The Ex-Con Inventor Disrupting Underwater Energy

Even when the narcos handed over a brown paper grocery bag full of $100 bills, Herbert Williams says, he was mostly thinking about the boat. They’d hired him to build a superfast catamaran, telling him they needed to expedite deliveries of certain goods from Colombia to, uh, Germany. Williams had experience building fast, double-hull fishing vessels, but he’d always dreamed of inventing something bigger, more outlandish. Such was his excitement in having the dream financed that he willfully ignored the warning signs. “I’m building a boat,” he remembers thinking. “Chevrolet doesn’t ask customers what they intend to do with its cars.”

Working out of South Florida, Williams drew up plans for a 96-foot, wave-piercing craft with twin 1,000-horsepower diesel engines. He named it Lady Jessica, after his young daughter. He rented cranes, bought quarter-inch steel plate to form the hull, and hired a crew to help him put it all together. (This was 1987, so you can imagine how Crockett-and-Tubbs everyone looked.) In its first sea trial from Port Charlotte, the boat sliced through chop where slower craft would have bounced around, wasting energy. “It was beautiful,” Williams says. “From the air, it looked like a delicate water spider or something from Star Wars.” At 30 knots (about 34 miles per hour), it cruised faster than anything its size, even faster than the U.S. Coast Guard cutters policing the shores.