:42:01:29 – 00:42:22:24
Brian Beckcom
It’s ridiculous. All that stuff. Like, there were men that stormed the beaches that were men. They got killed. All that stuff happened, but they have to compress like that event into something that you can digest on a movie screen in about five minutes, or however long that scene took, ten minutes or whatever it was in the Maersk Alabama.

00:42:22:24 – 00:42:47:24
Brian Beckcom
I think that scene takes five minutes, and then you’ve got Tom Hanks afterwards doing the Tom Hanks thing where he’s breaking down all that stuff. But I’m talking about the actual operation of rescuing him was significantly longer, and they got to compress the time and they got to make it interesting and stuff like that. So, the basically the details of the movie are, are all made up.

00:42:47:29 – 00:43:00:02
Brian Beckcom
That large picture of what happened is true, but the details are just and I’m not again, I’m not criticizing Hollywood or anybody like that, that that’s what they have to do.

00:43:00:04 – 00:43:22:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah. Again, movies are for entertainment. Well, you talked about the the Navy, and we’re at the point in the movie’s timeline where the Navy starts to, come into the picture after all of this escalation. We see the US Navy getting involved. They send multiple ships to deal with the hostage situation with Captain Phillips. The primary ship in the movie is a destroyer called USS Bainbridge.

00:43:22:03 – 00:43:41:06
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, the US Navy has identified the Somali mothership that we talked about briefly earlier. It’s a they say it’s a Taiwanese fishing ship that was hijacked by pirates a year earlier under a Somali warlord named Garrard. And then we kind of get a little bit of a little, almost a little backstory that captain, the captain of Bainbridge, recognizes Garrett’s name.

00:43:41:12 – 00:43:59:29
Dan LeFebvre
He’s somebody who apparently just wants money. So they think they can negotiate for Captain Phillips. But the clock is ticking because the Pirates are trying to reach the Somali coast. There’s two more Navy ships that are coming, USS boxer and USS Halliburton. They’re sent with the Navy Seals. And the way the movie sets this up, basically, Bainbridge is their first.

00:44:00:04 – 00:44:10:09
Dan LeFebvre
And if they can’t resolve the situation before the Seals get there, the Navy Seals are going to take care of it. Can you share what the situation was like as the Navy entered the picture?

00:44:10:12 – 00:44:46:08
Brian Beckcom
Yeah, that the the Maersk Alabama was actually lucky in a way. I mean, I had to I had to say lucky given what happened. But they were lucky that there were American naval ships that were so close by. That’s that’s almost never the case. And so at that point, there really is nobody and I mean, Captain Phillips, at some point loses command of the vessel, like the most famous saying, you know, maybe if I’m the captain now, I mean, how many times that there’s basically a that’s a, that’s a meme now.

00:44:46:08 – 00:45:10:21
Brian Beckcom
And by the way, I’ll tell you a cool story about that. That was completely ad libbed. And that actor, it was not a professionally trained actor. Like he’s Somalian, but they, they they did a casting call in Milwaukee where there was a huge Somali community, and they picked those four guys and they’re not actors. They had no training at all.

00:45:10:21 – 00:45:32:04
Brian Beckcom
When he comes up there and he says, I’m the captain now, that’s completely ad libbed. And that’s the most famous line in the movie, and probably the most famous line of any movie, or at least top five over the last 15 years. Right. I’m the captain now. But in any event, once the. So there are and I got to be a little bit cautious about.

00:45:32:05 – 00:46:00:11
Brian Beckcom
I don’t want to give up any confidentiality, but there are people in Africa who, serve as conduits between commercial and governmental interest. And these pirates or terrorists or whatever you want to call them. And it’s like, I like we were talking about just a few minutes ago, there’s a foreign corrupt practices that got me super duper careful about running afoul of that.

00:46:00:13 – 00:46:28:22
Brian Beckcom
But like, there are local, warlords and chieftains, there are people like Russell Crowe on the movie Proof of Life who specialize in dealing with those people. There are back channels that oftentimes you can utilize to get stuff done. But on the flip side, the more you do this, the more you encourage more attacks. I mean, the more to, the more ransoms that are paid, the more kidnaping.

00:46:28:22 – 00:46:51:14
Brian Beckcom
And so it’s a really, really tough problem. I mean, if it was your family or a family member that was kidnaped, you would God wouldn’t care how much you pay him or whatever they want. I want my family member back. But the policymakers have to look beyond just the one individual events. They have to look at, kind of a broader.

