Woman's Garage Food Market Shuttered by Town, Health Department

EAST HAVEN, CT — Amelia Iuliano says the grocery market she set up in her driveway and garage in March, at the beginning of the worst of the pandemic, was done to help “my customers who needed food and were afraid to go to Stop & Shop.”

After being open for months — and after appealing, and losing, a cease-and-desist order by the town — she finally closed her garage grocery market June 25.

She said she started the market “to help people.”

“I got a lot of calls from customers stressed they couldn’t get fresh produce. I know where to get good stuff. I usually have a farm stand, but then nothing was ready. Now I have strawberries, peas, zucchini and tomatoes. Then, I said I’ll just open my farm stand in my garage," she told Patch in a phone interview.

"I never said it was local stuff. I never lied to my customers. What I did was I got what they needed. People were afraid of the coronavirus, and there were crazy prices and limited editions and hard-to-find things, so I set up a little convenience store, produce convenience, for them,” she said.

Her driveway and garage market was open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Sunday, she wrote on Facebook.

“What did I do wrong? I was getting people food during the pandemic.”

What she did wrong, the East Shore District Health Department said, and the town zoning official also found, was to operate a food store in her driveway, garage and yard without a license.

Beginning at the end of March, Iuliano started posting on Facebook updates about the store she’d set up, starting with produce, the prices of which she also posted on social media.

Iuliano is licensed to sell produce at farmers markets, and she is permitted to sell produce she grows herself at a farm stand she is permitted to have at her 80 Oregon Ave. house. But what she was selling was store-bought produce and myriad other grocery items, town health and zoning officials said.

And that’s against the law, the officials said.

In a hearing last week, her son told town zoning officials that the meats, cheese, eggs, dairy and numerous other items found in her market were for personal use. But her Facebook videos tell another story.

Iuliano’s Facebook live videos from April 24, 29 and 30, which were used as an exhibit at a recent hearing, has her showing a market’s worth of groceries in her driveway and garage.

Watermelons, pineapples, mangoes, avocado, honeydew, cantaloupe, squash, zucchini, garlic, onions, lettuces, Brussels sprouts, celery, sweet potatoes and more produce are seen in the videos.

So, too, are store-bought packaged brand-name foods, fruits and vegetables including mushrooms, grapes, Driscoll berries, Halo citrus fruits, Wonder Bread, Chiquita and Dole bananas, Guida’s milk, English muffins, packaged dried pasta, and coolers packed with mozzarella, cream cheese, butter, eggs, cold cuts, Italian meats, bacon and sausage, all making an appearance in her Facebook video.

Health department and zoning officials say none of that would have been grown at 80 Oregon Ave., documents show.

Most of the goods were stacked on tables and in boxes and crates in the driveway and garage, with a couple of small room fans blowing nearby.

Enforcement action against Amelia Iuliano

On April 29, health department and town zoning officials showed up to her house and conducted an inspection.

“The zoning man, (East Haven Planning & Zoning Enforcement Officer Christopher) Soto said, ‘How fast can you shut down.’ I said, ‘I could, but I’m not.’ I said, ‘How am I violating anything? I’m only helping people that need food.’ He just said I had to shut down. Maybe if he told me what I was supposed to do ... he could have given me the information on what I had to do to (operate a store), but he didn’t. He didn’t care,” she told Patch.

On May 1, the health department sent a certified letter to Iuliano notifying her of the public health code violation it found at her address.

“During our site investigation, our office made the following observation: foods, including meat, milk, and eggs, are being sold in the backyard without an East Shore District Health Department food license,” in violation of state law and the state and local public health code. The letter said she had to “immediately correct this nuisance condition by ceasing the selling of food until a proper review is conducted and, if deemed appropriate, a food license issued. Failure to immediately comply with this order may result in fines and may include arrest and a criminal prosecution.”

Iuliano said she never had the certified letter "handed to me" and said she forgot to go to the post office to retrieve it. In the exhibit during a zoning hearing last week, the certified letter had the word “refused” written across it.

Four days later, a Connecticut state marshal showed up at her home with a cease-and-desist order from the town zoning official. She said she was not home at the time but her husband and sons were. She said the marshal was “very disrespectful” to her family.

The marshal, Peter J. Criscuolo, said that as soon as he arrived, and as he was explaining why he was there, the Iuliano family members began yelling at him. He said her son, Domenico, “was agitated, confrontational combative, and threatening" and that Iuliano’s husband, Rafaelle, had to “push and hold him back and restrain him from physically attacking me.”

“He was swearing filthy vulgar language and making sexual hand gestures telling me to go F myself and he was going to throw me off the Effen property. This violent and abusive behavior is what led me to calling 911 East Haven Police for back up.”

Criscuolo said that he “warned” the men that if the son “came at me I would cuff and arrest him. He said he did not care.”

Iuliano said that her son was pushed into acting out against Criscuolo.

“He disrespected my sons and my husband,” she claimed.

When asked if her son tried to attack the marshal, she did not answer.

