Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (15 page)

At the range one day, Mattera helped a customer with a broken mainspring on his .45 automatic, no charge, happy to do it. The customer asked if Mattera might be looking to become a police officer, a reasonable question given the venue. Mattera was intrigued by the idea. Of course, he presumed he’d never qualify given the life he’d led. But then he got to thinking. Despite all his capers, he’d never come under police scrutiny for anything more than a traffic violation.

He showed up the next day at the Westhampton Beach police station
on Long Island. The customer with the broken .45 turned out to be the town’s chief of police. The man took Mattera’s photo and had him sign papers, then took him across the street to a courthouse, where a judge told Mattera to raise his right hand and swear to uphold the laws of the state of New York.

“No one back on Staten Island is going to believe this,” he thought. “Even I don’t believe this.”

He made the pledge. They handed him a badge and a police ID card, and told him to report to the police academy in a month.

Mattera was a natural in the classroom. By graduation, he carried a ninety-nine average and was named valedictorian. Westhampton Beach hired him on provisional status. There was a hiring freeze on full-time employees, but that wouldn’t affect his hours or pay, and he took the job. Soon, he was out on the streets working a beat.

Other cops didn’t see what Mattera did. If there were bad guys packing guns, Mattera knew. If college kids were selling drugs, he knew. If a senior citizen out for a stroll was really casing a home in order to rob it, he knew.

No one on Staten Island could believe he’d become a cop. Made members of the Gambino family threw friendly punches into his arm and said, “What did we do wrong with you?” The one person who seemed most happy for him was John Bilotti. “It doesn’t surprise me,” he told Mattera, who picked him up one day and took him for pastries in his police car. “You always could do whatever you wanted.”

Mattera loved being a cop—making pinches others missed, thinking like a bad guy in order to do good—and he did it for two years until it became clear that, due to the hiring freeze, he would always be provisional. By this time, however, he was thinking bigger about law enforcement.

He went to live in Missouri and Arizona in order to learn from Jeff Cooper and Ray Chapman, the fathers of modern combat shooting. This was the Ivy League of gunfighting, and Mattera took to it right
away. And he made friends at the school. One of them, through contacts at government agencies, arranged for Mattera to do covert work overseas, the kind that required a man who wouldn’t flinch.

Working as a contractor for the U.S. government, Mattera traveled to Nicaragua, Turkey, Montenegro, and a dozen other high-risk countries, distributing propaganda, protecting shipments, and training security details. He worked mostly in war zones, always in the shadows.

In his early thirties, he flew to a third-world country hostile to the United States to conduct covert surveillance. A contact he trusted there betrayed him, leaving him pinned in a burned-out building and surrounded by armed insurgents eager to collect the rich bounties paid for the heads of Americans.

His only hope for survival was to make it back on foot to the American Embassy, more than a mile away. But he didn’t dare try it in daylight, so he passed the hours running through New York Mets lineups he’d memorized as a kid, and counting off the things he’d meant to do in life but hadn’t yet made time for. When he needed to calm himself for his nighttime run—one he likely wouldn’t survive—he thought about shipwrecks, and of how beautiful it would be to find one that no one knew was there.

After dark, Mattera walked, slowly and purposefully, to the embassy. He waited for shots to ring out but the road remained silent. Six hours later, he was on a flight back to the States. On the government airplane, he kept his hand on his gun and promised himself that no matter what, he wouldn’t put off until tomorrow what his heart told him to go for today.

A
FTER
M
ATTERA RETURNED HOME
, his uncle died of lung cancer, just as Mattera’s father had a decade earlier. People at the funeral tried to console him, but no matter what anyone did, Mattera could not stop crying. It was the first time he’d cried since before his father died.

B
Y
1992, M
ATTERA HAD
attended dozens of law enforcement-related specialty schools, covering everything from the operation of submachine guns to explosive room breaching to the latest in hostage negotiation. That year, he took a job with a security company in Virginia.

He provided executive protection for CEOs, celebrities, and dignitaries, and he flourished. Soon, he was earning at the top of the pay grade, all for doing what came naturally. He did this work for years, building a reputation and protecting the kinds of people who appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine.

