Salinas-based Taylor Fresh Foods sued former Tennessee subsidiary president Brian Thure and his wife over an alleged four-year, $32 million fraud scheme. The complaint is unproven, no defendant has answered, and the company says an outside IRS audit — not its internal controls — surfaced the theft.

Taylor Fresh Foods, the Salinas produce giant better known as Taylor Farms, has accused a former subsidiary president of stealing more than $32 million over roughly four years — and by the company's own telling, it took a federal tax audit, not its own books, to catch him.

The company sued Brian Thure, who ran its Smyrna, Tennessee subsidiary from 2012 until March 2026, in a civil complaint filed June 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee (Case No. 3:26-cv-00772). Also named: his wife Julie Thure; James McPherson; and MTS Building and Electrical, which the complaint calls an unregistered "sham" contractor used to move stolen money. The suit was first reported by SFGATE's Madilynne Medina and later by Nashville outlets WSMV and KTVU.

Here is the cap-table reality behind the headline number. Taylor Farms is privately held, so none of this sits in a public financial filing — the $32 million and its component figures come entirely from the company's own unproven allegations. The complaint alleges Thure had control over finances, payroll, vendors and accounting systems at the subsidiary for some 14 years, and that more than $12 million flowed through MTS on invoices deliberately kept between $35,000 and $45,000 to stay under review thresholds. The company says only about $400,000 of legitimate work was ever done. Individual line items reported from the filing include a $5.5 million Hawaii home bought in October 2024, a 400-acre Humboldt County ranch, and roughly $1 million routed to a UC Berkeley football fund the complaint calls the "Brian and Julie Thure Right Tackle Endowment." Taylor Farms says it opened its internal investigation only after an IRS audit in early 2025 flagged MTS and "other questionable reimbursement practices."

The unglamorous through-line is a controls failure: a subsidiary chief with unchecked authority, invoices structured to dodge scrutiny, and a scheme surfaced by an outside auditor rather than the parent company.

Several things remain unsettled. No defendant has filed an answer or public denial; the Thures' only reported move is a motion to stay the civil case pending what they describe as a parallel federal criminal investigation — which no prosecutor's office has publicly confirmed, with no charges on record. Dollar figures for sub-categories vary between outlets, and defense counsel is not yet clearly established in the coverage. A case-management conference is referenced for September 15. The suit also lands a month before Taylor Farms began grappling with a multi-state lettuce recall — a bad stretch for a company already under a public-health microscope.