The cease-and-desist order appeal hearing

“They voted, all five of them, to shut me down. Why? They stated that I could have killed people because my food wasn’t inspected,” she said. “What?”

All the evidence, including screenshots of her own Facebook posts, was presented at the virtual hearing.

Soto, the East Haven zoning enforcement officer, laid out the case.

He pointed out that all the foods she was selling were from everywhere but her yard.

“They do not meet the regulations for a farm stand,” from size, setback and, “that none of the products are grown on that land.” He said what she was doing conformed more to a “retail grocery” store, and that is not allowed; and he said that during the April 29 visit, he told her to shut down and she refused. He said the cease-and-desist order followed that refusal. And, he said, “they kept selling.”

Soto said that Iuliano told him she was licensed to sell at her home, had a permit and insurance. He said that was not true. He said she had a trade name registration for her florist and farm market “from a decade ago.”

“There are no permits by zoning, or OKs to operate any kind of market at that location. It’s a retail operation, not a farm stand,” Soto said.

Iuliano told Patch that if heath and zoning officials “just told me what I had to do, just direct me, then I could have kept helping the community (by) getting food to the people that needed food during the pandemic, but they didn’t want to help.”

During the hearing, her son, Ralph Iuliano, represented his mother, saying she was not comfortable speaking in public and “doesn't want to be entrapped.”

“We never defined ourselves as a market,” he said. “There was stuff that was being sold during the coronavirus, as a pandemic, we could have got them removed.” He claimed that the diary, meat, eggs and other items such as pasta and other goods “was storage ... for our personal use.”

He claimed that there were signs that foods besides produce were not for sale. The photographs and videos do not show these signs. Soto said there were no signs and that the dairy and meat in the coolers were for sale.

And, Soto told Ralph Iuliano and the Zoning Board that nothing in her store was grown on-site, as is required by law.

“Watermelon, pineapples, avocados, grapes, berries, mangoes, pastas,” he listed, “none grown on-site, and they continued to sell all of these items. All are displayed as for sale. On our arrival is a sign that advertises a market they've repeatedly told me they're operating as a market.”

Soto said that when he asked her if she “grew avocados on-site, her response was, ‘Yes.’”
Her son denied that she said that.

“We were trying to help out the East Haven community during the coronavirus,” Ralph Iuliano said. “We’re trying to do things for community. Neighbors love us. We’re a fresh alternative.”

Assistant Town Attorney Jennifer N. Coppola, who represents the Zoning Board of Appeals, noted during the hearing that the Iulianos repeatedly referred to having some sort of licensure or certification but they do not. And she noted that even if they were operating a farm stand, there are COVID-19 mitigation measures required under Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive order, including sanitizing, that were not adhered to.

Ralph Iuliano said that his mother is a farmer and “she’s been here for 30 years” and said that sometimes, details may have been missed including address changes, for example. Amelia Iuliano ran a farm stand and floral shop on Hemingway Avenue years ago.

Once the public hearing portion of the meeting was closed, some board members expressed concerns about the possibility of a “dangerous precedent throughout the town if people started doing this. We’re dealing with food here and if it’s not done right, we’re setting a dangerous precedent.”

And members asked about further enforcement measures or an injunction against Iuliano.

In the end, the board voted unanimously to uphold Soto’s cease-and-desist order. So on June 25, she had to shut down her market.

Read the full case file here:

Amelia Iuliano ZEO Appeal by Ellyn Santiago on Scribd

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Iuliano has her supporters

On her Facebook page and on an East Haven community Facebook page, people were upset that she was being shut down by the town and health department.

“With all the craziness in the world to have someone making a living selling wonderful fruits and vegetables in a community setting I think this is absolutely absurd,” one wrote.

Another said, “This is beyond horrible! East Haven should be ashamed of themselves. We finally had something nice.”

And in the East Haven High School newspaper The Comet, a student praised Iuliano and the food "fresh from her garage."

“Amelia gave the residents of East Haven a safe and friendly environment to buy produce, pasta, and dairy, fresh from her garage, which she calls Amelia’s Florist and Farm Market. She exemplifies some of the good that can be found in East Haven.”

Though Ralph Iuliano told the Zoning Board of Appeals the driveway and garage store was “not a market,” his mother was quoted in the story: “I especially have a lot of elderly people coming to me because they don’t want to deal with any of the supermarkets because of the Coronavirus […] they tell me every time they come here how happy they are that I am doing what I am doing, and they support me one hundred percent.”

Amelia Iuliano told Patch she's "Proud of what I did.”

“All I was doing was helping people during a hard time when they didn’t want to go to the store,” she said.

“I had to shut down or pay a $150 a day fine, or they’d put a lien on my house,” she said. “Someone does something good for the benefit of the community ... I was hoping (the town) would care, but evidently they don’t care.”

In a Facebook post from the day of the hearing, she wrote, "I’m an east haven resident for 35 years and a farmer in East haven and not even a loud to be in my own town farmers market I’ve been quite to long East haven town is horrible to there own."

Meanwhile, Patch learned late Wednesday that the town plans to send the case to the state’s attorney’s office.