Latest / REAP/SOW / Does anyone in Biloxi care about seafood fraud?
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- You are listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Mary Mahoney’s Old French House might be the most famous restaurant in Biloxi, Mississippi. And last year it got itself in hot water. News report: Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Incorporated, as well as the restaurant’s, co-owner and manager, pled guilty today to conspiracy to misbrand fish and wire fraud. News report: The company admitted that between December 2013 and November 2019, it fraudulently sold more than 29 tons of fish, claiming it was local seafood when it was actually being imported. Teresa: The owners of Mahoney’s pleaded guilty to fraudulently selling more than 29 tons of mislabeled fish between December 2013 and November 2019. They claimed it was locally caught when it was actually imported, and they were not the only local business that was doing this. At the end of the day, Mahoney’s and its supplier, Quality Poultry & Seafood, which is also an iconic Gulf Coast business, had to pay more than a million dollars apiece in penalties. This very fishy crime is actually an example of a much bigger problem. Imported seafood has been undercutting local prices for decades, and that’s basically killing off local fishing fleets in places like Biloxi. FERN contributor Boyce Upholt just published an awesome story about this. He produced it in collaboration with the show Gravy: Stories of the Changing American South. There’s also a text version of it, which FERN copublished with Inc. Magazine. I’ll let Boyce take it from here. Promotional video: Biloxi, there’s no place quite like it. Boyce Upholt: When I started to dig into the story of Biloxi and its fraudulent seafood, I stumbled on to a series of videos that the city had produced at some point years ago and posted to their YouTube page. They give a good sense of how this place likes to advertise itself. Promotional video: Beaches, golf, fishing, and casinos. Boyce: I noticed in particular that the water here was described as a place to play. Promotional video: When it comes to tourism, Biloxi’s in the big leagues. Boyce: And maybe that’s fair enough. Biloxi once was a favored destination for New Orleanians on vacation. But in the late 19th century, things began to change here, as another one of those city videos explains. Promotional video: With the invention of artificial ice in the mid-19th century and the coming of the railroad in the 1870s, the Biloxi seafood industry was going to experience a boom. Boyce: The first known written record of Biloxi, from a Canadian-born French explorer in 1699, mentions the rather good oysters he found on this sandy peninsula. Indigenous people had been eating oysters here for thousands of years. What was new at the end of the 1800s was that they were being shipped to far-flung locations. Canneries popped up along the Biloxi shoreline, big clattering factories where the oysters were shucked and packed into cans. Promotional video: By 1904, Biloxi was known as the seafood capital of the world. With the demand for labor high, Polish, Acadian, French, and Slavic workers came to work in Biloxi’s seafood industry. Boyce: This made for a second identity in Biloxi. Here’s a fisherman named Frank Parker talking about it on the local news in 2023. Frank Parker: You could walk out my front door. I mean, you could, if you looked north, you could see boats. You looked east, you could see boats. You looked south, you could see boats. There’s just shrimp houses and shrimp houses. You could just smell the smell of seafood. Boyce: The Southern Foodways Alliance, which produces this podcast, interviewed Frank Parker, too, and a few other fishermen back in 2008 for an oral history project. Listening now, these interviews sound like an extended obituary. Imported seafood began undercutting local prices in the 1980s. Here’s Richard Gollott, who has long worked in the shrimp industry, talking about how restaurants soon lost their loyalty. Richard Gollott: You know, if nobody complains about it and it works for ’em, they don’t care. They want the cheapest thing that they can feed to people and, and make as much money as they can. Boyce: I can’t help but note the irony. Biloxi became the seafood capital in large part because people figured out how to send its oysters across the globe. But now, as other countries industrialized and began to ship out their seafood, that hit the town hard. The canneries began to shutter. Corky Hire: And little by little, it kept phasing out, phasing out. And then they ain’t too many shrimp boats left. Boyce: That’s a retired shrimper named Corky Hire. Remember, these interviews were from 2008, just three years after Hurricane Katrina, which made all the problems even worse. And this was two years before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which sent oil spreading across the Gulf and seafood sales plummeting. Already, though, the situation felt existential. Here’s