Caught!

On the morning of November 19, 2019, federal agents—at least 15, according to reporters on the scene—swarmed Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, perhaps the most prominent restaurant in Biloxi, Mississippi. A confidential informant had told investigators that a local seafood company was passing off imported shrimp and fish as premium, local product—including red snapper, the star of several iconic dishes at Mahoney’s.

The Old French House is a brick residence featuring parapet gables, a cast-iron railing across its four front bays, and an ancient live oak in the courtyard. The building, constructed around 1835, is one of Biloxi’s oldest documented structures, a fact the restaurant incorporates into its mythology. The place was meant to be Old South classy and entirely local. Eventually, though, the restaurant would be charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to misbrand seafood—a serious crime that undercuts both commercial fisheries and other, competing restaurants. The allure of local catch—a plate of all-American seafood—lies at the heart of Biloxi’s appeal to tourists. Or at least it was thought. In court, a lawyer representing one of the restaurant’s co-owners would argue that no one seemed to care about the supposed fraud.

For now, though, after the feds arrived, Bobby Mahoney—the son of the eponymous Mary, and the man who serves as the co-owner and public face of the restaurant—sent home the employees who had been preparing to serve lunch in the high-ceilinged dining room. A note appeared, taped to the green gate beyond the courtyard, announcing a brief closure: “Sorry for the inconvenience!” To reporters, Bobby Mahoney diminished the event. Any wrongdoing was “very trivial,” he said, just “about fish.” The agents remained inside the restaurant for several hours, while dark SUVs lingered in the street. For many businesses, a federal raid might be a fatal blow. But Mary Mahoney’s is no ordinary business, and Biloxi is no ordinary town.

“The first written record of Biloxi comes from the Canadian-born French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who arrived ashore on a sandy peninsula in 1699 while trying to find the mouth of the Mississippi River. D’Iberville recorded the presence of some “rather good oysters.” Two centuries later, the quality of those oysters, alongside the abundance of shrimp available just offshore, helped turn Biloxi into the self-declared Seafood Capital of the World.

This was not the city’s only attraction. Even before the Civil War, natural springs had turned Mississippi’s narrow strip of coastline into a destination for tourists, most arriving by steamboat from New Orleans. After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis retired to Biloxi, for­ever draping the city in Old South nostalgia. During Prohibition, corrupt local officials proved tolerant not just of booze but of gambling too, adding a layer of clandestine wildness to the area.

When Mary Mahoney’s Old French House opened in 1964, it pulled on all these threads. The dining room was “proudly and magnificently French,” early menus declared, but the restaurant was never stuffy. For years, Mahoney’s featured a 24-hour café and an Irish pub for the late-night crowd. It was the kind of place where businessmen gathered to hash out plans for casinos, a location featured in several John Grisham novels.

Tourism was booming when Mahoney’s first opened, but in 1969 Biloxi suffered a momentous turning point. Hurricane Camille, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to strike the continental U.S., made landfall just west of the city. The beachside highway, known as the Strip, had been home to countless hotels and restaurants. It was nearly wiped clean. Half the town’s hotels were in ruins. Mary Mahoney’s, though, stood unharmed. The restaurant reopened to customers the following week.

Thirty-six years later, the restaurant took on over seven feet of water during Hurricane Katrina; the waterline is still marked by a sign in the dining room. Bobby vowed quick restoration of the main restaurant: He’d be in the streets serving gumbo by Mardi Gras, he told reporters.

It didn’t take even that long. Mary Mahoney’s reopened in less than three months; Anderson Cooper later detailed his encounter with Bobby on CNN. The restaurant had become a nearly certifiable symbol of a coast that would not be destroyed.

This made Mary Mahoney’s a good stage for political grandstanding, especially when it came to issues of seafood. BP announced its coastal restoration plans at the restaurant after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Mississippi’s attorney general used the courtyard to unveil a 2019 lawsuit over flood policies harming local aquatic life. Though by then, behind the scenes, state officials suspected that the seafood at Mahoney’s was not what it seemed.

