[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A second Somali fraudster, who stole half a million dollars, was handed a mere six months in jail by a Minneapolis judge, just a day after one of her co-conspirators was sentenced to a year.
Zamzam Jama was ordered to pay back $491,000 and will spend half a year in jail for her role in the Feeding Our Future scandal on Tuesday, Kare 11 reporter Lou Raguse reported.
She was sentenced by Judge Nancy Brasel, who gave her co-conspirator Abdul Abubakar Ali a one-year sentence just the day before.
Jama and Abubaker are just two of the dozens of fraudsters in the case. Jama is the first of six in her family to be sentenced.
The Jama family ran their scheme out of Brava Restaurant and Cafe in Rochester, Minnesota. The Jama family has been accused of stealing $5.6million of taxpayer cash by falsely claiming to be feeding children.
Jama used the money to buy a $480,000 home in Rosemount and a Toyota Rav4 with the stolen money. Those possessions, as well as $150,000, have been seized from her bank account, Raguse said.
Her family members have pleaded guilty and are awaiting their sentencing.
Jama is only the eighth defendant to be sentenced in the case. Others have been given a year and 17.5-year sentences so far, according to the Center of American Experiment, a think tank.
The Justice Department accused the defendants of stealing $250million by exploiting the federally funded child nutrition program from 2019 to 2021.
The group was indicted in September 2022 and accused of using the nutrition program to launder millions, instead of using the money to feed children, as was intended by the program.
The Jama family claimed to have served 1.7 million meals out of their restaurant through the program.
Defendants submitted false documentation, including invoices and attendance rosters, the DOJ said.
Jama and Ali both apologized to the court for their actions, and Brasel said she did not expect to see Jama back in court for another crime, Raguse reported.
On Monday, Judge Nancy Brasel sentenced Ali to just over a year behind bars - a punishment that sparked outrage across the city, according to Kare 11 News.
Despite initially pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, additional charges of money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud were ultimately dismissed at sentencing as part of his plea deal.
Ali apologized to the court after learning his fate, vowing to spend 'the rest of my life' attempting to make things right.
Ali's sentence includes a legal technicality that could pave the way to a halfway house with good behavior, despite pocketing more than $100,000 in taxpayer money for himself.
All parties - Judge Brasel, defense attorney Kevin Gregorius and Assistant US Attorney Matthew Murphy - agreed that Ali had shown genuine remorse, emphasizing that he was among the first to plead guilty more than three years ago.
Murphy, not part of the initial prosecutions in the Feeding Our Future scandal, said his immediate cooperation sparked a chain of guilty pleas and played a key role in building the government's case in the broader investigation.
'Mr Ali did immediately accept responsibility, within weeks of being indicted, accepted responsibility and wholly admitted his guilt and provided very valuable and useful information to the government at a very early stage,' he said.
Both the government and Ali's defense attorney requested a probationary sentence, noting that he had accepted responsibility for his actions in the years since, including having already paid $90,000 of the $122,000 in restitution he owed.
The judge ultimately decided that, while probation was off the table, Ali's early cooperation justified a sentence below the recommended 30 to 36 months.
Ali confessed that he and his co-conspirators relied on fake invoices for food and services, falsely claiming to have served over 1.5 million meals provided by S&S Catering in just seven months.
To date, more than 60 people have been convicted in the case - most from Minnesota’s Somali community - and a total of 79 have now pleaded guilty or been convicted.
The criminals falsely claimed they had served 91 million meals. Instead, much of the money was funneled into shell companies and squandered on shopping sprees and real estate, including properties in Kenya and the Maldives.
The probe has become a national story, representing the largest single‑fraud case pursued by the US Attorney’s Office in recent memory.
Minnesota's Democrat Governor Tim Walz has been accused of ignoring the scandal after being given initial warnings about it over fears he would be accused of racism.
[Daily Mail] A Russian An-26 military transport plane has crashed into a cliff in Crimea, killing 29 people on board, due to a possible technical malfunction. At least it landed
Communication with the aircraft was lost at about 6pm local time (1500 GMT) on Tuesday on a planned flight over Crimea.
The peninsula, covered in sweeping mountains leading down to the coast of the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.
'The defence ministry reported that a search team found the site of the catastrophe,' TASS reported.
'According to a report from the site, six crew members and 23 passengers on board were killed.'
The ministry did not say how many people were on board, but it made no mention of any survivors on the An-26, a light tactical military transport that has for decades been a mainstay that can carry cargo and up to 40 passengers over short and medium distances.
'There was no impact on the aircraft,' TASS quoted the ministry as saying, implying that objects like missiles, drones and birds were not involved.
'The preliminary cause of the crash is a technical malfunction. A commission from the military is working at the site,' it said.
Travelers note: Very, very bad about falling from the sky, those AN-26's.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/02/2026 13:23 Comments ||
Top||
#2
It's like all of these people watched 'The Apprentice' but none of them worked out the theme of the show.
When you work for Don Trump, you are a fire and forget missile.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/02/2026 14:58 Comments ||
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#3
They better learn that Dontavius ain't playing the bullshit.
Posted by: chris ||
04/02/2026 19:35 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
