Financial Crime Weekly: Mississippi Seafood Supplier To Pay $1.15M For Selling Bogus Seafood; Stem Cell Outfit Busted For Unapproved Drug; Magic Mushroom Maker Arrested For Fraud
A Mississippi seafood distributor and two company managers pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with others to mislabel seafood and to commit wire fraud by marketing inexpensive and frozen imported substitutes as more expensive and premium local species.
Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc. (QPS), the largest seafood wholesaler on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, agreed to pay the U.S. $1 million in forfeitures and a criminal fine of $150,000 for its part in the crime, the Department of Justice said.
QPS sales manager Todd A. Rosetti and business manager James W. Gunkel, both of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, also pleaded guilty to misbranding seafood.
QPS admitted to taking part in this fish substitution scheme from as early as 2002 through November 2019. The indictment alleges that QPS sold to restaurants foreign-sourced fish that substituted for the local species advertised on menus. QPS also labeled the cheap imports it sold to customers at its own retail shop and cafe as premium local fish.
Mary Mahoney’s, a restaurant that pleaded guilty in May, admitted that between December 2013 and November 2019, it fraudulently sold, as local premium species, approximately 58,750 pounds of fish that was not the species identified on its menu.