one last voice, a fisherman named Sammy Montiforte. Sammy Montiforte: You’re not gonna be able to save this industry. It’s the prices of everything and, and the imports of shrimp. You can’t. I don’t see it happening. Boyce: It’s not known exactly when Mary Mahoney’s began mislabeling its fish, but investigators determined it was at some point between 2002 and 2012. Officials from the restaurant declined to comment for the story, but state records and court documents detail much of what happened. The investigation goes back to 2016, when an anonymous source gave state officials a tip. Mary Mahoney’s and its seafood suppliers had for years been mislabeling some of their fish. The case eventually focused on one particular species, red snapper, the premium Gulf product, which had been replaced by cheap imported African perch, among other species. The FDA got involved, and in 2019 raided the restaurant. A reporter named Anita Lee from the Sun Herald stopped by and recorded a quick comment with the restaurant’s lawyer. Anita Lee: This is a broader investigation than Mahoney’s, is that right? Restaurant’s lawyer: Most likely. But I don’t know. I don’t wanna go anything beyond than what I know to be true. They showed up this morning, they’re investigating about fish and, uh, Mahoney’s has cooperated fully, and uh, they should be finishing up shortly, and Mary Mahoney’s will be open for dinner tonight. Boyce: Representatives for the restaurant have said in court that the fraud stopped after that 2019 raid. But it wasn’t until 2024 that charges were brought and the restaurant pleaded guilty. And only then did the public learn what Mary Mahoney’s had been up to. The investigation found that at least 55,000 customers had purchased mislabeled fish, and that was just the beginning. Mahoney supplier Quality Poultry & Seafood,, another iconic Biloxi business, had sold mislabeled fish to other restaurants, too. Some of them knew about the scam, some did not. Eventually, both businesses had to forfeit more than a million dollars apiece. Quality’s sales manager was sentenced to prison, and at the same time this played out in courts, there was a new development. News report: A new study tonight revealing the truth behind the menu: Which Gulf Coast restaurants are actually serving what they say they’re selling. Boyce: In the wake of the Mahoney’s guilty plea, a consulting group had come to the Biloxi area to conduct anonymous tests in restaurants. SeaD, the company is called, spelled S-E-A-D. They worked with funding from a lobbying group for Gulf shrimpers. And they found that out of 44 restaurants in the area, only eight were properly labeling their shrimp. Dave Williams: And it is a real slap in the face of our industry that the actual city that is known as the shrimp capital has so many inauthentic products served to diners. It’s just wrong. Boyce: That’s Dave Williams, SeaD’s founder. He developed a new genetic test, and he’s had it peer reviewed. Basically, you can extract genetic material, even from a cooked dish, and see if it’s the species of shrimp that’s farmed in Asia, which is where most of the imports come from. Dave: We are making it affordable and we’re making it easy, because affordable and easy is the way you get enforcement. Boyce: Besides just the fact of misleading customers, there are other consequences to such fraud. Studies have found that imported shrimp often contain banned veterinary drugs. And then there’s an economic issue. Dave did some back-of-the-envelope math for me. He figured that if you could cut fraud in half in terms of shrimp, replace half of the mislabeled imports with actual Gulf shrimp, then that would bring in nearly a billion dollars to U.S. shrimpers every year. So he’s been going from town to town along the Gulf, finding almost everywhere the same problem as in Biloxi. He says it’s making a difference. Dave: The price of shrimp in the box has gone up, and it could be a combination of different factors. But I also think public awareness of what’s going on has played quite an important part. Boyce: What Dave is saying is that the public cares. But I was struck by the situation in Biloxi after Mary Mahoney’s pleaded guilty. One diner had commented on Facebook about deciding to go eat there anyway. And finding a full packed house. “I can’t wait to get home and support my favorite restaurant,” another wrote. Southern Foodways Alliance: When we come back, we’ll grapple with a puzzle. Mary Mahoney’s is a community favorite, in part because it’s local. And yet, it wasn’t, and people didn’t seem to mind. We’ll try to understand why after the break. But first: Love listening to Gravy? Excited to read SFA’s weekly newsletter? Wanna spend the weekend with curious eaters from across the South and beyond, lapping up engaging talks and delectable bites? Then join us for SFA’s Fall Symposium in Birmingham, Alabama. We’ll gather October 25 and 26 to weave together engaging talks, great food, compelling films, and thought-provoking conversations focused on the Southern city. Together, we’ll