Chinatown Restaurants Being Raided by FBI

Tony Hu declined commenting.

http://abc7chicago.com/news/chinatown-r ... ts/364395/

There was a chinatown raid in sf a while back that read like a jackie chan movie script. I wonder if this is going to be similar or something more traditional.

warning: the comments section of the above link (and maybe future ones) are full of comedic envelope pushing jokes.

Let's hope it's just a little back room Pai Gow.

At least as of 2pm Lao Yunnan has re-opened. I'm having them cater a party for 40 people tomorrow, and I've already paid for it, so I was a little concerned.

Looks like a bunch of Tony's places were shut down today:

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20141024 ... nts-report

Nothing is showing up for the FBI being at the Downers Grove location today.

kenji wrote:Looks like a bunch of Tony's places were shut down today:

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20141024 ... nts-report

In the link quoted it did state near the end:

Lao Sze Chuan and the other restaurants reopened Friday afternoon. An employee inside Lao Sze Chuan had no comment.

Regards,

It's obvious they're just trying to find the recipe for 'crack chicken'.

Posted today at the Sun Times' website (thanks, Jazzfood, for the heads up) . . .

The FBI suspected Hu’s restaurants had been dodging taxes by underreporting gross receipts. And it laid out its allegations in a 110-page court record filed last fall as it sought to raid nine of Hu’s eateries around Chicago, as well as Hu’s South Michigan Avenue condominium. The raid went down Oct. 24.

But agents also scoured bank records and emails documenting the restaurants’ sales, the records show. And the investigators said the numbers they found often didn’t match the amounts submitted on the restaurants’ tax forms.

Feds went to Chinatown looking for food — and fraud

=R=

AlekH wrote:There was a chinatown raid in sf a while back that read like a jackie chan movie script. I wonder if this is going to be similar or something more traditional.

Something more traditional won.

Do those dollar amounts in the newspaper article stun you? They stun me. That's a lot of hot chili soups, braised beef and chicken feet.

Sounds a bit more Tony Soprano than Tony Hu.

The #'s don't stun me @ all, in fact, they make me happy. Having actual #'s is a great way to make projections for other projects, which is exactly what I do. Thanks Tony.

Maybe I misunderstood. I assumed people were stunned by the discrepancies in the numbers. I don't know how common such underreporting of income is, but I find the alleged discrepancies troubling.

Katie wrote:Maybe I misunderstood. I assumed people were stunned by the discrepancies in the numbers. I don't know how common such underreporting of income is, but I find the alleged discrepancies troubling.

Oh yeah, especially when you tried to hide income so efficiently documented by your bank.

In the days when restaurants were cash businesses, siphoning off money might have been fairly easy and tempting to do. Today when people like to pay with plastic, which is documented and not so convenient to siphon. To under report what is already known to the authorities is asking for trouble.

Regards,

Katie wrote:Maybe I misunderstood. I assumed people were stunned by the discrepancies in the numbers. I don't know how common such underreporting of income is, but I find the alleged discrepancies troubling.

Yeah, I think so. I believe the original comment about the surprising numbers wasn't in reference to the alleged discrepancy, it was about the volume of business these places do (or did).

=R=

kenji wrote:Do those dollar amounts in the newspaper article stun you? They stun me. That's a lot of hot chili soups, braised beef and chicken feet.

Annual "took in as much as" figures, or "average monthly bank deposits," the kind of language used in the Sun-Times article, are not immediately translatable into the kind of total revenue, income, or profit figures I'd need to be stunned in either direction. For the number of people employed (seemingly full time) at original Lao Sze Chuan, for example, I'd certainly hope they were generating the kind of receipts the article was reporting. This all highlights to me that food business costs and margins are generally not well communicated or understood, and encourages me to continue to personally thank as many chefs as I can on a weekly basis.

Santander wrote: to be stunned in either direction.

8000/day from a 4000sq ft Chinatown storefront biz is just hard to fathom.