NEW JERSEY — A man who oversaw food service for New York City schools was convicted Wednesday in a bribery case that revealed how chicken fillets with bones and metal bits were served for months in the food system. largest public school in the country.
Former city Department of Education official Eric Goldstein and three men who founded a school food vendor, Blaine Iler, Michael Turley and Brian Twomey, were found guilty of bribery, conspiracy and other charges after a trial of one month.
He delved into school menus, from yogurt parfaits to ravioli. And the trial gave jurors a poignant look at what some students and school staff found in their food when they saw the Chickentopia brand on their plates in 2016 and 2017.
“Our children were dependent on nutritious meals served in schools and instead received substandard food products containing pieces of plastic, metal and bone,” Brooklyn-based United States Attorney Breon Peace said in a communicated on Wednesday. He called the case “a textbook example of choosing greed” on child welfare.
Goldstein’s lawyer, Kannan Sundaram, declined to comment. Messages seeking comment were sent to the city’s Education Department and to attorneys for Iler and Twomey, both of Dallas, and Turley, of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The charges carry the potential of 20 years in prison. A date for sentencing has not yet been set.
As the director of the school system’s Office of School Support Services from 2008 to 2018, Goldstein oversaw functions including the food service operation, known as SchoolFood. Iler, Twomey and Turley had a company, SOMMA Food Group, with its eye on the New York City school system.
Around the same time, the three men and Goldstein formed another company to import grass-fed beef. Prosecutors argued that the company amounted to a conduit to pay Goldstein.
SOMMA’s founders “made sure they had the key decision-maker at SchoolFood in their pocket to make sure the DOE served many of their food products,” Assistant US Attorney Laura Zuckerwise said in closing argument this week. week. “Eric Goldstein also got what he wanted. He took advantage of the power, resources, and influence of his office to enrich himself.”
According to prosecutors, Iler, Turley and Twomey paid thousands of dollars to Goldstein and his lawyer. Meanwhile, Goldstein helped ensure that the school system bought Chickentopia items and other SOMMA products, sometimes fast-tracked.
Then, in September 2016, SOMMA ran into a problem: A school system employee choked on a bone in an allegedly boneless chicken from Chickentopia and required the Heimlich maneuver, according to court filings. For a while, schools stopped serving the company’s chicken fillets.
They were allowed to return two months later, one day after SOMMA’s founders agreed to pay Goldstein $66,670 and gave him their shares of the meat business. Goldstein then signed off on reintroducing the Chickentopia products, prosecutors said.
The offers reappeared. So did complaints about foreign objects in them. SchoolFood finally abandoned SOMMA products in April 2017, according to prosecutors.
Goldstein testified that he could not buy a product alone, saying the “tightly closed process” could involve a dozen decision-makers. Speeding up doesn’t mean skipping steps, he said.
He insisted that he was careful to separate his personal affairs from his work in the city.
“I always made sure that my responsibilities to the DOE came first,” he told the jury.
His defense rejected the argument that the payments from his meat trading partners were bribes, saying the amounts were for things like reimbursement of travel expenses.
