HONOLULU -- The head of a mainland labor-recruiting company accused in the largest-ever human trafficking case in U.S. history surrendered Friday in Honolulu. Federal authorities want to keep him behind bars because they're worried he's a flight risk.

His spokeswoman told KITV 4 News Friday he's innocent, and she said the FBI overreacted when agents mistreated his wife when they tried to arrest him early Thursday morning in Los Angeles.

Mordechai Orian, 45, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Honolulu Friday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie Kobayashi, who set a trial date for the week of Nov. 3. Orian is the president of Global Horizons, Inc., a 16-year-old labor recruiting company based in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Orian is accused along with five other people in a federal indictment that claims they lured 400 workers from Thailand to work on farms in Hawaii and elsewhere with promises of high pay. The indictment said the defendants then took away the laborers’ passports and paid them much less money than promised, while sometimes housing them in unsanitary conditions under the watchful eye of guards.

Prosecutors said Orian -- an Israeli national -- is already appealing a deportation order from July of 2009.

They plan to ask a federal magistrate to keep him at the federal detention center near Honolulu Airport until the trafficking trial starts in November. Orian could face up to 70 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors expect to bring another indictment with further charges against Orian and possibly others, authorities said.

"Just the nature of the offense has such a massive penalty associated with it, that there's always the concern when foreign nationals are charged that they won't show up for their own trial," said FBI Special Agent Tom Simon.

Orian has used invalid passports when travelling in the past, Simon said. He also holds an airline pilot’s license from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to public records.

Simon described a frustrating chain of events over the previous 36 hours as the FBI tried to get Orian to turn himself in Friday in Honolulu.

"We were told that he was in Los Angeles, Texas and Albuquerque and we believe that he was not in all places at the same time," Simon said. "This became a bit of a comedy of errors for us, but the important thing is that he did make his way to court and that's an honorable thing to do. He decided he wanted his day in court."

Federal prosecutor Susan French, of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told Magistrate Judge Kobayashi it was a “major saga” getting Orian to surrender, spending “extensive useless hours of FBI time,” since Thursday.

Orian was booked to arrive in Honolulu on a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Los Angeles, but did not come off the plane and agents were about to launch a fugitive investigation when they got a call from his public relations spokeswoman saying he was arriving on another flight a couple of hours later, Simon said.

While defendants usually negotiate with authorities about their surrender through a lawyer, Orian had Global Horizons’ public relations firm, KSL PR, and its representative, Kara Lujan of Sacramento, Calif., handle the negotiations, Simon said.

“We have been cooperating with the FBI since Thursday morning to negotiate his surrender,” Lujan told KITV 4 News Friday.

Lujan said Orian was in Texas on business when FBI agents went to his million-dollar Malibu, Calif. home at 5 a.m. Thursday, busting down the door, breaking windows, putting his wife in handcuffs and scaring his three children.

Lujan called the FBI raid overkill. "He's not a violent criminal, doesn't have a violent past. He's a businessman. And we felt the way he was being treated by the FBI was just ridiculous," Lujan said. “They were very, very rude to his wife.”

Lujan said Orian’s company and three of his employees are not guilty of forcing immigrant laborers to work on farms. "The claims are false and that he's basically being targeted by the Department of Labor and the Justice Department when all he's trying to do is bring these workers here and help them and he has helped them," she added. “We are disputing those charges. They are not correct.”

The Honolulu immigration lawyer for 56 of Orian’s alleged victims, Melissa Vincenty, was in the federal court room Friday to watch him face the charges wearing leg shackles around his ankles. "We thought for a while that he might flee the country before this case would ever be prosecuted," she said.

Vincenty said she's happy Orian remained locked up at the federal detention center in Honolulu, where some of his alleged victims also were housed before they were deported.

"To know that some of these guys have been through that process and have been detained on immigration charges due to the fact of his company not living up to his promises, it was very satisfying to see him being held in the same facility," she said. "We are just thrilled for our clients and we can say justice has been served, so far."

Vincenty and fellow immigration lawyer Clare Hanusz first tipped the FBI to the case in 2008.

