A Columbia Heights man pleaded guilty Thursday to laundering fraudulently obtained money meant to feed hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Abdullahe Nur Jesow, 65, admitted in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis to his role in helping steal $17.4 million from a federal child nutrition program by falsely claiming to serve thousands of children per day at food program sites run with eight co-conspirators through the company, S&S Catering. Jesow was scheduled to go to trial Oct. 14 before U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel.
Court filings say Jesow operated the food site Academy for Youth Excellence, which claimed to serve meals out of a banquet hall located above S&S Catering. Jesow’s Academy for Youth Excellence contracted with S&S Catering as a vendor to provide the food that the site was supposed to deliver through the federally funded food program.
Instead, prosecutors said, Jesow and his co-conspirators submitted false meal counts and inflated attendance rosters and invoices. In December 2020, the group claimed to serve 2,500 children daily. By April 2021, the numbers of meals grew to 5,000 per day. From December 2020 to September 2021, Academy for Youth Excellence claimed to have served more than 1.7 million meals, for which the group received more than $4.2 million.
Jesow received a fraction of that amount, prosecutors said, and turned the bulk of the funds to the co-conspirators in cash payments or by laundering the proceeds.
Jesow is the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the mammoth federal food fraud case come to be known as the Feeding Our Future investigation — referring to the nonprofit at the center of the scheme. The case has so far netted 75 suspects.
On the same day of Jesow’s plea, federal prosecutors filed wire fraud charges against eight people in another “massive” alleged fraud scheme. The eight individuals are accused of defrauding Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program by billing Medicaid for housing services they did not provide.
Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson nodded to the new indictments in a statement about Jesow’s conviction.
