The great Houston horse-meat caper
State health inspector J.F. Lakey didn’t know where the horse meat was coming from, but he knew where it was going: school cafeterias in Houston. In 1948, he teamed up with Harris County District Attorney A.C. Winborn to bring charges against 11 Houston meat distributors for selling horse meat fraudulently labeled as beef.
Horse meat masquerading as beef was a relatively common practice in the post-war years. During World War II, when meat often was rationed, horse found its way onto the plates of American consumers; in Texas, it was legal to consume or possess it but illegal to sell it commercially. Warfocused federal, state and local governments, just happy that citizens were getting fed, mostly turned a blind eye.
After the war ended, Texas passed stricter laws to prevent horse meat from being possessed or sold for human consumption. But meat packers and distributors were slow to change their practices, and it was up to Lakey to enforce the new laws. The 1948 charges in Houston were the opening salvo.
Though newspaper reports of the time noted that most of the horse meat went to “high class” Houston restaurants, Lakey played up the school-cafeteria angle to create a sensational story that put potential fraudsters on notice. That appeared to stem the flow of horse meat from Dallas, where almost all of it originated.
But Houston’s Chief City Veterinarian (a fancy name for agricultural inspector), R.S. Martin, wasn’t so sure. In 1949, he banned meat shipments from Dallas to Houston, cryptically stating that Dallas meat-inspection standards “didn’t meet those required here.” Meat distributors in Dallas objected, and the ban was dropped.
Lakey went back to work. In early 1950, spurred in part by an exposé in the Houston Chronicle, he discovered 18,000 pounds of horse meat labeled as tenderloin beef had been shipped to Wagers Packing Co. in Houston. Again he teamed up with Winborn to bring charges against company president Wilson Wagers for selling horse to Houston restaurants, specifically mentioning the Swayze Barbecue Pit on Main.
It was another sensational indictment that put Houston meat distributors on notice. Lakey, with a flair for publicity reserved for the best government muckrakers, famously termed Houston “the horsemeat capital of Texas.”
Ironically, Martin doubted Wagers was actually guilty, implying that Lakey and Winborn were just making an example out of him. Martin noted that invoices showed Wagers bought the meat for 97 cents per pound, which was the going rate for tenderloin beef at the time. If Wagers had intended to buy horse meat, he would have demanded a much lower price to account for its illegality.
The horse-meat story took on a life of its own, with newspapers calling it the “Filly mignon” scandal. The shipment of horse meat to Houston caused a minor panic in surrounding cities. Perhaps lacking the finesse of a politician or trying to match Lakey’s flair for publicity, Martin added fuel to the fire by announcing to the Orange Leader newspaper that “There’s not a city in the Gulf Coast area that isn’t full of horsemeat.”
Health inspectors from Beaumont, Orange, Galveston and Corpus Christi were quick to open investigations, and all eventually denied that horse meat was being served in their respective cities.
In Dallas, Lakey turned his attention to the source of the horse meat. He enlisted the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which traced it to the Meyer Gilgus & Son Meat Provision Co. of Kansas City, Mo. Owner Meyer Gilgus acquired the meat from broker Louis “Sonny” Risken of Minneapolis. The federal investigation revealed that Risken bought the horse meat legally from The Western Plains Horse Meat Co. of South Bend, Ind., and then fraudulently repackaged and relabeled it as beef tenderloin and sold it to Gilgus.
As detailed in Associated Press reports at the time, federal prosecutors indicted both Risken and Gilgus for shipping mislabeled meat across state lines. They each pleaded no contest and agreed to pay a $5,000 fine to avoid a jail sentence.
At the sentencing hearing, the would-be partners turned on each other. Gilgus pleaded ignorance, claiming he had no idea the meat that Risken provided was horse. Risken countered that records showed Gilgus paid 40 cents per pound for the meat — much lower than the going rate for beef — and thus Gilgus must have known he was getting horse meat.
“May God strike me dead right here if I didn’t tell him it was horsemeat,” declared Risken.