Quality Cover-ups Lead to Lengthy Prison Terms in Salmonella Case
This article was originally published in The Gold Sheet
Executive Summary
Internal e-mails showed Peanut Corporation of America officials faked certificates of analysis so customers would buy the company’s Salmonella-contaminated products. Now they’re going to prison.
A federal district court judge in Albany, Ga., handed out lengthy prison terms Sept. 21 in a case that marked a shift toward criminal prosecution for medical and food quality violations.
Peanut Corporation of America’s owner, Stewart Parnell, was sentenced to 28 years in prison and the company’s quality assurance manager, Mary Wilkerson, was sentenced to five.
Parnell’s brother Michael, a food broker for the company, got 20 years. Two employees, Samuel Lightsey and Daniel Kilgore, are scheduled for sentencing on Oct. 1.
The case’s February 2013 grand jury indictment, which focused on mail and wire fraud allegations, set the stage for the December 2014 indictment of New England Compounding Center officials on racketeering and murder allegations (Also see "Government’s RICO Case Against NECC is Unprecedented" - Pink Sheet, 30 Jan, 2015.).
Both cases involved major sterility assurance failures and associated fraud allegations. Together, they send a message to owners and managers in FDA-regulated industries that federal prosecutors will pursue criminal convictions.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in a final May 2009 update
on its investigation of the outbreak in 2008 of Salmonella typhimurium linked to the Peanut Corporation of America that there were 714 reports of infections and those infections may have contributed to nine deaths.
A federal jury in September 2014 convicted Parnell of multiple counts of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and sale of misbranded food and introducing adulterated food into commerce. Parnell and Wilkerson were both found guilty of obstruction of justice.
Damning e-mails
The indictment quoted extensively from company e-mails to document fraud allegations.
For example, when a customer notified the company that a batch it had shipped without waiting for microbiological testing results tested positive for Salmonella, contrary to the false certificate of analysis copied from a previous batch, Parnell replied by e-mail (emphasis in original): “I am dumbfounded by what you have found. It is the first time in my over 26 years in the peanut business that I have ever seen any instance of this. We run Certificates of Analysis EVERY DAY with tests for Salmonella and have not found any instances of any, even traces, of a Salmonella problem.”
In a later e-mail, Parnell said retained samples from that lot tested negative for Salmonella when in fact they were positive.
The indictment gave numerous instances where the company shipped peanuts with false certificates before receiving test results, and then failed to notify the customers when the tests came back positive for Salmonella.
In one e-mail exchange, Parnell suggested they could save on laboratory testing of peanut paste by sending smaller samples, “and hope they don’t ever catch it,” as well as by no longer requesting expedited testing, which was “pointless because the samples don’t ever match the loads anyway.”
In an e-mail about retesting of product that had tested “presumptive positive” for Salmonella, Parnell wrote, “I go thru [sic] this about once a week…I will hold my breath………..again…”
Wilkerson noted in an e-mail to a colleague that “we have a problem with the granulation line and Salmonella at least every other week if not every week, but when retested by a different lab it comes back OK.”
In another case, she e-mailed a colleague inquiring about a customer’s request for a certificate of analysis, saying, “Waiting on retest! [The product] was out on Coliforms?????” She attributed the problem in a subsequent e-mail reply to “MICE!”
Wilkerson later recommended dividing the plant into separate areas for inspection audits. “Separating the Peanut Butter Room from the rest of the plant would give us a better chance at passing at least one or the other. Hoping to pass both. … And if they wanted a full report and there happen to be a problem with the plant area our butter customers wouldn’t have to know that.”
In one e-mail exchange, Parnell instructed employees to tell FDA, if asked, that a customer had rejected product because of size issues when in fact it was because of metal fragments. This was after Daniel Kilgore, who is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 1, had written, “We all need to have our stories straight if and when we are questioned by the FDA.”