The Warren E. Burger Federal Building and United States Courthouse in St. Paul. Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer.
A federal grand jury Wednesday indicted five people for attempting to bribe a juror in the Feeding Our Future fraud trial, in a case that is likely to raise questions about juror security in high-profile criminal trials.
Three of the people charged with bribery were on trial for stealing $49 million from a federal program intended to feed hungry children in what’s become known as the Feeding Our Future scandal; a fourth is the brother of two defendants; the fifth is a Seattle woman recruited to bribe a juror, prosecutors said.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger called it a “chilling attack on our justice system” and an elaborate scheme to infiltrate the jury — akin to those he saw years ago as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn where he worked to dismantle mafia families.
When the scheme was made public in the courtroom on June 3, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson called it “something out of a mob movie.”
“It is so much more,” Luger said during a press conference. “It just doesn’t happen in Minnesota, until now.”
The night before the jury was set to begin deliberations in the first Feeding Our Future case to go to trial, a woman driving a Mazda dropped off a gift bag with $120,000 in cash at a juror’s home in Spring Lake Park. The juror called 911 and reported it to the Spring Lake Park Police Department and was later excused from jury duty by U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel, who said the juror was “terrified.”
A Seattle woman, Ladan Mohamed Ali, is charged with delivering the cash. Prosecutors say she agreed to deliver the bribe in exchange for $150,000. Luger said her fingerprints were found on the bag, and she was seen in street surveillance videos following the juror home from the courthouse on May 31, the day closing arguments began and one day after she flew from Seattle to Minneapolis and rented a hotel room and Mazda. Ali’s rental car records showed she repeatedly followed the juror, driving near the juror’s home 19 times, Luger said.
All five of the defendants are charged with conspiracy to bribe a juror, bribing a juror, corruptly influencing a juror and planning the scheme using Signal, an encrypted messaging app. Luger said the defendants were in custody or turning themselves in, and three were scheduled to make their first appearance on bribery charges later Wednesday.
Two of the three people charged in the bribery who were on trial in the case were convicted — Abdiaziz Shafii Farah and Abdimajid Mohamed Nur — but the third, Said Shafii Farah, was acquitted and now faces multiple bribery charges.
Abdulkarim Shafii Farah, brother of Abdiaziz Shafii Farah and Said Shafii Farah, is charged with helping orchestrate the bribe. Luger said he bought a screwdriver to remove the rental car’s license plate and drove with Ali to the juror’s house to deliver the cash bribe. The FBI recovered a text to his brother Said Farah saying, “still posted outside of house” and a video of Ali delivering the bribe with the message “watch and delete.”
Luger said when Thompson announced during the trial that someone had tried to bribe a juror, Abdiaziz Farah immediately grabbed his phone and deleted everything on it by doing a factory reset — for which he was also charged with obstruction of justice. Two days into jury deliberations, the FBI searched his home and found a list of the jurors’ names in a water bottle, Luger said.
Luger said the group targeted the juror known only by number, Juror No. 52, because she was the youngest, and they believed her to be the only juror of color (Asian-American).
“Fortunately for all of us, Juror 52 could not be bought, and she terminated their scheme,” Luger said.
The suspects researched her online, found her address and surveilled her, following her home from the courthouse. Ali bought a GPS tracking device that was delivered to her hotel room, but she’d already fled Minneapolis when the bribery scheme was made public.
Luger said the defendants obtained about $200,000 in cash to give the juror — although $120,000 in cash was ultimately delivered, along with what he described as a “chilling” list of instructions and arguments for the juror to make in pushing that all the defendants be acquitted. Luger said they wrote a subtly intimidating message: “You alone can end this case.” They also sought to win sympathy on racial grounds: “We are immigrants: they don’t respect and care about us” and “People of color and immigrants (were being) prosecuted for the fault of other people.”
Luger said they were trying to inject arguments for which there is no basis and that could never be made in a court of law, employing the same tactic nonprofit Feeding Our Future used to get state officials to back off when they tried to stop the fraud.
The Minnesota Department of Education — which administered the federal child nutrition program — stopped payments to the nonprofit in 2021, but Feeding Our Future sued the state, alleging racial discrimination. Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann ruled that the state couldn’t halt payments unless it found fraud, so MDE resumed payments.
Luger called it an obvious attempt to inflame the jury.
“We do our jobs without fear or favor,” Luger said.
He said prosecutors will now consider sequestering juries and keeping their names anonymous in future cases. He said they don’t have any evidence attempts were made to bribe other jurors, but are still investigating.
When the bribery attempt came to light as the trial wound down, the judge had to keep the remaining 12 jurors and five alternates from hearing about it and ensure no other juror had been tampered with. Brasel ordered all of the defendants jailed, their cell phones turned over to the FBI, and the jury sequestered until it reached a verdict four days later, convicting five of the seven defendants.
The seven defendants faced 41 charges — chiefly wire fraud, bribery and money laundering — alleging they claimed to give away 18.8 million meals to needy children from 50 sites across the state during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecutors said they fabricated invoices and submitted thousands of phony names of children in order to get reimbursed millions of dollars, which they used to buy luxury cars, houses, jewelry and property overseas — and very little food.
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur were convicted of a variety of money laundering, wire fraud and bribery charges. Said Shafii Farah and Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin were acquitted of all charges.
More than five dozen other defendants have been charged; 18 have pleaded guilty and one fled the country.
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