consider the ways the urban South shapes how we eat, how we think about ourselves, and how we understand this place we call home. Tickets go on sale in August. Hope to see you in The Ham. Boyce: When I went to visit Biloxi, I found that a lot of people didn’t want to talk about the Mary Mahoney scandal. It was a big fuss in a small town, a place where the Mahoney family name means a lot. But eventually, I tracked down one of the Facebook posters who expressed support for the restaurant. Debbie Batia had written that Mary Mahoney’s had long been her family’s choice for special occasions, and she told me it will remain that choice into the future. Debbie Batia: I mean, it’s just, it’s just such a wonderful place to go. The atmosphere’s terrific. The people are terrific. Everything about it just makes you just keep want to go, going back. Boyce: Debbie knows the town’s history. She’s watched as the number of fishermen has declined. But she works in her family’s furniture and interior design business. She admitted her knowledge of seafood doesn’t run very deep. Debbie: I know what I like, a white, flaky fish. I know what to order and, you know, that’s about it. So it didn’t, I didn’t really think much of it, frankly. Boyce: To me, this served as a reminder. Sure, Biloxi likes to market its seafood history, but that’s not the only story here. There have always been people who live and work on the land here, who just depreciate living alongside an ocean. And there’s always been tourism, which boomed in the mid-20th century when a man-made beach was installed along its marshy shores. Promotional video: The white sand beach quickly became a tourist attraction for those coming in droves on the new superhighway. New motels, restaurants, and nightclubs sprang up along the beachfront. Boyce: “Nightclubs” is a nice way of saying casinos, which were technically illegal, but Biloxi leaders looked the other way. That added to the town’s Old South vibes, a bit of clandestine appeal. Mary Mahoney’s Old French House opened in this era, in 1964. The family had ties to the shrimping industry. Indeed, Mary Mahoney’s brother, a partner in the restaurant, sold the shrimp boat to raise the money needed to buy the property. Just a few years later, Biloxi went through one of the most momentous events in the town’s history. Promotional video: Then, in 1969, Hurricane Camille wrought destruction on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In the wake of the storm, the people picked themselves up and began to rebuild. Boyce: After Camille, Interstate 10 was completed just a few miles inland, draining tourist traffic from downtown. By the late 1980s, Biloxi was, as one visiting journalist put it, a hard-time city. But change was coming. Promotional video: Biloxi’s economy recovered slowly until 1992, when the state of Mississippi legalized dockside gaming, igniting the biggest economic boom in Biloxi’s history. Boyce: This, as it happens, was also the ascendant era for big national sit-down restaurant chains. Think TGI Fridays, Olive Garden. These kinds of restaurants began to appear in Biloxi after the new casinos opened, and now the casinos themselves added another big dash of could-be-anywhere food. Here, for example, is an advertisement for Beau Rivage, one of the town’s big casinos. Beau Rivage advertisement: And feast on pub-style favorites, like hardy appetizers, oversized hamburgers, brick-oven pizza, and other savory entrées to fulfill all your cravings. Boyce: And then, in 2005, came Katrina. Another storm that, like Camille, looms large in Biloxi’s story. It looms large in the story of Mary Mahoney’s, too. This was one of the first local restaurants to reopen its doors. Debbie: When they opened, it was such a relief for all of us, because we had nowhere to go to get out of the, I called it the debris zone, and the hellhole all of us were living in, you know, with all our homes gutted and businesses gutted. Boyce: Mary Mahoney’s had at this point become a symbol. It was a survivor on a Gulf Coast that had been ravaged by so many forces, by a global economy, but also by nature itself. But as I talked to Debbie Batia, I couldn’t help but think of those oral histories with fishermen bemoaning the end of an industry. They often talked about their intimate connections with the ocean. Here, for example, is Sammy Montiforte again. Sammy: Yeah, when you live in an area where, you know, your food is abundance, that’s what you, that’s what you grow up accustomed to. Very seldom ever eat meat. A lot of people don’t eat meat around here, I mean, ’cause they’re used to eating seafood. That’s what their taste is, you know?. Boyce: This loss of intimacy seemed to be reflected in the restaurants themselves. The all-you-can-eat buffets and po’boys began to substitute foreign shrimp, and diners didn’t seem to notice. In my research, I came across a 2002 article from a food critic in the Biloxi Sun Herald. She heaped praise on Red Lobster: Fresh seafood served consistently well, she wrote. In the meantime, the