On Aug. 19, 2024, a storm swept into Sicily’s Gulf of Porticciolo and, within minutes, sank the megayacht Bayesian, drowning 58-year-old British tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and five other passengers. For many, the incident conjured up the hubris of those who compete with the gods. Months of investigations by the Italian judiciary and by journalists have failed to provide a clear explanation for what caused the shipwreck. Footage shot by Italian Navy divers, who entered the hull at a depth of nearly 165 feet, shows it waterlogged but its structures and equipment perfectly intact. The Bayesian looks like a ghost vessel: It gives the impression that it could resurface and resume sailing. The affair remains surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, much like the owner of the vessel and its 235-foot mast that defied the sky.
Lynch was a visionary, a scientist who created the only British computer company capable of competing with the Silicon Valley giants. In his extraordinary career as a self-made man, he had always been lucky. Perhaps that was why he ignored the superstition that claims changing a boat’s name condemns it to bad luck. The vessel was launched in 2008 by Italy’s Perini Navi shipyards with the name Salute, an auspicious word used when lifting a glass in a toast. When he bought the yacht in 2014, Lynch wanted to turn it into a tribute to the theorem that, since college, had inspired his research and enabled the creation of the software that made him a billionaire. So he called it Bayesian, after Bayes’ theorem.
Bayes’ theorem can calculate a probability conditioned by seemingly random and unconnected events. In the story of Lynch’s death, there are also many such events. First, a storm suddenly erupted in the placid corner of the sea where the yacht had recently dropped its anchor. Next, a boat that was supposed to be unsinkable — equipped with the most comprehensive safety systems — sank in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, a smaller and older sailing vessel that was just over 100 yards away did not suffer any damage at all.
There are other extraordinary elements. On board was a brilliant and famous entrepreneur who was celebrating his acquittal after a year under house arrest and a decade-long civil suit claiming more than $4 billion in damages, brought against him by a multinational corporate plaintiff (with Lynch were his lawyer and the banker who testified in his defense). Just hours earlier, Lynch’s right-hand man and co-defendant was hit and killed by a car while jogging in the English countryside. And for the quarter-century leading up to these events, the British billionaire’s activities had been intertwined with the evolution of intelligence apparatuses on both sides of the Atlantic, first in the hunt for jihadist militants and then in the cyberwar against Russia and China.
These incidents, each unlikely on its own, would have had next to no probability of occurring simultaneously. Bayes’ theorem, however, allows for a plausible concatenation of seemingly distant events, such as those that accompanied Lynch’s death by drowning. The theorem offers no truths — only calculations that can guide the search for probable answers amid the inferences and suspicions that have surfaced since the shipwreck.
There is one certainty: Bayes’ theorem enabled Lynch to build a business empire and introduce a revolutionary approach to computing, going so far as to anticipate artificial intelligence. According to his early partner David Tabizel, the scholar’s extraordinary insights were those of “a human supercomputer who liked to keep his brain on.”
Lynch’s early life was not easy: He grew up in London’s suburbs as the son of Irish working-class immigrants. His father was a firefighter and his mother was a cleaner in a hospital; Lynch’s first paid job was with her, scrubbing floors and bathrooms in hospital rooms. Being an Irish teenager in England while the IRA was detonating bombs in cities was difficult because, as he explained, “you had to learn to run fast.”
He won his first scholarship at the age of 11, and from high school all the way to his doctorate, he always made use of such funding. He enrolled in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, and his doctoral studies focused on digital neural networks — the premise behind machine learning. He wrote his dissertation on connectionist models — applications based on the theorem developed by Thomas Bayes in the mid-18th century, which from then on was the north star of all his work.
While still working on his doctorate, Lynch created his first IT company with a loan of $2,500, which he negotiated in a pub. With a handful of fellow students, he worked locked in an attic, an experience he later described with nostalgia: “We were eccentric people who threw ourselves into projects, no accounting or bureaucracy.” This was in the late 1980s, the onset of the computer age. Lynch was the only person in the U.K. to achieve anything like the success of the California startups; he opened one company after another, ever larger and more successful, winning the moniker the “British Bill Gates.”
