Abdiaziz Farah tried to buy his way out of a federal fraud conviction with $120,000 in cash. It cost him another decade behind bars.
A federal judge in St. Paul sentenced Abdiaziz Shafii Farah to 120 months in prison on July 22 for conspiring to bribe a juror during his 2024 trial, on top of the 28-year sentence he is already serving for his role in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud. U.S. District Judge Eric C. Tostrud ordered the new sentence to run consecutively, bringing Farah's total time behind bars to 38 years.
The scheme was as brazen as it was clumsy. Prosecutors say that shortly after jury selection began in Farah's trial, he and four associates, Ladan Mohamed Ali, Abdulkarim Shafii Farah, Said Shafii Farah and Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, conspired to deliver a bag containing $120,000 in cash to the home of one of the jurors, with a promise of more money if she voted to acquit. The juror did not take the deal. She called law enforcement immediately, and the plot fell apart before it could taint the verdict.
Feeding Our Future was supposed to be a nonprofit that fed hungry kids during COVID-era school closures, drawing on federal child nutrition dollars administered through the Minnesota Department of Education. Instead it became a vehicle for one of the largest fraud schemes ever prosecuted in the United States, with prosecutors tracing roughly $250 million siphoned out of a program meant to feed children who, in many cases, never existed on the meal counts submitted to the state.
Farah himself ran Empire Cuisine and Market, one of the food-site operators feeding off the program, and was convicted at trial in 2024 on multiple counts of wire fraud, bribery and money laundering. The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor later found that state officials had flagged irregularities early on and kept approving payments anyway, a systemic failure inside the very agency charged with catching exactly this kind of theft. Prosecutors have said publicly that much of the $250 million may never be recovered.
A Trump DOJ still cleaning up a Biden-era mess
The juror bribery case has continued moving through federal court well into the second Trump administration, with the Justice Department pressing forward on a scheme that metastasized during the Biden administration's watch over pandemic relief spending. The fraud itself ran largely in 2020 and 2021, when federal nutrition waivers loosened normal verification requirements to speed food aid to kids during lockdowns, a relaxation of oversight that prosecutors and auditors now agree left the program wide open to exploitation.
Farah's case is one of more than 70 charged in connection with Feeding Our Future, and it stands out for what happened after the verdict came down against him. Most fraud defendants take their sentence. Farah tried to buy a different one, cash in hand, delivered to a juror's front door in the middle of a federal criminal trial. That is not a footnote to the fraud case. It is its own crime, obstruction of justice dressed up as desperation, and Judge Tostrud treated it that way with a sentence that adds a full decade rather than folding it quietly into time already being served.
The broader Feeding Our Future prosecutions are not finished. Additional defendants continue to face trial and sentencing in Minnesota federal court, and the same U.S. Attorney's office that convicted Farah has signaled more cases are coming. For a program built to feed hungry children, the lasting legacy so far is a case study in how loose federal oversight during the pandemic opened the door to theft on a scale the country had not seen before, and how far at least one defendant was willing to go to avoid paying for it.
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