A federal grand jury indicted a 66-year-old Hawaii woman after prosecutors accused her of fraudulently making millions of dollars by selling foreign-grown coffee that was labeled and sold as “100% Kona.”
Patricia “Trish” Johnson was taken into custody Sept. 23. Johnson is accused of orchestrating fraud that spans from 2012 to 2024 and relied on multiple mainland green coffee traders, coffee shipping companies and Hawaii-based roasters.
Johnson pleaded not guilty on Oct. 2 in U.S. District Court in Honolulu on charges including 16 counts of wire fraud, five counts of illegal monetary transactions and three counts of obstruction of justice. She is awaiting trial, scheduled for December 2025, according to court documents.
Prosecutors said they will be seeking forfeiture of at least $5.26 million, according to court records.
An indictment signed by U.S. Attorney for the District of Hawaii Kenneth Sorensen alleges Johnson was the sole owner and operator of a Kona-based coffee business called Kona Coffee Café from the 1990s through at least March 2024, selling bags of coffee from a strip-mall storefront, on Amazon and directly to consumers from her home.
Prosecutors accuse Johnson of making “materially false, fraudulent, and misleading representations by advertising, labeling, and selling coffee described as ‘100% Kona’ when in fact JOHNSON knew that the coffee was not 100% Kona coffee.”
The 26-page indictment outlines allegations that Johnson sourced foreign-grown coffees from two green coffee suppliers, one based in Seattle and the other in Oakland, paying approximately $494,000 for green coffees to the latter from Oct. 2012 to March 2024. Authorities accuse Johnson of changing the names on her business accounts with importers “as part of her scheme to defraud.”
The indictment also notes that multiple shipping companies were involved in moving coffees from the mainland to Hawaii, and that Johnson “instructed them to avoid the agricultural department once the foreign green coffee bean shipments arrived.”
Multiple parties were then paid to roast the coffees, according to prosecutors, including some who “suspected that the coffee was from a foreign source and not from Kona, based on information on the coffee’s burlap sacks.”
Specific trading, shipping and roasting companies were not identified by name in the indictment.
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