Judge Orders Joe’s Lobster Mart to Close Over Stolen Oysters
Update, 11/4:
Joe’s shut down Monday, Nov. 3, The Cape Cod Times reports.
Original story:
Time is running out on Joe Vaudo, the owner of Joe’s Lobster Mart in Sandwich, who has faced a regulatory battle over the course of the year after the longtime small businessman admitted to receiving stolen oysters.
A Suffolk Superior Court judge on Monday gave Vaudo two weeks to sell off his remaining inventory before he will lose his licenses to buy and sell seafood. Vaudo has said losing the licenses would force him to close.
Vaudo, who has run his wholesale and retail business for more than 40 years, is fighting a Department of Public Health decision to revoke the permits. Shortly after DPH’s decision was issued earlier this month, Vaudo received an injunction against the state, allowing him to stay operational over the last couple of weeks. At a hearing in early October, Judge Thomas Connors took the matter under advisement before ruling earlier this week to deny the injunction.
Connors’s decision, embedded at the end of this article, says Vaudo “failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of any of (his) claims’’ in his fight to stay open.
At the October 7 hearing, state officials had said they would be amenable to a scenario in which Vaudo would be given seven days to sell off his inventory. Connors gave him twice that. Vaudo’s attorney, John Kiernan, said at the hearing that Vaudo had about $200,000 worth of stock on hand.
Vaudo plans to continue with the legal fight, The Cape Cod Times reports.
Vaudo pleaded guilty earlier this year to having received stolen oysters last year from Michael Bryant, who himself has pleaded guilty to pulling off a series of 2013 shellfish heists and was sentenced to two years in prison. While some customers have remained supportive of Joe’s Lobster Mart, others in town have boycotted it. Vaudo also lost a seat he had held on Sandwich’s planning board to a write-in candidate in a local election shortly after news of his guilty plea broke.
Vaudo has denied that he paid for the oysters, and said he dumped them into the Cape Cod Canal, which is adjacent to his store. (According to The Sandwich Enterprise, Bryant gave testimony alleging Vaudo bought multiple loads of the oysters he stole.)
DPH has said that even if Vaudo’s argument is true, it doesn’t matter—by receiving the stolen, untagged oysters, he violated state regulations meant to protect public health.
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