Life Below Deck: Industry-Wide Experiences of Ex-Crew Members
(Select podcast quotes are included here for reporting, research, and educational purposes related to the Amy Bradley case. All excerpts are limited, attributed, and used under fair use. Original content belongs to the respective creators.)
🆕 “It was kind of a competition between the crew staff guys who could hook up with the most passengers. Everybody was very open about it… It was against the rules if you got caught… if you were too obvious… or like the parents of the 17-year-old girl complained - that wasn’t me, that didn’t happen to me – that’s the only time you’d get in trouble.”
— My Ship Story podcast — late 80s/90s Cruise Director Kirk Detweiler (Sep 08, 2022)
🆕 “I was in front of the machine to put my toast in… a guy gave me a really [shove] in the shoulder, took my toast, threw them away, looked at me and put his thumb under the neck like ‘I’m going to cut your neck.’ … He was Filipino… I understood there was kind of mafia on board.
After that I understood there’s two ways… you look the floor or you look him in the eyes and show you’re not scared… even if you’re two french on board and they’re two hundred… I felt a little bit in prison.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Waiter Richard Fernandez (Feb 14, 2022)
🆕 “I've done it on deck out in the stars at night… I would say the laundry room... And I was watching looking at my watch the whole time, because I knew at 3:00 in the morning that all the Chinese guys would be waking up and going to work… yeah, with a passenger, yeah… back then, it was always open, you know? ...It just wasn't the security. I mean, you could get on…”
“It was “very easy” for the waiters to pick up passengers, especially when they were in uniform… To connect with passengers, an Italian waiter said he’d stand at the dining room door and ask, until someone said yes, every single girl that left if they wanted to have a drink.”
— My Ship Story podcast — mid 80s Head Waiter / Dining Manager Harry Greenlee (Jan 31, 2022)
🆕 “Famous for our darkroom parties…The [photography] darkroom… down pretty deep… no security is really going to go by down there… Some photographers used to brew their own beer and they kept it down in the darkroom… ‘that wasn’t us, but I did hear of that’… parties—crew staff… dancer parties… casino parties… ‘two most dangerous departments were photographers and casino’… it was trouble because of the amount of drinking.
We did have one crew member unfortunately not wake up from the party… a few months later, a passenger… was carried off the ship too…”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Photographer Mark Switzer (July 26, 2021)
“In the first couple of years… I actually got stopped - no more… ‘No more investigating.’ … ‘You’re too good. Quit it. We’re losing too many crew members.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Security Officer John Scullion (Jan 31, 2022)
“A guest complained their credit and telephone cards were ripped off… about $20,000. We identified Bluefields, Nicaragua… put next-of-kin forms in every door… one number was on the list. The cleaners were writing down credit and phone card numbers and selling it in St. Thomas and San Juan… we rolled up about 15 people.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Security Officer John Scullion (Jan 31, 2022)
“We had one guy [Security Guard]… He had a habit… used to always go to the bathroom during the shift for about 25 minutes… the other teammate would then not be able to search everybody, so he would wave people through… It was rumored as well that he was being friendly with some guests…”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Security Officer John Scullion (Jan 31, 2022)
“…we were doing the Bahamas… saw some bubbles going away from the ship… went down and he saw the sausage [vulcanized cylinder with approx 150 pounds of marijuana], and Miami said, ‘Leave it there unless you really need the stabilizers.’ We waited all day… to see if somebody would come and recover. Nobody ever did.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Security Officer John Scullion (Jan 31, 2022)
You get on the elevator… So if you needed to get to the fifth floor, you could stop and start the elevator and it wouldn't open. So you could just bypass the floor… we learned that trick because when we were delivering supplies to different locations… we weren't supposed to take the elevators except for the… crew elevators… And then we learned to drive them to not let any passengers in until we got to the floor.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Singer/Cruise Staff Bucky Heard (Aug 23, 2021)
“So, we're in St. John, and the security officer says, I'm taking [me] out for the day, and the safety officer says, No, we have a... full Coast Guard drill… And he says, No, no, I'm taking her. He's like, Okay, well, when you put her in the tender, she has to hide, because I don't want the bridge to see her… I get in, and I go up to the wheelhouse, and I'm like hiding… And off we go, and we get to St. John, and I got to spend the day with the security officer. We just had a great time.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Assistant Purser Amy Minches (Sep 26, 2022)
“I literally have to clear a ship in… Ho Chi Minh City in Saigon…Vietnamese military people coming on… You need a case of Jack Daniels Black and you got 33 cases of cigarettes… No — it was Johnnie Walker Black or nothing… they would not compromise in Vietnam. It was Johnnie Walker Black, and that was it. If you didn't get Johnnie Walker Black, they were not clearing the ship.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Purser Chris Romine (Aug 29, 2022)
“We used to have stowaways all the time… People would go to Grand Cayman… wait for it to rain hard… they were checking your card at the tender, not on the ship. They would sneak onto the tender when it was raining… They weren’t checking very well. People would sneak onto the ship.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Host Commentary (Aug 15, 2022)
“I mean, they had so much shit. They had like four costume changes. They had — no — they had amps, they had road cases, they had like fifteen or eighteen different pieces of heavy road luggage. It was… it was him, Ben, and Jerry — they were the worst baggage people.'