With fewer than 50,000 residents, Biloxi is a small city; everyone is entangled, socially and politically. Through the decades, the Mahoneys have established themselves as a prominent local family—devout Catholics, consistent supporters of their local church and its schools, mainstays of community fundraisers.

Still, I was surprised by how reluctant people were to talk about the Mahoneys on the record. The haze of silence around the case was as thick as any I’ve encountered in my career as a journalist.

The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources declined to comment about the investigation. The editor of the Biloxi Sun Herald would not allow me to interview his reporters on the record for this story—not about the raid, not about Biloxi’s food culture. Nothing. One local chef told me that Mahoney’s closed for one shift after the raid: “And then when they opened for dinner, you couldn’t get a reservation. Because everybody was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re picking on our favorite restaurant.’“

But the chef did not want to go on the record about the incident. “Biloxi is not real far out of pretty corrupt times,” he said, explaining his reluctance. “And maybe not out of it at all.”

Mary Mahoney’s father, Tony Cvitanovich, arrived at Ellis Island in 1906 as a 16-year-old kid fleeing what is now Croatia. He was carrying instructions, in English, for his receivers: He was to be sent on to Louisiana, where relatives would get him a job. That work, it turned out, was the wearying task of hauling ashore oysters and sorting them by size. He was paid 20¢ per sack.

“He learned right away that this was not the land of opportunity where the streets were paved with gold,” Mary said, years later, in a speech for the Friends of the Biloxi Libraries. “He knew he was going to have to work for everything he got.”

Tony saved his money and recruited more family from Croatia, and eventually worked his way up to owning 12 shrimp boats and a seafood canning factory. Mary—one of three children—proved that she had a strong work ethic too when her husband, Bob, won the lease on a hotel bar in 1951. Mary, then in her late 20s, had no experience as a bartender, but her employment helped keep overhead low. Through years of reading the Sunday New York Times, Mary had developed what her son told a local magazine was a doctoral-equivalent degree in “social endeavors”—she was chatty and attentive, perpetually festive with customers. That turned the bar into an institution. By the end of the decade, as Biloxi’s beaches and casinos surged toward their apex, she was becoming a local celebrity: The bar became known as Mary Mahoney’s, with the name written in neon on the hotel façade.

When the hotel changed hands in 1961 and the new owners wanted to take over the bar, the Mahoneys staged what the local newspaper called a “lie-in”: They refused to leave; Mary slept onsite, even. The owner cut the electricity, but hotel residents ran extension cords down from their rooms. Eventually, after the bar was barricaded, the Mahoneys conceded and moved on—and were later comforted, somewhat, that without them the bar lasted only another few months.

Mary, for her part, decided to go bigger. She wanted to launch a fine-dining restaurant—another business in which she had no experience—in one of the city’s most prominent properties: the Old French House. The building is two blocks from the beach, near the city’s small-craft harbor. Even today, with the 12-story tower of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino rising between the restaurant and the beach, the airy, light-filled dining rooms offer a feeling that you’ve slipped into a romantic coastal past.

Mary’s brother, Andrew Cvitanovich, sold his shrimp boat and came on as partner so they could afford the property. She recruited one of Biloxi’s best-regarded maitre d’s and, after two years of prep work, opened in 1964. As at the bar, Mary was core to the restaurant’s appeal. She greeted each diner at the door, wearing her trademark butterfly-frame glasses. Bobby has said it was the experience, not just the food, that kept people coming back. Mary didn’t think of diners as customers, but as “just new friends and old friends,” he said.

The restaurant has always been a family affair. On a visit to Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia) in 1969, Mary was appalled by the poverty and suggested her uncle move to the U.S. to work in her restaurant. Two years later, his 15-year-old son, Georgo Trojanovich, followed. Starting as a dishwasher and busboy, by 1979 Trojanovich had worked his way up to head chef. He’d never seen a shrimp before arriving in America, but he staked his reputation on the Gulf of Mexico’s seafood: It was some of the best in the world, he told Francis Lam, an oral historian from the nonprofit Southern Foodways Alliance in 2008.

