Smuggler Freighter’s Crew Mutinied, Charges Show

The broken-down freighter that brought nearly 300 Chinese refugees to a New York beach was the scene of chaos with a mutiny on board after the smuggling plan went awry, according to charges brought Monday against the captain and crew.

The captain of the Golden Venture, Amir Humuntal Lumban Tobing, was charged along with 11 crew members with one count of conspiracy to commit alien smuggling.

The nationality of the crew was not given in the charge but federal officials earlier said the captain and crew were Indonesian.

The men appeared before a federal magistrate in Brooklyn Federal Court late Monday.

According to the complaint, Tobing was not in charge of the vessel when it ran aground in New York harbor early Sunday morning. The complaint said that Tobing was the victim of a mutiny by the crew, with co-defendant Kim Sin Lee taking command and ordering Tobing to be physically restrained.

The mutiny came after the ship twice failed to meet smaller vessels in the Atlantic that were supposed to bring the refugees to the United States.

Lee had been in charge of providing food, and with supplies running low he ordered the ship to sail into the harbor, where it ran aground, leaving the refugees to scramble for shore.

Instead of blending into New York’s Chinatown and disappearing as planned, the 271 refugees in custody will be spending up to two years in federal detention centers, an official for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said Monday.

Eight of the would-be illegal immigrants died after trying to swim to shore. Another five escaped, according to official figures released Monday.

Meanwhile, a group of Chinese men rounded up minutes after they were dropped off in Huntington Beach, Calif., Sunday were part of a larger group of illegal immigrants who made a monthlong voyage aboard a freighter that may still be off the coast, immigration officials said Monday.

Authorities said the 26 men--some of whom made down payments of as much as $2,000 for this first leg of a planned journey to New York, were turned over to officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles, where they were interviewed before being transferred to a detention center in San Pedro.