Yeah, so they tipped as well… but… we needed a luggage cart.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Stage Steward Neil Galvin (Dec 27, 2021)
“We had keys to everything. We had keys to the crew bar too. We used to go in the crew bar… We had the high-tech video walls, but the old TVs… they kept going out of balance.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Stage Steward Neil Galvin (Dec 27, 2021)
“Towels were the worst thing… giant 60-pound red bags… carry the towels from the ship… tender… first and last thing we did in every island.
We may have been a little bit too pissed off and threw maybe three or four bags and let them fall off the tender in Grand Cayman. I’m sure they’re still at the bottom of that pier.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Stage Steward Neil Galvin (Dec 27, 2021)
“We’d sit [in Cozumel] for like six or seven hours, drink all day, and then we go back on the ship and then do a show… then… drink some more… then another show.
First week… heavily inebriated… only a warning.”
“Put it in a glass so you’re not obviously drinking.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Stage Steward Neil Galvin (Dec 27, 2021)
“Singles party… a guy… didn’t speak English well… comes to the captain’s cocktail party in street clothes… security found him sleeping in the lounge… he was a stowaway… In Puerto Rico, they deported him… That night I’m escorting passengers to the El San Juan Hotel—and who do I see? This guy… Two weeks later… same guy… Another week later, I see him in the Port of Miami.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Cruise Staff/Hostess Julie Yeager-Luxton (Aug 15, 2022)
“We came back and the ship was out in the water… they decided to pull it out earlier than they told us. We convinced a little fisher rental boat guy to take us to the ship and we had to be hoisted up… throw all our shopping bags up and then climb up.
Webster and I almost missed the ship… the gangways were all up… the only way we were going to get on board was jumping [through] the gun port—luckily it was still open because they were still loading some supplies.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Purser Rob Mauldin (Nov 21, 2022)
“They piled on 150, 200 contractors onto the ship, as usual… And we leave Lisbon, and I get a call from one of the… general managers.. he’s like, ‘We don’t know who’s on board the ship.’… ‘You need to send a manifest to Lisbon, because that was due like a day ago.’… I said, ‘Tomorrow morning you’re going to do a full check-in, and you just lock every door, lock everyone out of their room.’ And that’s what we did… we made everybody come in and check in on the check-in, and we were a process of elimination... like, ‘Holy crap, I hope this guy has a visa!’… And somehow immigration let us go, and there were no fines or anything. We were amazed.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Purser Rob Mauldin (Nov 21, 2022)
I was explaining to the Disney attorneys how to bribe Customs and Immigration officials… a bottle of Jack Daniels here… a hard-pack of Marlboro Reds over there. And they were like, ‘We cannot do this.’ … And I’m like, ‘You don’t have to do this… I’m just telling you what the practice is.’
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Purser Rob Mauldin (Nov 21, 2022)
“A cruise staff cabin steward… showed me a photo album… he said, ‘This is the photo album of my wives.’ …He had a wife in Nicaragua, but 30 to 40 women spread all over the United States who would be visiting him on the ship, and he would visit them in their cities.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Social Host Micha Berman (May 09, 2022)
I’m getting closer to the ship… everything is gone… everything’s taken apart. There’s only one thing open, which is right where the cargo is. There’s a square, maybe eight feet by ten feet. And the cruise ship has started to move parallel away from the land… I’m running like Carl Lewis. I’m running as hard as I can… People are yelling and screaming on the top of the ship… I jumped about 2 to 3 feet. I roll into the cargo area and I land at the feet of the head of security… he looks down on me and says I.D… And I’ve lost my I.D…
I [later] get a phone call from John, a great cruise director, and he called me up to his office and he threw my ID at me and he said… don’t do it again. And he smiled and laughed.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Social Host Micha Berman (May 09, 2022)
“If you want to stay at port, you could stay at one of the ports and you could fly into the ship the next day… I had this incredible opportunity to walk on the ship not in uniform. They disembarked me first in the Eastern Caribbean to go play golf… It was like a fantasy.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Social Host Micha Berman (May 09, 2022)
“Everybody got along… so many nationalities… I used to bribe the Filipino people [Security Guards]… they would look after you when you’re trying to hook up or whatever.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Cruise Staff Bucky Heard (Aug 23, 2021)
“Christmas… the most hours I ever had to work… The whole time I was on the ship, you just did whatever needed to be done and that was it. There was no clock in or clock out…”
“There are international rules about how many hours you can work… a lot of cruise lines were not maintaining these… attorneys sit outside the pier… asking crew… so they can sue the cruise lines.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Showband Musician Melanie Howell Brooks (Nov 14, 2022)
“Most of us have gone to work drunk… I know I have.”
