Remember the $180,616 that officials overseeing the dissolution of Penn Dutch Meat and Seafood thought was picked up from the company’s Hollywood store a month after it closed permanently last year?

An attorney for the dissolution firm says the mystery has been solved. But there’s a gag order on the details.

After weeks pursuing the money’s whereabouts, attorney Jason Slatkin, representing Michael Moecker & Associates, now says it was a mistake. No money was picked up at Penn Dutch, Slatkin said this week. And that means there’s no windfall to distribute to employees whose final paychecks bounced or local suppliers who were stiffed when Penn Dutch folded in September 2019.

“The funds were mistakenly identified as belonging to Penn Dutch when in fact they are funds belonging to a third party completely unrelated to these proceedings,” Slatkin said in an email this week.

The $180,616 showed up on a spreadsheet listing months of pickups at Penn Dutch by transport company Loomis. According to the spreadsheet, the large sum was picked up last year on Oct. 24, more than a month after listeria contamination prompted Penn Dutch’s owners to shut down their stores in Hollywood and Margate for good.

Documents recently obtained by Moecker & Associates and disclosed to other parties in the case under a confidentiality agreement show that on Oct. 24, Loomis transported exactly $180,616 to a vault owned by another transport company, GardaWorld, after picking the money up from a company in Hollywood.

Matthew Zimmerman, attorney for GardaWorld, said by email, “We can confirm that GardaWorld’s records reflected that the deposit in question was unrelated to Penn Dutch.” He added that checks included in the $180,616 deposit “were made out to another business in town, which is not related to Penn Dutch to our knowledge.”

The documents do not reveal how the mistake happened — whether a Loomis driver credited the pickup to the wrong customer or whether a computer glitch transposed the entry to the Penn Dutch spreadsheet.

Emails and phone calls to Loomis seeking information about the case were not answered.

Douglas Jeffrey, a Miami Lakes-based attorney representing a Penn Dutch creditor in the dissolution proceedings, said Slatkin gave him the same explanation and he has no reason to disbelieve it.

“I think it’s time to close that chapter,” Jeffrey said. “It appears there was a mistake and the mistake appears to have been an anomaly.”

The search for the money began over the summer when Moecker & Associates, the firm assigned to distribute Penn Dutch’s remaining assets to its creditors, discovered the entry on the spreadsheet obtained from Loomis, which regularly carried receipts from the company’s two supermarkets to the bank.

In a July deposition, Slatkin grilled Loomis branch manager Rasheeda Samad about the pickup. Among his questions: Who authorized the pickup and where was the money deposited? Also, why didn’t Penn Dutch’s bank, Bank of America, have any record that the money was deposited?

Samad said she didn’t have the answers to those questions but said Loomis’ records indicated it was transferred to GardaWorld’s Miami Lakes vault.

On Sept. 4, Circuit Judge Jack Tuter ordered Loomis and GardaWorld to produce records connected to the transfer.

Records turned over by Loomis did not answer outstanding questions.

Then GardaWorld asked all parties connected to the case to sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing discussion of anything in the records it proposed to share.

Zimmerman said the confidentiality order was requested to protect the privacy of the unrelated business that deposited the $180,616, “which is common in commercial litigation.”

Slatkin and 14 other attorneys involved in the Penn Dutch case will presumably review the GardaWorld documents to confirm that the third-party company is unrelated to Penn Dutch.

Meanwhile, the Penn Dutch dissolution is far from over.

Moecker & Associates is still being sued by two of Penn Dutch’s cofounders, William and Paul Salsburg, who claim they hold the right to be first in line for distribution of any remaining assets among creditors.

They say they obtained that right when their company, W&P Holdings Inc., settled lawsuits by two produce suppliers who asserted that a 1930 federal law protected their claims by giving them priority over claims of any other creditors.

The suppliers' lawsuits also named seven members of Penn Dutch’s controlling Salsburg family as defendants.

W&P Holdings, which owned the real estate under the Hollywood store, settled the suits with proceeds from the sale of the property. As part of the settlement, W&P required the produce suppliers to sign over their protected claims.

Now W&P is asserting those protected claims in a federal suit against Moecker and Von Kahle.

Von Kahle, in response, asked the judge to dismiss W&P’s claim, saying the 1930 federal law was never meant to be assignable to parties who are not produce suppliers.

At this point, there’s not much money to distribute to creditors.

A court filing by Von Kahle this week shows a bank balance of just $60,446 — before expenses and fees related to the dissolution. But that balance could grow. Von Kahle is pursuing an insurance claim stemming from a computer hack in early 2019 that shut down cooling systems at the Hollywood store.

Penn Dutch’s insurer, Liberty Mutual, is a co-defendant in W&P’s lawsuit seeking priority creditor status.

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