Distributor Penalized $12.5 Million For Bribing Grocery Buyers Asks Judge If He's Ever Been To Cabo

Calvert Beverage Group was ordered Thursday to pay $12.5 million for a decade of buying supermarket shelf space with cash, prepaid gift cards, Rolex Datejusts, resort stays, chartered flights, and golf trips billed internally as compliance seminars, sources confirmed. The nation’s largest wine and spirits distributor arrived at the courthouse with a second set of gift cards.

Prosecutors described a scheme running from 2016 to 2024 in which Calvert regional vice presidents moved payments to chain grocery buyers through third-party marketing vendors, generating invoices for tastings, consulting engagements, and educational seminars that never took place. The company attempted to resolve the matter at 9:15 a.m. by offering the assistant U.S. attorney a fishing trip, and again at 9:20 a.m. by adding an all-expenses-paid casino weekend to the fishing trip.

By the time the distributor reached the magnetometer, a company representative had asked the screening officer whether he “did anything in the wine space” and handed him a $200 prepaid card for a steakhouse with no San Francisco location. The same representative approached the court reporter during the morning recess to ask what her end-of-year volume looked like.

Dean Ostrowski, Calvert’s vice president of chain account development, spent the first eleven minutes of his testimony turned away from the bench and facing the gallery, where four former grocery chain buyers were seated as witnesses in the related criminal cases. He addressed his answers to them directly, at one point telling the third row that he could still do something on the Pinot Grigio.

When U.S. District Judge Ellis Prewitt instructed him to direct his attention to the court, Ostrowski turned around, said “oh,” and asked the judge whether he had ever been to Cabo.

Prewitt then spent roughly four minutes explaining that a federal judge has no role in grocery procurement, does not set planograms, and could not affect shelf placement at any supermarket in the Northern District of California under any circumstance.

“Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear you,” Ostrowski said. “But you know someone.”

“Come on. Come on, man. One endcap,” Ostrowski continued, adding that he would take a bottom shelf, a floor stack, a cardboard thing by the ice, whatever they had. “Look at me. I’ve got eleven hundred cases of Pinot Grigio in a warehouse in Union City and nowhere to put them. You want the watch? Take the watch. It’s a Datejust, take it off my wrist right now, I don’t care. Just tell me I’m in the Kroger reset. Just tell me that and I’ll sit down.”

At press time, Calvert had asked the clerk’s office whether the $12.5 million could be routed through a third-party marketing vendor, and, if so, who handled placement at Treasury.