Prosecutor shows texts bragging about stacks of cash as Feeding Our Future trial begins

In a Minneapolis courtroom Monday, federal prosecutors laid out their case that six men and one woman launched the nation’s biggest pandemic relief fraud from a tiny East African restaurant in Shakopee. There, they collected millions in cash purloined from a federal program meant to feed hungry children.

Defense lawyers argued their clients were caught up in a confusing bureaucratic morass, with changing rules that governed the program during a chaotic time. If they made some money, that’s because they were merely living up to the program’s purpose, to enlist for-profit entities to help feed children.  

It’s the first case to go to trial in what’s been dubbed Feeding Our Future — after the nonprofit prosecutors say organized the $250 million scheme. These seven are charged with defrauding the federal government of over $40 million.

Of the 70 people charged since September 2022, 18 have pleaded guilty.

As a jury of mostly young, almost all white people looked on — with one middle-aged man nodding off repeatedly during the first couple of hours — Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Ebert took the jury back to what it was like four years ago, when fear and uncertainty spread as quickly as the pandemic. Stores, schools and offices closed. Federal rules were loosened to allow for-profit entities like restaurants to feed children and get reimbursed for it.

They weren’t supposed to get rich, Ebert said. But some did.

“This case is about an epic outbreak of another sort: about lying. Lying to get money,” Ebert said during his opening statement.

In April 2020, a Shakopee restaurant with just a couple of booths, Empire Cuisine & Market, enrolled in the federal child nutrition program. It grew exponentially, collecting reimbursement for over 5,000 meals in April 2020, and by the end creating an empire that claimed to have provided 18.8 million meals at multiple sites across the state — all covered up by bogus receipts, fake invoices, imaginary children, bribes and kickbacks, Ebert said.

Soon they were reporting meal counts in “impossibly round figures” day after day, week after week.

Within months, they registered 50 sites in the Twin Cities, suburbs and greater Minnesota. But many sites were nothing more than parks, apartments or commercial buildings — some of whose owners had no idea their address had been used to enroll in the program. They became more brazen with time, Ebert said, when “they saw how easy it was.”

“Their fraud went viral,” he said.

In the town of Faribault, home to a school district with about 4,000 students, they set up food distribution sites — each ostensibly serving 7,000 daily servings in six locations.

“You will not need to be expert mathematicians to realize the ridiculous and absurd numbers in the defendants’ lies to get money,” Ebert said.

Some made thousands of dollars; others made millions, depending on their role, he said. 

“It was like a golden ticket,” he said. “Their own endless ATM.”

The money was used to buy “everything other than children’s food” — courtside NBA seats; rooms at the Ritz-Carlton in Miami; a custom-built, lakefront home in Prior Lake; property in Kentucky and Ohio; an apartment building in Nairobi, Kenya; fine jewelry; an $80,000 Porsche and $80,000 Tesla. Millions were transferred to Kenya, United Arab Emirates and China.

Ebert showed jurors a text in which one alleged conspirator asked his “bro” to do him a favor and pick up $1 million in cash, attaching a photo of stacks of $100 bills.

Another photo showed a defendant popping the cork of a champagne bottle in the Maldives — the cork suspended in air above a luxurious meal, with the sparkling blue ocean in the background.

He showed jurors texts bragging about their newfound wealth. One predicted that in seven months, they’d be multi-millionaires. 

“This food stuff is kind of a golden ticket,” read one text.

Ebert showed jurors an invoice with no detail or itemization claiming reimbursement for $1.6 million worth of food. Another $2 million invoice was submitted the next day, he said, and weeks later, another $1.26 million invoice.

Sometimes, the defendants would buy gallons of milks and pallets of rice to fool regulators and inspectors, Ebert said, and some really bought food because they also ran restaurants, but only about 10% of the money was actually spent on food. 

By the time the FBI raided homes and offices in January 2022, the group had committed a “monumental crime of opportunity,” Ebert said.

Defense attorneys will try to portray the program as confusing and complicated, but “fundamentally it is not,” Ebert said: The reimbursement amounts were either true or false.

“Even a child would know the difference,” he said.

“Coming up with thousands of names is hard,” Ebert said, so they made up names and sometimes made mistakes that resulted in names like “Inactive” and “Unique Problem.”

“The defendants were lying so much they ran out of names and they simply recycled them, hoping no one would notice,” he said.

Two nonprofit sponsors — Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition — were supposed to monitor the program, but instead enabled, and sometimes participated in, the fraud by taking kickbacks, he said. 

