Employees at the Irving Materials plant on 96th Street in Hamilton County went about business as usual this morning as they prepared for the day’s concrete pouring jobs. Daily Reporter
Employees at the Irving Materials plant on 96th Street in Hamilton County went about business as usual this morning as they prepared for the day’s concrete pouring jobs. Daily Reporter
Jane Hodson/Daily Reporter

MaryAnn Moreland stepped onto the smooth concrete of her front step this morning and looked around at her new home on Greenfield’s east side. She isn’t surprised, she said, to find out that Irving Materials Inc. is involved in a price-fixing scandal that bilked customers out of millions of dollars.

That it may have indirectly involved her – as well as thousands of people who have driveways, basements, slabs and sidewalks – makes the situation even worse. “It’s a shame, you know?” she said. “It makes you feel robbed, pretty much robbed. How can a big company like that do something like this? Of course, big companies get away with things like this all the time.”

Her neighbor, Linda Cain, also was upset to learn that IMI conspired to artificially fix the price of concrete used a wide range of construction projects. “It’s another case of those who have the money want more,” she said. “The rich get richer, and it does affect everybody. They knew what they were doing,” she said.

Cain, Moreland and thousands of homeowners, contractors and government agencies are potential victims of a scheme to fix prices of concrete products at an artificially high level. The price-fixing went on for four years, prosecutors contend. Caught in the act last year, IMI officials agreed to help unravel the conspiracy in exchange for $29.2 million criminal fine. It is the largest fine involving an antitrust action in the country’s history.

“This conspiracy cheated virtually everyone who purchased ready-mixed concrete in the Indianapolis market…” said Scott D. Hammond, a prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division. “Regardless of whether you were a homeowner, fixing your driveway, a business constructing a new facility or a taxpayer funding a public construction project, consumers paid more than they should have because the defendants and their co-conspirators secretly met and fixed the prices of ready-mixed concrete.”

Added Steve Reilly, a prominent Hancock County developer who has done business with IMI: “This is huge. Four years, multiple companies, thousands of loads of concrete each day…”

An immediate estimate on the local impact of the price-fixing was impossible to calculate.

According to federal officials, IMI executives, including its president, Pete Irving, held clandestine meetings at hotels and at an area horse farm with representatives of several other ready-mix concrete companies. The goal: to set prices – and built-in price increases – on concrete products. The market is huge in an area where construction is robust: About 8.5 million cubic yards of ready-mix concrete was produced last year in Indiana, said Robert Garbini, president of the National Ready-Mixed Concrete Association, an industry organization.

IMI did not act alone, and authorities believe several other companies in the Indianapolis area were parties to fixing and raising the prices of ready-mix concrete. The FBI is still working to uncover just how much Indiana’s concrete companies profited from the price-fixing scheme, and officials said Wednesday that more charges are imminent.

Reports put IMI’s profit from the scheme at $225 million.

“The other companies involved will not rest easily tonight,” Hammond told a news conference. “We are confident that the investigation will continue. You can’t be involved in a conspiracy alone.”

For now, though, IMI, the nation’s largest independent supplier of ready-mixed concrete, is in the spotlight. Known to many as the place on Ind. 9 with the exotic animal taxidermy in its lobby, its chief executives will wind up in prison. Fred R. “Pete” Irving, the president; Price Irving, vice president; Daniel C. Butler, vice president; and former officer John Huggins each face five months in federal prison for their role in the price-fixing scheme. The four IMI executives have taken full responsibility for the company’s involvement. Each will spend five months in home detention following their release from prison. Pete Irving has agreed to paying a fine of $200,000, and the others will pay $100,000 in fines.

Earl Brinker, IMI’s chief financial officer, released a statement Wednesday at the company’s headquarters. It quoted Pete Irving: “IMI has cooperated with government officials. In the best interest of the company, our families and our employees, we have agreed to enter into these plea agreements with the government.”

Brinker declined further comment.

The company, started by “Skunk” Irving in 1946, has been one of Hancock County’s stalwart corporate citizens. It donated, for example, $250,000 to the Hancock County Boys & Girls Clubs Fortville Unit several years ago.

The charges, however, resulted from a continuing investigation of the concrete industry by the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division’s Chicago office and the Indianapolis office of the FBI. Hammond would not say how many companies were believed to have been involved.

The Irving case is the second against an Indiana concrete firm in recent months.

Lee’s Ready Mix and Trucking Inc. of North Vernon and its former president, Larry Lee, were indicted on charges the company conspired to fix prices on concrete it sold in Bartholomew, Jackson and Jennings counties between February 2003 and June 2004.

Lee on Monday agreed to plead guilty and serve eight months in prison.

For now, people who may have been taken in by the scheme are left to wonder how much they were hurt by it.

“What choice do we have,” MaryAnne Moreland said, “when you have no control over what they say they’ll do a job for? You pay what they tell you to.”

The Associated Press and senior staff writer Eric North contributed to this story
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