Ship Captain Is Indicted for Cruelty : Courts: Fishing boat crew says they were denied food, handcuffed and imprisoned during a monthlong voyage.

A federal grand jury Wednesday indicted the captain of a fishing boat for allegedly imprisoning his crew, withholding their rations and inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment” during a monthlong voyage last year.

Bruce A. Mounier, captain of the Magic Dragon, was indicted on two counts of cruelty to seamen under a 160-year-old federal statute designed to protect sailors from harmful treatment at sea.

The case stemmed from a fishing expedition in May, 1994. Two members of the four-man crew said they were denied food and handcuffed to the deck for more than a day while sailing about 2,000 miles off the California coast. Two others said they were held captive in a small, overheated cabin. Mounier, the crew members said, became obsessed with a missing candy bar, which he accused them of stealing.

One of the crew cheered news of the indictment.

“He won’t be the captain in jail, that’s for sure,” said Todd Schotanus, 27, of North Hollywood. “He terrorizes people. He won’t abuse anybody in jail.”

Mounier, 54, was at sea on another fishing expedition and could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Carlton Russell, said Mounier was wrongly accused of committing a crime.

Russell said the captain took appropriate action--as he is required to by the federal law--to ensure a safe voyage with a crew that was unprepared, refused to work and wished to cut the trip short.

“The wrong person is being indicted,” Russell said. “The crew members should be indicted for inciting to mutiny.” The crew members also have filed a federal lawsuit against Mounier seeking nearly $20 million in damages. In the suit, which is scheduled for trial Jan. 17, the sailors allege that Mounier denied them food. Schotanus said he and the other crew members refused to work unless they were fed.

The lawsuit also alleges that Mounier turned on the boat’s heater while the crew was locked in the cabin, and that Mounier slowed the boat’s engines to delay the return to port. Mounier, a well-known skipper from Orlando, Fla., who has sailed out of San Pedro for the last three years, has faced criminal charges in the past.

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

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. Also in 1994, Mounier reported another mutiny to the Coast Guard in a case in which a shot was fired to quell the disturbance, prosecutors said.

Schotanus said Mounier was rough from the day the crew set out on the scheduled 40-day, 4,000-mile voyage. Mounier had a pistol strapped to his hip, cursed at crew members for not working hard enough and showed off a photograph from an earlier expedition that depicted a crew member hogtied on the deck.