An exciting day at work: How a boat investigator hunts down Europe’s thieves

In his first major case, investigator Thomas Kern is almost grateful to the perpetrator. For years, Andreas Schmidt stole boats and engines, selling them to middlemen who channelled the stolen goods into the legal market. The end customers had no idea – or, given the low prices, chose not to suspect anything. The boats had new serial numbers, and the dealers enjoyed such a high level of trust that even a fisheries authority and a police officer bought from them.

“I’d been with the water police in Konstanz since 1984,” says Kern. The case that shook the underworld and laid the foundations for a Europe-wide investigation network took place 25 years ago. “In 2001, I was new to the investigation unit when a member of staff from the Shipping Authority rang.”

​Also from the series:

• Get up close to the harbour master during Kiel Week
• Non-stop work as a boatswain on a museum ship
• Why a retired captain works as a lock keeper
• ​Get up close to the harbour master during Kiel Week
• From the roll of cloth to the finished sail at the sailmaker’s
• Pupils at a sailing boarding school are giving it their all to fulfil their Olympic dream
• ​Off to winter storage – a visit to a shipyard
• ​At the Sirius Shipyard, dreams come true

Unlike on the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, boats on Lake Constance must be registered and inspected – a sort of boat MOT. One trailer-mounted motorboat stood out: the hull number had been tampered with. Kern could explain how he spots such forgeries, but he keeps that to himself. The names of Kern and Schmidt have also been changed, and the location of the centre of excellence remains a secret. Suffice to say that Kern’s office is on the upper floor of a police station in Baden-Württemberg.

“We then went to the boat, which was an Italian Sessa with an 80 PS outboard motor.” The new owner from Ulm had bought it on Lake Wörthersee. “And the previous owner was a colleague,” meaning another police officer. Even Kern was taken aback: of all people! “And that colleague had bought it just as naively as the then new owner from Ulm.”

Thomas Kern speaks very openly. Beating about the bush isn’t his style. And so the listener learns very directly how his investigative work is carried out. “We checked the engine number and got a hit,” he says, meaning a match. A stroke of investigative luck – the engine they found matched one reported stolen five years earlier on the Schlei in Schleswig-Holstein. “We rang them up – back in 2001, things weren’t quite so digital yet. So the engine had been stolen there years ago, along with the boat.” The original boat plate had been removed. “He’d had a new one engraved and riveted it on. He’d certainly gone to a lot of trouble.”

The investigations revealed that several boats had been stolen from the Schlei. “Send me the files,” Kern demanded. Several folders arrived, containing 15 to 20 thefts spanning two or three years. Kern analysed the cases and spotted a pattern: the offences took place in spring and autumn, always following a similar pattern. The trail led to a suspect who’d previously been convicted of boat theft. “We thought we’d have a look at him.”

There’s a boat in the hall that’s just been stolen

Kern found out which dealer the Austrian police colleague had bought from, “and we found some more like it”. The investigators tracked down three boat dealers from Carinthia and one in Styria. And a warehouse in the south of Hamburg that the potential thief had rented. But why? A home visit was to clarify that. “He can’t have got much sleep; he was very tired,” recalls Thomas Kern of the raid at six o’clock in the morning. What the police didn’t know was that boat thief Andreas Schmidt had only just returned a few hours earlier from a very recent theft in Denmark.

“Many people would have been shaking in their boots: you’d only just been out stealing in the middle of the night, and now six plainclothes detectives with a search warrant are standing at the door.” In fact, Schmidt must have calmly reasoned that the latest theft could hardly have been discovered yet. “He was completely relaxed.” The investigators searched his computer, but found nothing. “And then we said, ‘Right, we’re off to the boathouse’ – that’s when he turned a bit pale.” He was told to unlock the door, otherwise they’d break in. “So there were the Correct Craft boats from Denmark that he’d stolen that night, and another boat he’d just been refitting.”

That same morning, Schmidt’s four receivers in Austria also received a visit; colleagues were providing mutual legal assistance. “The one who’d ended up selling the most boats and engines was actually a perfectly normal bloke,” says Kern, meaning that this fence had no police record prior to the start of the investigation, had not come to the attention of the police for any criminal activity, and had a permanent address. “But he wasn’t that hardened.”

He was “in a right panic”, as Kern describes it with a southern accent, “but you still had to give him a bit of a hand”. And that’s said with a touch of sarcasm, because the Austrian colleagues held out the prospect of immediate detention and pointed to the suspected offence. “At the time, there were seventeen boats that were linked to him in the same way. We were able to prove six of them, but he didn’t admit to any.”

