"He'll wait and see how far something goes, and then he'll settle out of court. "DeCoster likes to settle," Donald Fontaine, a Maine labor lawyer who has gone head-to-head with Quality Egg many times, told me. A clerk at the Maine District Court in Bangor told me that I was welcome to look at their public records, but I'd have to leaf through pages and pages of unrelated material in order to find anything.įurthermore, DeCoster's own strategy has made tracking him more difficult: by routinely settling civil cases before they reach a verdict, he has lowered the profile of his offenses-and sometimes even succeeded in making them confidential. Go back any farther, and the records might as well be lost. Court documents are easily available only for cases from the past 25 years or so. Tracking DeCoster's history of past offenses is no easy task. Some of the smaller infractions have never been reported in the national press, and some have not been reported at all. Many of the incidents here-aside from the major national stories like the historic OSHA fine-have not been reported on since they first happened. Otherwise, you won't get anything."ĭeCoster has left a trail of illness, injury, mistreatment, and death in his wake for decades. "You can only get to that man," one Turner resident who has known Jack DeCoster all her life, said to me, "if you get to his pocketbook.
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What emerged from my interviews and research is a pattern of offenses-a stubborn, company-wide refusal to abide by regulations, no matter how many times DeCoster was caught and no matter how many times Maine's alert litigators tried to force constraints on a chronically law-breaking mogul. This chronology-the result of interviews with dozens of people with firsthand knowledge of DeCoster's track record in Maine and scouring through angry headlines and forgotten court records that have faded from public view-shows how it all began. DeCoster's history of legal cases in Maine demonstrates that the more recent labor, environmental, and public health offenses are part of a long pattern that continues today, and in several states. DeCoster has done business in Turner, Maine, his hometown, for over 60 years-and has incurred a decades-long list of violations there. Salmonella, mounds of excrement, and hefty citations are nothing new to Jack DeCoster, whose Iowa henhouses were blamed for last month's nationwide egg recall.