A deli in southern New Jersey was the vessel for an elaborate fraud scheme involving three men who managed to inflate the company’s stock-market value to $100 million, according to federal prosecutors and regulators.
The story of how Hometown International Inc.’s stock achieved such a lofty valuation was a mystery that played out in public last year. “The pastrami must be amazing,” hedge-fund manager David Einhorn wrote in a note to investors, before citing the stock as an example of how “the market is fractured and possibly in the process of breaking completely.”
