Leaky Pants
First came explosive diarrhea. Then came allegations of a $32 million inside job. It's been one crappy summer for Taylor Farms.
“How can any company know if its processes, products, people are safe? Only if everyone is watching and telling the truth.” – Margaret Heffernan
How can a company that can’t keep track of its own money monitor growing operations in Mexico for microscopic parasites?
It’s a fair question for consumers to ask as a cyclospora outbreak linked to lettuce from Taylor Farms that spans 27 states and includes products sold to Taco Bell and Walmart.
Federal and state health officials have now identified more than 22,000 confirmed or suspected illnesses. It has led to at least two deaths and turned the phrase “explosive diarrhea” into one of this summer’s most disgusting headlines.
Taylor Farms has filed a federal lawsuit accusing a former executive of embezzling more than $32 million. The company filed the lawsuit in June, but it didn’t make headlines until Taylor Farms found itself battling an even bigger disaster with links to contaminated lettuce.
The food-safety crisis could ultimately cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in product recalls, lawsuits, lost sales, food-safety upgrades and long-term brand damage.
The privately held California company now has money leaking everywhere. Its own lawsuit suggests why: weak internal controls.
The lawsuit says Brian Thure, former president of Taylor Farms Tennessee, effectively controlled payroll, vendor approvals, accounting and financial reporting with little meaningful oversight from about 2012 until March 2026.
Thure hasn’t been charged with a crime, nor has he commented publicly on the case, which names three co-defendants, including his wife, Julie.
The complaint even alleges that Thure apologized to CEO Bruce Taylor, though those allegations have not been tested in court.
The alleged fraud was so sprawling it’s a wonder it wasn’t detected years ago. Among the many dozens of artifices, Thure allegedly put his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and several personal employees on the company payroll, including a chef, chauffeur, personal trainer a handyman, and even a personal aquarium maintenance attendant.
The lawsuit also claims he used sham vendors to siphon off money through fraudulent invoices.
He allegedly used the money to pay for a $5.5 million home in Hawaii, a 400-acre ranch in Humboldt County, Calif, luxury spending, gambling, women, and about $1 million to create the Brian and Julie Thure Right Tackle Endowment at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had played football before a brief NFL career with the then Washington Redskins.
He was even busy diverting funds during a stint in rehab, according to the lawsuit, which alleges:
“While Mr. Thure was in rehabilitation for a DUI conviction in 2024, he continued to approve fraudulent invoices despite having limited ability to communicate with the outside world, demonstrating the critical and ongoing nature of his personal involvement in the fraud.”
A DUI conviction involving a top executive who allegedly had his own chauffeur should have been a red flag. But according to the lawsuit, Taylor Farms didn’t discover the money leaking from its Tennessee subsidiary until an IRS audit.
Nor, according to federal investigators, did it discover its cyclospora problem until the FDA came calling.
Controls appear to have failed on a remarkable scale.
They were repeatedly bypassed in several different ways over more than a decade. The list of schemes is truly astonishing and hits almost every trick in the Business Blunders White-Collar Playbook.
