The Shark and The Shrimpers

After the BP oil spill, a well-known lawyer helped land a $2 billion settlement for gulf coast seafood-industry workers, including 42,000 vietnamese fishermen. Only one problem: they did'nt exist.

- By Francesca Mari. Photohgraphs by Elijah Barret

In 2010, Dung Nguyen, a 39-year-old Vietnamese fisherman living in Dickinson, Texas, decided to take his boat out early in the season. Peak shrimping in Texas’s Galveston Bay wouldn’t begin until mid-August, but Nguyen was saving to send his three children to college, so in April, he began heading out for four or five days at a time. Nguyen was accustomed to long days; he had come to America as a refugee in 1992 and had saved for years to buy his first boat. That season, the waters were calm and the catch was good; when he wasn’t harvesting shrimp, Nguyen lay on his cot watching Vietnamese soap operas. Then, on April 20, a friend radioed him: The Coast Guard was calling everyone back to shore. Deepwater Horizon, a BP oil rig 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, had exploded. Nguyen was far from the flames and the oil. As he traveled home, he saw only an endless expanse of night and a sliver of moon. But when he reached the dock at three in the morning, the Coast Guard forced him to dump his catch. The three evenings he’d spent at sea, and the thousands of dollars he’d laid out for diesel, had been a waste.