Back in the late 1920s, local and federal law enforcement officials struggled with how to put gangster Al Capone behind bars. They were having trouble linking Capone with the murders and shakedowns he was clearly a part of. So they became creative: in 1931, they decided to charge him with evasion of income taxes. It worked, and the courts put him away until he died in 1947.
I couldn’t help thinking about Al Capone as I spent the day trying to keep track of the investigators from Michigan, Indiana, and the federal government going through headscratching and double headscratching in their determination to penalize the Family Farms Cooperative over its distribution to members of raw milk. Possibly because of their frustration in applying state laws, the bureaucrats are now making like Eliot Ness, the lead federal investigator in the Al Capone case, and exploring a federal case against the co-op.
Inspectors from the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have taken the lead in the ongoing investigation of the co-op, which has shifted to northern Indiana, and the dairy owned by an Amish farmer there, who has asked not to be identified. Twice, FDA inspectors have visited the farm, most recently yesterday, when they presented the farmer with two affidavits that had him acknowledging he bottled unpasteurized milk and sent it to a Michigan cooperative, along with a copy of a federal law that prohibits the sale of unpasteurized milk in interstate commerce. He refused to sign the affidavits in the presence of the inspectors. They discussed the interstate commerce issue with him. An FDA spokesperson refused comment to me, saying the agency won’t discuss an ongoing investigation.
The FDA inspectors were accompanied by an inspector from the Indiana State Board of Animal Health. A spokesperson for the Indiana agency said her agency and the FDA were "communicating back and forth with Michigan" authorities.
Peter Kennedy, a lawyer with the Weston A. Price Foundation, who is representing the co-op, said he expects the FDA to issue "a cease and desist order" prohibiting the Indiana farmer from sending his raw milk to Michigan. He said that, in the FDA’s view, "even shipping to leaseholders is commerce." The co-op members aren’t technically purchasing raw milk, but rather receiving it as part of their lease arrangement, with their payment applied to boarding expenses of the cows.
Interestingly, the FDA last year went after Organic Pastures Dairy Co., the Fresno, CA, raw milk dairy shut for more than two weeks in September and October in an E.coli scare, under the same interstate commerce pretext, sending it a warning letter. Organic Pastures got around the edict by labeling all its raw milk for sale outside California as pet food, since government officials who are determined to protect us from raw milk seem not to care if people consume pet food. Kennedy said the pet food option is one way around possible FDA interference by the co-op.
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