Mary Mahoney’s Old French House: Fish Fraud

0:09The town of Biloxi, Mississippi sits on the southern end of the state, right along the Gulf Coast. It's a small community of 50 ,000 people, featuring peaceful white sand beaches, rolling hills of manicured golf courses, as well as tourist attractions like fine dining. Since it's right on the water, seafood is a big part of life in Biloxi. And one of the most well-known seafood restaurants is a place called Mary Mahoney's Old French House. Everybody in town knows who the Mahoney's are. I found when talking to sources, there were some sources that didn't want to talk to me for the story. The Mahoney's are a big, powerful family.

0:53In the years since the restaurant opened back in 1964, Mary Mahoney's became a local institution, drawing in both townies and tourists alike. The gorgeous old building that houses the restaurant features ivy-colored walls, exposed brick, pine floors, and an open fireplace. The elegant dining room features tables covered with crisp white linen tablecloths. People go to Mary Mahoney's for a special experience. Something serene and elevated. But on the morning of November 19th, 2019, that serenity was shattered by something very unexpected. did. Some of the details are sort of wrapped in secrecy, but there was an anonymous tipster who went and talked to the state.

1:49At least 15 federal agents burst into the courtyard garden and swarmed into the elegant dining room. Someone had tipped them off that something about Mary Mahoney's old French house wasn't what it seemed to be.

2:12This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Mary Mahoney's Old French House, Fish Fraud. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we dig into the story of a famous seafood restaurant that got caught serving something that wasn't supposed to be on the menu.

2:52In many ways, the story of Mary Mahoney's Old French House is connected to the city where it's located. Just as the restaurant combines elevated service with crowd-pleasing seafood dishes, Biloxi itself is a blend of Old South charm and more modern attractions. We spoke with reporter Boyce Upholt, who is familiar with the establishment and with the area in all its contradictions. It's a man-made beach, but it's a beach town. You get this Old South vibe. There are casinos again. They've been re-legalized. And so it's kind of got this high-low thing where you can get a touch of regal Southern-ness, or you can go hang out at the Hard Rock Casino.

3:38Among the many restaurants, bars, and resorts, Mary Mahoney's Old French House stands out. It's a place that's made a name for itself. In my mind, as someone who has been visiting Biloxi for almost a decade, it is sort of the marquee restaurant in town. It is the place that kind of appears first on every list for tourists because it's such an institution. The restaurant's roots go back to at least 1835, when the building where it resides was first built. The restaurant's website claims that it goes back even further than that, to a French homesteader who built the house in the late 1730s. It's called Mary Mahoney's Old French House because it is in this very old property, not quite as old as the restaurant sometimes claims, but it's from the early 1800s, the oldest building in town that sort of survives unchanged.

4:35And there's this beautiful oak tree in the courtyard. Like the building's venerable roots, Mary Mahoney's family history is also entwined with the Biloxi area, going back generations. Mary's father, Anthony Sitanovich, immigrated to the States through Ellis Island in 1906. He was just 16 years old at the time and fleeing from Croatia, which was embroiled in political tensions with Serbia. Mary's father, who was actually a Satanovich, arrived in the United States in the early 20th century and kind of made his way up from hauling oysters ashore in Louisiana to being a pretty big deal in this big seafood industry.

5:26Mary's father worked his way up from the bottom until he owned several shrimp boats and a seafood canning factory. Mary Satanovich was born in 1924 and later married Bob Mahoney in 1945, when he was 22 years old and she was 21. Bob served in the Air Force during World War II. When he returned to Biloxi, he found work managing a couple of upscale hotels in the area, including the prestigious Travoli Hotel. Mary joined him in the hospitality field. Eventually, she came to run the tavern in the Tivoli Hotel, working as both a hostess and bartender. She put her personal stamp on the bar until it casually became known as Mary Mahoney's.

6:14However, in 1961, the hotel changed hands and the Mahoney's were pushed out. They didn't linger in the setback. Instead, they pivoted toward fine dining and decided to establish their own restaurant so they wouldn't be at the whim of other owners. The Mahonies had high hopes for their new endeavor, and high standards. They went into business with Mary's brother Andrew, who sold his shrimp boat to help raise the money needed to get the restaurant off the ground. The Mahonies invested in buying the historic old French house, and they spared no expense when it came to staffing the restaurant. Mary Mahoney made a point to track down the very best maitre d' in town who had recently retired from some other fancy restaurant and make sure she got him, which was impressive because they were opening on a shoestring and she sort of had to scramble to even get menus printed there.

