Dogged by Allegations of Weighty Misdeeds
“I have a criminal record in Ventura County,” Nancy Baird told me.
It was purely a circumstantial thing, she was saying in that aggrieved tone of voice one usually hears from hardened criminals protesting their innocence. She was minding her own business -- in this case, a business selling gourmet pet treats -- when she took her eye off the ball for one fateful moment. The next thing she knew, she was snared by that most pitiless of law enforcement bodies, the Ventura County Division of Weights and Measures.
“When you see the paperwork,” Baird says of her criminal case in Ventura County state court, “it looks like I bludgeoned someone to death.”
The paperwork includes Baird’s nolo contendere plea to a criminal misdemeanor charge of selling short-weighted goods: to wit, plastic containers shaped like wine bottles filled with dog bones, priced at $14.99 each, and labeled Mutt Merlot.
Baird paid about $1,000 in fines and penalties, including a $35 county administrative fee called, appropriately, an “ARF.” She also agreed to 24 months’ probation. On top of that were legal fees, which came to about $2,500. Since Baird didn’t choose to fly from her home in Chicago to California to fight the case in person, she was required to waive her constitutional right to a trial by jury and to cross-examine witnesses.
“It’s ludicrous,” says Baird, 48, a former advertising executive and corporate head-hunter. “This is a whimsical dog treat, an impulse buy. It’s a Pet Rock thing.”
Jim Delperdang, the manager of the Weights and Measures Division, doesn’t see it that way. “There are rules and laws that exist, based on standards in place everywhere in the country,” he says sternly. “If you put it in a package, it’s required to have a statement of content, and the law doesn’t make a distinction between hamburger and a specialty pet product.”
As it turns out, Weights and Measures appears to be on something of a crusade to eradicate the short-weighting of dog treats in the County of Ventura. Currently on the court docket is its criminal case against one Big Bark Bakery, a small Dallas company that allegedly misled buyers of its individually wrapped, 8-inch Megabites dog bones into paying $2.25 for a lighter treat than the label promised.
Big Bark’s owners, who face fines of $1,000 plus fees for each of five counts, have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyer, a former prosecutor and candidate for D.A. named Ron Bamieh, tried to place the issue in perspective for me. “The intent of the statute is to prevent the consumer from being duped,” he says. “There’s no possible way the consumer can be duped by this product. The consumer is looking right at the product. It’s wrapped in clear cellophane. The label is almost irrelevant to the consumer’s decision to purchase the product.”
He says that his clients, like Baird, never intended to mislead anyone. But that’s not a defense under the labeling law, which as a strict-liability statute doesn’t require intent for a defendant to be found guilty. “If I could find a credible defense to get around strict liability, I’d put this before a jury and there’d be no way my clients would get convicted,” Bamieh says.
Meanwhile, the division’s campaign is threatening to sully the otherwise spotless records of small businesspersons all over the country.
Baird’s rap sheet, for example, dates all the way back to July 2002, when an inspector from Delperdang’s office entered the premises of Le Gourmet Chef, a gift and cookware shop in the Camarillo Premium Outlets mall. The inspector’s trained eye landed on a shelf display of dog products from Baird’s company, Creature Comforts. Perched there were about a dozen packages of Poochi Sushi, each with nine dog treats shaped like California rolls; a dozen packages of so-called Barbecued Squirrels and 11 Mutt Merlots.
These last proved to be the smoking guns. The inspector’s portable scale confirmed his suspicion that each bottle of Mutt Merlot contained less than the 12 ounces advertised on the label. Perhaps luckily for Baird, the inspector did not test the Barbecued Squirrel packages to determine their actual squirrel content. A lab report later specified that the Mutt Merlot labels overstated their weight by as much as 18%. Baird says the differential could have resulted from the dog bones’ dehydration during shipment from Chicago to California, but Delperdang says the shortfall is too great to have resulted from natural moisture loss. Within a month, Baird received a letter from the Ventura D.A. ordering her appearance in criminal court.
(For an objective measurement, I submitted the Mutt Merlot samples to my own lab for testing. That would be my yellow lab, Roxy, who consumed the suspect dog treats as well as a control sample of Milk-Bones with equivalent alacrity, leaving the determination of relative weight and density inconclusive.)
After pleading out her case, Baird tried to finesse the issue by removing any mention of the net weight from future shipments of Mutt Merlot.
But she underestimated the division, which watches out for merchandise that it has cited before. The inspectors quickly spotted her dodge and last November cited Baird again, this time for shipping a product without a weight label.
The division levied a $300 fine, which Baird says she’s ignoring for now. But she’s aware that as a probation violator, she might be subject to arrest if she so much as gets pulled over for speeding during an upcoming business trip to San Francisco.
I’m not sure whether this is the sort of overregulation that big lobbying groups such as the California Business Roundtable complain about in their phony-baloney reports about the state’s supposedly lousy business climate. (They usually gun for bigger game, like anti-pollution laws and business taxes.) But it’s plain that a certain measure of human judgment has been lacking in the work of Weights and Measures, not to mention prosecutorial discretion over at the D.A.’s office. I don’t think it’s casting aspersions to say that people who shell out $14.99 for a package of canine treats because it’s shaped like a wine bottle are implicitly showing how little they rely on the vigilance of -- for lack of a better term -- government watchdogs in their purchasing decisions. It’s not as though they’re using the net weight label to judge the relative value of Mutt Merlot versus Poochi Sushi (also $14.99, retail).
In fact, Baird has based almost her entire business on selling pet owners merchandise at a huge markup. She got into the pet-supply trade when a home-made patterned leash she fashioned for her own chocolate lab drew oohs and aahs at the dog park. She says her first sale was to Nieman-Marcus, whose clientele is the epitome of people who don’t know from weights and measures.
“It’s stuff no one needs but they want for their pet,” she says of an inventory that produces 56% profit margins and includes seasonal lines such as Doggie Dreidels, as well as hardy perennials like Bite the Hand That Feeds You hand-shaped treats.
Baird says she has now ordered her distributors to keep her merchandise out of Ventura County. Bamieh says the effect of prosecution on his clients is even worse; thanks to the case, a deal they had to sell their business to a buyer who wanted to move it into California has fallen through.
“Doesn’t the government have the responsibility not to hamper business?” Bamieh asks. “This is not the right way to take a bite out of crime in Ventura County.”
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
