Coast Guard officials displayed about the MARPOL agreement. I 

 spoke to several officers in the Miami office and found that they 

 did not appear to understand where Coast Guard jurisdiction 

 began. 



In January of 1992, in an effort to exert some pressure on the 

 Coast Guard to move the case along, we granted an interview to 

 the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In April, with little progress reported, 

 we again went public granting an interview to Conde Naste Maga- 

 zine. The story appeared in the June 1992 issue. 



Our continued calls to the Marine Safety Office and the pub- 

 lished articles appeared to do little to accelerate this investigation. 

 With a great amount of reluctance, my wife and I agreed to pro- 

 vide NBC news with the videotape scenes from our cruise and 

 grant them an on-screen interview. It was our feeling that the 

 threat of public pressure and embarrassment of having to explain 

 the eight-month delay in the processing of our complaint through 

 the national media would pressure the Coast Guard to action, and, 

 in fact, it did. 



In July of 1992, within a few weeks of when the Coast Guard 

 learned of NBC's interest in the story, the case was processed 

 through the Coast Guard's legal office to the U.S. Attorney's Office 

 for prosecution. On April 15, 1993, the U.S. Attorney for the South- 

 ern District of Florida filed a criminal charge against Princess 

 Cruises for discharging plastic bags filled with garbage into the sea. 

 On April 26, Princess, as part of a plea agreement, pled guilty to 

 the crime and was fined $500,000, maximum under the law. 



Although we are pleased that our videotape played a major role 

 in the successful outcome of this case, it is distressing to us to 

 recall the significant additional effort that went into moving this 

 case along. If the Coast Guard would not take action on a well-doc- 

 umented and videotaped incident, how will they respond to a less 

 well-documented case? 



Perhaps the lack of responsiveness on the part of the Coast 

 Guard was due to the fact that this was the first well-documented 

 case of this nature presented to them. The thought of a few bags of 

 garbage thrown overboard may have taken low priority given their 

 wide range of responsibilities. Now that the first case has been suc- 

 cessfully concluded and the Coast Guard's role clarified, we would 

 hope that procedures have been established and formalized so that 

 citizen complaints are handled more aggressively in the future. 



The Center for Marine Conservation and the U.S. Attorney's 

 Office are to be commended for their professional, intelligent, and 

 diligent efforts that went into the successful outcome of this case, 

 in our opinion. 



We do have two thoughts that we would like to share with the 

 committee. First, it seems to us that the financial penalty is an in- 

 significant deterrent to a large carrier. Over the course of a year, 

 the maximum penalty of $500,000, if spread over the number of 

 passengers sailing Princess ships out of U.S. ports, might average 

 only a dollar or two per passenger. This is not a severe financial 

 penalty to a company the size of Princess. Perhaps the law should 

 be broadened to include the loss of port privileges to repeat offend- 

 ers. This would represent an economic threat great enough to truly 

 discourage the prohibited practices. 



