A drumstick oozing red goo and chicken tenders with bones and metal sticking out were on the menu for the city’s school children, jurors in Brooklyn learned at the bribery trial of the Education Department’s former food czar.
A Brooklyn Federal Court jury got a gag-inducing look Monday at the chicken products Somma Food was sending to city school cafeterias in fall 2016 — including a gnarly photo of what a trial witness described as a “thick red liquid coming out of a bone.”
One school employee almost died choking on a bone he swallowed while eating a chicken tender and needed the Heimlich maneuver to save his life, but still, the schools kept serving Somma’s chicken, prosecutors allege.
That’s because of a bribery and kickback scheme between Eric 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, prosecutors said.
Goldstein got into business with the Somma Owners to start his own beef supply company, Range Meats, in the hopes that they would sell products to the schools with his meat, prosecutors allege. In exchange, he’d steer the city school system’s chicken and yogurt business their way, they added.
The defendants deny the charges, with Goldstein’s lawyer contending he never took a bribe and was running an above-board beef business.
Somma’s food often didn’t pass muster, testified Debra Ascher, a former supply chain manager for school foods.
She rattled off a list of complaints, complete with photos, starting in September 2016. The complaints were kept in an incident log spreadsheet and she repeatedly raised the alarm in e-mails, she said.
Ascher described three incidents in which bones were found in chicken tenders in a single week in an e-mail to a Somma Food executive, writing, “This presents a real potential danger to our customers, not to mention something that is very unappetizing and alarming to…
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