7:13After two intense years of prep work, Mary Mahoney's Old French House opened on May 7, 1964. Continuing her legendary hospitality from the Hotel Tavern, Mary personally greeted every diner at the door, usually wearing her signature silver glasses in the shape of a butterfly. Later, Mary's son, Bobby Mahoney, would say that his mother thought of her guests as more than customers. They were just new friends and old friends. According to him, people kept coming back for more than the food. They came for the unique experience, for the personal touch. And the power of that personal touch extended outside the restaurant, throughout the town of Biloxi.

8:03The restaurant's been around for more than 50 years. They are just a big name in this town. They're supporters of a lot of charitable causes. They are big in the social scene. And so everybody in town knows who the Mahonies are. Because so many folks in Biloxi felt a close personal connection with the Mahonies, many were wary of saying a word against them, at least on the record. It's not a big city, so kind of everybody knows everybody. And then you add in the fact that, again, Mary Mahonies is sort of this institution in town, so everybody recognizes that name. I found when talking to sources, there were some sources that didn't want to talk to me for the story just because, you know, they're like, I don't know, there's been a lot of corruption in Biloxi.

8:47The Mahoney's are a big, powerful family. There was just something special about Mary Mahoney's that inspired loyalty. And that loyalty translated to early success. Riding a wave of tourism throughout the 1960s. As the decades went on, the restaurant's fame and prestige only grew. In 1984, the Old French House was one of seven institutions chosen to cater a seafood jamboree on the White House lawn held by President Ronald Reagan. By this point, seafood, specifically locally caught seafood, was known as the restaurant's specialty. When cooking for the president, Mary Mahoney's head chef even went so far as to bring in Red Snapper from the Gulf to the White House.

9:42Then, in 2005, disaster struck. Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the Gulf Coast. The Old French House was flooded under seven feet of water. But even this tragedy didn't keep their doors closed for long. Mary Mahoney's reopened less than three months later. People like to emphasize this resilience, and that's part of the story of Mary Mahoney's. They were the first restaurant to open after Katrina. And people I talked to through this story really loved them for that. It gave them a space in this really still difficult moment when there was still a lot of destruction, a place to go and remember what Biloxi could be.

10:24It was Mary Mahoney's unstoppable spirit that became a source of pride and inspiration for Biloxi. But not every institution in the area was so lucky. All around the old French house, other restaurants and suppliers struggled to bounce back from natural disasters, as well as certain unfavorable economic trends. these disasters have been really hard on the seafood industry in particular again there was already these economic pressures and then both katrina which like physically literally physically damaged some of the seafood processing plants and then the deep water horizon disaster at this giant oil spill which meant that shrimpers couldn't go out and catch shrimp because we had to figure out you know is it safe before they could do that and so those sort of extended periods where people couldn't operate in the seafood industry in the way they used to, combined with already the pressures of so many imports coming in, that made it quite hard for trippers to come back.

11:25And so each time these things hit, you kind of see a big loss to that industry. Around this period, when Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill made it impossible to fish in the Gulf of Mexico, many seafood suppliers made the decision to switch from locally caught products to cheaper options shipped in from other places around the world. And even after the Gulf waters recovered, financial incentives made it so that a lot of those suppliers never switched back. However, Mary Mahoney's menu didn't change. They continued to proudly assert that all of our seafood is caught in our bountiful Gulf waters.

12:11But all around them, things were changing. And at some point, even Mary Mahoney's had to be conscious of their bottom line. Up next, the old French house gets caught up in a federal investigation. Most homes' security systems only kick in after someone breaks in. They let you know when someone's in your house. That's already too late. I like SimpliSafe because it's built to stop crime before it happens. Their new Active Guard Outdoor Protection uses AI and live monitoring to spot suspicious behavior, talk to intruders in real time, turn on lights, and call the cops if needed, before anyone gets to your door.

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14:41Mary Mahoney's Old French House became a local institution almost from the moment it opened in 1964. As the restaurant was located in Biloxi, Mississippi, just off the Gulf Coast, it made sense that locally caught seafood became their signature. And they took pride in that. Here's local reporter Boyce Upholt. It grew through the years into being a seafood restaurant. It serves lots of different things, but they leaned into that quite heavily, given their location two blocks away from this beach that was the seafood capital of the world. For 20 years, locally caught seafood ran the roost at the old French house.

15:26Then in 1985, Mary Mahoney passed away. She had started the restaurant that she infused with so much of her spirit and warmth. She had been committed to providing the best of everything to her customers, who she treated like close friends. After Mary's death, her son Bobby Mahoney took over the restaurant. He vowed to keep things running the way his mother had, and that included a commitment to serving only the highest quality locally caught seafood. This dedication was, in part, a sentimental way to keep Mary's memory alive. But there was also a financial aspect. Seafood had become a major part of the restaurant's brand.