Seafood became integral to the restaurant’s identity: If you had to describe the place, call it a seafood restaurant, Trojanovich said. He estimated that as much as 90 percent of his sales consisted of seafood: pond-raised catfish stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat au gratin, chopped Florida lobster smothered in shrimp, mushrooms, brandy, and cheese. Trojanovich was especially proud of his red snapper—“one of the sweetest fish that is,” he said.

Back in the 1980s, when he was invited to cook at the White House, he made sure to bring local snapper along. At the restaurant, too, everything was fresh and domestic, he said: You could order the speckled trout, but if the fishermen hadn’t caught it, you’d have to ask for something else. Even a decade after that interview, the restaurant’s website declared, “All of our seafood is caught in our bountiful Gulf waters.”

Mary Mahoney passed away in 1985 and Trojanovich retired in 2016. Today, as many as 10 family members—Cvitanoviches and Mahoneys from several generations—still work at the restaurant in various capacities. Bobby has said he’s made sure little has changed over the years. “My mother had it all set up,” he told a reporter in 2011. “I followed her around 22 years and I’m still doing it her way.”

But there is a sense among some locals that with Mary gone, the restaurant’s quality has waned. One theory I heard was that once Mary died, Bobby realized he was making his money on visitors who would never be back. Another local told me that when she last visited, in the 1980s, the vegetables seemed canned.

To be fair, the Gulf Coast culinary world outside of Mahoney’s was changing too: By the end of the decade, chains were arriving—Red Lobster, Olive Garden—turning the Strip into a stretch of highway that could be almost anywhere, putting local institutions into competition with restaurants that operated at national economies of scale.

According to state records, the investigation into Mary ­Mahoney’s Old French House goes back to early 2016, after a confidential informant told a Marine Patrol officer that he wanted to discuss “illegal activity” taking place at Quality Poultry and Seafood, a well-known Biloxi supplier.

The informant alleged that in lieu of redfish, an iconic (and heavily regulated) product, Quality was selling a related local fish, black drum; shrimp often came not from the Gulf at all, but from Ecuador or Nicaragua. Importantly, what Quality sold as red snapper was often perch, a carnivorous freshwater fish imported, in this case, from Africa. State investigators began to stake out the Quality warehouse, tracking the deliveries, confirming the details.

Most of the restaurants that Quality supplied with seafood were unaware of the scheme. But the informant suggested that Mary Mahoney’s had knowingly bought foreign fish for use on its menus. The state’s Department of Marine Resources eventually turned the investigation over to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the labeling of fish.

Federal investigators—who also declined to comment beyond what was published in court records, citing the change in presidential administrations—later determined that the family had been knowingly buying imported fish since at least 2012, and perhaps as much as a decade earlier. Federal prosecutors focused on substitutions of redfish and red snapper specifically, two of the most sought-after local Gulf products.

To mislabel fish may seem a bold crime in a town that dubs itself the Seafood Capital of the World. But that title is complicated. The city’s seafood factories opened in a rush in the late 19th century. Between the early 1880s and 1890, the population of Biloxi doubled as the seafood factories needed more workers to process the catch. At these facilities, the local oysters and shrimp were packed into cans to be shipped around the country. Biloxi was indeed a town that ate seafood, but its superlative status came from processing it and selling it to other places.

This industrial mindset shaped the city’s next century. When oyster harvests collapsed in the 1940s, the city focused on shrimp. By the 1980s, new freezing technology and federal incentives had transformed shrimp from a local delicacy to a national commodity. That may be a good thing for the consumer, but commoditization results in woefully cheap prices for the supplier. The fast-food chain Popeyes introduced Cajun-seasoned popcorn shrimp in 1985, just as Asian farming operations began flooding the market. The irony was sharp: Biloxi had built itself by shipping seafood abroad; now global trade was destroying its local industry. Estimates now suggest 90 percent of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. is imported.

As local seafood struggled, so did Biloxi’s tourism. Bobby Mahoney pushed for revitalization. He became a go-to source for sound bites supporting the movement to bring back gambling, this time legally. Mahoney turned out to be right about the benefits: In 1992, after voters approved dockside casinos, Biloxi’s moribund tourism economy jolted back to life.

