Again, this is 20 years ago, so the times may have changed....BUT....

Especially back then, a pizzeria was mainly a cash business. It was also not uncommon for it to be run by people of.....questionable....family backgrounds...

Which meant it was very hard for Uncle Sam to figure out how good a business you were running, and if you were giving him his cut, practicing fair labor, etc.

What the IRS figured out (or so he story went) was they could model your business pretty well based off how much of certain things you ordered. One of their favorite things to use for this was flour.

Why flour? Well cheese you aren't going to use a consistent amount sometimes on your pizzas. Maybe one guy goes heavy, one guy goes light. You switch vendors constantly as its prices bounces around. You use it for other stuff.

But flour, you use the exact amount each time you make a standard sized pizza, and the IRS knows what that is. It also has a long shelf life so you aren't accounting for spoilage and stuff, aside from the occasional we made too much dough that day, which isn't very common once you have your business going.

So basically they could look at the books, see how much flour you bought, figure out how many pizzas that means you made, and that would give them a good sense as to your volume of business.

Enter the Amish who could hook you up with flour uncle Sam didn't have tabs on.

The Hasidics factored in because of unpasturized milk. They would sell it out of ice cream trucks and stuff in Bensonhurst.