One of those employees who took kickbacks will testify after recently pleading guilty and cooperating with investigators.

They created shell companies to move money as the flow of cash became a “gushing current,” Ebert said.

They talked about taking cuts and using a wholesale grocer to “paper it up” and sometimes made the money hard to track, and other times, just went out and bought $65,000 trucks. Abdiaziz Shafii Farah allegedly wrote a $1 million check to buy a lakeside Prior Lake home.

Attorneys for the defendants said their clients — many of whom fled civil war-torn Somalia and refugee camps and came to America with nothing — were simply trying to provide food to children through legitimate businesses.

Attorney Andrew Birrell said his client, Farah, came to America after his mother was killed in a bomb blast. He lived in refugee camps for years until they got asylum and he moved to Minnesota at age 15. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a business degree, Birrell said.

Farah bought an old gas station and renovated it into Empire Gas & Groceries. In 2019, he expanded into neighboring space, dropped the gas and renamed it Empire Cuisine & Market, which Birrell said averaged over $5,000 per day in sales pre-pandemic. It continued to thrive during the pandemic by selling takeout food, Birrell said.

Then one day, he ran into a close family friend and fellow restaurateur from Burnsville who told him about the pandemic food program. He gave Farah contact information for Kara Lomen, former executive director of Partners in Nutrition, and Farah called her that day. They met, and he applied to be a vendor. Almost all his work after that went through her nonprofit.

Birrell said the government decided to use the power of the free enterprise system to feed children — getting the private sector to advance the money for food and reimbursing them.

He said for-profit entities took on financial risk to make a profit, even as the government constantly changed the program rules.

“They’d do all this and wait to be paid by the government,” Birrell said.

Sponsors like Partners in Nutrition didn’t invest any money up front but were allowed a fee of 10 to 15% of the profit, he said. Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition went from being small nonprofits collecting a few million dollars before the pandemic to dispersing about $200 million each in 2021.

“The program was exploding, as it was designed to do,” Birrell said.

One person could take 35 meals if they wanted, no identification was required and people could come from anywhere and get meals, Birrell said. The program was administered by the state Department of Education, which could do site visits.

“No one came,” Birrell said.

Farah spent millions of dollars on food and sometimes waited months to get paid, and after paying expenses, yes, made a profit. 

He said there were no rules forbidding Farah from making a profit.

“That’s how we do things in America,” Birrell said. “He made a fair profit margin. He did make a lot of money.”

‘It was his dream job’

Patrick Cotter, attorney for Mohamed Jama Ismail, said Ismail followed the rules as he understood them. 

Ismail was separated from his family when the Somali civil war erupted and nearly died of hepatitis and hunger before immigrating to Minnesota in 1998. He bought a home in Savage with his wife in 2018, and realized his dream of starting an East African restaurant, partnering with Farah, not far from where Amazon later opened a warehouse that brought a steady stream of customers.

Cotter portrayed Ismail as putting up an “enormous” investment to participate in the food program, even though the government didn’t give clear guidance.

Ismail helped package and deliver meals and shared in the profits, his attorney said. Empire was no shell company used to launder money, he said, but a legitimate business that is still open today. 

Ismail spent $137,000 to pay off the mortgage on the house he’d bought six years earlier, Cotter said.

Hard worker in over his head

Attorney Edward Sapone said his client, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, was 20 when he began working in the food program. He portrayed Nur as a hard worker who picked rocks out of crops at age 10 and put in 14-hour days working at Dairy Queen in high school, where he was a “track star” who ran the 800-meter dash. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as a teen, then got his “dream job” working 14-hour days in the food program for 10 months, serving as a site supervisor, delivering food six to seven days a week. He made “a lot of money” and was proud of himself, and was seen as “the star of the family.”

“This is about food, not fraud,” Sapone said. “He didn’t make the rules; he played by them.”

He “may have been in over his head,” Sapone allowed, but saw it as “his big chance.”

He promised jurors would see proof that they delivered millions of meals, with photos of lines of cars full of people waiting to pick up the free food.

“The people couldn’t get enough of it,” he said.

Nur’s sister, Hayat Mohamed Nur, is another defendant who’s charged with in the case.

‘He didn’t buy anything’

Andrew Garvis said his client, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, was part-owner of Bushra Wholesalers. When agents searched his one-bedroom apartment, they didn’t seize anything because “he didn’t buy anything.” All he did was make sure food was bought and delivered to trucks, Garvis said. He sent money overseas because “if you make money you get to do what you want” with it. 

