Today, Lloyd's occupies a glass-and-steel building considered to be a masterpiece of modern design. It contains a dramatic glass-roofed atrium overlooked by open-office galleries and populated by hundreds of buttoned-down brokers and underwriters who sit in clusters under their group names, peering at flat-screens and murmuring into phones with a British calm that belies the intensity of the decisions they must make. Marine coverage now constitutes only about 7 percent of the activity, but it continues to define the Lloyd's culture.

Here's how it works. A smallish containership at half-life may be worth $25 million and carry a cargo of equal value. The owner goes to a Lloyd's broker, who negotiates basic coverage for the ship with the syndicates there. That coverage typically excludes liability for loss of cargo, pollution, and wreck removal. To handle those risks the owner joins one of several “protection and indemnity” (P&I) clubs, almost all of which cluster near the Lloyd's building. The P&I clubs are shipowner mutual societies that spread the risk among their members and may also take it to re-insurers, most likely back at Lloyd's. In the end, therefore, the ship is insured by a consortium, and Lloyd's is at the helm. To control some risks, the consortium requires that the ship meet the standards of a classification society. Classification societies are non-governmental organizations, invented at Lloyd's in the 18th century, which oversee the technicalities of ship construction and operation. There are at least 40 such organizations in the world, some with integrity. To keep insurance costs down and maintain good standards on his ship, the owner might choose DNV GL, a Northern European group. So, all is well, and the ship cruises the world making money, until one day in a storm the engine breaks down, and the ship—all $50 million of it, vessel plus cargo—starts drifting toward a dangerous shore. At that point Nick Sloane shows up with the Lloyd's Open Form and offers a tow in return for partial possession. For the insurers and P&I clubs, the choice is obvious. They know Sloane and his reputation. They will have to pay out perhaps $5 million but may avoid the full loss. The decision is purely financial, with no emotion involved. This is how the business is supposed to work, and often does.

But there is also a murkiness to the arrangement that sometimes comes into view. There are shipowners, agents, and salvors who believe it is only normal to game the system hard. The simplest technique is to pay a crew to take an old ship out to sea and scuttle it. This may explain why ship sinkings increase when scrap-metal prices fall. The problem, however, is that the owners are reimbursed only for the value of the hull. Far better are the possibilities afforded by salvage, in which the value of the cargo is taken into account, and the ship returns to service after the deed is done. It is widely assumed that a system of kickbacks exists by which certain unscrupulous tug companies, awarded a salvage contract, are expected to return a percentage of their gains to the shipowners who gave them the job. This leads to a recurring scam in which shipowners arrange to have a vessel break down in a convenient location, get it salvaged by friends, then repossess it and carry on to the original destination. The underwriters in London are usually wise to these cases, but for lack of proof have to pay up.

And then there was the *Brillante Virtuoso—*a Greek-owned tanker ostensibly carrying $120 million of high-grade fuel oil from Ukraine to China—which was boarded by pirates off Yemen in 2011. During the attack, its engine and pump rooms were nonsensically set on fire. After the pirates rifled the ship's safe, they and the crew escaped in separate directions, leaving the ship to drift. A Greek company got the salvage job and dispatched a team from Aden, who extinguished the fire and took the ship under tow. Sloane was sent in to assist but is tight-lipped about the case, which remains in dispute. The record is nonetheless abundant. The pirates had arrived in a patrol boat and were dressed in Yemeni uniforms. Initially this was reported as a clever ruse by nefarious Somalis, but given that they had not done what pirates do—take the ship, take the cargo, take the crew—suspicions soon grew that the reverse was true, and that they were in fact Yemeni authorities pretending to be pirates. A few days later a British insurance investigator named David Mockett inspected the ship and made the mistake of sending an e-mail expressing his opinion that the attack was a fraud. He wrote that he had scheduled a meeting for the following day that would prove it. He copied Sloane on the e-mail, along with his wife and a few others. It is widely presumed that the e-mail was intercepted or leaked. The next day a powerful bomb detonated beneath Mockett's car and killed him. The Yemeni government blamed al-Qaeda. A year later, after an investigation by Scotland Yard, a detective testifying at a British inquest said he believed that Mockett had been killed for getting too close to the truth. By implication, Yemeni authorities were involved. An average salvage payout on such a ship might have amounted to $40 million—plenty to spread around. Suspicions were further raised during the transfer of the cargo to another tanker when it was discovered that the Brillante Virtuoso may have been carrying junk oil worth barely more than half the declared value. This time, it seems, the scheming had gone too far, and London has not yet paid out for the claim. The Greek salvage company, however, describes the Brillante Virtuoso operation as a success and reports that the ship was delivered back to its owners.