5 of the Worst Criminals in Food History

From maple syrup fraudsters to The Codfather.

JackF/iStock; SensorSpot/iStock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Like precious gem heists and exotic animal snatching, food crimes come with their fair share of high drama. The details of one seafood kingpin’s story are enough for an episode of The Sopranos: Federal agents disguised themselves as Russians and busted fisherman Carlos Rafael for a laundry list of crimes, including mislabeling his catch and selling thousands of pounds of fish under-the-table to a dealer in New York City.

For our latest episode of Bite, our food politics podcast, we talked to journalist Ben Goldfarb about his recent Mother Jones feature about this fish tycoon, known as “The Codfather.” The interview with Goldfarb begins at 1:24.

“The Codfather has always been kind of a notorious figure in New England,” says Goldfarb. “He has a reputation for being unscrupulous, he’s run into trouble with the law a few of times, and a lot of small fishermen feel he’s squeezing them out.” Rafael currently faces 24 counts of fraud and is due in court May 30th. He joins a long line of food criminals, including:

Sticky Fingers
At $1,300 a barrel, maple syrup was about 26 times more valuable than crude oil last year. In what became known as the Great Maple Syrup Robbery, 540,000 gallons of syrup—worth roughly $13.4 million—were stolen from the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers in 2012. According to prosecutors, writes Vanity Fair: “The gang would truck barrels out of the Reserve to a sugar shack where they would siphon the syrup in the way you siphon gasoline from a semi, feeding it, a cask at a time, into their own ramshackle barrels and then re-filling the originals with water.” The heist was discovered when an inventory check revealed the water. Richard Vallières, one of the ringleaders, was found guilty in November of theft, fraud, and trafficking stolen goods; he reportedly claimed he was forced to commit the crime under a death threat.

Wine Wizard
From the early 2000s until 2012, a young Indonesian immigrant named Rudy Kurniawan swindled Silicon Valley socialites—including wine and art expert William Koch—out of nearly $30 million by repackaging wine in his basement and selling it for thousands of dollars per bottle. In 2014, a judge sentenced Kurniawan to 10 years in prison. Kurniawan earned his nickname “Dr. Conti” because he was known for bidding high on famously-expensive Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wines at auctions.

This is Nuts
Nine people died and thousands got sick in 2008 and 2009 after eating peanut butter contaminated with salmonella. The story’s grossest detail is that the CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America, Stewart Parnell, knew the food may have been contaminated—but shipped it anyway. Parnell was found guilty in 2014 on more than 70 criminal charges and received the longest prison sentence of any food-related crime: 28 years.

Oh, SNAP
In spring of 2016, vendors at South Florida flea markets were in cahoots with customers carrying EBT cards: Owners rang up purchases but never sold anything. Customers instead left with cash, and shop owners got a cut. According to the Miami Herald, thousands of food stamp recipients were involved in the $13 million food stamp fraud, perhaps the largest scheme of its kind. Investigators dubbed the bust “Operation Stampede.”  

Bite is Mother Jones‘ food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate