Team 4: Strip District Co. Charged With Selling Bad MeatPOSTED: 4:50 pm EDT October 9,
2007 PITTSBURGH -- A Strip District company was indicted Tuesday on charges of selling bad meat, according to U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan's office.The indictment charges American Dispatch Inc. on 30th Street with selling more than 2,000 pounds of meat that was unhealthy for human consumption.Team 4 broke the story last year, when investigator Jim Parsons talked to a former American Dispatch employee who complained to federal authorities about tainted meat.After the employee complained, agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture raided the company.Photographs taken inside American Dispatch's cooler at that time showed pallets of meat products with expired "use by" dates. Some of those dates went back more than two years.Former American Dispatch manager Ron Labick complained to the USDA when he found out his company was shipping 100 cases of thawed, two-year-old hot dogs to groceries plus more to a low-price salvage food market in McDonald, Washington County, where you can get a cooked hot dog on a bun for a quarter."Basically, it was a public safety violation and I had to put a stop to this to keep harm from happening to the public," Labick said.The storeowner said USDA agents showed up the morning after the hot dogs arrived from American Dispatch, before he had a chance to open the cases to see how old they were.According to the indictment, American Dispatch sold 2,800 pounds of tainted meat products on a single day: Sept. 29, 2005."They were putrid, they were smelly, they were decomposed, some in a liquid state, so they were extremely unwholesome and not fit for human consumption," Buchanan said.The company faces a maximum sentence of five years of probation and a $10,000 fine."Specifically, what makes this a violation of the law is that they took this product and put it in interstate commerce for distribution for human consumption," Buchanan said.Company president Tom Goslin did not return Team 4's phone calls on Tuesday. Related Links: More Allegheny County NewsGet RSS | E-Mail Alerts Copyright 2007 by ThePittsburghChannel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
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