As a U.S. Marshal escorted Mohamed Jama Ismail into the courtroom Tuesday morning, his gaunt appearance and the sound of his shackles led to audible gasps and sobs from some of his family and supporters in the courtroom.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ultimately sentenced Mohamed to 12 years in prison.
Mohamed, 51, has been held in Sherburne County Jail for the past seven months. He wore an orange-and-white striped prison suit and a kufi cap and embraced his defense attorney, Patrick Cotter, as he entered the courtroom. His supporters filled up two rows of benches in the courtroom.
Mohamed, the co-owner of Empire Cuisine & Market, received the prison term along with three years of supervised release for his crimes. The Shakopee restaurant was at the center of the first Feeding Our Future trial held this past spring.
After the hearing, federal prosecutors declined to comment on the sentence. Cotter told reporters that Mohamed, a former refugee who fled war-torn Somalia three decades ago and built a family life in Minnesota, should not be defined by one mistake he made. Cotter added that he is certain Mohamed will appeal the sentence.
“My client is disappointed by this sentence,” Cotter said. “He doesn’t feel like it is an individualized sentence. This sentence was made to send a message. That said, we respect the judge and the court process.”
A jury found Mohamed guilty of three crimes — conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and money laundering — after a six-week trial that concluded in June. A handful of the jurors who made the verdict attended Mohamed’s sentencing Tuesday. All of them declined to comment.
In delivering her sentence to Mohamed, Brasel said she “certainly” credits all the hardships he’s experienced as a refugee and all successes he’s made in his family life. But she argued that they are not an excuse for a reduced sentence.
“At a time when the world was most vulnerable, you decided not to be a helper, but a thief,” Brasel told Mohamed. “I can think of no motivation other than pure motivated greed.”
Mohamed made a brief statement to the court near the end of his hearing, sometimes speaking emotionally.
“Your honor, I am not a bad person,” he said. “I’m just a family man. But the government, they say I’m somebody else.”
Federal prosecutors asked for roughly 12½ years in prison for Mohamed. Mohamed’s defense attorney asked for a much smaller range, between two to three years in prison.
Federal prosecutors noted in their sentencing memo that Mohamed took $2 million in federal food-aid money and spent much of it on personal expenses, including $130,000 on his home mortgage and $11,000 on firearms. The memo also said that Mohamed invested more than $400,000 abroad in China, money that the government can’t recover and that Mohamed can access.
“Ismail will leave prison a wealthy man, with real estate holdings in both Kenya and Somalia,” the prosecution memo said. “And for that reason alone, the Court needs to impose a significant sentence.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson argued for a long sentence for Mohamed, stating that the Feeding Our Future fraud is much different from a typical white-collar embezzlement case. Those cases usually involve business owners motivated to scam their clients to keep their business afloat, or someone in a financial crisis who is stealing money to pay off their personal debts.
“That’s not what happened here,” Thompson said.
Instead, he argued, Mohamed and the other Feeding Our Future defendants exploited the worst pandemic in a century.
“The streets were like the zombie apocalypse,” Thompson said of the early COVID-19 days, when Empire Cuisine was formed and enrolled in the federal child nutrition programs. “Everyone stayed home to flatten the curve. The defendants took advantage of that from day one. They saw the opportunity to get rich from day one.”
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Cotter argued that Mohamed played a minor role in the fraud scheme and that he shouldn’t be defined by one mistake. Cotter took issue with arguments from prosecutors that Mohamed has not expressed remorse for his crime.
“He can’t come in here today and express remorse because his rights have not been exhausted. The government knows that,” Cotter said. “I cannot get up here and ethically express remorse because he has not been fully vindicated of all his rights.”
Mohamed’s sentencing memo argued that he was a minor player in the fraud scheme who “did not have a full knowledge of the scope and the structure of the criminal activity.”
Cotter argued in the memo that Empire Cuisine co-owner Abdiaziz Farah “controlled all bank accounts, conducted all communications with Feeding or Future and Partners in Nutrition, and set up a separate company Empire Enterprises that [Mohamed] was not aware of to submit claims.”
“Mr. Abdiaziz Farah planned and organized the criminal activity along with other co-conspirators, and had full decision-making authority,” Mohamed’s memo said. “Mr. Ismail’s participation was more limited.”
Cotter also unsuccessfully asked the court not to consider Mohamed’s passport fraud conviction, which prosecutors argued was obstruction of justice, as part of his sentence. FBI agents arrested Mohamed on a jetway in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in spring 2022 for passport fraud as he was boarding a trip to Kenya. This came just months after the FBI seized Mohamed’s passport, raided his house and told him he was the target of a fraud investigation.
Mohamed later pleaded guilty to lying on a passport application to fraudulently obtain a second passport and served time in jail for it. Mohamed has always maintained he wasn’t fleeing the country to avoid prosecution, but was instead visiting family in Kenya.
But Brasel denied Cotter’s argument, saying that she considered it appropriate for his sentence because Mohamed devoted “significant time and resources” to obtaining the passport and attempting to leave the country.
Federal prosecutors have said the broader fraud case involved the theft of at least $250 million in federal money earmarked to feed underprivileged children during the COVID pandemic. The Minnesota Department of Education distributed the money to organizations like Feeding Our Future and Partners in Quality Care, which distributed it further to food vendors and sites that were supposed to feed children ready-to-eat meals.
Some organizations along the chain allegedly reported serving more meals than they actually did in order to receive more federal money. Some never served any meals at all despite claiming that they had.
Prosecutors charged 70 people in the case. Twenty-two defendants have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors estimate that $47 million in federal money flowed through Empire Cuisine.