00:46:51:17 – 00:47:09:19
Brian Beckcom
And so, boy, it’s a it’s a tough call. But then once you’ve once you’ve got once you’ve engaged the United States military, they’re in charge like that, that at that point you’ve lost, you’ve lost control. Like once you send them in, they’re going to they’re going to do what they’re going to do. And there’s not anything anybody can do to stop it.

00:47:09:19 – 00:47:11:07
Brian Beckcom
Quite frankly.

00:47:11:10 – 00:47:13:00
Dan LeFebvre
They’re the captain now okay.

00:47:13:02 – 00:47:16:15
Brian Beckcom
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

00:47:16:17 – 00:47:17:20
Brian Beckcom
And perfect.

00:47:17:20 – 00:47:40:27
Dan LeFebvre
Love it. Well, the movie kind of it focuses then kind of shifts to talking about, you know, with Captain Phillips and that hostage situation. But we do see a brief scene where the Navy, there’s some Navy who go on the Alabama, and there’s there to escort it to Mombasa. Did they actually did that happen? Did they get a Navy escort basically to make sure they made it there safely the rest of the way?

00:47:40:27 – 00:47:41:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah.

00:47:41:12 – 00:48:05:24
Brian Beckcom
Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. And again, it was kind of luck as I recall. And you can fact ship me on this. The reason that we were able to, use Navy Seals to rescue these guys is because they were in close proximity. And the reason they were in close proximity is I think we were doing some aggressive military exercises over there, and they were able to divert some assets and take care of this pretty quickly.

00:48:05:28 – 00:48:25:06
Brian Beckcom
So people criticize Obama all the time for not going to war with Syria and a lot of other things he did. But I’ll tell you what, he made some tough calls like that Navy Seal thing could have gone sideways. And I like they could captain Phillips could have been killed. The crew could have been killed. That thing could have gone sideways in a heartbeat.

00:48:25:08 – 00:48:43:11
Brian Beckcom
He made the call. Well, let’s go in there and get him that. You know, that stuff is the way that all that Special Forces stuff is depicted in movies is super clean and almost antiseptic, that it is not like that in real life, like it’s nasty. I mean, when they went in, got bin laden and one of the Black Hawk helicopters crashed, right?

00:48:43:11 – 00:49:02:24
Brian Beckcom
It was a mess like it was did did not go the way they planned at all. But but it was fortunate as I recall again, people can fact check me. The military was doing some sort of exercise, some sort of joint exercises over there, and so they were able to get over there quickly where that’s that’s usually not the case, unfortunately.

00:49:02:27 – 00:49:26:23
Dan LeFebvre
That. Yeah, that makes sense. And in the movie they show the the other ship start arriving with, with Bainbridge. But we see Captain Phillips, he tells his captors that he has to pee, and they let him go outside and then Phillips pushes that one of the pirates is watching him below. He pushes him into the water, and then he jumps into trying to escape, and he starts swimming towards the Navy ships.

00:49:26:23 – 00:49:44:06
Dan LeFebvre
But then the pirates turn around the lifeboat. They start shooting at him in the water, and so they bring him back and bring Captain Phillips back into the lifeboat, and they start beating him pretty severely. Pretty much at that point you get the impression from the movie that he tried to escape, and because they beat him so badly, he’s not going to try to escape again.

00:49:44:08 – 00:49:47:15
Dan LeFebvre
Is it true that Captain Phillips tried to escape like we see in the movie?

00:49:47:18 – 00:50:07:28
Brian Beckcom
No, that is complete. That is this. So again, that that’s that was it. And that was part of the I was that was what that’s the kind of stuff that worried me the most because it basically inverted the real story. The real story was Captain Phillips screwed up, Mer screwed up, and the crew made the best of it.

00:50:08:03 – 00:50:32:08
Brian Beckcom
I mean, that’s really what the crew was heroic, and I could tell story after story. But we already told you about Spann against AK 47. That was not Phillips. That was the crew. And and the way the the part of the movie that you’re talking about is the part that I think bothered my clients the most because it really was the opposite of what actually happened.

00:50:32:15 – 00:50:55:21
Brian Beckcom
Phillips he wasn’t beat up. He didn’t jump in the water and try to escape. None of that happened. I mean, that is completely and totally not what happened. And it makes it look like the crew was a bunch of idiots and Captain Phillips is some sort of heroic figure, and it was like it was the complete opposite, like I said.

00:50:55:21 – 00:51:00:23
Brian Beckcom
And so that that part is definitively not true.

00:51:00:26 – 00:51:13:07
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, it definitely does make him seem more heroic when, you know, he’s trying to escape. He’s doing doing these things and taking this. But I guess that’s Tom. You have Tom Hanks in a movie. You gotta be Tom Hanks sometimes. Yeah, yeah.