fine-dining scene was, according to some people, getting kind of stale. Alex Perry: It sort of was taking what New Orleans was doing maybe 50 or 60 years ago, and just sort of running with that. You know, lots of that blackened redfish, tasso cream, a lot of those kinds of things. Boyce: That’s a chef named Alex Perry. He grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and left awhile to cook, then moved back in 2013. Alex was an ambitious young chef then, and wanted to open his own restaurant. And he’d found an affordable property in his hometown of Ocean Springs, which sits just across the bay from Biloxi. Alex’s restaurant is called Vestige, and it stood out from the local scene. Alex: You know, I would say when we opened, we were very Southern-heavy. You know, sort of that Sean Brock-esque kind of revival. Boyce: Southern ingredients and techniques in a modern and innovative fine-dining context. Alex wanted to use as much local product as possible, and remembers not being sure if other local restaurants were doing the same, especially when it came to seafood. Alex: You always had a suspicion, but you couldn’t a hundred percent know. That was just one of those things. People just weren’t talking about it. Boyce: Alex told me he actually serves some nonlocal seafood himself. What he cares most about is sustainability. So he is happy to bring in, say, Alaskan king salmon, which is both tasty and carefully regulated. Alex: Now, crustaceans, that’s pretty much all local. Why would you go anywhere else? There’s no reason to. Boyce: Last year, Vestige was a finalist for the James Beard Award for best restaurant in the country. This is high-end stuff. A tasting menu these days, one that’s heavily influenced by the Japanese heritage of Alex’s wife and co-owner, Kumi Omori. Their nomination served as a kind of notice. This strip of coastline in Mississippi was no longer just all-you-can-eat shrimp and crab au gratin. Alex: Cause one thing that I’m very encouraged by is the amount of really cool restaurants starting to open up is increasing — dramatically. Chefs that I know, that care about these things, it’s local, local, local, fresh, fresh, fresh. Boyce: This means more people who see local product as part of telling the local story. But there’s a caveat. Alex: We are very niche. We’re sort of a percentage of a percentage in that, you know, all of the vast majority of it are definitely tourists or locals who just don’t care. Boyce: Fine-dining restaurants can take this mission only so far, in other words. Alex: It’s like, give it to me cheap, give it to me big, give it to me fried. We’re good. No, you lie to me. It’s all right. But it’s fine. It’s okay. And it’s really not. But that’s just a personal decision people have to make. What are you comfortable with? Are you cool with an entire industry disappearing? Boyce: Personally, I love fried shrimp. As much as anything, it’s a local recipe, the flavor of this coast. But what does it mean when a local recipe is made with a foreign product? What we’re figuring out now is what parts of Biloxi’s culture matter. The crux of the issue, in other words, isn’t about big or fried. Cheap, though, that’s more complicated. I left Vestige worried that local seafood might become a luxury, but then I visited another restaurateur, named Bill Bradley. I’m glad I’ve met you, ’cause I feel like coming out of, the way I’ve been thinking about this is, like, right now, it’s mostly these high-end restaurants that are so focused on Gulf products. Not that this isn’t a lovely establishment, but it’s very different, right? Bill Bradley: Oh, it’s a gas station. Boyce: The restaurant is inside a Shell station, eight pumps. Inside, there’s a counter where diners can buy fried or boiled seafood. And Bill says the economics work. Bill: The only two import shrimp that we have in our store are the Argentine reds, and then we — the tail on, just because tail on is so expensive. Our fried shrimp, we’re all domestic. They all come from Paul Piazza & Sons in Louisiana. But no, every, out the shrimp that we use for our salads, they’re all, everything else here. Boyce: For Bill, this is personal. He’s got shrimpers in his family. He’s actually set up his own distribution company to ensure he can get quality local products. Bill: We proved to a lot of people, we can sell you domestic around the same price, and they went for it. Boyce: After Bradley’s, I went to talk with one more chef, Austin Sumrall. I should probably disclose, I wrote a magazine profile of Austin years ago after he first opened White Pillars. I liked the food so much that we kept in touch and became friends. He catered my wedding even. Austin Sumrall: So I grew up in McComb, Mississippi, which is not super far from here, a couple hours away. Boyce: After years of cooking across the South, Austin moved to the coast to be close to his wife’s family. At first, he didn’t take to it. Then he decided to make an effort to embrace the region. Austin: It was something as simple as making sure that we, like, went