WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice said Tuesday that a Mississippi seafood distributor and two company managers pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to mislabel seafood and to committing wire fraud by marketing inexpensive and frozen imported substitutes as more expensive and premium local species. 

The largest seafood wholesaler on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Quality Poultry and Seafood Inc., agreed to pay the United States $1 million in forfeitures and a criminal fine of $150,000. Two men—QPS sales manager Todd A. Rosetti and business manager James W. Gunkel—pleaded guilty to misbranding seafood to facilitate the fraud.

QPS admitted to participating in the fish substitution scheme from as early as 2002 and continuing through November 2019, the DOJ said. QPS recommended and sold to its restaurant customers foreign sources of fish that could serve as convincing substitutes for local species that the restaurants advertised on the menu. In addition, QPS also labeled cheap imports that it sold to customers at its retail shop and café as premium local fish, the DOJ said.

Company officials and QPS took time to conspire and perpetuate fraud for more than a decade which could cause harm to fishermen and wholesalers in the market, the DOJ said.

“Mislabeling seafood harms local wholesalers and fishermen who compete to sell locally sourced, premium fish in a market unfairly flooded with less expensive fish, frozen and imported from overseas," Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said.

Earlier this year, Louisiana passed a batch of laws that would increase transparency and protect Louisiana’s historic culinary heritage.

One law specifically outlaws misleading descriptions of seafood as “Louisiana-style” or “New Orleans-style” unless all processing is completed locally or within the Gulf region.