U.S. ramps up anti-fraud efforts

Hearing Room A2 in Boston’s State House is just about filled, as a state senate investigation into seafood fraud gets under way. Local celebrity businessman Roger Berkowitz, CEO of the Legal Sea Foods restaurant chain that spans the East Coast from here to Florida, emerges from the hallway into the wood-paneled room flanked on each side by legal counsel. He finds his seat at the wide front table and adjusts the microphone. A New England Cable Network news crew readies its cameras and the murmuring crowd quiets.

Berkowitz is here to speak voluntarily, and also because his family-owned company, an institution in this city since 1950, was one of many named in a Boston Globe exposé about misbranded seafood in and around the city just a few months prior. Of the myriad offenses illustrated in the two-part, front-page “Fishy Business” series, Legal’s transgression was most likely a simple case of human error: A sample of a cod dish ordered by reporters from the Peabody, Mass., restaurant was proven by DNA testing at a Canadian lab to instead be haddock. In fillet form, the two groundfish species can be hard to tell apart, even for experts.

However, other instances outlined in the series demonstrated clear intent to defraud consumers via a bait-and-switch scheme known as species substitution. Multiple restaurants were selling tilapia as red snapper, Alaska pollock or Pacific cod as the regional favorite Atlantic cod, and escolar as the mysterious “white tuna,” among other transgressions. An astonishing 48 percent, or 87 of the 183 samples, were sold with the wrong species name, according to the Globe.

In nearly every case, a cheaper, more readily available species was masquerading as a more expensive species or given an appealing-sounding name that is illegal to use, according to federal regulations. In fact, there is no such thing as white tuna, but it looks good on a menu, far more recognizable and enticing to the average diner.

Cavalier use of vernacular fish names and outright deception had spun out of control and now all seafood businesses and restaurants in the region were under suspicion. State Sen. Thomas P. Kennedy would later say during the hearing that the story “touched a nerve” throughout Massachusetts, a state with deep seafood industry roots — the famous five-foot “Sacred Cod” carving, a symbol of this centuries-old connection, hangs in the chamber of the House of Representatives, just down the hall.

Berkowitz, perhaps the most well known fish guy in a town full of fish guys, told the committee that the problem is “easily fixable,” without a shred of the humor so evident in Legal Sea Foods’ TV spots and print advertisements.

“What we need is a process that is transparent, one that allows the public to have trust in the seafood they consume,” Berkowitz testified. “There are regulations out there, but the feds haven’t really paid attention to them. It’s really a question of enforcing. A public-private partnership is the quickest and most effective way of eliminating fraud.”

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