Captain Sued by Crew Alleging Terror at Sea : Courts: Four plaintiffs seek $20 million, saying they were held captive and denied food. Skipper reported incident as mutiny.

Working on a fishing boat hundreds of miles from shore, Todd Schotanus was increasingly troubled. The captain, Bruce Mounier, seemed less and less rational, he thought, and there was nowhere to run.

First Mounier, a pistol ominously planted in his belt, cursed at his new crew members for not working hard enough, Schotanus said. Then, he recalled, Mounier showed off a photograph from an earlier excursion on his boat, the Magic Dragon: a crew member hogtied on the deck.

Finally, Schotanus and another crew member were denied rations and handcuffed to the deck for 30 hours after Mounier became obsessed with a missing candy bar and accused them of stealing it, according to a federal lawsuit seeking more than $20 million in damages.

“To be on a boat hundreds of miles from shore . . . you’re trapped, that’s your world. You’re helpless,” said Schotanus, a 26-year-old North Hollywood resident who joined the crew on a lark and is one of four former crew members now suing their former captain.

Two more hired hands--18-year-olds who similarly sought adventure and now are plaintiffs--allege that they were held captive in a small, overheated cabin and also denied food.

Their tale of terror on the high seas has prompted a federal investigation based on the rarely invoked, 160-year-old Cruelty to Seamen Statute. The target: Mounier, who told the Coast Guard he has had to get rough with unruly crews six other times.

No criminal charges have been filed so far, and Mounier’s attorney says the case stems not from an abusive captain but a rebellious crew that refused to work and generally wasn’t up to snuff. Mounier was fishing in the Hawaiian Islands and unavailable for comment.

Word of the incident has rippled up and down the coast in sailing ports.

“It was just so outrageous that I had to laugh,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of a Sausalito-based fishermen’s organization. “This is like something out of the last century, if not the century before that or Roman times. The only thing he didn’t have them doing was rowing.”

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It all started in May, 1994, when Schotanus, an amateur sailor who had never been on an extended sea voyage, drove down to San Pedro to look for a job as a seaman. He had previously worked as an oil technician and handyman, and now wanted to try something different.

People at the docks directed him to Bruce Mounier and the 100-foot Magic Dragon.

Mounier, 54, is well-known in San Pedro--in a variety of ways. “You talk to 50 different people about him, you’re going to get 50 different opinions,” said one friend who works on the berth where the Magic Dragon used to dock and who asked not to be named.

A scuba diver and fisherman, Mounier will regale listeners with tales of his exploits, proudly displaying photographs of his biggest catches, including a sea turtle “as big as a Volkswagen,” friends say.

Born in Florida, he has fished throughout the world, had photos of his catches published in National Geographic and broken new ground in fishing techniques, according to friends.

But since he moved to California in the early 1990s, Mounier has had problems with recalcitrant crews, said John Henderson, an Orlando resident and former fishing hand who stays in touch with the captain.

“I admit, every time I’ve heard (about an incident) I say, ‘Damn, another one,’ ” said Henderson, 35, who maintained that Mounier has gotten along well with thousands of fishermen.

Late last year, Mounier reported another mutiny to the Coast Guard, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Mary Andrues, who is handling the investigation into the incident involving Schotanus. In the other alleged mutiny, a shot was fired to quell the disturbance, said Andrues, who refused to elaborate.

In 1990 federal prosecutors charged Mounier with harboring and concealing illegal immigrants and killing a migratory bird, a humpback whale and a killer whale.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John Peyton, who handled the case in Hawaii, said Mounier pleaded guilty to lesser charges of concealing information about illegal immigrants and illegally transporting a dead killer whale. He was fined $5,000 and placed on three years probation, which ended two weeks before the Magic Dragon set sail with Schotanus aboard.

Schotanus said he was not aware of Mounier’s reputation when he signed on. Nor were co-plaintiffs Jason Garinger, Amy Roumagoux and Ryan Hallas, all Oregon residents who responded to classified ads in a local paper for positions on the Magic Dragon. Garinger, 24, had worked on boats since he was a teen-ager, but Roumagoux and Hallas were inexperienced.

