Something fishy was going on at a famous Mississippi seafood joint. Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Restaurant, a well-known institution in the heart of Biloxi’s fishing capital, passed off foreign, frozen seafood as local Gulf Coast catches for years, federal prosecutors charged. Mary Mahoney’s pleaded guilty on Thursday to misbranding seafood and wire fraud, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Co-owner Anthony Charles Cvitanovich, 55, also pleaded guilty to misbranding 17,190 pounds of seafood during 2018 and 2019. The mainstay, which was founded in 1962, admitted that between 2013 and 2019, it worked with co-conspirators — including its wholesale supplier — to fraudulently sell over 29 tons of fish that was frozen and imported from Africa, India and South America. It then catfished customers into paying more for lake perch, tripletail, triggerfish and unicorn filefish that they thought were premium Gulf red snapper and redfish, according to prosecutors .
“The conspirators ...
benefited from the sale of seafood that would not have been as marketable nor as profitably sold if its actual species and origin had been known,” prosecutors said. They also said the scheme started as early as 2002. “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,” US Attorney Todd Gee said in a statement.
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