There was also a big fuss at the fence dealer’s home: a few police vehicles, plenty of blue lights, and he was taken away not in the investigators’ unmarked car but in a police car – “entirely deliberately”.

One case leads to a European network

From that day onwards, it was clear to Kern that many of the missing boats had been stolen by professional thieves and were being sold on in Europe. Boat theft is, admittedly, similar to gang-related car theft. However, to solve cases in this particular field, you need a specialist – someone who is both an investigator and capable of training colleagues along the trade routes. Him, for example.

“Back then, we were able to prove to Andreas Schmidt that he had previously sold over a hundred outboard motors to his main fence in Austria; the value of the stolen goods at the time was half a million.” Armed with knowledge of his tactics and distribution channels, the police officers wanted to make life difficult for other offenders. After all, Andreas Schmidt had even been stopped once before whilst driving a trailer boat. However, his colleagues had only been paying attention to the towing vehicle. When he says this, Thomas Kern looks like a golfer whose ball has just grazed past the hole.

What was needed, first and foremost, was a European database of boats that colleagues could access at the border or during random checks. Another common occurrence at the time was that “buses and construction machinery were hardly ever checked”; the investigators quickly learnt that such items were also being stolen and moved in an organised manner.

“And our colleagues need to have someone they can always call if they have a suspicion or are carrying out a check.” The Motor Vehicle Investigation Unit soon had specialists for caravans, but not yet for construction machinery or boats. “And our thief from Winsen an der Luhe knew that,” Kern is quite certain. The number of thefts halved.

To illustrate how he and his small team are now making life difficult for the thieves, Thomas Kern cites some figures: “Up until 2001, we had around 500 thefts of engines and boats a year in Germany. Today, that figure is less than half.” On a European scale, 10,000 boats were still being stolen in 2001; currently, the figure stands at 4,000 a year. Outboard motor thefts have also fallen: “There were 60,000 across Europe in 2001. By 2023, the figure had fallen to less than half.”

These include cases such as the one currently stored in the station’s garage. Dirty outboard engines: “We assume that someone stole them and then had to get rid of them relatively quickly.” Where were they found? “Only the perpetrators know; we’re not saying,” the engines were tampered with and left there, “we waited a long time,” but the bait didn’t work. Now Kern is trying to match the engines to their rightful owners.

From trailer boats to million-pound yachts

In another case – a ‘textbook case’, as the investigator calls it – a boat dealer near Offenburg immediately reported a night-time theft to the local police station: ‘Bloody hell, a boat was stolen from my yard on its trailer last night!’ The dealer was able to provide a photo of both the boat and the trailer, and the officer on duty got in touch straight away.

That very same evening, a Croatian colleague trained by Kern spotted a trailer being transported. A check revealed a match. The vehicle and trailer were escorted at a distance to the nearest border, where the arrest warrant had already been prepared. “They were very well organised,” said Kern, “because it wasn’t easy to get the boat out of the yard there.” In fact, there is such a thing as ‘boat theft to order’ in that underworld. So certain models are singled out and then stolen; in such cases, the neighbouring boat and its owner are lucky if nobody has their eye on it at the time.

In one remarkable case, a stolen catamaran turned up off Sint Maarten. The fact that the island is Dutch territory had made the search possible under a European arrest warrant. And in 2023, investigators seized a two-and-a-half-million-euro yacht off the coast of Norway that had been stolen in Denmark. A motor yacht flying the German flag, which was intercepted in a harbour near Bodrum – having previously been stolen in Spain – was worth three million euros.

Whether it’s a small outboard boat or a large yacht – they would be delighted to see all cases solved, Kern emphasises. Above all, however, thefts of large yachts have declined particularly markedly since the centre of excellence was established. There are several reasons for the success of the investigation team, which has a staff of just 3.7 full-time posts. One is European networking. There are annual conferences, as well as a database accessible to police officers from all departments.

Furthermore, Kern and his colleagues in the boat investigation unit are always on call. There is no rota, and if he takes the day off and receives a work-related call, then that day is no longer a day off, says Kern. They are purely an investigation and support unit and base their working hours on the ‘working hours of their clients’. Added to this are the training courses they provide for colleagues. ‘When people get in touch with us, they’re very often people we’ve trained ourselves.’

You have to develop an eye for stolen boats. A motorboat at the border in the middle of winter? That strikes anyone in the know as odd. Kern has also been in contact with the manufacturers since the investigation team was set up, “and almost all of them are very cooperative”.