Federal prosecutors said Orian has a history of not complying with civil and administrative judgments against him.

Public records show he has faced nine tax liens for unpaid bills in four states since 2003, totaling $2.2 million.

The most recent two liens were filed in April by Canfield Funding, LLC in New York for $132,191.

The state of California filed a $502,655 lien against Orian in December of 2009. The state of Hawaii went after him for a $15,563 lien in 2008. And the IRS filed a $1.5 million lien against him in 2007.

A detention hearing for Orian is set for Wednesday when a federal magistrate will decide whether he can be released on bail. Even though Orian is the CEO of a large company and owns an expensive home in Malibu, he appeared with a court-appointed lawyer paid for by the federal government Friday.

His spokeswoman said he plans to hire his own attorney with his own money soon. “We expect to hire someone who has the experience to deal with this kind of high-level case,” Lujan said.

On Tuesday, the Kauai Coffee Co. filed a lawsuit against Global Horizons, which provided the company with workers from Thailand in 2004. Since 2006, 17 people filed discrimination complaints against Kauai Coffee Co. through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Kauai Coffee denies the allegations, but has had to defend itself against the EEOC charges, running up attorneys' fees and other court costs, the lawsuit said. Kauai Coffee claimed Global Horizons should be defending the charges on its behalf.

In 2008, Florida-based Del Monte Fresh Produce Inc., which operates in Hawaii, filed a similar lawsuit against Global Horizons, alleging breach of contract. Del Monte faces 28 charges from the U.S. EEOC.

In recent weeks, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued findings against Orian’s company, Global Horizons, for civil rights violations, according to The New York Times.

The alleged victims in Orian’s case worked at 13 to 14 farms on Oahu, Kauai, Maui and the Big Island, tending to coffee, fruits and vegetables. Their employers included Aloun Farms on Oahu as well as Maui Pineapple Farm, which is no longer in business. But the farm workers were also sent to 12 other states as far away as Florida, Ohio and Kentucky, the FBI said.

The workers signed over mortgages on their Thai homes and farms and paid Orian’s company up to $21,000 for Global Horizons to secure them jobs in the United States. They were promised jobs paying up to $1,900 a month, twice as much as the average annual income in Thailand. But they were often paid much less and sometimes nothing at all, according to advocates for the laborers.

Two of the defendants strung yellow tape around the Maui Pineapple Farm housing units and installed bells on string lines in the woods to alert guards of any escape attempts, according to the indictment.

Some of the workers were housed in flophouses with no running water or electricity, Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the Thai Community Development Center told The Los Angeles Times. Others had to survive eating leaves from plants in Hawaii or by river fishing in Florida, she told the Times.

Another of the six defendants is Sam Wongsesanit, 39, of Kona, who is expected to surrender to the FBI next week. His first appearance in Honolulu federal court is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

Two Thai recruiters, both of them women, were also indicted in the case. The FBI said Ratawan Chunharutai and Podjanee Sinchai are both considered fugitives. FBI agents in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok will work with Thai law enforcement to “bring them to justice in accordance with existing treaties between the United States and Thailand,” Simon said.

In 2007, Orian unsuccessfully sued rival labor contractor J & A Contracting, to whom he had lost one of his biggest clients. According to Fortune magazine, Orian claimed it was because J & A “provides cheaper, illegal workers, scooping workers up on street corners by the vanload and delivering them to farms.” He also claimed he had “evidence of falsified Social Security cards” as proof.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Labor settled an investigation with Global Horizons in which the company paid 88 Thai workers were almost $300,000 in back wages and civil penalties.

A federal probe found the company committed a series of violations when it placed workers at Aloun Farms in Kapolei and Del Monte in 2003. Labor investigators found the workers were brought to the United States on special visas and were only approved for work in Arizona, even though they worked in Hawaii.

Orian gave tens of thousands of dollars to the National Republican Congressional Committee on eight occasions between 2004 and 2006, according to campaign finance records reported by the website The Rawstory. His largest contribution of $11,000 was in July of 2006, the website said. He also gave $2,000 to the GOP-affiliated Restore America political action committee twice between 2004 and 2006, The Rawstory reported.