In 1998, Mattera married Denise, a woman from Staten Island who had a five-year-old daughter, Danielle. On his farm in Virginia, he would unroll a “treasure map” (really, a plat of his property), put Danielle on his tractor, and set out looking for gold. Time and again, they found foreign coins Mattera had buried in advance, which thrilled the little girl. Once, after inspecting the date on a piece of treasure, she asked Mattera why the coin was only three years old. “I don’t know,” he responded. “Treasure is a mysterious thing.”

By 2000, Mattera had a baby daughter, Dana. Sensing that he could build something special for his family, he and a partner bought the security company outright. They had more work than they could handle, and soon, Mattera was taking home more than a million dollars a year. If a celebrity or CEO needed protection, Mattera himself was available at rates that made him among the highest paid bodyguards in America.

Now he could see the mountain. If he and his partner continued to push, there was no limit to where they could go. Giants in the industry put out feelers to see if Mattera and his partner would sell, but Mattera had long since made up his mind. Building this company was his chance to do something historic.

There were costs, however, to doing it. He often worked twenty-hour
days. High-risk projects—his company’s sweet spot—ate away at his stomach, making him dependent on a milk shake of Mylanta, Excedrin, and Advil. Tensions were building with Denise.

When a buyout offer from a global security giant arrived in 2002, Mattera and his partner listened. By putting his name to the contract, he would walk away with three million dollars in cash, and the buyer would pay him a consulting salary. At age forty, he could live on the interest from his savings alone.

The offer was generous, but the chance to build his business into something world-class was too rare for Mattera to give up. His partner, however, wanted him to sell, and he wasn’t the only one. Some of Mattera’s friends and family also urged him to get out, reminding him of people they knew who regretted not taking the sure thing. The buyer needed an answer.

In a law firm conference room in Manhattan, Mattera signed his name to a pile of papers, and in a moment his company was gone. Walking the streets outside, not headed in any particular direction, he couldn’t shake the sense that, after a lifetime of challenging big worlds, he’d gone and sold himself short.

His marriage, already strained, began breaking, and he and Denise separated. Even Mattera’s guns let him down; he took them to the range but could never muster the will to unpack them. He waited for these feelings to pass, reminded himself of his good fortune. Yet, when it came time to drive his $125,000 Mercedes, he couldn’t think of anywhere to go but Jean and Tony’s, where he ordered the same bacon and egg on a roll he and his father had loved to eat there on Saturday mornings when John was a boy.

As the months passed, it occurred to Mattera that he might be chasing the wrong things in life. Money was great and success important, but at bottom, he loved history. It was the one thing that spoke to him, and yet he’d never set out after it himself. He’d come close through the years—by diving unexplored shipwrecks and solving small mysteries in great archives—but even then he was still one step
removed, an observer looking back through the distance. What he really wanted, and had since grade school, was to do something historic himself, to add an enduring story of his own.

He might have done that by rising to the top in organized crime, but he hadn’t wanted to live a life of violence. He might have done it by taking his security company global, but what kid would want to read about that in a hundred years?

That’s when he moved to the Dominican Republic. Diving the waters around Santo Domingo, he began to feel like himself again. He started Pirate’s Cove, an exclusive resort for scuba divers. And he began dating Carolina Garcia. She loved history as much as Mattera did. Soon, Mattera came to love Carolina.

And then he came up with a plan.

He would set out in search of a galleon, a treasure ship loaded with gold and silver that had sailed between the New World and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He bought a boat and equipment and did a thousand hours of research. In 2006, he joined forces with Chatterton, the most driven and relentless person he’d ever met. Together, they pledged their savings to the project, which would make them rich and the toasts of the diving world.

And then, on the eve of the search, he’d thrown it all over to look for a pirate ship.

The sudden change of plans risked his treasure dreams and his savings—political winds were blowing hard against salvors, and every week spent searching the seas cost thousands. But Mattera had no choice. Finding a Golden Age pirate ship was rarer than stepping on the moon. Only one had ever been discovered and positively identified. But it was the pirate, even more than the ship, that took hold of him. To Mattera, Joseph Bannister couldn’t have become the most wanted man in the Caribbean and defeated the Royal Navy in battle without meaning to do something historic himself. And for that, Mattera was willing to risk whatever it took to go find him.

All that remained was to tell Carolina his plan. Over dinner at a
seaside restaurant, he told her all he knew about Bannister and the
Golden Fleece.
And he told her what the search could cost him.

Carolina took his hand.

“I’m with you,” she said. “I think you’ve been searching for this pirate for a very long time.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE ORACLES

M
attera flew back to Santo Domingo after his journey to the archive in Seville, but he didn’t go on to Samaná to rejoin his team. Instead, he made phone calls to old men in America, living legends of treasure hunting who knew things a person couldn’t learn from books. He doubted that any of them had chased a pirate before—these men lived for silver and gold—but he believed in wisdom and experience, and in that way, they were oracles to him. Soon, he had appointments to see the best of them.

He flew to Florida and checked into a hotel in Key Largo. At a lobby kiosk, he saw a brochure for the Pirate Soul Museum in Key West. “See real pirate treasures from the Golden Age!” “No quarter given!” Mattera stuffed the flyer into his pocket. Key West was one hundred miles to the south. He had people to see the next day. But pirates were calling, so he started driving.

Standing in line outside the museum, he took in the passing parade of bohemians, artists, and tourists. To him, Key West was laid-back and glorious, a place he could live for up to a week before going crazy and needing something to do.

He paid the $13.95 entry fee and walked back in time. In the first few rooms, he saw authentic pirate swords, pistols, treasure, cannons, rum bottles, and tools, including a gruesome amputation kit. The museum
even had a globule of quicksilver—mercury—captured from pirates and entombed in a small jar of water. All of it dated to the Golden Age of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720. But the rarest items were still to come.

Hanging on one wall, ominously lit, was an original Jolly Roger, the infamous skull-and-crossbones flag flown by pirates, and one of only two known surviving examples in the world. Near it lay the only pirate treasure chest in America, complete with hidden compartments and belonging to captain Thomas Tew, number three on
Forbes
magazine’s list of the Twenty Highest-Earning Pirates (estimated career earnings $103 million), who was said to have been disemboweled and killed by a cannon shot during battle. On another wall, Mattera saw an authentic English proclamation from 1696, offering five hundred pounds for the head of pirate Henry Avery; the piece was likely the oldest wanted poster in existence.

The museum had been put together by Pat Croce, the former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, from his personal collection. “This guy might love basketball,” Mattera thought as he stood before a 1684 first-edition copy of Exquemelin’s
The Buccaneers of America.
“But he loves pirates more.”

Mattera didn’t leave until he’d read about the great pirates, and they all lived here: Morgan, Blackbeard, Kidd, Anne Bonny, “Black Sam” Bellamy, “Calico” Jack Rackham. Each one’s career seemed more thrilling than the last. Yet, walking out the door into the blinding Key West sun, Mattera couldn’t help but smile, because he knew a pirate captain who could top them all.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Mattera walked into Manny and Isa’s restaurant in Islamorada, about twenty-five miles south of Key Largo, and shook hands with a quiet, slightly built eighty-year-old man named Jack Haskins. Few names were better known in the treasure business, yet Haskins had never been the classic treasure hunter. A researcher first,
he had done work that had led to the discovery of some of the greatest Spanish galleons ever found. In talking to others about treasure, Mattera always heard the same things about Haskins: first, that he knew more about finding old shipwrecks than anyone in the world; second, that he was a decent and honest man, a rarity in the business; and third, that he’d been taken advantage of throughout his career.

Haskins recommended the conch chowder, and the two men got to talking. In treasure, he said, information was paramount. A person could own the latest technology, operate the finest boat, and have the deepest pockets, but little of that mattered without knowing where to look. And that always came down to research.

Haskins’s own research had begun in Seville, at the General Archive of the Indies, the place from which Mattera had just returned. As a young man, he’d made a pilgrimage there, armed only with an English-Spanish dictionary and a hunger to find a galleon, and over the next few years made himself fluent in the archaic language and script that told the story of the great Spanish treasure fleets.

Soon, treasure hunters began paying Haskins to do research in Seville. He stayed for weeks at a time, completing assignments, then copying thousands of other documents, some of them seemingly at random, until he’d built an archive of his own—one that filled even the bathrooms and reached to the ceilings of his small Florida home. He used some of that research to find shipwrecks himself; by many accounts, he was as fine a treasure hunter in the water as he was in the stacks in Seville. But perhaps Haskins’s greatest contributions came from the groundbreaking research he did that helped lead to the discovery of the galleons
Atocha, Concepción, Tolosa, Guadalupe, San José,
and
Maravilla.