00:51:13:07 – 00:51:34:01
Brian Beckcom
Well yeah, that that’s exactly right. And again, they’re not trying to win a lawsuit in this movie. They’re trying to entertain people who have come to sit in a seat for two hours and be entertained. And so I don’t blame Hollywood for doing any of this stuff. What I had to be careful about and what my job was and still is, is to protect my client’s interests.

00:51:34:01 – 00:52:01:12
Brian Beckcom
And so what I was concerned about, and I’m very proud, quite frankly, the fact we’re able to do this, I’m normally not taken on $1 billion, international corporation with multiple billion dollar insurance companies behind them. I do that all the time. But then what I don’t do is have Hollywood and the Hollywood publicity machine on top of that talent, a narrative that hurts my case.

00:52:01:12 – 00:52:37:29
Brian Beckcom
That was the hard part of it. Right? So I had to I mean, going against these big insurance companies, these big corporations. That’s a Tuesday for me. Going against Hollywood in their publicity machine was a completely new experience. Fortunately, I was we did a fantastic job of like, everybody basically knows, I think that that movie was a good movie, but there’s questions about the accuracy of it, and that was because we were able to go on, you know, nowadays you can get on social media, you can go websites, you can put up videos, you can put up all this information even 15 years ago.

00:52:38:02 – 00:52:59:23
Brian Beckcom
You know, I have a degree in computer science. I’m a technically pretty competent. I was able to use that to get our news out there to get on Nightline, Dateline, London’s Daily Telegraph, you know, New York Times, when you looked up Captain Phillips The Movie to two lengths below, it would say the truth about Captain phillips.com. That would take you to my website.

00:52:59:23 – 00:53:23:06
Brian Beckcom
So that was really the the most difficult, part of the case. I mean, like proving what happened. That’s right. In my wheelhouse. I do that on a daily basis, proving what happened without letting Hollywood and all the publicity completely hijack the narrative. That was that was a little bit more challenging.

00:53:23:08 – 00:53:49:28
Dan LeFebvre
While the movie ends with a whirlwind of events, the Seal team arrives. They take over command and communication with the pirates, and immediately they confuse the Pirates by listing off all of their names and where they’re from. They go on to say that they’ve spoken to their tribal elders, and the elders are being flown in to negotiate and exchange Captain Phillips for the money, and while that happens, they need someone to go aboard Bainbridge to negotiate the deal with the elders, and they’re going to tow the lifeboat to the exchange spot.

00:53:50:01 – 00:54:12:20
Dan LeFebvre
Moussaoui agrees to do this. The tow line is attached and to attach the lifeboat, I should say. And then Musa goes to Bainbridge for the meeting with the elders. And that leaves the other three pirates with Captain Phillips on the boat. Meanwhile, the Navy ship turns on these really bright lights because I think it was like, oh, 400 so early in the morning, dark out, and they tell the pirates that’s just for towing them to the exchange spot.

00:54:12:20 – 00:54:30:04
Dan LeFebvre
But really what they’re doing is they’re getting the snipers into position. We see Phillips start fighting against his captors. They subdue him, tie him up, blindfold him, and then that moment that you talked about before, you see the three Navy Seals, just perfectly timed shot, you know, three shots to kill the remaining pirates at the exact same time.

00:54:30:07 – 00:54:50:28
Dan LeFebvre
And then back on Bainbridge. Moussaoui is taken into custody. There’s no elders, no negotiation. And then, as the only pirate left alive, he’s going to face trial for piracy in America. Captain Phillips returned safely in Bainbridge. And that’s where the movie ends as he’s getting medical treatment. How well does the movie do showing the way the whole situation came to an end.

00:54:51:00 – 00:55:24:12
Brian Beckcom
It does a decent job of that. I mean, the way Tom Hanks depicts Captain Phillips breaking down is all Tom Hanks. That is nothing at all like captain. I mean, that is Tom Hanks at his best. Okay, the Navy Seals would never allow Hollywood to show their trade secrets. So some of the stuff that they basically it was like a bait and switch is what’s depicted in the movie.

00:55:24:12 – 00:55:48:18
Brian Beckcom
We’re going to put the pirates are going to be looking this way, and we’re going to be doing stuff over here. They do that kind of stuff all the time. The actual operational details, are not same because again, there’s all sorts of different security issues involved in this. I mean, people probably don’t appreciate. I went on an inspection at Los Angeles Harbor two weeks ago.

