A Winnetka man who owned a Skokie medical supply company could face up to a year in prison after being convicted of price gouging on N95 masks early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Krikor Topouzian, the 62-year-old owner of Concord Health Supply, was found guilty Thursday of buying nearly 80,000 N95 masks in March and April 2020 for about $5 per mask, which he then turned around to sell for about $20 a mask.
The masks had been labeled “scarce materials” during the pandemic as part of the Defense Production Act. According to prosecutors, he continued to mark up the masks even as friends told him prices were too high and FBI agents visited his business to warn him of the same thing — even attempting to buy more masks the day after federal agents had stopped by.
“Who is going to report me?” Topouzian allegedly said to a friend who told him the prices were too high. “I’ve already been threatened by so many people that they’re going to call the FBI.”
After law enforcement visited, Topouzian wrote a letter to then-President Donald Trump claiming his profit was less than $9 after overhead, which included “rent, insurance, payroll” and more.
Court documents detailed Topouzian bragging about his business, stating in one text how he’d made nearly $50,000 on 6,400 masks, and in another, “how much he was making and how cheap the masks were to buy and that he was making massive profits.”
“You can’t imagine my business. $50-80,000 a day, I did $1 million in the last couple weeks,” Topouzian said in a text message, according to prosecutors.
“[M]ade a fortune selling masks and other stuff. We did 40 times the business of a day every day for the last four weeks,” he wrote in another text days later.
When bad reviews of his company came in, he asked a relative to get friends to write fake online reviews of Concord Health Supply, according to court documents.
Topouzian is set to be sentenced Oct. 10.
