A federal jury has convicted an erosion control company, its vice president and one of its employees over a five-year agreement to hold up the price of grass

Sod is grass on a pallet. It is what holds the dirt on the side of a new road while the seed takes, and somebody has to sell it to whoever is building the road.

A federal jury in Oklahoma City has now convicted three defendants of agreeing what that grass would cost. The Justice Department announced the verdict on Thursday, naming Sioux Erosion Control Inc., its part-owner and vice president BG Dale Biscoe, and an employee, Randall David Shelton. Daniel W. Glad, the acting deputy assistant attorney general who runs the Antitrust Division's criminal work, dates the verdict in his own quotation to the day before, which puts it on Wednesday.

The conduct the department describes ran from September 2017 to April 2023 and touched more than $100m of publicly funded transportation contracts across Oklahoma.

Three schemes, not one

The department's account has price fixing at the centre and two other things bolted to it. The defendants and their competitors are said to have agreed to raise and maintain prices for erosion control products and services, sod among them. They are also said to have carved Oklahoma up between them, allocating contracts by area.

The third is the one worth pausing on. Bids were rigged, the department says, in two ways: by putting in a number that was deliberately too high, and by refusing to bid at all.

That second method leaves almost no trace in the procurement file. A job that draws one bid looks like a job nobody else wanted.

Seven, not three

Thursday's verdict is the end of a longer queue. Six individuals and one company were charged over the scheme, and four of the men, Stanley Mark Smith, Roy Henry Henrich, Ryan Ashley Sullivan and James Travis Feazel, had already pleaded guilty. The department records all four as awaiting sentencing, which is why its own subheading counts seven defendants convicted rather than three.

The exposure now runs to the sentencing. For an individual the statutory maximum is 10 years and a $1m fine. For a corporation it is a $100m fine, and the release prints the provision that matters more than the cap: the fine may instead be set at twice the gain from the crime or twice the loss to the victims, whichever produces the larger number.

The case was investigated by the Transportation Department's inspector general and the FBI's Oklahoma City field office, and prosecuted by two trial attorneys from the Antitrust Division's Washington criminal section, Marc Hedrich and Matthew Grisier, with senior litigation counsel Gary Bell.

No lawyer for Sioux, for Biscoe or for Shelton is named in the announcement, and it carries no comment from any of them. The department does not say whether an appeal is expected, and the verdict form itself is not posted with the release.