Meat removal is not listed in most contractors’ business repertoire. 

But Two Man Crew, Inc. could very well add that to its resume — along with carpentry, drywall, paint, construction and the other, more typical focuses of the general contractor — after the company removed nearly 1.5 tons of rotting meat allegedly left in a Basalt commercial space at 216 E. Cody Lane. 

“This is a first,” Two Man Crew Owner Gordon Altmaier said of the removal.

The last business with a Basalt business license that operated out of that location was Il Porcellino Salumi, but they haven’t renewed their business license since 2023, according to the Basalt Finance Department. Altmaier said, however, the meat packages were labeled Il Porcellino Salumi. 

Il Porcellino Salumi’s Instagram account denied leaving the meat at the address in an exchange with The Sopris Sun on direct message.

The owners of the address were MinerTaylor, LLC until May, when the business was foreclosed, according to the Pitkin County Treasurer. 

Roughly a month after the foreclosure, Sotheby’s International Realty, representing new owners 5Star Bank, hired Two Man Crew to change the locks and fix a water leak at the space. Around mid-July, two weeks after they were first hired to work on the project, the crew discovered the meat in two unrefrigerated walk-ins. They spent the next two weeks restoring power to the space and refreezing the meat, before four Two Man Crew employees spent half a day removing the 1.5 tons on July 23. 

Two of the crew members reportedly vomited.

“They just made it in the front door. They didn’t even make it to the meat,” Altmaier said of the vomiting crew members, adding that the meat smell affected them upon entry.

The crew transported the meat via dump trailer to the Pitkin County Landfill, where it was weighed and deposited. Altmaier did not know why the meat was left in the space.

The foreclosure process against MinerTaylor, LLC began with a Notice of Election and Demand for Sale listing the “Failure to pay principal and interest when due together with all other payments provided for in the evidence of debt secured by the deed of trust and other violations thereof” as the reason for the notice, according to the treasurer. 

The Colorado Secretary of State website lists William P. Miner as the registered agent of Miner Taylor, LLC. Bill Miner is listed as the owner of Il Porcellino Salumi in online news reports. 

Il Porcellino Salumi said via Instagram direct message the business ceased operations in Basalt in December 2025. The business claimed it never owned 216 E. Cody Lane, but that Nathan Taylor had owned it at some point. The Basalt Town Clerk, however, said Miner submitted the business license application to operate out of 216 E. Cody Lane and had no records connecting Taylor to the space.
According to news reports, Miner and Taylor were Il Porcellino Salumi business partners starting in 2018 until at least 2022. Taylor said in a text to The Sun that Miner was the president and CEO of the business, and that he himself had been an investor. He said he had been “f***ed out of this deal along with others” and planned to file a lawsuit against Miner “for multiple offenses.” He added that he had no knowledge of the meat left in the space.

The notice said 5Star Bank had given a loan of $422,355 to MinerTaylor, LLC in April 2023. When the notice was filed in January, MinerTaylor still owed 5Star $413,768.76. 

The foreclosure sale occurred on May 20 and a Public Trustee’s Certificate of Purchase was recorded on May 21 for $1.44 million by 5Star. Sotheby’s International Realty is representing the new owners as they seek further real estate transactions. 

This is not Salumi’s first location to cease operations. The business’ original shop in Denver, which opened in 2015, closed in early 2024, according to Salumi’s Instagram.

Pitkin County Solid Waste Manager Tyler Carvell said a 2,900-pound meat deposit in the landfill is not common. 

“In this quantity,” Carvell said, “not common at all.”

He said that restaurants, businesses and grocery stores do deliver food waste to the landfill to be composted. The 2,900 pounds of meat, however, could not be composted because it was still in its packaging and it had been sitting “for an unknown amount of time,” Carvell said.

“You just have concerns with bacteria getting into that stream that we don’t know or can control,” he said. “And people that buy our compost, they can grow vegetables in it and stuff like that. You don’t want that stuff to get passed on.”

He added that disposing of food waste in this manner generates methane emissions, which composting does not. 

“It’s much better for the environment in general if you compost it,” he said.