Timeline of Shame: Decades of DeCoster Egg Factory Violations
September 17th, 2010Via: The Atlantic:
Salmonella, mounds of excrement, and hefty citations are nothing new to Jack DeCoster, whose Iowa henhouses were blamed for last month’s nationwide egg recall. DeCoster has done business in Turner, Maine, his hometown, for over 60 years—and has incurred a decades-long list of violations there. DeCoster’s history of legal cases in Maine demonstrates that the more recent labor, environmental, and public health offenses are part of a long pattern that continues today, and in several states.
This chronology—the result of interviews with dozens of people with firsthand knowledge of DeCoster’s track record in Maine and scouring through angry headlines and forgotten court records that have faded from public view—shows how it all began. What emerged from my interviews and research is a pattern of offenses—a stubborn, company-wide refusal to abide by regulations, no matter how many times DeCoster was caught and no matter how many times Maine’s alert litigators tried to force constraints on a chronically law-breaking mogul. “You can only get to that man,” one Turner resident who has known Jack DeCoster all her life, said to me, “if you get to his pocketbook. Otherwise, you won’t get anything.”
Research Credit: Eileen
