January 18, 2019 — Jack Ventola, the imprisoned founder and president of Gloucester-based National Fish & Seafood, is appealing his two-year prison sentence, claiming he received a more severe punishment than one of his convicted co-conspirators.
Ventola, 71, is in the midst of his 24-month sentence at the Federal Medical Center Devens he started last July. He was convicted April 27 in U.S. District Court in Boston of failure to pay taxes on $2.9 million he fraudulently diverted from National Fish in schemes that ran from 2006 to 2013.
As part of his plea deal, Ventola admitted conspiring with two other National Fish executives — senior sales executive Richard J. Pandolfo and head of operations James Corbett, who died in 2013 and was never criminally charged —and National Fish accountant and board member Michael Bruno in several schemes to defraud the IRS and majority National Fish owner Pacific Andes.