Carronshore chip shop boss avoids jail over sexual assaults on young girls

Francesco Falcone, 48, who left a top job as an analyst to revive the fortunes of his family fast food firm in Carronshore, was placed on social work supervision and on the sex offenders' register for two years and ordered to do 140 hours of unpaid work. A sheriff said the sentence was a direct alternative to prison – to have jailed him would have been "catastrophic" for his own family and children.

But he noted that according to a social work report, Falcone showed "no sign of remorse."

Falcone appeared for sentence at Falkirk Sheriff Court on Thursday after being found guilty in January of three offences of sexual assault and one of communicating indecently with the girls, aged "15 or 16" at the time. They were said to have taken place between November 2019 and April 2022 at Falcone’s Fish Bar in North Main Street.

The verdicts and subsequent sentence followed a marathon summary trial that began in November 2022, heard over numerous separate days.

The trial heard how sausage pizza at Falcone's was referred to by him as "sex pizza". Married Falcone called onion rings "cock rings", mozzarella balls "breasts" and made phallic jokes about the haggis. He once made reference to a pornographic film in relation to a pizza.

Prosecutor Catherine Fraser said Falcone's remarks were "wholly unacceptable and criminal".

He described women's private parts, said a 10-year-old girl had "hips to die for", asked a girl how she and her boyfriend "had sex long distance", and said another young girl was "looking like a stripper". He also made sexual comments to young girls and commented on their figures.

Falcone, of Larbert, touched the girls on the hips and waist and twice slapped one of them on the bottom.

Sheriff Craig Harris said he rejected Falcone's position – that none of it ever happened, and that the three girls had concocted their evidence and came to court to lie. He said Falcone "had engaged in opportunistic sexualised and flirtatious behaviour and touching with young, impressionable girls".

He ruled Falcone's comments to them about sex and their sex lives were for made for the purposes of obtaining sexual gratification or of humiliating, distressing or alarming them. He said he accepted that Falcone also made comments about foodstuffs, but some of the evidence was that this was in the girls' presence rather than to them, and he could not be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that this was for those purposes.

Solicitor Murray Aitken, defending, said Falcone had been assessed as at low risk of future sexual offending and continued to deny the offences, while accepting the verdict of the court.

He said: "His name is quite literally above the door. By and large his family, customers and suppliers are fully supportive of him."