But the casino boom—sometimes known as the Mississippi Miracle—had mixed effects on local dining. Some of the restaurants in the casinos serve excellent food, but the casinos themselves are national brands, and their arrival in Biloxi coincided with the ongoing shift toward corporate dining culture.

Alex Perry, whose restaurant, Vestige, sits across the bay from Biloxi, in Ocean Springs, and was a James Beard Award finalist for the nation’s best restaurant, says the dominant dining ethos on the Coast today is simple: “Give it to me cheap, give it to me big, give it to me fried.” People often don’t care about the product’s quality, let alone its provenance.

Nonetheless, for an old-school restaurant treading water, the casinos presented a potential benefit: They delivered a steady supply of gambling tourists. And though they also brought a generic and nationalized food culture, that allowed restaurants like Mahoney’s to stand out as a link to an earlier, more distinctive era. Hurricane Katrina helped strengthen that link— underscoring Mahoney’s long history in town.

It also pushed many fishermen over the edge. Several canneries were “completely wiped off the face of the earth,” one shrimp packer and supplier told Lam, the Southern Foodways Alliance historian. He noted that throughout the months that the local industry was shut down after Katrina, many restaurants turned to imported product—and then never switched back. As long as no one complained, the restaurants didn’t care where the product came from, the shrimp packer said: “They want the cheapest thing.” Lam also spoke to Todd Rosetti, the sales manager of Quality Poultry and Seafood. Rosetti sounded a mournful note about the state of affairs—”we do need our local fishermen,” he said—but also indicated that, as a processor, he could keep going without them. “Shrimp is shrimp,” he said, suggesting that while buyers come in asking for a specific product, like local white shrimp, the differences are too subtle for most to discern.

Investigators eventually found an employee at Quality who was willing to cooperate, and began to flesh out the details of the fraud. They learned, for example, that at one point in 2015, Anthony Cvitanovich—the son of Mary’s shrimper brother, cousin to Bobby—had paid a visit to Quality to receive samples of fish. A co-owner of the restaurant, Cvitanovich had recently also become the manager.

Quality wanted Cvitanovich to taste the samples and determine which might be the best substitute for local fish. Even after the FDA raided Quality’s warehouse, in September 2018, it kept selling Cvitanovich imported fish. The restaurant made 72 separate purchases in 2019 before Mahoney’s itself was searched that November.

After the FDA’s investigation hit headlines that year, the family offered a statement, explaining that the government was investigating mislabeled seafood and the restaurant was cooperating. The details of that mislabeling were never clarified, though one local chef said his understanding was that the restaurant had simply failed to update the menu with sufficient frequency. It might say snapper when what they were serving was tripletail, but it was still local product.

On Facebook, many commenters suggested that the Sun Herald’s headline—which used the verb raid to describe the search—was melodramatic. Several complained about federal agents wasting so many resources over a few fish. A few months later, when Mahoney’s appeared again in the Sun Herald, the focus was on its response to the Covid pandemic. The investigation, which remained surrounded in mystery, went unmentioned.

Behind the scenes, the FDA was assembling a powerful case. The investigators compiled a long list of invoices, detailing sales of multiple nonlocal species—African lake perch, tripletail from Suriname, unicornfish from India—that included the quantities sold, the pounds delivered, and the price per pound. The prosecutors were able to calculate that the restaurant had purchased more than 29 tons of foreign fish, served to some 55,000 customers—one $38 platter of stuffed snapper at a time. In a subsequent class-action lawsuit, still unfolding in court, prosecutors suggested the total cost to consumers reached over $5 million.

But the public had no idea until May 2024, when co-owner Anthony Cvitanovich pleaded guilty to mislabeling seafood; Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, Inc., did too, and to the additional charge of wire fraud. (The charging documents made clear that a seafood supplier was a co-conspirator, although Quality was not specifically identified for several months, when the business and two of its employees, including Todd Rosetti, entered their own guilty pleas.)

“Mahoney’s is in hot water,” the Sun Herald stated in a headline. “Diners love them anyway.” The reporter noted a mixed response to the charges on Facebook, with praise more forthcoming than criticism. “I can’t wait to get home and support my favorite restaurant on the Coast,” one commenter declared.