Most boats the size of Mounier’s depend on hired hands who work from voyage to voyage. Often they are experienced fishermen like Garinger, but sometimes they are adventure-seeking novices such as Schotanus, Hallas and Roumagoux.

The Magic Dragon began its scheduled 40-day, 4,000-mile journey May 16 with the four new crew members, Mounier, and Mounier’s first and second mates, James Alexander and Michael McGuire. The hired help was assigned to tend the ship’s 30 miles of fishing lines by baiting them and pulling in their catch, and to do general maintenance during a workday that sometimes stretched to 16 hours.

The trip began routinely enough, Garinger said. Schotanus complained of seasickness early on, but although Mounier was loud and critical, there were no serious problems.

But as the voyage dragged on, matters worsened, the crew members said in interviews. Several times, their suit claims, the captain and his mates denied them food. Around June 11, Schotanus said in an interview, he and Garinger said they would not work unless they were fed.

The captain was furious, crew members said, and told Schotanus he was not being fed because he was suspected of stealing a missing candy bar. Their suit claims the captain confined all four crew members to one 7-by-7-foot cabin; Mounier’s lawyer, Carleton Russell, said the new crew voluntarily went into the cabin.

Mounier told them they could get food and water if they came out one by one, Russell and the crew members agreed. The crew members refused, saying they feared Mounier would jump them. Russell said Mounier was afraid he and his two officers would be overwhelmed if he let all four out at once.

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The lawsuit alleges that Mounier turned on the ship’s heater while the crew was in the room, and slowed the boat’s engines to delay their return to port. At midnight June 17, Garinger left the cabin to get a drink of water, crew members said.

The ensuing confrontation between Garinger, Schotanus and Mounier and his officers led to the hired hands suffering numerous injuries, according to the suit.

The new crew members were threatened with death during the ordeal, and Schotanus and Garinger were bound to the deck for about 30 hours until the Magic Dragon reached San Pedro the morning of June 18, according to the lawsuit. For most of their alleged imprisonment, the lawsuit claims, Garinger and Schotanus were clad only in the underwear they had stripped down to to cope with the cabin’s heat.

Both sides agree that Mounier radioed ahead to tell the Coast Guard there was a mutiny on board. The Coast Guard met the boat, everyone on board gave statements, and the four crew members were taken to a nearby hospital for medical examinations, the plaintiffs said.

Mounier told the Coast Guard that the crew members--particularly Schotanus--did not perform all their duties and were not tough enough, according to a Coast Guard report. He also complained that the four crew members did not clean up after themselves.

Mounier said he has had six similar situations in the eight years he has owned the Magic Dragon, the report states. He also said that verbal abuse is enough to get some workers going, according to the report, while others “are motivated by being slapped around a little.”

His comments raised a red flag with the reporting Coast Guard officer, who wrote: “In my opinion, this type of behavior is completely unacceptable in any working environment, and especially on board a commercial vessel.”

The Coast Guard referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Attorney Russell said Mounier acted to protect his ship and crew.

“They’re calling this case ‘The Caine Mutiny,’ ” Russell said, referring to the Herman Wouk novel and film classic in which Humphrey Bogart plays the paranoid and abusive Capt. Queeg. “But I have a new title for it: just ‘The Mutiny.’

“In this case we have very inexperienced people trying to become fishermen,” Russell said. “The sea is a very unforgiving place. You can’t just call a cab.”

Mutiny, or disobeying a captain’s orders, is a federal crime. Most cases involving alleged mutinies come down to a question of whose account a jury believes, said Robert Jarvis, a maritime law expert from NOVA Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Jarvis said case law sides with the captain.

“We’d rather have you be an abusive captain than be a mutineer,” Jarvis said. “If you have a mutineer on one ship you could have a mutineer on any ship.”