NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- A twice-convicted felon who helped orchestrate a scheme to inflate the value of a small New Jersey delicatessen to more than $100 million was ordered to spend 21 months behind bars.
James Patten, 67, was sentenced by US District Judge Christine P. O’Hearn in Camden, New Jersey, on Tuesday, more than two years after he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy in the case.
Patten and two others were charged in September 2022 with artificially inflating the price of two companies through manipulative trading, including Hometown International Inc. That company’s only asset was “Your Hometown Deli” in Paulsboro, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from the Philadelphia airport.
Hometown became infamous on Wall Street when David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital highlighted the company in an April 2021 letter to investors as an example of irrational exuberance in the market. Einhorn noted that the deli barely had sales of $20,000 in 2019 and even less in 2020 despite reaching a nine-figure valuation.
“The pastrami must be amazing,” Einhorn observed.
Patten, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, pleaded guilty in December 2023, admitting that he worked with two other men, Peter L. Coker Sr. and Peter L. Coker Jr., to manipulate the companies’ stock prices through coordinated trading that created the false impression that there was real supply and demand for the shares.
Patten, who previously served time in federal prison for mail fraud, had faced as much as 20 years if convicted at trial over the deli scam.
Federal sentencing guidelines had called for Patten to serve 70 to 87 months, but prosecutors asked the judge for 12 to 18 months behind bars. Defense lawyers sought a sentence with no prison time, arguing Patten had served as an employee of Coker Sr. during the scheme.
The Cokers pleaded guilty a year after Patten in December 2024. Peter Coker Sr. was sentenced to six months in prison in May 2025, while his son received a similar sentence after credit for time served and good behavior at jails in New Jersey and Thailand.
Patten — a Paulsboro native — helped start the deli in October 2015 with a friend and wrestling coach at the town’s high school, but he soon began conspiring with the Cokers to create a public company that would serve as a reverse-merger vehicle, according to prosecutors and a parallel suit filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Patten had worked for 25 years in financial services when he was convicted in 2010 and released from prison two later, leaving him unemployable in the industry, his lawyer wrote to the judge. When the elder Coker recruited him to join the scheme, “Mr. Patten’s pride and desire to reclaim his professional identity overrode his better judgment,” attorney Adam Brody wrote.
“He ignored the voice in his head that told him that what he was doing was wrong,” Brody wrote in a sentencing memo. “It was pride, not greed, that motivated Mr. Patten, and that same pride proved to be his downfall.”
Hometown merged in March 2022 with Makamer Holdings, a bioplastics startup, selling the deli’s inventory for $700 and the store itself for $15,000, according to court filings.
The three men also used the same method to prop up the value of shares of Kent, Washington-based E-Waste, which merged with EZRaider Global Inc., a private Nevada corporation that purported to distribute electric tactical vehicles, in September 2021.
Your Hometown Deli shut down in August 2022.
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