In 1991, at the age of 26, Lynch launched Cambridge Neurodynamics, a company that specialized in fingerprint recognition systems. In 1996, he created Autonomy, which also wrote programs to do searches within phone calls, video recordings and the text of emails. It was a profit machine, which was listed on the stock exchange and entered the top 100 companies in the U.K. with 2,000 employees in 20 countries. Its boom also stemmed from a tragedy: 9/11 unleashed the global “war on terror,” and Autonomy’s programs became one of the tools for hunting down al Qaeda leaders. Lynch was said to have a passion for James Bond, and for a time drove the same Austin Martin DB5 as 007. Asked about the reason for his relationship with the intelligence sphere, Lynch replied with a smile: “I’m interested in it because it’s the one that has to solve the most complicated problems.”
Algorithms and predictive analytics failed to anticipate that his biggest deal would turn into a nightmare. In October 2011, Autonomy was sold to U.S. giant Hewlett-Packard for $11.1 billion, and Lynch personally cashed in some $650 million. But a few months later, the wind changed abruptly and dragged him into a storm that lasted a full decade. “It was like being swept away by a tsunami,” he said. “I had to fight to stay afloat.” In late 2012, Hewlett-Packard accused him of inflating the price of his company and brought suit in a U.K. civil court, seeking $4 billion in damages. Lynch lost the U.K. case. Then the U.S. government successfully extradited him to face trial for fraud in California. The FBI charged Lynch and two other top Autonomy managers with falsifying sales reports to inflate the company’s value. There were 17 counts; Lynch faced up to 25 years in prison and was dead set against the extradition sought by the Justice Department. Even former Prime Minister David Cameron, whom he had previously advised, stepped in to support him. But resistance was futile: In May 2023, he was handed over to the FBI, handcuffed and transferred to a cell in San Francisco. In exchange for bail of $100 million, he received house arrest but was in solitary confinement, not allowed even to see his family.
The trial was complex. In 2020, the U.S. appeals court finally sentenced Autonomy’s former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, who was convicted of fraud in 2018, to five years in prison. In 2022, the British civil court acknowledged Lynch’s liability but did not quantify the financial damages. In the San Francisco criminal trial, Lynch was defended by Reid Weingarten — who defended Jeffrey Epstein — and Chris Morvillo, an international fraud specialist who, as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the aftermath of 9/11, led the first investigations into Osama bin Laden’s network. The defense’s line was simple: Lynch never dealt with financial or accounting matters. But the verdict seemed to be foretold: According to statistics from the Pew Research Center and others, only 1 in 200 defendants is acquitted in federal courts.
Yet Lynch beat the odds: On June 6, he was completely exonerated — free and rich again, in a situation he considered “bizarre.” He told The Sunday Times: “Now you’re looking at a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
He was still unclear about the future, but he knew how it should begin: a cruise on the Bayesian. In 2014, during the toughest phase of the legal controversy, he sold the yacht for $35 million to Revtom, a company based on the Isle of Man that was owned by his wife, Angela Bacares. It was not a front. Angela was both his life partner and his business partner, whom Mike had publicly praised for her investment insights. The two were close: She had attended all the trial hearings in San Francisco for 16 weeks straight.
One of the managers of the shipyard that built the Bayesian, who met the couple several times, said they loved sailing, particularly to the Italian coast during the summer. This summer they would be celebrating his release. Lynch wanted the people who had been closest to him during the difficult previous decade to be there. These included his wife and youngest daughter, 18-year-old Hannah (the eldest was busy with university exams); Morvillo and his colleague Ayla Ronald, also on the defense team; Charlotte Golunski, who had joined Lynch in launching the Invoke Capital fund; and Morgan Stanley International’s managing director, Jonathan Bloomer, who had testified on Lynch’s behalf at trial. All arrived with wives and companions. Golunski brought her daughter, Sophie, who was just 1 year old.
Sailing on the Bayesian was a magnificent experience. The interior had been designed by Remi Tessier, the star of naval design, who had been inspired by the style of Japanese houses. There were no tacky oligarch luxuries, but a harmony of soft colors and light woods. In the 184-foot hull, there was no shortage of space. The six cabins with 12 beds occupied 1,500 square feet. The yacht could spin at 17 miles per hour and draw on the thrust of two 965-horsepower engines. Navigation and guest assistance were handled by 10 crew members, the oldest of whom was the New Zealander James Cutfield, 51, a captain who had long experience at the helm of double-masted Perini boats. The Salute, which later became the Bayesian, had been designed by Ron Holland, one of the most famous superyacht designers, with a single massive 235-foot aluminum mast.
On Friday, Aug. 16, they were in Cefalu and moored in the piers overlooking the medieval town. The following day, they set sail. They pointed toward Palermo, then abruptly reversed course and returned to port. It is not known what prompted that decision. Some say that Lynch had just received news of the death of Stephen Chamberlain — his close friend since they were at Cambridge, a former Autonomy finance director and a co-defendant in the federal trial.
