Rotten Tomatoes for Price-Fixing Tomato Processor

The tomatoes in my garden never survived the summer drought so I don't have any left around rotting right now.  Wish I did.  I'd certainly like to throw a few at Alan Scott Huey.  And his cronies.

Huey was senior vice president at SK Foods in Monterey, California, from 2004 to 2008.  Today he's looking at five years in prison and $250,000 in fines if he's convicted of the price-fixing conspiracy charges he's facing.  Seems Huey conspired to sell poor quality tomatoes, including moldy ones, to processing giants that include B&G Foods, Inc., Frito-Lay, Inc., and Kraft Foods, Inc., among others.  And he sold these rotten tomatoes at premium prices.

Some of Huey's co-conspirators are already behind bars for their part in a scheme that involved bribing purchasing agents from some of the largest tomato-processing food companies into paying top dollar for lousy produce.  The food-processing companies weren't the only ones paying the inflated prices for these rotten tomatoes, though.  People like you and me paid the ultimate price for those nasty things.

Huey's attorney claims her client is a "good man, who made a mistake."  The mistake was apparently big enough that he's pleading guilty and helping federal prosecutors weed out more of the bad seed.

I'm afraid I make mistakes, too. My concern over this story is that my current mistake would be faulty aim with those rotten tomatoes I wish I had at hand.