Major fraud sentencing in nutrition scheme

A Minneapolis man just got 43 months in federal prison after prosecutors said he used a banquet hall called Benadir Hall to help siphon money from a pandemic child meal program, and a judge also ordered him to pay $866,458 back. The Justice Department said the man, Abdullahe Nur Jesow, was sentenced on April 9, 2026, after pleading guilty in September 2025 to one count of money laundering. (justice.gov) The case sits inside Minnesota’s sprawling Feeding Our Future scandal, which federal prosecutors have described as the largest coronavirus fraud scheme in the United States. By late 2025, the Justice Department said 77 defendants had been charged in the broader case. (justice.gov) The basic setup was simple on paper. Small sites claimed they were serving free meals to children through the Federal Child Nutrition Program, then asked the government to reimburse them for each meal. (justice.gov) Prosecutors said Jesow’s site operated through a nonprofit called Academy for Youth Excellence and claimed to hand out meals from December 2020 through September 2021 at Benadir Hall on Lake Street in Minneapolis. During that period, the site claimed more than 1.7 million meals. (justice.gov) Federal prosecutors said those meal counts were fiction. They said Academy for Youth Excellence provided only a fraction of the meals it claimed, but the paperwork still brought in $4,286,088 in federal nutrition money for the site and its listed food vendor, S&S Catering. (justice.gov) Jesow was not accused of inventing the whole scheme by himself. In his guilty plea, prosecutors said he was part of an eight-defendant S&S Catering group that worked together to steal and launder $17.4 million, while his own site reported daily meal counts that rose from about 2,500 a day to about 5,000 a day, seven days a week. (justice.gov) The money trail mattered as much as the fake meal logs. Prosecutors said Jesow received about 5 percent of the federal money tied to his site and then sent most of the rest back to co-conspirators in cash or by check, which is why he pleaded guilty to money laundering rather than a meal-count charge. (justice.gov) The Justice Department also said Jesow used fraud proceeds for personal purchases, including a home in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. Judge Nancy E. Brasel said at sentencing that the fraud “severely undermined public trust” in government programs. (justice.gov) That loss of trust is a theme running through the whole case. In one of the biggest Feeding Our Future sentencings, prosecutors said scheme leader Abdiaziz Shafii Farah stole more than $47 million by claiming 18 million meals at more than 30 sites, some of which were described in court papers as parking lots or vacant commercial spaces. (justice.gov) Jesow’s 43-month sentence is smaller than the headline-grabbing prison terms in the top tier of the case, but it shows where federal prosecutors are still pushing: not just at the organizers, but at the site operators, vendors, and money movers who turned meal reimbursements into cash withdrawals, real estate, and kickbacks. The agencies on Jesow’s case were the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, and the United States Postal Inspection Service. (justice.gov)