Forty-year-old Mahdi stands on a floating wooden platform and turns on his ‘diving machine.’ It’s a compressor that is normally used to inflate car tires, not supply air to a diver 10 meters deep.
“There are no air regulators,” he says, pausing to examine the rudimentary equipment, “so the bigger the airflow the better.”
Mahdi is one of 30,000 illegal und…