Mississippi Gulf Coast restaurant and its co-owner are sentenced for mislabeling seafood

GULFPORT, Miss. — A Mississippi Gulf Coast restaurant and its co-owner it were sentenced Monday on federal charges of mislabeling inexpensive imported seafood as local premium fish.

Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, founded in Biloxi in 1962 in a building that dates to 1737, was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay nearly $1.5 million. That included a $149,000 criminal fine and $1.35 million in forfeiture for some of the money it received from fraudulent sales of seafood, the Justice Department said.

Mahoney’s co-owner/manager, Anthony Charles Cvitanovich, 55, was sentenced to three years of probation and four months of home detention. He was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine. On May 30, Cvitanovich pleaded guilty to a felony Information charging him with misbranding of seafood during 2018 and 2019.

“Misbranding foreign seafood as premium, locally caught fish hurts the Gulf Coast seafood industry and defrauds customers that paid to taste the real thing,” U.S. Attorney Todd Gee said in a news release Monday.

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The restaurant pleaded guilty May 30 to conspiracy to misbrand seafood and wire fraud. Prosecutors said the misbranding scheme began as early as 2002 and continued through November 2019.

The restaurant admitted that between December 2013 and November 2019, the company and its co-conspirators at a Biloxi seafood wholesaler fraudulently sold as local premium species about 58,750 pounds (26,649 kilograms) of seafood that was frozen and imported from Africa, India and South America.

The court ordered the restaurant to maintain at least five years of records describing the species, sources and cost of seafood it acquires to sell to customers, and that it make the records available to any relevant federal, state or local government agency.

In a related case, a Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood distributor and two managers pleaded guilty Aug. 27 to conspiring to mislabel seafood and commit wire fraud by marketing frozen imported fish as more expensive local species.

Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc. agreed to forfeit $1 million and pay a $150,000 fine, the Justice Department said. The company’s sales manager Todd A. Rosetti and business manager James W. Gunkel, both of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, also pleaded guilty to misbranding seafood.

Sentencing for QPS, Rosetti and Gunkel is set for Dec. 11.