How a Businessman Fleeing Fraud Charges Built a Life Offshore

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.

What distinguished Landi from a run-of-the-mill fraudster, though, was the outlandishness of his maneuvers, which exploited every loophole the globe had to offer. Landi was a libertarian who sought freedom from meddling governments and their cumbersome regulations, but in a select few nations, he found willing accomplices. Landi hid money in Switzerland, skated around extradition treaties while living comfortably in Dubai, registered companies in bespoke tax-free zones, procured diplomatic credentials from Liberia, dabbled in crypto and, finally, took to the sea, where there was no one to tell him what to do.

Landi was able to pull this off thanks to his knowledge of the offshore world, and his story makes him a perfect guide to this vast archipelago of third spaces. It also “embodies all the ways laws can be evaded through these jurisdictions, whether it’s tax laws, extradition laws, regulatory laws or taking advantage of regulatory quirks,” said Vanessa Ogle, a Yale professor working on a book about the history of the offshore world. “Once you develop a mind for it, a whole range of opportunities arises.”