Debbie Batia, a longtime patron of Mary Mahoney’s, noted on the platform that her family had held special occasions there—birthdays and anniversaries and wedding rehearsal dinners—for years, and would continue to do so. Her parents had been friends of Mary Mahoney’s, she told me later; her daughter was best friends with Bobby Mahoney’s daughter.

“I think it was just a thing that happened. Probably a makeshift thing,” she said of the fraud. “One time they were out of something and someone said, ‘Hey, we can buy this instead, it’s less expensive and tastes the same.’ ” She presumed most of the family members did not know about the crime: “I can’t imagine them conniving to do it, knowing how long those two families have been in the seafood business.”

During the sentencing in November 2024, Bobby Mahoney—who was not specifically named in the lawsuit, and who sat in the courtroom as an observer—projected an insouciant confidence. Stocky, bald, and natty in his dark suit, he sauntered over to two reporters for the Sun Herald. “What do you think?” he asked. But he would not be answering any of their questions, he made clear. Mahoney also did not return my calls for comment.

Cvitanovich, who was sentenced to three years on probation and four months of home detention and fined $10,000, declined through his lawyer to comment for this story. The restaurant’s attorney, Arthur Madden, indicated that the business was “not in a position to comment” on events that “occurred more than five years ago.” (Billy Gibbens, the lawyer for Quality Poultry and Seafood, and Joe Hollomon and Joe Sam Owen, the lawyers for its employees, either did not reply or declined to comment.)

To date, the only substantial public statement the restaurant has made was in the courtroom. Eileen Mahoney Ezell, Mary’s daughter and one of the restaurant’s co-owners, testified for the business. Now in her late 60s, dressed in elegant white, Ezell spoke quickly enough that the judge asked her to slow down.

Ezell noted that the restaurant had faced many “hardships” before, but this was the first one that the family had “brought upon ourselves.” She hoped that now, as the restaurant paid a penalty of $1.49 million to the federal government and agreed to a five-year probation, they could get back to honoring the legacy of her mother and uncle, and “once again be recognized as a premier restaurant in Mississippi.”

In December, just a few weeks after the sentencing, a new development rocked the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A private company, SeaD Consulting, had developed a genetic test capable of identifying farm-raised shrimp. After sampling several dozen Mississippi coast restaurants, SeaD found that more than 80 percent of those tested were mislabeling their shrimp.

The company has found even higher rates of fraud elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico, but Dave Williams, SeaD’s co-founder, considered the Mississippi fraud particularly galling. “Biloxi is known as the shrimp capital,” he said. “If you don’t get authentic stuff at the shrimp capital, then something’s wrong.”

The cost of commodity shrimp has dropped to as little as $1.50 a pound in recent years—a price that hardly allows U.S. shrimpers to afford fuel. Two years ago, in what they called a fight for their lives, shrimpers gathered at the Louisiana state capitol in Baton Rouge holding signs calling for federal officials to “Slow the flow of imports.” Long before the Trump administration’s economic exclusionism began to dominate headlines—and rattle markets—Gulf shrimpers had been begging for bans or regulations. In February, Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana wrote an official letter to President Trump asking him to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on seafood imports from China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. As of April 2025, the highest tariff rate on shrimp applies to Vietnam, at 46 percent.

Ryan Bradley, a fifth-generation fisherman and the executive director of the nonprofit Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United, told me he got out of shrimp about a decade ago, in part because of the imports undercutting the business. Now he fishes deeper water, seeking red snapper—the same product that Mary Mahoney’s was mislabeling. He sells much of his catch directly to restaurants for about $8 per fish. Text messages revealed in court indicate that Quality was selling its perch for as little as $5.69. At that price, and at such a large scale, “we can’t even begin to compete in the local marketplace,” Bradley said.

