John Merrone pleaded guilty Friday in federal court in Brooklyn to all five counts of an indictment charging him with aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, and abusive sexual contact. He entered the plea after a jury had already been selected for trial.
When sentenced, Merrone faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
A profound abuse of authority and a betrayal of trust.
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Unlikely. There’s most likely a plea deal here for less than the maximum.
This incident was predated some years ago by the death/disapearance of a South African female cadet from a ship after being sexually assaulted by one of the officers.
Historically cadets or apprentices as they were known and other youngsters under 16 years of age and all male were supposed to be allocated segregated accommodation from the rest of the crew in a “deck house”.
Unscrupulous shipowners ( often the captain) would split the deck house between the petty officers and the apprentices.
I believe the legislation for this welfare measure dated about 1856 in British law predating the modernising safety and welfare act of 1894.
On a list to Greenwich ,London 40 years ago I noted that the Cutty Sark had an illegally divided deck house.
One hopes that these young women victims will prompt some soul searching by both employers and legislators on the vulnerability of young seafarers.
Serious Question Guys,
I went to sea as a Cadet in a major British Tanker Company and they embraced female Cadets and Officers.
It wasn’t unusual to have a very small number of females on board.
Did this abuse happen then?
Without the Social Media exposure we have now.
Sorry needed to put a date on this.
I started as a 17 year old in 1978.
I will admit I can be a bit useless at seeing things but I don’t remember even a sniff of scandal
I would assume yes. There used to be a frequent contributor on here, @catherder , who had all types of bad stories of working on water decades ago. I worked a few years with a senior citizen client rep who was a USCG officer in the 80’s & 90’s. She didn’t talk about her sexual harassment experiences much but when she did they were horrific. I think she had PTSD from it because of her current sexual orientation & because how fast she could flip from a 5’3" sweetest, little old lady to a cunning, fight to the death monster that had everyone from the galleyhand to the ships master fired or transferred. Tailhook where 83 women & 7 men where assaulted happened 35 years ago. So yeah, pretty sure this aint nothing new.
Thanks for that.
As I said I am hopeless at seeing this like this.
The times there has been an affair and I haven’t seen it even when it’s right under my nose.
I am also an optimist so I also wish things away.
I didn’t see it, that’s why I asked others.
I also cannot envisage how people can behave like that.
The culture must have been toxic if a senior officer could get away with that.
I don’t want to go into detail but I did intervene very forcibly as a 3rd mate when I saw my Captain stepping over the line.
He never did on my watch again.
I would rather be sacked then stand on the sidelines and do nothing.
There has always been a decent certain percentage of mariners who are only alive or not in prison because their job keeps them away from the general public and alcohol/drugs for at least half the year.
Not any more. They falsely assume eliminating ex-cons will clean up the whole thing. Sadly it won’t. The ones committing these crimes have no previous record. Though a lot of guys how have been in the industry for 5-30 years lost their licensing recently this stuff won’t disappear. Harsh punishment for those caught doing this actively would have much better effect and leave the industry with less of a manpower shortage.
Not in this case. That s.o.b was previously in prison for rape! Who in the hell hired him giving him all the authority of a king at sea in charge young student sailors? Fck’ing never heard of Googling someone before hiring?!
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/fl-district-court-of-appeal/1636354.html
The problem with background checks is with whom should that responsibility lie… USCG during the licensing/renewal process? Union during the enrollment process? Company during the onboarding process? There are good arguments for each of those to be the responsible party and I don’t think any of them, on their own, is going to be willing to eat the cost.
I watched a contract negotiation get hung up on this topic. Company wanted the union to perform background checks on all officers prior to sending them to vessel on the union’s dime. Union argued that it should be treated as an additional screening such as a driver history check or company mandated pre-embarkation physical that is on the company dime.
It was a major sticking point that delayed the contract by months. Ultimately the company backed down on the requirement for the union to pay for the background checks. Since it’s now something the company can do on the company dime there have been no background checks.
