“In his mind, he could slick-talk anyone, and had no fear of actually getting caught.” How one Missouri man defrauded organic-food consumers.
Not long after Ty Dick began working for Quixotic in Cañon City, Constant called him and said, “Hey, what are you doing?” Dick replied that he was working. “Come to Vegas!” Constant said. “We’ll be there in three hours. How soon can you get there?” Dick flew to Las Vegas that day and met up with Constant and John Burton, who was now also involved with Quixotic. Constant and Burton were in a giddy mood.
The National Organic Program accepts complaints from the public, and from interested parties. But, as Sam Welsch, the founder of OneCert, a long-established certification company, told me, “it seems like when you report things, they’re looking for reasonsto have to investigate.” As Lynn Clarkson, of Clarkson Grain, sees it, the system was set up in such a way that “as long as someone is covered with paper documentation you don’t go after them.
No chemical analysis could have settled the question of whether that corn was properly described as organic. Yet Constant, at a time of corn scarcity, was selling corn in great bulk, at prices way under market. A few months after the trader received Michael’s dismissive e-mail, he got a call from Brad Meyer, of the U.S.D.A.’s Office of Inspector General, which was now overseeing a criminal inquiry into the matter. Meyer, who is in his forties, is a former military-police officer. He has a firm handshake. Because he and his colleagues handle fraud cases across the U.S.D.A., he had no particular expertise in organic agriculture at the time.
In 2016, when the entire organic-corn output of Missouri and Nebraska was about 2.4 million bushels, Constant sold 1.8 million bushels of supposedly organic corn. His corn output that year represented about seven per cent of the national organic crop. His soybean sales represented eight per cent.
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