16:15It was why people came and spent good money,$40 to$50 for a signature dish, and up to$70 for lobster tail. Eventually, seafood orders made up about 90 % of the restaurant's business. So Bobby would have to have been motivated to keep serving up seafood, even in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which made it more expensive to source seafood from the Gulf. Even with Bobby claiming to keep his mother's legacy alive, Things changed after her passing. Certainly Mary Mahoney's death was a turning point in the story of the restaurant in one way or another.

17:00Things were evolving at the old French house. And throughout the sea industry as a whole. The fishing industry all along the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America, whatever you want to call it, it has been declining for decades. Basically in the 1970s, 1980s. all of a sudden there is this swift appearance of a lot of fish farms in Asia, shrimp farms in particular. And just that production method and the economy of globalization, you can get farm frozen shrimp from Asia into America at a much cheaper price than it makes sense for an American shrimper to go out and spend the fuel catching our local wild shrimp.

17:41And so just for decades and decades, it's been a tough business. The prices have been going down and down and down. There's plenty of fish and shrimp in the Gulf to support local business, but it all comes down to the bottom line. There's a lot of people who tell me there's so much shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico and there'd be no problem supplying every restaurant, at least on the Mississippi coast, with local shrimp if those restaurants were willing to pay the price. But in this world where there's more and more access to cheap imported product, a lot of people look at it and say, well, why does it make sense for me to pay a premium for local product when the average consumer isn't going to taste the difference between these two and I can get a much cheaper product from somewhere else?

18:25As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. And in the case of importing cheap seafood from abroad, you don't get what you don't pay for. namely strict regulations on what is produced and how it's harvested. Part of the reason why local seafood is more expensive is the United States has stronger regulations than a lot of other places. So if you're bringing seafood in from somewhere else, there can be questions about, you know, what kind of additives are in there? How has it been treated? Are there chemicals that they need to use to get it preserved to move that far? I think there's also been a lot of really good reporting about slave labor in the seafood industry.

19:08So if you're buying a foreign product, it's not entirely clear how it got to your point. And it could be that your money is going to a company that is sort of capturing people and forcing them to go out fishing. And then there's just like this question of where do you want your dollars to go? Are you willing to pay a couple extra bucks for your seafood because you want your neighbor to be able to continue doing this intergenerational thing that his or her family has been doing for a long time that has been part of your local identity. Even with the financial upside of sourcing products from overseas, Bobby claimed that the restaurant was still serving exclusively locally caught seafood.

19:46This claim was very much part of the restaurant's brand and built into its lore. But even so, some customers had their doubts. I got two very different stories, depending on who I talked to and their experience with Mary Mahoney. So there were definitely people I talked to in Biloxi who said, I haven't eaten there in decades because I went decades ago and it felt like the food was coming out of the vegetables. It tasted like they were coming out of cans or like it feels like they're phoning it in. And so one of the people, one of the theories is that when Mary Mahoney herself passed away, at that point it got passed down and her son Bobby became the face of the restaurant.

20:24And it was so well established that one of the theories is sort of like they didn't really need to do much. Tour buses wouldn't show up anyway. Like people were going to come there because it was already renowned as the institution. And so some people do feel like the food fell off at that point. It could be that Bobby saw an opportunity to cut some corners and make the business more profitable. After all, the seafood business was changing and the old French house was already very well established. Bobby might have taken a gamble that even if the food quality tanked, people would keep showing up to Mary Mahoney's just so they could say that they went.

21:06As it turned out, in 2016, a confidential informant accused Mary Mahoney's supplier, quality poultry and seafood, of cutting corners in an illegal way. Some of the details are sort of wrapped in secrecy, but there was an anonymous tipster who went and talked to the state. So the state of Mississippi has the Department of Marine Resources, whose job in part is to take a look at the seafood that's coming in. And the finger was pointed first, not quite directly at Marimonides, but at their supplier. So Quality Poultry and Seafood, which is sort of the big seafood supplier in town. The informant came forward with claims that the supplier was passing off black drumfish in place of the iconic local redfish.

21:55Also, what Quality was selling as a local red snapper was often perch, imported all the way from Africa. Plus, most of Quality's shrimp came from Ecuador or Nicaragua, nowhere near Biloxi shores on the Gulf Coast. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. As the investigation continued, they discovered that quality had been using this shitty practice as far back as the early aughts. At some point, kind of in the early 2000s, they began selling food from other countries, from India, from Africa, often farm-raised product, and selling this to customers saying, this is local Red Snapper. And local Red Snapper is sort of one of the premium products that people really want to put on their menus.

22:45It's one of the sort of famous Gulf products. Now, just because Mary Mahoney's supplier was cutting cost, that didn't necessarily mean that the old French house was in on the racket. Quality has a retail department in their store, so you can go in as an individual consumer and buy fish, and then they sell to restaurants. And at both levels, this seemed to be happening. They were selling fish to retail customers and wholesale customers. And a lot of the customers weren't aware of this. Most of the restaurants that Quality supplied with seafood were not aware they'd shifted to using products from overseas.

23:29But the informant suggested that Mary Mahoney's did know exactly what was going on. And in fact, they'd been in on it for years. They were saying, like, this is what we're doing, like, kind of cutting these deals so that everyone knew what was going on. And that included Mary Mahoney's. Mary Mahoney's was aware this whole time that they are buying this fish at a cheaper price that they can then pass on to customers as local red snapper and pay a higher price for. As the federal investigation went on, it became clear that Mary Mahoney's had been serving their customers foreign seafood and knowingly lying about it since at least 2012.

24:17And maybe for a decade longer than that. Apparently, in 2015, the restaurant manager, Anthony Satanovich, paid a visit to Quality's offices to sample some of the fish. The reason for the little taste test was specifically to figure out which foreign fish would be the most convincing substitute for the local fish they claimed they were serving. And Mary Mahoney's kept buying imported fish from Quality Poultry and Seafood, even after Quality's warehouse was raided in 2018. In fact, in 2019, the old French house made 72 separate purchases from them. So it seems pretty likely that the management at Mary Mahoney's knew exactly what they were doing.

25:13And they kept it up for years, even with the authorities circling their supplier. In fact, they kept it up right until November 2019, when the feds came knocking on their door. Up next, the old French house faces the music. The following products are intended for adults. Consult with a physician before use if you are pregnant, nursing, or have any known or suspected allergies or medical conditions or are taking any medication. FDA has not evaluated these products for safety or efficacy. Sometimes you want the ritual of a drink without the heaviness that comes with alcohol. Breeze offers an adult sparkling tonic made for moments like that.

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26:42After a confidential informant accused Mary Mahoney's supplier of passing off foreign seafood as locally caught, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration led an investigation into quality poultry and seafood. And throughout 2018 and 2019, there were stories in the news. This wasn't a great look for Mary Mahoney's, but the restaurant owners downplayed the whole thing. The family offered a short statement saying that they were cooperating with the investigation. Maybe they hoped the investigation would just quietly go away. But in November 2019, any hopes of that went out the window when they were raided by the feds.

27:33after that point it was a little harder for mary mahoney's owners to pretend that they weren't involved in any wrongdoing but still they tried to minimize the fallout in the immediate aftermath of the raid bobby mahoney put a note outside the restaurant that said just that they'd be closed briefly sorry for the inconvenience it said federal investigations do have a way of being a hassle. Yet Mary Mahoney's did everything they could to bounce back. After the raid, they were only actually closed for one shift. And then when they opened for dinner, they were fully booked. The local community responded with a show of support.

28:24They didn't like the idea of the federal government picking on their favorite restaurant. Once again, Boyce Upholt, a reporter who covered the story. When you know someone belimitantly and you either like them or don't like them, and if you like them, you give them a lot of grace. I made it a point to interview a particular woman who had gone on the record on Facebook, kind of saying, I don't care about this. Part of her story is that she loved this restaurant and she had so many special occasions there. And so in her head, and maybe this is true, but she's saying, I don't think everyone in this family knew about this crime.

28:57I just know them too well to believe that that could be true. The truth would come out in time. Meanwhile, Mary Mahoney's continued to downplay the whole affair. They updated their menu. For example, changing a dish from stuffed snapper to stuffed fish. And they removed the bold claim that all of their seafood was sourced from the Gulf. But they did this quietly, without drawing attention to it. They've updated their menus, but they haven't announced that they've updated their menus. And so they're just trying to sweep this on the rug and move forward without kind of looking Biloxi in the face and saying, this is what happened and why we did it.

29:45The old French house tried to move on, as if nothing major had happened. But the fact was that, behind the scenes, the federal government was building a strong case against them. Then, in May 2024, the other shoe finally dropped. The owners of Mary Mahoney's old French house were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to misbrand seafood. It's not illegal to buy from other places, right? That's how the global supply chain works. There were a couple different charges, but one of them was about wire fraud. And so ultimately, that wire fraud had to do with charging people's credit cards for local seafood that was not local seafood, right?

30:29So it's this misrepresentation of what the actual product was turns into wire fraud when you start doing it at that scale. When the charges were filed against Mary Mahoney's, this was the public's first real confirmation that something seriously illegal had been going on at the old French house. Still, the reaction was mixed. Some locals downplayed the fraud. They didn't think that it was intentional, long-running, or vindictive. But ultimately, the matter would be decided in court. The court case was pretty straightforward. From the beginning, everybody was like, there wasn't much defense here.