The woman who hit Chamberlain with her car stopped to assist him and called an ambulance. But no one else witnessed the accident. Police issued an appeal for witnesses or cameras that might have filmed anything along the route, known as the A1123. A road that glides between pastures and farmhouses, it is lightly traveled, and accidents are a rarity. It was sunny that Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the hatchback was electric blue and Chamberlain knew the road well. He had lived in the area for years and ran nearly every day. The local police station, however, maintains that there is nothing suspicious about the incident.
When I visited the site, I reconstructed Chamberlain’s last running steps along the river. On the guard rail, at the spot where he was run over, locals left a soccer shoe with the dedication “Thank you for your assists” — Chamberlain played with a local soccer team — and a seedling. In that countryside of villages not far from Cambridge, I found no one who said they remembered the accident, while those who had known Chamberlain did not want to talk.
Lynch must have been upset by the news of his friend’s death. We don’t know if he wanted to leave for England, but on Aug. 18, he chose to approach Palermo. The Bayesian reached the Porticciolo roadstead, opposite Bagheria. Ronald, in a melancholy mood, posted a photo of the sunset on social media. A last supper was served. Late in the day, guests and crew went to sleep. On watch was 22-year-old Matthew Griffiths. Although the Bayesian had the most modern instrumentation, including weather radar, no special measurements were taken. And this is a real conundrum, because just over 100 yards away there was another sailing ship, smaller and much older — the 42-meter Sir Robert Baden Powell, launched in 1957. German captain Karsten Borner, a bearded sea dog, said he made different decisions: “We had a weather forecast of westerly wind, but also of thunderstorms. And we saw thunderstorms coming, and we prepared a little bit.”
Even the Porticciolo fishers realized this was no time to head out: They scanned the lightning-lit horizon in the distance and returned home. No one, however, expected such an angry, dramatic event, Borner pointed out: “And then between 4 and 5 in the night, it happens and it came all of a sudden very fast with violent gusts of about wind force 12 and, um, with a lot of water. So it seems to have been a Class 2 tornado.” The technical term he uses means winds of more than 110 miles per hour.
Tracks from the position transmitter show that the Bayesian felt the sea rising. There were numerous movements around the mooring point, potentially dangerous because, in that roadstead, there are some sharp rocks rising from the bottom. What surprised everyone was the speed. Lightning, wind and waves were concentrated in the darkness. In a flash, the situation became dramatic. Borner is the only direct witness of those moments: “They were about 150 meters behind us and we didn’t want to have a collision with them in case we would drift or so. But at a certain moment, we turned around and we saw that the ship was gone, and we couldn’t understand why we couldn’t see them anymore.”
A security camera from the harbor captured the same scene. The Bayesian plunged into darkness and was engulfed by a wall of water. There were no lights on board; only a lamp on top of the mast remained and disappeared within a minute.
It all happened between 3:50 and 4:05 a.m. The Bayesian was gone and seven people were missing. The body of cook Recaldo Thomas was found a short time later; the other six were trapped in the hull more than 160 feet below. They included Lynch and daughter Hannah, along with Jonathan Bloomer and Chris Morvillo as well as their wives, Judy Bloomer and Neda Morvillo. Fire department divers would complete the recovery of the bodies four days later.
Survivors in the hospital were in shock. They gave only brief, confused accounts. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Golunski told doctors:
“We were sleeping in the cabin, when suddenly the boat went upright. All the furniture fell on us, the light went out. We found ourselves outside. I was holding my daughter Sophia, only one year old. I was holding her afloat with all my strength, my arms up to keep her from drowning. A wave snatched her from me, but I grabbed her immediately.
Everything was dark, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was shouting for help, but I could only hear the screams of others.”
Fabio Genco, the director of emergency services in Palermo, described an “apocalyptic” situation. He explained to the BBC that they often have to intervene in shipwrecks — the frequent ones of migrant ships heading from North Africa to Sicily that have claimed thousands of lives but are quickly forgotten. “In front of death, there is no difference between rich and poor,” Genco said. Lynch’s wife also realized this, despairing for her husband and daughter. In the turmoil, she remembered little — the lightning strikes and jolts tilting the boat, getting up to figure out what was happening, climbing on deck in the darkness and injuring her feet, trying to climb down into the hull but realizing that it had been tilted by the storm and water had already invaded everything. The investigation was entrusted to the prosecutor’s office of Termini Imerese, a town of 25,000 approximately 19 miles from Palermo, which has jurisdiction over the site of the shipwreck. It is a small judicial office, headed by Ambrogio Cartosio and located in the heart of an area where Cosa Nostra’s presence is entrenched. The office does not deal with mafia crimes, which are delegated by Italian laws to magistrates in Palermo, the Sicilian capital.