Markers and GPS trackers to combat boat thieves

Nowadays, many owners have their expensive Select engines, “We have purchased a laser marking device for 5,000 euros”; in addition, the departments are increasingly using microparticle marking, which involves artificial and initially invisible DNA. “Some offenders do try to remove it. But we’ll sometimes search for a few hours and always end up finding the hidden DNA trace.” This is important so that he can prepare cases properly for prosecution. Furthermore, more and more owners are working with GPS trackers, which send alerts as soon as a pre-set radius is exceeded. “In this way, we were able to stop a charter boat worth 800,000 euros just before it reached the Corinth Canal, because the charter company had fitted its boats with this system following an initial loss.”

Kern is also mindful of displacement effects; in Germany in particular, his client base is now noticeably smaller, “but there are still good boats and engines to steal in Poland, Slovakia or the Czech Republic, for all I care”. Nevertheless, far too much is still happening in Germany as well. And all too often right under the noses of passers-by. “Anyone who sees something suspicious and reports it is not a snitch,” says Kern. In his view, people in the harbours aren’t paying nearly enough attention. Andreas Schmidt must have known that too – in all those thefts, he had managed to remain undetected at the scene of the crime.

• Anyone wishing to at least make it more difficult for thieves to gain access can secure outboard motors mechanically. In the YACHT test, various Locks for outboard motors stand up to oppression and violence.

The first offender and an impressed judge

Before retraining on his own initiative to become a naval thief, Schmidt had worked as a boat mechanic; “he effectively set himself up in business,” is how Kern describes the background of his first client, who apparently hadn’t even let his partner in on the secret. She was known as a businesswoman of integrity. “She assured us convincingly that she hadn’t had the faintest idea. She was completely taken aback. Schmidt had told her the story that he was a boat dealer.”

“One has to rule on a matter that does not form part of a judge’s private daily life,” says Albert Paulisch of this first case. Twenty-five years ago, Paulisch was the investigating judge whom Kern rang early one morning to secure his detention. “I was impressed by the water police’s professional expertise at the time,” says Paulisch, who has since retired. “They had to explain to me, plausibly and beyond any doubt, that engines and boats had in fact been stolen from their owners at the locations specified.”

The perpetrator was sentenced to four years in prison at the time – the maximum penalty for theft and handling stolen goods. After his release from prison, Kern suspects that his client, Andreas Schmidt, probably did not hold down a regular job. “We had information that he’d hidden something somewhere.” However, the investigators were unable to locate the hideout. “He was born in 1961, like me; he certainly isn’t retired yet,” Kern reckons.

A boat investigator approaching retirement

It is 6 pm and it has long since gone dark. Two recessed spotlights in the ceiling cast a stark light over Thomas Kern’s three desks. His gaze falls on the four monitors he is about to turn his attention to. He has spent the whole day explaining his team’s work; now he is staying on late. For the final – and arguably most important – factor in the success of the boat investigators is their founder. “I could have retired back in 2022,” says the state official. Nobody believes him, mind you, but he has no problem letting go.

In recent years, he’s simply wanted to carry on investigating. Chasing criminals, tripping them up every now and then – as he puts it – that is the policeman’s reward. He is simply content to be able to work “so freely”, he says. “The way we work, we’re successful”; the motivation is immense. He refuses to accept that any achievements might be linked to him personally. “Well, it wasn’t down to my efforts alone,” he writes in an email after the visit; all of this is only possible with a “highly motivated” team.

Despite being on call at all times, he does have a private life. “I used to sail an H-boat,” says Kern, who has always been a water sports enthusiast, “it was moored in Friedrichshafen; to be precise, I had a camper van and my colleague had the H-boat – we always took turns.”

During his extended years of service, Kern was certainly also keen to establish training courses across Europe on boat crime, and to maintain the contacts and friendships he’d built up with European colleagues over the past 25 years. He’s already training his successors. To understand how he does his job, the following anecdote is probably the best illustration: “We always go out for a meal together at training sessions. I’m well aware of the meagre salaries my colleagues from south-eastern Europe, in particular, have to make do with. And I always tell them: ‘The meal’s on Frontex.’ Today, everyone can know the truth: Thomas Kern was lying every single time. He paid all the restaurant bills out of his own pocket. He’s retiring at the end of November.”

Book recommendation

Buying a boat By Ralf Neumann, this guide covers everything from comparing suitable boats to contract negotiations, payment and handover. It also covers ship registers, insurance and the risks involved in buying new and second-hand boats.

Professional boat theft cannot be tackled by technology alone. Alert boat owners, moored boat owners and passers-by also play a crucial role. Are people in German harbours still turning a blind eye too often? Share your views and experiences in the comments.