and walked on the beach every so often. You know, buying shrimp straight off the boats, going out to visit the oyster farms. Those kind of things really kind of get me going. Boyce: Back in Biloxi’s heyday, there was a restaurant that was a key rival to Mary Mahoney’s. White Pillars, it was called because of a set of white columns out front that face towards the Gulf. It’s also built into a big old sprawling house. But this restaurant was shuttered in 1989. Austin visited and fell in love with the building, so he signed a lease-to-own agreement. Austin: And at that point, you know, it’s kind of off to the races. Boyce: Last year he opened a second restaurant, Siren Social Club. Twice in the past five years, he’s been nominated for the James Beard Award for best chef in the South. Austin, in other words, is a part of the change that Alex Perry was talking about. He has very much made seafood a part of his brand. A few years back he won a competition and was named the nation’s seafood king. Austin: So here at White Pillars, we do not serve anything in this restaurant that’s not from the Gulf of Mexico. Boyce: Louisiana and Alabama both recently passed laws about seafood labeling. After Austin and I talked, Mississippi passed one, too. It’s an open question, though, how enforceable such laws will be. So Austin would also like to see a voluntary certification, a seal that could be placed in the doorways of restaurants, like his, that commit to serving only local seafood. He talked about how if things were properly labeled, then at least everyone could make the choice for themselves. Austin: Then you’re gonna have a $9 po’boy and you’re gonna have a $14 po’boy. And then it’ll be up to the consumer to decide if you wanna spend that extra five bucks for something local. And, like, I know what my decision would be. But that doesn’t have to be the decision for everybody. Boyce: I was stuck on a different question, though: Does all this matter? I kept thinking about Debbie Batia’s frank admission that she knows she likes flaky white fish. I write about food quite a bit, but give me a taste test, and I’m pretty sure I’d fail to pick out the local Gulf product. I always hear people talking about the fishing industry and how a way of life is disappearing, and sure, it’s stirring to walk along the beach and know there are grizzled old fishermen making their living from the ocean. But fishing can be a difficult and dangerous business for those who do it, and it’s worth saying it can be rough on ecosystems, too. I noted some of this to Austin. Austin: You know, you can just drive a mile and a half that way and see the hundreds of shrimp boats. And I think that it would completely change the way this coast looks if that were to go away. But I don’t know. You said the romance of it’s not enough. It probably is for me. Boyce: Again and again, this is what I heard. Fishing is simply a part of life here. The place will change without it. Promotional video: Twenty-six miles of white sand beach along the blue waters of the Mississippi Sound. Boyce: Obviously, it’s sad when a way of life disappears. But places do change. Promotional video: Oak trees felled by Hurricane Katrina transformed into beautiful sculptures. Boyce: Businesses shutter. Promotional video: The iconic Biloxi Light, standing proudly, fully restored. Boyce: I wonder, though, if Biloxi can afford to lose this part of its story. Promotional video: A subtropical climate that invites outdoor activities year-round. Boyce: Biloxi’s tourism economy might need that romance. The judge who oversaw the Mary Mahoney’s case made a different point. The town owes something to its fishermen. They helped build this place. Promotional video: Extraordinary sportfishing in the Fertile Fisheries Crescent. Boyce: Biloxi exists because of the ocean, in other words. Promotional video: A wide variety of sightseeing boat tours. Boyce: And if the ocean becomes just something to look at, something to contemplate while eating seafood from elsewhere, it seems like some knowledge is going to be lost. Which matters, I think, because the ocean, with its hurricanes and rising tides, will keep on shaping this place, no matter what we put on the menu. Teresa: This story was produced in collaboration with Gravy: Stories of the Changing American South, a production of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Gravy is recorded and mixed by Clay Jones and Broadcast Studios, and it’s hosted by Melissa Hall. Sarah Camp Milam is Gravy’s managing editor. Olivia Terenzio is its podcast editor, and Mary Beth Lasseter is its publisher. Special thanks to fact checker Lisa Pollock and to Wendel Patrick, who produced Gravy’s theme music. To listen to more episodes of Gravy, visit southernfoodways.org. REAP/SOW is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. FERN News is our home on YouTube. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauren Newsome. Katie Gardner is the producer and video producer for REAP/SOW I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.