Really though, we should all have had background checks done as part of the credentialing process. Why did Merrone have a license to begin with? What kind of checks are the NMC doing and is it only a one time deal for your initial issuance?
A British tanker caught fire on passage in the midships accommodation and personnel were evacuated aft as the fire raged. Suspicion fell on an engineer cadet who had made it aft with all his belongings neatly packed in a suitcase.
A background check revealed he had received an award for saving his landlady when her house caught fire. A deeper check revealed there were many fires in which he had played a part as a victim, raising, the alarm or helping in the fight to extinguish the flames.
A humerous outcome was the company, like many large owners carried its own insurance and the officers claimed for lost goods.
The company initially denied what they saw as exorbitant claims for silk suits, high end electronics and cameras etc. However most of the officers were in a pools syndicate( a kind of lotto based on English football results) and they had a significant win which they pointed out allowed them to purchase the goods.
From Maritime Executive 2022 article: American Captain Surrenders License After Sexual Assault Accusations
Merrone had a similar encounter with law enforcement ten years earlier. In 2011, he was charged with false imprisonment, sexual battery and aggravated battery in connection with an alleged assault in the Florida Keys. The woman involved in the case testified that she had been beaten and raped in Merrone’s apartment. A jury convicted Merrone of false imprisonment and two counts of simple battery, but an appeals court reversed the conviction in 2013. Merrone retained his license and continued to sail as recently as this year.
How does the FBI end up sending a investigator/prosecuter into this case with a last name of Barnacle?
AMO. The answer is AMO.
Let’s not forget that Midshipmen X was on a MEBA boat
Re: background checks for hiring;
We do background checks for hiring, and they are vital. But they are not perfect.
Criminal background checks are easy to do, in general. But they only reveal criminal cases, not civil cases, and if a person has had prior history of harassing people etc. it is more likely that a legal remedy would end up in civil court rather than criminal court.
Therefore most cases of harassment etc. are not going to find their way to a criminal background check.
Is there a comparable set of services to quickly research civil litigations nationwide? I’ve never heard of it. (Though lawyers seem pretty fast at getting the info…)
The other type of background check we do is checking social media and news reports. This is time consuming and uses up staff hours, and sometimes turns up false positives because of similar names.
I once did a search like this for a deckhand applicant. He had an unusual name and I did an internet search, looking for, to be blunt, dirt on him.
I found a newspaper story from a small New England town about a guy with the same name being accused of scurrilous behavior. Then I dug deeper and learned the charges were dropped.
No criminal record came up on our very capable investigation service.
So, what do you do with the info? On the second interview I asked him if he was the guy. He said no. I could have detailed staff to call the police in the town etc. to get more facts. But the charges were dropped, so what would it matter?
At a certain point you cross over from being an employer to being a private investigator, which is a waste of company resources. Deckhands are like butterflies. Here one day gone the next. You can’t devote hours of staff resources to complete a dossier on somebody who might make only one 24-day trip.
Generally their employment history gives you the strongest clues about what is going on. Changes jobs every nine months? Don’t touch him with a ten foot pole. A lot of villains are easily screened out by this rule.
Has held the same job for seven years? Gold. And what’s more, you can likely talk to his former employer over the phone and get a reference.
To be honest, with unions it seems harder. Not a judgement. An observation. To explain that statement from my perspective: if an applicant to my organization comes from a non-union company I have at least a 30% chance of getting dope on him from a previous employer. If their background is union I have 0%.
Again, not a judgement, just an observation from the hiring trenches.
So my statement remains true. Since the case against him was reversed, he had no convictions. Also the charges he was convicted of then later reversed wouldn’t have denied him his licensing. In fact, interestingly enough, if they abuse someone in an official capacity they can STILL get a license under the new rules after a time period. The rule is very poorly done.
Would you be fine hearing some dude say that about your daughter at a workplace she had to live in?
“No further questions, your honor.”
