California agribusiness magnate Frederick Scott Salyer was charged Thursday with running his company as a massive racketeering enterprise that routinely bribed food company executives, rigged bids and slapped false labels on old and moldy tomato products that families nationwide consumed.
A federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted Salyer on Thursday after a nearly four-year probe of his Monterey-based SK Foods LP, which controlled up to 20 percent of the Central Valley's tomato crop.
The highly unusual move to characterize SK Foods as a racketeering enterprise stems in part from federal agents' belief that as many as two dozen of the company's executives knew about the criminal nature of its business.
Sacramento Bee, 2/19/10; see also LA Times, 2/19/10