For this series of reports on the current Feeding Our Future fraud trial in Minneapolis I am using a thumbnail photograph of Guhaad Hashi or Guhaad Hashi Said. Lifted from his old Facebook page, Hashi’s s image instructs Somalis to keep their lips sealed about Ilhan Omar. Indeed, that’s how I first heard about him in the course of my initial reporting on Omar’s marriage to her brother. I was told that he is a thug who served as Omar’s enforcer. I posted his mug shot in “Stand by your sham: Omertà for Omar.”
Hashi is also one of the Somali defendants charged in the original Feeding Our Future indictments. He awaits trial. The related Department of Justice press release briefly recounts: “He is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Hashi ran a site under the name Advance Youth Athletic Development that falsely claimed to serve up to 5,000 meals a day.”
Hashi turned up in David Farenthold’s excellent New York Times story on the case. Fahrenthold didn’t know anything about his background, but he found Hashi’s place in the free lunch fraud.
All the Feeding Our Future cases have been assigned to Judge Nancy Brasel. At the end of the day yesterday afternoon Judge Brasel adjourned the trial to take a guilty plea from Abdikadir Mohamud, one of the original defendants charged in the first set of indictments. The facts of his case bear on the current trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said and serve as a template for the whole case. This is the Department of Justice press release on the plea:
A Minneapolis man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud for his role in the $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.
According to court documents, from April 2020 through January 2022, Abdikadir Ainashe Mohamud, a.k.a. “AK,” 33, claimed to be operating a child nutrition site in Willmar, Minnesota, a small town with a total population of approximately 21,000. Mohamud ran his food site, Stigma-Free Willmar, under the sponsorship of Feeding our Future. In October 2020, Mohamud approached the owner of FaaFan restaurant and offered to pay him monthly so that he could claim the small storefront restaurant as a Stigma-Free Willmar food site. By October 20, 2020, less than a month after registering the Stigma-Free Willmar site, Mohamud claimed to be serving meals to 3,000 children per day, seven days a week from FaaFan. Mohamud created a shell company, Tunyar Trading, and claimed it was a meal vendor for the Stigma-Free Willmar food site. Between November 2020 and December 2021, Mohamud and his co-conspirators claimed to have served approximately 1.6 million meals to children through Stigma-Free Willmar.
To accomplish their scheme, Mohamud and his co-conspirators prepared and submitted fake meal counts, invoices, and attendance rosters. Mohamud ultimately transferred more than $2.5 million from Tunyar Trading to himself and other co-conspirators. He also created another shell company called Five A’s Projects LLC, where he transferred more than $1 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. These proceeds were used to purchase the former location of Kelly’s 19th Hole, a bar and restaurant in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.
According to court documents, Mohamud paid more than $225,000 in bribes and kickbacks from Tunyar Trading LLC to Abdikerm Eidleh, a Feeding Our Future employee who served as the site support manager for the Stigma-Free Willmar site, in exchange for sponsoring and facilitating Stigma-Free Willmar’s fraudulent participation in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. In exchange, Feeding Our Future received nearly $500,000 in administrative fees for sponsoring the Stigma-Free Willmar site’s participation in the program. In December 2021, the defendant paid $5,750 to a GoFundMe account for Feeding Our Future created by Aimee Bock.
In total, Stigma-Free Willmar received over $5.3 million in payments from Feeding Our Future based on fraudulent claims. As part of his sentence, Mohamud was ordered to forfeit the Kelly’s 19th Hole property, and $378,207.20 in fraudulent funds seized from his Tunyar Trading LLC bank account.
According to FBI Special Agent Jared Kary, this is the thirty-sixth guilty plea entered in the case that now includes 70 defendants. At the hearing I learned that Mohamud is a Navy veteran. He served from 2011 to 2015. He is a well-spoken man with a clean-cut appearance. He scrupulously responded to Judge Brasel’s questions to support the guilty plea.
The press release refers to his forfeiture of Kelly’s 19th Hole, a closed Brooklyn Park restaurant and bar. Bill Glahn wrote about it here. The plea also includes an agreement of restitution of $3,000,000. His sentence will include an order of restitution (background on the process is posted here).
He obviously had a constructive contribution to make, but he did the crime and needs to do the time, whatever it turns out to be. It is appalling how many otherwise decent immigrants were unable to resist the lure of free money. I do not understand how they could have been so oblivious to the consequences or unconstrained by any pangs of conscience.
This case stands at the intersection of insane immigration and the correlative Democratic politics. Some explanation of what happened is called for. Attention must be paid.
Feeding Our Future founder and executive director Aimee Bock is on trial in the current case. She helped ruin the lives of immigrants whom she used for her own purposes. The voluminous incriminating evidence the government has introduced so far gives little hint of her motives. She apparently wanted to be idolized by the community. She enriched herself, to be sure, but on nothing like the scale of those whose lives she helped ruin.