The survivors were isolated in the Domina-Zagarella resort, away from the press, and interrogated. Their depositions were shrouded in secrecy, and they never spoke to the media. After 11 days, they were allowed to leave Italy. Cutfield, the captain, Tim Parker Eaton, engineer officer, and Griffiths have been placed on the register of suspects under suspicion of manslaughter and multiple manslaughter. The investigation is looking into possible liability, asking why the crew did not take the same precautions as Borner, such as activating the engines, and why they failed to get the guests to safety. There are no details about the suspects’ testimonies.
The key focus of the investigation is the speed at which the boat sank. The inspection inside the boat carried out by divers of the Comsubin, an underwater incursion unit of the Italian navy famous among special forces around the world, ascertained several features that can be seen in footage broadcast by an Italian TV program. The hull was intact, revealing no impacts with the rocks. The side hatches had been closed, which made it more difficult to understand the amount of water that had entered in a matter of minutes. The electronic systems and engine controls appeared intact, with no visible traces of damage. The divers recovered some computer cards, which should contain data collected from the onboard equipment and cameras. The cards are being examined by experts appointed by the prosecutor’s office.
A New York Times investigation focused on the boat’s design. According to several yacht designers, including Spaniards Guillermo Gefaell and Juan Manuel Lopez, in extreme wind conditions, the one very heavy aluminum mast caused the hull to tilt to such an extent that it submerged the engine intakes, which let in tons of water, causing it to sink rapidly. Italian Sea Group, the luxury yacht company that took over the Perini shipyards, announced in a press release that it was taking legal action: “The Bayesian, while having a stability curve slightly different from a ketch, still fully and largely complies with the stability criteria set by the Maritime Coastguard Agency for commercial sailing vessels.” The company further explained in the press release that “to have a water ingress of one tonne per second as stated above, the engine room ventilation opening would have had to be completely immersed at about 3 meters depth and this condition cannot be achieved even with a complete capsize.”
The strength of the wind during the final minutes remains another point of contention: the Times’ reconstruction claimed that the boat was swept by 60-knot gusts with several changes in direction, but the shipyard retorted that that strength was reached for fewer than two minutes: “Therefore, with such wind pressure the vessel would have listed by 18 degrees, which confirms the total absence of risk, even in the hypothesis that the crew had not carried out all the necessary activities correctly.”
Alessandro Vismara, a longtime yacht designer who worked with Perini but did not deal with the Bayesian, told New Lines that “the ship had been certified by ABS, the American Bureau of Shipping, which conducted stability tests to do so, which allow the degree of heeling of the boat to be assessed. They are done in port with no wind and from the result they then run computer simulations of the various heels, for example at 45° and 90°, usually with a flooded compartment and the drift down. Bayesian passed them, otherwise [it] would not have been certified.”
The failure to deploy the centerboard, a kind of retractable fin on the bottom of the hull intended precisely to compensate for the buoyancy of the mast while sailing, is one of the questions about the crew’s actions. Why did they not deploy it when weather conditions began to deteriorate? The alert issued by the Italian authorities indicated “moderate” risk, but the onboard radar would have made it possible to spot the lightning storm 15 to 30 minutes in advance. The watertight bulkheads, which, according to the manufacturer, could also have contained the flooding of the engine room possibly caused by the air intakes, were also not activated. Finally, there was the inexplicable shutdown of the electricity at 3:56 a.m., which caused a total blackout in the final moments while the emergency generator failed to activate.
The prime location and luxuries of the best cabins were precisely the factors that turned them into death traps. Not only were they acoustically insulated, but they were located downwind and lower in the center of the yacht, where there is more stability in rough seas. According to their autopsies, Chris and Neda Morvillo, along with Jonathan and Judy Bloomer, died not from drowning but asphyxiation, trapped in a sealed cabin deprived of oxygen.
On the morning after the shipwreck, a veil of secrecy was drawn over the survivors, with the discreet support of emissaries from the British Embassy and of security personnel — though whether the latter were employees of government or private entities remains unclear. After a few days, surveillance measures were also introduced along the perimeter surrounding the wreck, with the presence of a coast guard patrol boat.