“On Majesty… we would order drinks from the bar… keep them in the safe-deposit room… take turns… three or four or five [drinks] while we were on duty at the front desk… the guest services manager came out: ‘you guys are having a little too much fun.’”
“I run through the doors ready to go on board and it’s pulling away… I take a flying leap… My feet are right at the water… I’d had a few drinks… I was due to go and do the lifeboat drill… I can barely stand still showing them how to put on a life vest.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Youth Staff Mike Stranges (Oct 10, 2022)
“Gibraltar - we’re late getting back from drinks. Couldn’t find a taxi. We still stop to buy four cases of Guinness. We hear the ship’s horn - it’s sailing time. We’re first and second crew purser; we’re supposed to be at the gangway helping check stragglers in… We walk up with the beer while the staff captain is just shaking his head at us.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Purser Chris Romine (Aug 29, 2022)
“New Year’s Eve… drunk… found the business card… called Miami… voicemail… ‘If you don’t hire me, you’re making a big mistake’… a few days later I’m in a toilet at work accepting a job with Carnival…”
“Cozumel… No Name Bar… haven for crew… guests didn’t know it… crew from all ships could cut loose… buckets of beers, music, burgers… at the pier bars (Carlos’n Charlie’s, Fat Tuesday)… guests so drunk security had wheelchairs at the gangway… guests boarding the wrong ship…”
“New manager… had never met any of us… looked at our portfolios: too old, too old… give it to younger ones and pay them a third of the salary.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Social Host Linda Woodward (Feb 27, 2023)
“Man, I’m telling you, I couldn’t get past the casino and the photographers and the dancer, crew-staff parties. That was enough for me because, you know, that was until like five in the morning. I was like, ‘I got to be up at six for the load - a bunch of frickin’ towels—to, you know, on the first tender.’ I can’t believe how little sleep we all must have gotten in those years.
And maybe that’s why to this day, I don’t need a lot of sleep. It sort of groomed me for later life of four hours a night - you wake up and you have to be on. Naps - it was all about your naps. If you could get a nap in the afternoon, then you could survive on four hours or three hours or whatever it was…”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Stage Staff Julie Stevens (Sep 13, 2021)
“3:00 in the morning with a passenger in passenger area, butt naked, drunk, stuck in a sun‑lounger chair… I sort of got half dressed and got in the elevator… from top to bottom to my cabin without being seen by anybody. … I did one or three things on the Majesty that I got away with I shouldn’t have got away with.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Assistant Purser Alex Berry (Jul 04, 2022)
“We went to the disco. People out there don’t know - the assistant pursers were not allowed in the nightclub. It was just for staff, officers, and above. The suggestion was that stripes should be swapped. So David and I ended up in the Staff Captain’s office the next day. Somebody had swapped the stripes on David’s jacket and he just went, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t notice…’ They let him go.
He turned to me and said, ‘What about you, Berry?’ and I went, ‘I didn’t even notice that my stripes had been swapped.’
The Staff Captain looked at me: ‘Were you that drunk?’ And I looked at the guy and went, ‘Sir, I didn’t have a drink the whole day.’
(Remembering I was in the middle of the dance floor with my jacket over my head.)
He looked at me and just went, ‘Berry, get out.’ **He couldn’t fire us—**there were like 50 people who had done it.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Assistant Purser Alex Berry (Jul 04, 2022)
“We get met in a conference room… and he looked us both in the eye: ‘There’s one thing you have to know about working on ships… Don’t shit in your own backyard. … You don’t date a purser … If you don’t do that, you’ll be okay… The rest you’ll learn on the ships.’ … And at 9:05 we finished five days’ training.”
— My Ship Story podcast — 1990s Assistant Purser Alex Berry (Jul 04, 2022)