The problem, then, is not that the fish are gone. The demand is strong but the supply is greater, Rosetti told Lam in 2008. Indeed, there are still plenty of restaurants where you can eat local seafood, from the tasting menu at Alex Perry’s Vestige to Bradley’s Cajun Quick Stop and Deli, a po’ boy and boiled seafood shop located inside a Shell station, owned by one of Ryan Bradley’s relatives. The problem is that some restaurateurs do not see any reason to pay the premium cost for local.

In court, arguing beneath a set of murals that depicted Biloxi’s shrimping history, federal prosecutors suggested that the impact on fishermen should be considered, and that the punishment for Mahoney’s should be severe enough to deter other restaurants from repeating such conduct. Other, as-yet-unidentified local restaurants also knowingly participated in Quality’s fraud, the prosecutors indicated; in a separate sentencing, the judge suggested that Quality and Rosetti specifically were the most culpable players in this scheme. Rosetti was the only defendant to be sentenced to jail. (Quality also forfeited $1 million.) But Tim Holleman, Cvitanovich’s lawyer, was left feeling that the case against the restaurant, which preceded the Quality trial, and dominated much of the news coverage, seemed like a message—a way to get attention by taking down the best-known restaurant around, he told me.

One lingering question is the extent to which consumers care about this kind of fraud. As the number of fishermen has dwindled, so too has the number of locals with any real connection to the industry. Holleman noted at the sentencing that after Mahoney’s updated its menus to remove references to local catch, sales did not decline. Thus, he argued, there was “no concrete evidence presented of any victims.” Certainly Debbie Batia, the longtime Mahoney’s diner, did not see herself that way: She told me she knew she liked flaky, white fish, and beyond that, what arrived on the plate didn’t matter much.

Perhaps modern economics had simply made the local industry obsolete. Cheaper foreign alternatives are available—and acceptable to diners. It’s a pragmatic view, but one that overlooks the cultural value of the industry. Fishing represents a vanishing kind of independence: just a boat, a net, and no boss.

That is more than just a romantic notion, another James Beard- nominated chef, Austin Sumrall, suggested to me. In 2017, Sumrall revived a different Biloxi institution: White Pillars, which opened in 1969 in another sprawling, historic, beachside home, and went on to rival Mary Mahoney’s as the city’s most-praised fine-dining institution.

White Pillars closed in 1989, amid Biloxi’s economic nadir, but when Sumrall, a Mississippi native, moved to the Coast with ambitions of opening his own restaurant, he fell in love with the vacant property. He arranged a lease-to-own agreement that brought White Pillars back to life—now with a devotion to local, seasonal ingredients, including seafood that is exclusively sourced from the Gulf.

He noted that you can drive a mile and a half from the restaurant and see the remnants of the shrimping fleet still moored in the harbor. “I think it would completely change the way this coast looks if that were to go away,” he said. Storytelling has always been a part of the tourism business, after all.

In 2019, in the wake of the FDA raid, the Mahoney family had to decide what story to weave. Or what story to elide, it seems: The restaurant updated its menus, so “Stuffed Snapper” became “Stuffed Fish”; all references to the bounty of the Gulf were removed. The family never made a formal, public apology, and the new menu does not proactively clarify the potential presence of foreign product.

It may soon have to. Last year, Louisiana and Alabama both passed laws requiring truth in seafood labeling; in the wake of the Mahoney’s scandal, Mississippi passed one too. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently reminded businesses that maritime decor—nets on walls, photos of shrimp boats—constitutes an implicit claim about serving local seafood.

In the weeks after the sentencing, I visited Mary Mahoney’s a few times to try the famous seafood gumbo, and to inquire about the provenance of the stuffed fish. It was tripletail, my server told me on one visit—locally caught, he added, after I asked.

The dining room was mostly empty. On my way out the door, I stopped behind one couple who were gawking at all the memorabilia: There was the sign indicating the Katrina waterline. And one for Camille, too. “Can you tell we’re from New York?” the man asked the bartender. He was charmed, it seemed, to see these records of disasters averted.

There was no memento from the restaurant’s latest setback, just as there was no mention that across the street, and beyond the hulk of a casino, there was a harbor where the Gulf waters lapped against Biloxi’s shrimp boats—the last few holdouts continuing the city’s oldest tradition.