Informant fed government lies

Steven Schleicher, attorney for Said Shafii Farah, the brother of defendant Abdiaziz Farah, said his client was in the grocery business; he filled food orders, transporting and storing food in his warehouse, distributing food through his company, Bushra Wholesalers LLC.

Schleicher said the prosecutors can’t prove meal numbers were inflated, or who inflated them, and said MDE failed in its job to oversee and supervise the program. His client is a 41-year-old U.S. citizen, father and husband and self-made businessman who lives in a modest Minneapolis home and owns a 2016 Toyota Highlander and 2016 Toyota sedan.

Said Farah was born in Mogadishu. His mother was killed in the civil war when he was 6; he lived in a Kenya refugee camp until 2005. He came to the U.S. with nothing and became part of the “very close” Somali community, where people often go into the same businesses, Schleicher said.

“They take care of each other because they’ve been through it, and they understand.”

Said Farah worked assembly lines, sold phone cards, worked at his father’s grocery store and eventually started a grocery store called Brookdale Market in Brooklyn Center, and then another in Minneapolis. He married and now has five children between the ages of 6 and 16. He named his company, Bushra Wholesalers, after his oldest daughter.

Everything changed on Jan. 20, 2022, when 10 federal agents showed up at Said Farah’s house with a search warrant, and his five kids sat on sofas looking downward and downtrodden in photos Schleicher showed jurors. The agents searched the house, including the closet of his daughter Bushra, 9. But they never searched his Bushra Wholesalers warehouse 15 minutes away, Schleicher said. They wouldn’t have even had to go inside; they would have seen pallets of rice stacked outside, he said.

The case is based on supposition and “raw speculation,” Schleicher said. 

‘Real food to real people’

Frederick Goetz, attorney for Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, said Shariff never defrauded anyone in his pursuit of a dream to build an East African cultural campus called Afrique Hospitality Group.

Shariff was one of eight children whose parents immigrated from a Kenya refugee camp to America. His brothers are doctors, engineers and teachers; Shariff was the only one who didn’t finish college but is an entrepreneur, Goetz said. Shariff moved to the Twin Cities in October 2020 at age 29.

He joined the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, and began working on creating the cultural center, hiring architects, contractors and lawyers as CEO of Afrique Hospitality Group, which prosecutors allege was a shell company. That company, Goetz said, is very real and a cultural center called the Zawadi Restaurant and Event Center was built.

Afrique Hospitality Group allowed the space to be used for food distribution to generate money. Shariff’s involvement was “largely logistics” — getting food from wholesalers, getting volunteers to assemble it into bags and delivering food.

Goetz said Shariff delivered “real food to real people” and Afrique bought at least $1 million in food from wholesaler Sysco from 2021 to 2022. Food was distributed at the mosque and a Bloomington middle school, he said. They will prove it with photos, he said.

“There were thousands and thousands and thousands of meals produced by him and Afrique alone,” Goetz said.

The Minnesota Department of Education was “awash in confusion” during the pandemic, Goetz said, while conflict roiled the nonprofit sponsors who were supposed to oversee food sites and vendors. 

Sales and money transfers between defendants “were not buttoned down to the extent you might want them to be,” Goetz said, but that’s not evidence of fraud or money laundering.

“You can’t take culture out of that conduct,” he said. Practices that may seem irregular to Americans are common among East Africans, who prefer “transactional informality,” Goetz said. 

Immigrants come to America with limited options, he said, and so they often start their own businesses. And it’s not unusual for a business formed for one purpose to be used for another, he said, because in East African culture, “if you need something from me, I’ll help.”

Ebert, the prosecutor, said state employees will testify about the red flags they saw and steps they took to try to stop the fraud; a former Feeding Our Future employee, Hadith Yusuf Ahmed, will testify to his role in the scheme after cooperating with investigators in the hope of a reduced sentence; and Minnesotans who lived and worked near the claimed food sites will testify about what they saw — and didn’t see.

FBI agents will testify about how they found virtually no overlap between the names of children enrolled in local schools and the names of children submitted as recipients of free food.

“(We) will prove the defendants’ guilt in this sprawling scheme in a time of tremendous hardship and in a time of painful loss for so many others, the pandemic … brought them easy luxury, all around the world,” Ebert said. “To be sure, the pandemic brought with it fear and uncertainty and vulnerability. This trial will reveal to you that the defendants fed off that uncertainty, fed off of that fear and they fed off of that vulnerability to the tune of more than $40 million.”