A Brooklyn federal jury served a bitter meal to Eric Goldstein, New York City’s former school food czar, and three businessmen by finding them guilty Wednesday in a bribery scheme that put tainted chicken on the plates of public schoolchildren.
Goldstein, the former head of the Education Department’s Office of School Support Services, and Blaine Iler, Michael Turley and Brian Twomey, the owners of the Texas-based Somma Food Group, were convicted after a nearly monthlong trial.
Jurors saw gross-out photos of bone- and metal-filled chicken tenders, and chicken drumsticks oozing blood, as prosecutors argued that the three men started an imported beef business with Goldstein as a front to bribe him to get Somma’s food in the schools. That included a yogurt parfait in 2015, and chicken tenders and drumsticks in 2016.
“The defendants’ criminal conduct is a textbook example of choosing greed over the needs of our schools and the well-being of our children,” said a statement by Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.
Somma’s chicken tenders were so bad that a school staff worker choked on a bone after eating one on Sept. 27, 2016, and needed the Heimlich maneuver to save his life, prosecutors said.
That got the poultry pulled off the menu — so the three Somma execs handed Goldstein their stakes in a beef business, plus another $66,700, in exchange for getting their chicken back into city schools, prosecutors argued.
“This right here, this is what corruption looks like by sophisticated players,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Zuckerwise said in her closing argument Monday. “It’s not bags of cash in the night. It’s the creation of a corrupt side business.”
Goldstein got into business with the Somma trio in 2015, and he came to own 20% of the beef business, Range Meats Supply Company LLC. The three execs owned 60%. Prosecutors said the Somma firm provided Range Meats with free labor and legal payments, and sent money through the company to Goldstein’s…
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