Chicken Wing Crime Exposes Pervasive, Disgusting Black Market For Meat

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Yesterday, we learned about a father-and-son team of crooked cooks who teamed up to illicitly order and re-sell $41,000 worth of chicken wings from their employer’s wholesale supply accounts. Yet who buys wings from the Back of Some Dude’s Truck Meat Market? It turns out that there’s a market for ill-gotten meats, and other restaurant owners receive occasional offers of chicken or shrimp from the back of a truck.

This came up during the investigation of the widely reported pizzeria case because the father was recently sentenced for re-selling chicken wings taken from his previous employer. Indeed, there is a black market for meat, and buyers who don’t really care about the origins of the turkey breasts or chicken wings they’re serving.

To refresh your memory, the duo have been accused of ordering extra wings from the pizzeria where they worked as cooks, and selling them to other food establishments on the sly for less than the standard price.

The Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard reports that the management of Twin Trees Too, one of the area’s leading cutters of round pizzas into square pieces, knew about the charges but wanted to give him a second chance. “He swore up and down that he wouldn’t screw us,” the store manager told the paper.

The restaurant’s owners began to notice that there were about 20% fewer chicken wings in the restaurant than they had paid for, and they hired a private investigator to follow their suspects. Once they had enough evidence, the restaurant took the investigator’s work to the local police.

Offers like this come to all kinds of business owners, but the difference between perishable food and other goods sold for a lower price than the standard one is that improperly refrigerated meat can hurt you.

Syracuse restaurant owners describe chicken-wing ‘black market’ [Post-Standard]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist