Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Restaurant, a Biloxi, Mississippi, seafood and steak place open since 1964, pleaded guilty this week to charges of conspiracy to misbrand seafood and wire fraud.

The co-owner and manager of the restaurant, Anthony Cvitanovich, also pleaded guilty to a charge of misbranding seafood in 2018-19, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi said Thursday. 

Another co-owner of the restaurant, Bobby Mahoney, was not charged. His attorney Michael Cavanaugh called the issue a “glitch” and said, “They made a mistake. It was resolved. They’re moving on,” according to Biloxi’s Sun Herald.

The scheme started as early as 2002, prosecutors said. From December 2013 to November 2019, Mary Mahoney and its unnamed co-conspirators sold 58,750 pounds of fish that customers thought were locally caught, premium species. 

In fact, the attorney’s office said, the fish sold was frozen and imported from as far afield as India, Africa and South America. Cvitanovich admitted he was responsible for 17,190 pounds of mislabeled fish from 2018-19 along with an unnamed wholesale supplier.

The fish were “described on Mahoney’s menu as premium higher priced local species, such as snapper and grouper from the Gulf of Mexico, when the fish was actually other species from abroad, including Lake Victoria perch from Africa, triple tail from Suriname, and unicorn filefish from India,” the attorney’s office said.

The real species were confirmed by Food and Drug Administration genetic testing.

Mary Mahoney’s Old French House Inc. faces as much as five years probation and “a $500,000 fine, or not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss, whichever is greater,” the prosecutors said. The restaurant will also forfeit $1.35 million to the government, according to the Sun Herald.

Cvitanovich faces up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

“Over the past five years, we have had extensive discussions with the federal government over inaccurate, entree descriptions of a certain item on our menu. This issue was immediately corrected five years ago,” Cvitanovich’s attorney Tim Holleman told the Sun Herald.