BANGOR — An Iowa egg farm owner, whose business started in Maine, and his son will be sentenced Monday in U.S. District Court in Iowa for their roles in the sale of contaminated eggs linked to a 2010 salmonella outbreak blamed for sickening an estimated 56,000 people nationwide.
In June, Austin “Jack” DeCoster, 80, of Turner, Maine, and his son, Peter DeCoster, 51, of Clarion, Iowa, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Iowa City, Iowa, to distributing contaminated eggs, altering expiration dates to hide how old its products were and bribing an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to a previously published report.
The company, Quality Egg LLC, has agreed to pay $6.8 million in fines, according to court documents.
Both men face up to a year in prison but could be sentenced to up to five years of probation and ordered to pay personal fines of more than $1 million.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter E. Deegan Jr., who prosecuted the case, said in his sentencing memorandum the DeCosters ran “a company that routinely disregarded important food safety standards and practices.”
He urged U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett to impose sentences that would “incentivize similarly situated corporate officials to act responsibly when it comes to food safety.”
The federal prosecutor did not recommend a specific sentence for either man.
Jack DeCoster was sentenced in 2003 to five years of probation on two counts of continued employment of undocumented workers at his production facilities in Iowa, according to the sentencing memo. In Maine, he paid a $14,000 fine in 1976 for falsifying a driver’s log.
Defendants with criminal histories generally receive longer sentences than those with clean records.
The sentencing memorandum filed by the elder DeCoster’s attorneys is sealed. Information about why the document is not public was not available Tuesday.
Stuart J. Dornan, the Omaha, Nebraska, attorney representing Peter DeCoster, recommended his client be sentenced to a combination of probation and community service. The lawyer suggested the younger DeCoster, whose only criminal conviction was for “retail theft” when he was 21 years old, be required to hire a mediator to facilitate meetings with victims.
“It will be a lot tougher for Peter to meet face to face with impacted victims, hear their stories, and be called to respond” than serving prison time.
Jack DeCoster, started egg farming in Maine as a teenager but expanded his operation to Iowa in the 1980s.
In 2011, after the salmonella outbreak, the father and son announced they would give up control of the business, which recalled about 550 million potentially contaminated eggs.
That was not the first instance of corporate trouble for the DeCosters. In 1997, DeCoster Egg Farms in Turner paid $2 million in fines for health and safety violations, and Jack DeCoster’s ventures in Maine and Iowa faced other action from state and federal regulators for environmental and workplace violations through the 2000s.
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