00:55:48:18 – 00:56:13:06
Brian Beckcom
I brought a friend of mine, and she could not believe how dangerous we were on huge commercial cargo ship doing an inspection with 18 wheelers trains. It was raining. We have these cargos, you know, going over. I couldn’t believe how dangerous it was. What what people don’t realize is how every time one of these huge ship comes into a port, it’s like an enormous bomb.

00:56:13:06 – 00:56:42:03
Brian Beckcom
Like those things are so, tempting. These big commercial ships for bad actors that the security plans and the security protocols are, like, extra critical. And we don’t want people knowing about them publicly. So a lot of the stuff that the military does or that the companies do, they won’t talk about publicly, but she can talk about it on or on the edges.

00:56:42:03 – 00:57:10:14
Brian Beckcom
So, yes, the Navy Seals did a fantastic job. Yes, they ended up rescuing Captain Phillips. But the surgical nature of this depicted in the movie is nothing. Nothing like it actually happened. In the movie, there’s three shots, right? But they did a, they did a, naval investigation afterwards. And that there was at least 20 rounds fired.

00:57:10:16 – 00:57:30:28
Dan LeFebvre
A little more, a little not as a surgical precision as you know. Yes. As a VC in the movie. Yeah. No. Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about the movie Captain Phillips. Aside from being a trial lawyer who represented some of the Maersk Alabama crew, after the events we see in the movie, you’ve got a fascinating podcast of your own called lessons from Leaders with Bryan Beckham.

00:57:31:00 – 00:57:40:27
Dan LeFebvre
Now, if you’re listening to this, check the show notes for a link to Brian’s podcast so you can cued up after we’re done here. And while they do that, and before I let you go, Brian, can you give us an overview of your podcast and where they can learn more about you?

00:57:41:00 – 00:58:07:05
Brian Beckcom
Yeah, lessons from later started and started in middle quarantine features. People that are positive leaders that maybe, a lot of people don’t know about, mainly military sports. That’s so New York Times bestselling authors, and it’s a focus on people that are doing really, really cool things that maybe not, maybe don’t get quite the publicity that they deserve.

00:58:07:05 – 00:58:26:20
Brian Beckcom
So, it’s a great show, and I think you’re you’re it kind of ties in a little bit with this. Like, you’re getting a true story of, like, leadership on the ground. So, you know, we have all these leaders on TV or so-called leaders on the we see all these all the time. But my theory is the real leaders, you don’t really hear much about them.

00:58:26:20 – 00:58:29:09
Brian Beckcom
And those are kind of people I try to feature on my show.

00:58:29:12 – 00:58:31:27
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. Well, thanks again so much for your time, Brian.

00:58:32:00 – 00:58:43:26
Brian Beckcom
Thank you. It’s been a it’s been a real, real joy. A lot of fun.

00:58:43:28 – 00:59:03:18
Dan LeFebvre
This episode of based On a True Story was produced by me, Dan the Fan. Thank you once again to Bryan Beckham for sharing his time and expertise to help us separate fact from fiction in the movie Captain Phillips. As you’ve seen from Brian today, he has a ton of knowledge that he’s happy to share, and beyond that, he’s also a podcaster who’s great at harnessing the knowledge of his guests.

00:59:03:23 – 00:59:20:17
Dan LeFebvre
So go subscribe to Brian’s podcast called lessons from leaders. I’ve got a link to that in the show notes as well as on the shows home on the web at based on a True Story podcast.com/380. Okay, now it’s time for the answer to our two tours and a live game from the beginning of the episode. And there’s a quick refresher.

00:59:20:19 – 00:59:45:08
Dan LeFebvre
Here are the two truths and one lie again. Number one, Maersk Alabama sailed within the range of known Somali pirates. Number two the $30,000 on Maersk Alabama was intended as ransom money. Number three, Captain Phillips tried to escape from the pirates at the first chance he got. Did you figure out which one is a lie? Got the answer right here in the envelope.

00:59:45:08 – 01:00:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
So let’s open that up. And the lie is number three. Brian, explain how the scene in the movie where we see Tom Hanks version of Captain Phillips jumping to the water, trying to escape from the pirates was completely fictional. Thank you so much for sticking around to the end. If you’re watching the video version here, in a moment, you’ll see the credits roll.

01:00:05:20 – 01:00:25:26
Dan LeFebvre
If you want to get your name in the credits for the next video and on the website at. Based on a True Story podcast.com/credits, you can learn how to become a based on a true story producer using the link in the description or at based on a true Story podcast.com/support. Once again, that’s based on a true story podcast.com/support.

01:00:25:28 – 01:00:31:18
Dan LeFebvre
Until next time. Thanks so much for spending your time with Brian and I today, and I’ll chat with you again really soon.