Many thought Haskins had never received the credit, or treasure, he deserved. At times, his finances had run so low he’d been forced to sell his scuba gear. Supporters urged him to fight for his rights, sue, throw a punch, anything; attorneys offered to take his cases for free. But he’d seen enough combat on PT boats in World War II, and he
was a gentle soul. Instead of fighting, he returned to the archives, finding things no one else could find, diving his own wrecks, selling enough antique coins to survive. Now almost eighty, he was renowned in the world of treasure—not just for his ability to find valuable shipwrecks, but for his instinct to forgive those who’d wronged him.

Mattera ordered a piece of key lime pie and sat back and listened to Haskins talk treasure. Modern gold and silver, Haskins said, could not compare in beauty or presence to the old gold and silver found on galleons, which had been mined using mercury, a dangerous process no longer permitted but which produced a remarkable purity. The imperfection of handmade early Spanish coins, or “cobs”—no two were exactly alike—made discovery endlessly interesting. The amounts of contraband carried by some treasure ships still staggered Haskins’s imagination.

“But I know you want to talk about pirates,” Haskins said. “Why don’t you follow me home and we’ll do that. I want to show you a few things.”

Mattera pulled into the driveway of a modest house built on stilts, a must in the flood-prone area. A narrow set of stairs led to the front door, which Haskins climbed carefully—there was no railing, so he held the side of the house for support. Inside, copies of centuries-old Spanish documents towered high in every room—hundreds of thousands of pages written in a near-indecipherable hand. There was little else in the place, not even a television.

“I married once, briefly. Never had any kids,” Haskins said. “Mostly, it’s been just me, my cats, and my research.”

Every few minutes, Haskins picked a random page from a random box and read aloud to Mattera—about cargo lost from a doomed galleon, the worries of a captain on the eve of his journey back to Spain, the accounts of survivors who had seen their loved ones vanish during storms. All of them came from the logs of treasure ships, many still out there waiting to be found.

In the kitchen, Haskins poured Mattera a cup of coffee.

“You’re working in Samaná and looking for a pirate,” Haskins said. “Which means you must be looking for our friend Mr. Bannister.”

Mattera smiled.

“You know about Bannister?”

Haskins did. He’d come across mention of the pirate and his ship, the
Golden Fleece
, while researching the
Concepción.
He’d even done research in Seville on the wreck, just as Mattera had the previous week. That alone made Mattera feel like he was playing in the big leagues. But it worried him, too. If a historian like Haskins couldn’t track down Bannister’s ship, what chance did he have on his own?

“What can I do, Jack?” Mattera asked. “I’m running out of ideas.”

Haskins sipped from his coffee and thought it over. Shipwreck research, he said, wasn’t just about looking through books and records. In the case of Spanish galleons, it was about understanding the nature of the target, the treasure ship—why she sailed when she did, what she feared, the shortcuts she used, the chances she took. In the case of the
Golden Fleece
, perhaps it meant understanding the same things about a pirate ship.

Haskins showed Mattera more documents and maps he’d acquired over a lifetime of research, then walked Mattera back to his car. Standing in the driveway, the men shook hands. Mattera needed to leave—he could see Haskins was tired—but he couldn’t go without asking one last question.

“Do you feel like you got ripped off all these years, Jack?”

For a moment, Haskins didn’t reply. Then he smiled.

“I just loved the wrecks.”

M
ATTERA
’
S NEXT APPOINTMENT
,
THE
following morning, was a three-hour drive north of Key Largo, but he was eager to make it. Seventy-five-year-old Bob Marx was one of the most successful treasure hunters ever. A former marine, underwater archaeologist, and the author of dozens of books on treasure and shipwrecks, he listed nearly
one hundred major discoveries on his curriculum vitae, and that was just the short version of the document. By turns bombastic, brilliant, and profane, he’d discovered, among other things, the sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica; the Spanish galleon
Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas;
lost Mayan temples in the jungles of Central America; and ancient Phoenician ports and wrecks in Lebanon.

