The $100 Million Pastrami

Stock manipulators pulled off a remarkable fraud. Now they're toast.

“Enjoy every sandwich.” Warren Zevon

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A father and son team served up quite a sandwich at a lousy, little deli in Paulsboro, N.J.

With a couple of shell companies and a series of manipulative stock trades, Peter Coker Sr., 82, and Peter Coker Jr., 56, somehow drove the shares behind Your Hometown Deli to a staggering $113 million valuation. They also drove up the value of another empty shell company, E-Waste, to over $100 million.

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital called attention to the fraud in April 2021, noting that the deli had bagged less than $36,000 in revenue over two years, peddling soda and sandwiches.

“The pastrami must be amazing,” he wrote in a letter to clients.

The heck of it was, Your Hometown Deli, didn’t even serve pastrami.

Would you like extra cheese with that order? (Illustration: AI generated.)

“Small investors who get sucked into these situations are likely to be harmed eventually, yet the regulators — who are supposed to be protecting investors — appear to be neither present nor curious,” Einhorn wrote.

For this, Einhorn deserves a hero sandwich.

Small investors weren’t the only ones sucked into stock of Hometown International whose sole asset was this deli dive. Inexplicably, Duke and Vanderbilt universities bought this stomach-turning stock, too. Who knew they were the Sloppy Joes of investing?

Regulators finally took notice after Einhorn’s missive.

Like they say, you can indict a ham sandwich, and this case generated quick guilty pleas. On Tuesday, Coker Sr. received six-months and Coker Jr. received 40 months in prison. Another defendant, James Patten, will be sentenced on June 10.

They will all have to suffer prison food, including what they served to investors: baloney sandwiches. The Po’ Boys.

You wouldn’t eat here, so why would you buy its stock. (Photo credit: Google Maps.)

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