Smuggling Suspects Acquitted

The captain and chief engineer of a Taiwanese fishing trawler were acquitted Monday of smuggling 10 Chinese nationals into Laguna Beach, where the undocumented immigrants paddled ashore last year naked and clinging to makeshift floats.

Jinn Yinn Wang, the vessel’s captain, and co-defendant Jin Long Guo denied that they were smugglers or that, as prosecutors said, the 10 men had paid $10,000 each to be brought into the United States.

Rather, Wang and Guo insisted that they had been the victims of mutiny on the high seas.

After a two-week trial, a federal jury in Los Angeles found them not guilty.

Last May, a group of teenage girls were partying on the beach when 10 naked men arrived on shore and began changing into suits and baseball caps, which had been stored in plastic bags.

The girls became suspicious because the men spoke no English and were smoking Chinese-brand cigarettes. Authorities were called, and the men were taken into custody.

During interviews with immigration agents, they said they had been held in squalid conditions during their voyage across the Pacific.

On the witness stand, however, Wang and Guo said that they had been the victims of a mutiny. They said they had been fishing for sharks about 600 miles off Hawaii when the 10-member crew turned on them, tying up Wang and locking him in a storage room. Guo said he was forced to continue working as chief engineer.

“The ship was brought here, I was kidnapped and that’s all I know,” Wang said after his arrest.

Defense lawyers Steven J. Riggs and William Morrissey argued that the vessel, the Fuxing N.06, had been loaded with two tons of fish, a payload that would have required help from willing hands. “This was an oceangoing vessel,” Riggs said. “There’s no way these two individuals maintained the boat, fished, kept 10 people in custody, fed them and otherwise looked after them.”

The captain and engineer said they freed themselves and steamed away after the 10 Chinese immigrants left the vessel.

Coast Guard helicopters caught sight of the boat about 100 miles from San Diego and ordered it to stop, but it did not comply. A Coast Guard vessel boarded the trawler.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Lawrence Kole said that the evidence against the two defendants was strong, but that the jury “still had some level of doubt.”

Nine of the 10 immigrants testified against the captain, but the jury ruled in his favor.

“Inherent in the government’s case was evidence that tended to support our side,” Morrissey said.

For example, he said, Wang kept a detailed daily account of the vessel’s activities from the day it left Taiwan until May 12, the day on which he said the crew mutinied. There were no additional entries.

Wang also testified that he had been locked up in a storage bin below deck. Guo said that after the crew abandoned the trawler off Laguna Beach, he used a power grinder to cut a heavy metal chain barring access to the bin. The chain was introduced as evidence during trial, lending further credibility to the defense case, Morrissey said.

After Monday’s verdict, U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi ordered Wang and Guo turned over to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for return to Taiwan.

Francisco Arcaute, a bureau spokesman, said the defendants and the other crew members probably will be deported within a month.

“If someone who has been held by a law enforcement agency does not have the correct documentation to be in the United States, they will very likely face removal from this country,” he said.

“Generally, in these cases, even if someone has been acquitted, they are still subject to immigration laws separate from their criminal charges.”

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Times staff writer Errin Haines contributed to this report.