Few men knew more about shipwreck hunting, or had seen more of the business, than Marx. He’d recovered millions of dollars in treasure, lectured in more than forty countries, and been knighted by the Spanish government for sailing in a replica of Columbus’s ship the
Niña
from Spain to San Salvador, a journey that had risked his life. When customers purchased his treasure, they received a certificate of authenticity signed “Sir Robert Marx.”

In recent months, Mattera had become friendly with Marx, but it hadn’t always been that way. In 1998, Marx had insulted Mattera, whom he did not know, at a book signing. Years later, when Marx showed up at a dive conference Mattera was sponsoring in the Dominican Republic, Mattera told him, “You’re too old for me to punch you in the face, Bob, but I can still yell at you,” and gave him an uncensored piece of his mind. To Mattera’s surprise, Marx apologized for the long-ago incident. That meant a lot to Mattera, given that he owned twenty-eight of Marx’s books and considered him a pioneer—and that Marx clearly didn’t remember the event.

But that was a long time ago. Now Marx was waiting for him in the driveway and waving him in.

“Are you packing?” Marx asked. He wanted to know if Mattera had brought a gun.

“Yeah, it’s in the glove compartment.”

“Good. We might need it. There’s some crazy bastard after me, don’t ask why. Just bring the piece.”

Marx was a hero to Mattera, so he did as he was asked.

The men walked up a pathway lined with shards of ancient pottery, the detritus of countless Marx scores.

“In the old days, everyone in the treasure business lived within about two or three miles of right here,” Marx said. “I don’t care if you worked in the Bahamas, Florida, Cuba, you were based here. All the astronauts were involved, ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan from
M*A*S*H
—you name it. This was the place to be.”

Inside the house, Marx introduced his wife and coauthor, Jenifer. Mattera had read her work and spoken to her on the phone; if anything, she was even more impressive than her husband. The couple wanted to show Mattera around the house, but he stood frozen in the dining room. He stared at a bronze disk about the size of a grapefruit resting on a high shelf.

“There it is,” Mattera said.

The mariner’s astrolabe predated the sextant and had been used as early as the late 1300s to determine latitude at sea. Coveted by treasure hunters, archaeologists, collectors, and museums, a single example could fetch as much as half a million dollars at auction. Marx had a dozen of them lined up beside the one Mattera was beholding.

And that was just the start of the treasures Mattera observed on his way to the kitchen: a piece of pre–Ming dynasty china (circa 1200) with delicate dancing dolphins; pristine olive jars taken from sunken galleons; a jade burial suit that dated, by Mattera’s estimation, to around 200
B
.
C
., used to bury royal members of China’s Han dynasty. Mattera couldn’t begin to calculate the value of that piece, if a value could be placed on it at all.

The men walked outside and crossed a small path to Marx’s office, which had once been the slave quarters on an old sugar plantation. Here, Mattera saw an even better kind of treasure—tens of thousands of books on double-deep shelves that seemed to stretch forever.

“Don’t touch those horses!” Marx called out when Mattera moved past sculptures recovered from a centuries-old Portuguese ship. “They’re a hundred grand apiece, don’t fucking break them!”

On a bench near Marx’s desk, Mattera saw a copy of a coffee-table book about Marx’s discovery of ancient Phoenician artifacts; on a
nearby table, he saw hundreds of those very artifacts, and others millennia old, laid out on display.

“I’ll sell you whatever you want,” Marx said. “Friends and family price. I’ll throw in a certificate of authenticity, too. There’s an X-rated section in the back. The ancients loved that shit.”

For the next several hours, Marx told stories about treasure hunters, past and present. Each was laced with adventure and close calls, but most of them underlined what Marx had said decades earlier—“Treasure is trouble”—a line that had become gospel in the business. Outsiders took the saying to mean that treasure hunters usually ended up broke, which was true, but not what Marx meant. The trouble he was referring to resided in the hearts of the unlucky few who found treasure—to the weight that gold and silver placed on the soul. Time and again through history, treasure turned honorable men greedy and brought out the worst in the well-intentioned. Just the sight of it caused reasonable people to sever marriages, friendships, and partnerships; to cheat investors; to fight for more than their fair share. In this way, gold and silver performed alchemies of their own. By mixing with human instinct, they could turn even the pious base.