Quality Poultry & Seafood accused of conspiring with Mary Mahoney’s in scheme misbranding foreign fish as Gulf seafood

BILOXI, Miss. (WLOX) - A second Biloxi business has been accused of falsely advertising and conspiring to sell foreign, frozen seafood as fresh, local fish.

Documents unsealed in U.S. District Court Tuesday morning accuse Quality Poultry & Seafood, a wholesale supplier to restaurants and stores along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and two of its employees of working with Mary Mahoney’s Old French House to misbrand inexpensive, foreign, frozen fish and sell it as higher-priced, local, fresh fish to customers.

Court documents say between December 2013 and November 2019, Quality supplied Mary Mahoney’s, which claimed to only serve local seafood, approximately 58,750 pounds- over 29 tons- of imported Lake Victoria Perch (LVP), Trigger Fish, Triple Tail, and Unicorn Filefish, with the intent to defraud and mislead customers into thinking they were eating local premium fish.

Quality faces one felony charge of conspiring to misbrand seafood and wire fraud. The company intends to plead guilty.

Quality could be placed on probation for a maximum of five years and receive a large fine.

Todd Anthony Rosetti and James William Gunkel are two of Quality’s employees who are named in the newly unsealed documents. Both are facing a $1,000 fine and a maximum penalty of up to one year in prison.

Rosetti and Gunkel were in court Tuesday morning and are both pleading guilty. They each posted a $25,000 bond.

Rosetti was the sales manager of Quality Poultry and Seafood. He is the son of one of the two owners of Quality and has worked there since 1993.

Court documents say Rosetti participated in setting the prices at which Quality would purchase and sell the various species of fish it marketed, along with managing other salesmen.

Gunkel became Quality’s business manager in 2014 after working there for about six years.

Gunkel managed Quality’s purchases of seafood from its suppliers and monitored the prices Quality charged its wholesale and retail customers.

In addition to the misbranding charges, Quality is accused of using “interstate wire transmissions”- essentially communication- to execute the scheme.

Court documents say the scheme began no later than 2015, possibly as early as 1999, and continued through November 2019.

Due to the misbranding, Quality and the two named employees generated higher proceeds for their customers and themselves, court documents say.

The scheme also benefited Mary Mahoney’s because the fish “would not have been as marketable or profitable if its actual species and origin had been truthfully identified,” court documents say.

In September 2018, a federal search warrant was executed at Quality, when U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) agents searched the premises and warned Rosetti and Gunkel that the sale of mislabeled seafood was a serious criminal violation of federal law.

Court documents say as soon as eight days after the FDA’s search, Rosetti continued selling mislabeled fish to restaurants and continued to do so well into 2019.

From June to November 2019 alone, court documents say Rosetti and Gunkel misbranded no less than 3,150 pounds of imported fish.

Documents released Tuesday include specific details about what happened in the years leading up to the FDA raid:

• January 26, 2015: Gunkel sent a text to Rosetti, saying “We need to raise the price of perch on [Mary Mahoney’s] perch we are getting 7%.”
• In or around 2015: While standing inside Quality’s large freezer containing boxes of imported seafood, Rosetti handed Anthony Cvitanovich, a Mary Mahoney’s co-owner, packages of three different fish, suggesting that they sample each and decide which would be the best substitute for the local premium species on Mary Mahoney’s menu.
• November 2016: Quality sold Triggerfish to ‘local Restaurant A’ for use as a substitute for premium local fish.
• July 5, 2017: Rosetti texted Cvitanovich, “Still have no triple tail I’m sending you trigger-style fish 8-10 to use till we get it back in stock. [Employee of Restaurant A] is using it already instead of triple tail at the [Restaurant A] and said he has used it for grouper snapper and triple tail with no complaints. And it’s cheaper than triple tail....” Cvitanovich responded, “Ok.”
• July 2017: Quality sold fish to a customer that Quality represented to be the local premium Red Snapper. It was determined by genetic analysis to not be Red Snapper but was instead an imported species of less value.
• September 2017: Quality and Rosetti sold Triggerfish to ‘local Restaurant A’ for use as a substitute for premium local fish.
• January 19, 2018: A Quality seafood purchasing agent sent Rosetti, Gunkel and other Quality employees an email that read “Due to the shortage on snapper we will be substituting triple tail for all snapper.” Triple tail was imported by Quality from Suriname in South America.
• April 16, 2018: Gunkel sent the following instructions to Rosetti and other members of the Quality sales staff: “I don’t understand why we are giving Perch away [LVP]. This is a replacement for the triple tail which were selling at $8.99 and $9.99. Now we are selling perch at $5.69 if we can’t get at least $6.99 or $7.00 then it’s not worth bringing it in here. This is a product that no one else has and it is versatile. Raise the price and make money where we can make money!”
• September 19, 2018: During the FDA’s raid on Quality, Rosetti replied to Cvitanovich’s text order for LVP, “Tomorrow[,] FDA here today.” Cvitanovich responded, “Ok.”

Documents also say Gunkel and Rosetti attempted to cover up the conspiracy and lied to investigators.

Court documents say when questioned by FDA agents during the September 19, 2018 search of Quality, both Gunkel and Rosetti told agents that if anyone in Quality’s retail market was labeling a fish with a name other than it’s true name, it was done without their knowledge or approval.

Gunkel also told agents, according to the documents, that Quality doesn’t ship any fish outside of the state of Mississippi and that Quality had sold fish to Mary Mahoney’s in the past, but not much anymore.

In the days after the raid, documents say the Mary Mahoney’s co-owner ordered 150 pounds of LVP from Rosetti via text in order to sell it to customers as Snapper. In October, 60 more pounds were ordered for the same purpose.

Throughout the next months, according to court documents, Rosetti told the Mary Mahoney’s co-owner Quality was running out of LVP and was looking for alternatives, like Unicorn Filefish, Triple Tail and Parrotfish.

In November 2019, Mary Mahoney’s Old French House in Biloxi was raided by the FDA.

In May 2024, Anthony Charles Cvitanovich and Mary Mahoney’s pleaded guilty to conspiracy to mislabel inexpensive imported seafood as locally caught, premium seafood.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the scheme began as early as 2002, and that between 2018 and 2019, Cvitanovich mislabeled 17,190 pounds of Lake Victoria Perch from Africa, Triple Tail from Suriname and Unicorn Filefish from India as Snapper and Grouper caught in the Gulf of Mexico.

“When people spend their hard-earned dollars to enjoy the incredible local seafood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, they should get what they paid for, not frozen fish from overseas,” said U.S. Attorney Todd W. Gee of the Southern District of Mississippi.

“U.S. consumers expect their seafood to be correctly identified. When sellers purposefully substitute one fish species for another, they deceive consumers and cause potential food safety hazards to be overlooked or misidentified by processors or end users,” said Special Agent in Charge Justin Fielder, FDA Office of Criminal Investigations Miami Field Office.

Sentencing for Cvitanovich and Mary Mahoney’s is scheduled for November 18.

We will continue to follow this story as it develops in court.

See a spelling or grammar error in this story? Report it to our team HERE.

Copyright 2024 WLOX. All rights reserved.