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.
