Two months after being acquitted in a bitter legal battle on fraud charges, British tech tycoon Mike Lynch celebrated his freedom with a cruise. He invited his family, friends and part of his legal team aboard his luxury yacht, a majestic 54.8-metre vessel named Bayesian in honour of the mathematical theorem around which he had built his empire.
On Sunday evening, after touring the Gulf of Naples, including Capri, and the volcanic islands of the Aeolian archipelago, the ship anchored almost a kilometre off the coast of Sicily, at Porticello, Italy. It chose a stretch of water favoured by the Phoenicians thousands of years ago for its protection from the mistral wind and, in more recent times, by the yachts of technology billionaires. The ship was lit up “like a Christmas tree”, local residents said, and was highlighted by the full moon.
But around 4 a.m. calamity struck. A violent, fast-moving storm hit the area with some of the strongest winds locals said they had ever felt. Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman, said he saw a flare shoot through the darkness shortly after 4 a.m.
Minutes later, the yacht was underwater. Only dozens of cushions from the boat’s deck and a giant radar from its mast were floating on the surface of the sea, the fishermen said.
There were 22 people on board, 15 of whom were rescued. By Thursday afternoon, six bodies — those of five passengers and the ship’s cook — had been recovered, including Lynch’s, an Italian government official said, adding that the search for her daughter was continuing.
It was a tragic and baffling turn of events for Lynch, 59, who had spent years trying to clear her name and was finally entering a new chapter in her life. Experts wondered how a $40 million yacht, so solid and stable, could have been sunk by a storm near a harbor in a matter of minutes.
“It’s disconcerting,” said Giovanni Costantino, chief executive of Italian group Sea, which in 2022 bought the company, Perini, that made the Bayesian. “Following all the proper procedures, that ship cannot sink.”
The aura of misfortune only deepened when it emerged that Stephen Chamberlain, 52, former financial vice president of Lynch’s former company and also a defendant in the fraud case, had died two days earlier, hit by a car while out walking near his home in England.
Since June, the two men had been in a jubilant mood. A San Francisco jury had acquitted both of them of fraud charges that could have landed them in prison for two decades. There were hugs and tears, and they and their legal teams went to a celebratory dinner at a restaurant in the city, said Gary S. Lincenberg, a lawyer for Chamberlain.
The boat trip was a thank-you by Lynch to those who had helped him through his legal travails. Among the guests was Christopher J. Morvillo, 59, a scion of a prominent New York law family who had represented Lynch for 12 years. He and his wife, Neda, 57, were among the missing.
So was Jonathan Bloomer, 70, a veteran British insurance executive who chaired Morgan Stanley International and the insurer Hiscox.
The body of the ship’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, was recovered. All other crew members survived. Among them was 19-year-old South African Leo Eppel, who was on his first yachting trip working as a deckhand, said a friend, who asked not to be identified.
Since the shipwreck, salvage work and research have turned the small port town of Porticello, a quiet enclave where older men sit bare-chested on balconies, into something like a movie set.
Helicopters have circled overhead. Ambulances have flown overhead with sirens blaring. Coastguards have patrolled the waters off the coast, in sight of a cordoned-off pier that had been turned into an emergency headquarters.
On Wednesday afternoon, church bells rang after the first body bag was loaded into an ambulance, as a crowd watched in silence.
Survivors were taking shelter in a resort near Porticello, overlooking the wreck site, and had so far declined to comment.
Attilio Di Diodato, director of the Italian Air Force’s Aerospace Meteorology and Climatology Centre, said the yacht was most likely hit by a strong “downburst” — when air generated within a storm descends rapidly — or by a waterspout, similar to a tornado over water.
He added that his agency had issued rough sea warnings the night before, alerting mariners to storms and strong winds. Locals said the winds “felt like an earthquake.”
The yacht’s executive, Costantino, said the yacht had been specifically designed to have a tall mast, the second tallest aluminum mast in the world. He said the Bayesian was an extremely safe boat that could list as much as 75 degrees without capsizing.
But he said that if any of the side and stern hatches, or any of the deck doors, had been open, water could have entered the ship and sunk. The usual procedure in such storms, he said, is to start the engine, raise the anchor and turn the ship into the wind, lowering the keel for stability, closing the doors and gathering guests into the main salon on deck.
The New York Times attempted to reach the captain, James Cutfield, who survived, for comment via social media, his brother and the yacht’s management company (which did not hire the crew), but was unable to reach them.
So far, none of the surviving crew members have made any public statements about what happened that night.
Fabio Genco, head of Palermo’s emergency services who treated some of the survivors, said victims had described the sensation of the ship rising and then falling abruptly and of objects from cabins falling on them.
The Italian Coast Guard said it had deployed a remote-controlled vehicle that can hover underwater for up to seven hours at a depth of about 300 metres (984 feet) and record videos and images that it hopes will help reconstruct the dynamics of the sinking. Such devices were used during search and rescue operations for the Titan, which is believed to have imploded last summer near the wreck of the Titanic.
Once rescuers broke into the yacht, they struggled to navigate the ropes and numerous pieces of furniture cluttering it, said Luca Cari, a spokesman for Italy’s national fire department.
By Thursday morning, all but one of the missing bodies had been recovered, and hopes of finding the missing person alive were slim. “Can a human being stay underwater for two days?” Cari asked.
The truth was that Lynch’s death was another cruel twist of fate for a man who had spent years trying to clear his name.
He made a fortune in technology and was dubbed the British Bill Gates. But for more than a decade he had been treated as anything but a respected technology leader.
He was accused by Hewlett-Packard, the American technology pioneer that had bought his software company, Autonomy, for $11 billion, of misleadingly stating the value of his company. (Hewlett-Packard wrote down the value of the transaction by about $8.8 billion, and critics called it one of the worst deals of all time.) He was increasingly shunned by the British establishment, which he had sought to induct into after growing up in a working-class family outside London.
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He was extradited to San Francisco to face criminal charges and placed under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance at his own expense. In a rowhouse in the Pacific Heights neighborhood — staffed by security who, he joked to his associates, were his “roommates” — he spent his mornings talking to researchers he personally funded about new applications for artificial intelligence. Afterward, he spent hours discussing legal strategy with his team.
Despite his persistent claims of innocence, even those close to Lynch believed his chances of victory were slim. Autonomy’s chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted in 2018 on similar fraud charges and spent five years in prison.
While Lynch was under house arrest, his brother and mother died. His wife, Angela Bacares, flew in frequently from England, and became a constant presence in the San Francisco courthouse during the trial.
After being finally acquitted, Lynch had his sights set on the future. “I am looking forward to returning to the UK and dedicating myself to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” he said.
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