... was basically a Facebook profile pic. When the camera wasn't on them, the pirates didn't bother to look menacing.

Via Thymaya Payne
Except for rocket-launcher guy. There's something inherently menacing about him.

They knew that any picture a journalist took of them would wind up online, and they wanted to be able to point out "That's me!" to their friends. Kids are all the same, even if they happen to make a living through violent piracy. They're still young guys who mostly want to look badass in front of girls and listen to Half Dollar* albums.

(*That's how the Somalis know 50 Cent.)

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Apparently they hijack brand consistency as well.

It's a mistake to think these people are so different from us. They may live in the desert and own a bunch of camels, but they're still denizens of 2014. Pirates of the Caribbean and gangsta rap belong to them, too. Which group do you think identifies most strongly with MIA's "live fast and die young" -- American teenagers, or 16-year-old Somali kids robbing freighters at gunpoint?

So it's not uncommon to see new pirates vomiting all over the boat because it's literally their first time out to sea. A lot of them wind up falling into rotors or drowning. But the most dangerous time is when the money comes. That's one thing every pirate movie gets right -- pirates like to murder each other on payday.

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Downsizing is always tough.

Many of the pirates Payne met were in prison and by definition not the best and brightest of the bunch. But he also met a lot of "fishermen" (as they call themselves) who were extremely wealthy. These guys were clever, and they treated piracy like any other form of organized crime. Once world governments started navying up Somalia's coast to crack down on the pirates, these guys simply switched to smuggling guns and charcoal (yes, the stuff you put in your grill -- Somali charcoal is awesome for grilling and thus in huge demand).

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Crime has changed.

But if most of these missions wind up in death or slapstick failure, why did so many want to get into piracy? Well ...

On the day Osama bin Laden's death hit the news, Thymaya Payne was sitting at an airport in Somalia with a local friend. This fellow had helped him track down pirates to interview but seemed distinctively un-piratey in appearance himself, down to his knockoff polo shirt. They talked about the assassination ("He was just some rich Saudi asshole, anyway"), and Payne's friend casually admitted to having joined the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab as a young man. It had been exciting, he said, but he'd wound up with a girlfriend and a kid and no time for terrorism. He spoke of this infamously violent militant organization like it was his old college garage band.

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"It's been a few years, but sometimes it's still nice to kill a few beers, listen to 'Glory Days,' and wire a bomb."

Al-Shabab, by the way, is the same group that shot up that mall in Kenya. They're also affiliated with al-Qaida. To us, they're a violent group of Cobra-level bad guys. To a starving 16-year-old in Somalia, they're the closest he can get to joining the Marine Corps. They offer food, training, social status, and the ability to feel totally awesome when you namedrop your job to girls in the bar. So you get an idea of why some parents would encourage their children to join the pirate crews. In addition to room and board, the job comes with the possibility of earning tens of thousands of dollars. (Note: Youth unemployment in Somalia is 67 percent.) So crime and terrorism doesn't just pay, it's sometimes the only paying job in town.

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"We're not really hiring any poetry majors at the moment, but how are you with a bazooka?"

For context, understand that Somalia's lifeblood used to be its coastline, and then illegal fishing operations started putting them out of business. That's actually how the first Somali pirates started off. Between poachers and ships dumping toxic waste on their shores, the Somali fishing industry died out, and failed states don't exactly have coast guards. A few angry fishermen started patrolling their waters themselves and then realized, "Hey, while we've got these guns and boats ..."

It's true that some pirates acted like Robin Hood with their winnings, and it helped a few people in a few villages here and there. But it didn't spread out into the economy. If you want to see which countries made bank thanks to piracy, look further west. "Specialist services" like risk consultants and security advisers are necessary to deliver a ransom and can easily double its cost. Those specialists did real well from the spike in piracy.

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"Did our consultant just say 'Avast'?"

As did the maritime insurance industry -- pirates only capture a handful of ships per year, but when they're active, every ship pays more for insurance. Somali piracy generated roughly $400 million a year in increased premiums at its height. Meanwhile, the Somalis were lucky to take in $160 million in a great year. Selling pirate insurance is more than twice as profitable as the act of piracy, in other words. So, kids -- crime pays. But not nearly as well as a good legal racket.