The Italian media has paid a great deal of attention to Lynch’s most recently established company, financed through his Invoke Capital fund — the one managed by Goulinski, who survived the shipwreck. The company, named Darktrace, was founded in 2013 with senior Anglo-American intelligence figures who went straight from high-level jobs with the CIA, NSA and MI5 to the company’s board. Darktrace focuses on cybersecurity, with a revolutionary approach that makes computer networks capable of repelling even previously undetected attacks. Its shares on the London Stock Exchange took off after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising to a market value of $9 billion as governments feared they would face a new threat of large-scale incursions from Chinese intelligence services. Darktrace has shown it can fend off such attacks. In 2022, Marcus Fowler, a former U.S. Marine, joined Darktrace after 15 years at the CIA, where he developed, according to the company’s press release, “global cyber operations and technical strategies, leading cyber efforts with various U.S. Intelligence Community elements and global partners.” In the press release, Darktrace described Fowler’s mission as “working to help defend the U.S. Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and Federal Civilian Agencies against cyber disruption and strengthen their defenses with complete AI-powered cybersecurity solutions.”
In 2023, speaking at a conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, the British defense think tank, Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson, who had worked with Lynch since he launched Autonomy, said there was a need to create a cybersecurity capability in NATO. Among Darktrace’s 6,800 clients are several intelligence and military bodies of the North Atlantic alliance, particularly in London and Washington, which have entrusted the company with the protection of their servers. Gustafsson left the company last October to become minister of state for investment in Keir Starmer’s government. A few weeks later, she was created a life peer as Baroness Gustafsson of Chesterton in the City of Cambridge, allowing her to sit in the House of Lords.
Given all of the above, the Hewlett-Packard lawsuit seems almost like a confrontation between two deep-state realities. David Packard, one of the two founders of the hardware giant, was undersecretary of defense in the Nixon administration, then a member of the Trilateral Commission created by David Rockefeller and an adviser to President Ronald Reagan on military matters.
Last April, when few would have bet on Lynch’s acquittal, U.S. investment fund Thoma Bravo bought Darktrace for $5.3 billion. The acquisition was only completed on Oct. 1. At the time of the shipwreck, Lynch no longer had any relationship with the company. According to the U.K. press, he earned over $350 million from its sale.
The arrest and extradition left Lynch with a grudge against the U.S. authorities: Before sailing on the Bayesian, he declared in an interview that he wanted to launch a campaign against the unfairness of its judicial system and against the extradition of U.K. citizens. His economic resources, his relationships and his secrets were not to be underestimated. Nor was his anger. During the trial, the federal prosecutor told the courtroom that Lynch and his co-defendants had “an attitude that, like one of the James Bond criminals or a mafioso, he considered himself above the law.” Lynch liked the evil bosses faced by the fictional spy so much that he dedicated the conference rooms of the Autonomy headquarters to Goldfinger and Dr. No. Like the Bond villains, he placed a tank of piranhas in the reception area of his office.
Lynch’s research was visionary and shocking. He had already gone beyond artificial intelligence. Autonomy wanted to make computer networks independent of humans. Darktrace gave them an immune system, and many wondered what Lynch’s next brilliant creation would be. Perhaps the most secret designs are locked in the inseparable laptop that, together with his smartphone, contained his web of contacts with several governments and security apparatuses. In the wreck of the Bayesian, the divers recovered several “computer devices,” handed over to Italian investigators, but it has not been confirmed that any of them belonged to the billionaire.
Now the Italian authorities have decided to bring the yacht back to the surface and to cut the mast of the ship, an expensive operation, the cost of which would be borne by the owner, Lynch’s widow. No one knows when the investigation will end. Since numerous technical reports have been arranged, it seems unlikely that it will be concluded by the end of 2025. An investigation has also been opened in the U.K. The initial inquiry was held at the Coroner’s Court in Ipswich, near Lynch’s home in Wickham Market, Suffolk.
Mindful of his Catholic education, Lynch reflected deeply on his life during the months he spent under house arrest and asked himself what he called “St. Peter’s questions.” He explained them in an interview that was published in La Repubblica: “So, you show up at the gates of Paradise and before being sent to the elevator that takes you to the basement, you ask Saint Peter: ‘Before I go, can you tell me what the meaning of it all was?’”
In choosing to spend what turned out to be his last days with his immediate family, Lynch might have been expressing a response to St. Peter’s questions. But the opportunity to deepen that meaning was taken away from him.
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