Feeding Our Future: the defense of Salim Said, Aye Begorrah!

The second Feeding Our Future trial resumed this morning at the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. Your correspondent was there.

Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant of south Minneapolis, is on trial with Feeding Our Future founder and CEO Aimee Bock in the sprawling alleged free-food fraud.

Said’s first defense witness, a social media influencer, gave his testimony Friday afternoon. Testimony from a second witness was abandoned, which left Said himself as first up this morning.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, the jurors all arrived dressed in green.

In direct examination by his lawyer, Said, now aged 36, told of being born in Mogadishu, spending some of his childhood bouncing back and forth between refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, then emigrating to Minnesota in his early teens. He began working while still attending high school in Minneapolis. Among his early jobs was working the log chute ride at Camp Snoopy at the Mall.

He had an early stint as a busboy, then dishwasher, at the Safari Restaurant. He returned years later, and while working full-time as an Amazon driver, returned part-time at Safari, eventually becoming a 1/3 co-owner of the establishment near Lake Street.

Said alternated between discussing, on the one hand, how hard he worked for his money (working 7 days a week/365 days a year, for five years straight until October 2020), and on the other, how detached he was from corporate decision making and knowledge of financial matters.

Said is overall Defendant No. 3 in the scandal. For the most part, Said sought to lay blame for the scandal on his business partner, Abdulkadir Nur Salah, Defendant No. 4, who pled guilty in the case right before the current trial began. Nearly everyone involved has a street name, and Nur Salah’s is “Fish.”

Both Said and his other witness, social media influencer Mohamed Liban, were asked by the defense lawyer to describe operations at Safari. Both men, unprompted, brought up the frequency of political events held at the restaurant/events center. Said went further, suggesting that the establishment played a kingmaker role in local politics, stating (and I quote), “If you don’t go through Safari, you don’t become a politician.”

It would appear that their political patrons have abandoned the Safari group of defendants in their hour of need.

To that point, defense counsel sought to introduce into evidence a video featuring local Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (DFL-Minneapolis) appearing at the restaurant. The prosecution objected and, so far, the video has not been introduced.

Many videos were introduced by the defense, all revolving around the themes of buildings and food.

In the late 1970s, the Talking Heads issued an album called More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978). It featured the hit cover song, “Take Me to the River.”

Today’s testimony featured discussion of the Mississippi River, and the buildings of the Cedar Riverside area, where Said alleges, he delivered large quantities of food. Said described the area as “Little Mogadishu” after his hometown and the adjacent Cedar Ave. as “Somali Street.”

I mentioned how the name of Shafi Qanyare, a former Feeding Our Future employee, came up in testimony last week. Today, Said testified that it was Qanyare who first recruited Safari Restaurant into Feeding’s food distribution network in April 2020.

Later, under cross-examination by lead prosecutor Joe Thompson, the jury was shown two checks totaling $40,000 that Said sent to Qanyare, personally. Thompson suggested that the payments represented a form of bribe/kickback to Qanyare. Said suggested that they were investments in a never-opened business. Qanyare has not been charged with, or accused of, any wrongdoing in the case.

The role of another former Feeding staffer was discussed, Abdikerm Eidleh, Defendant No. 2 who continues to be an international fugitive from justice. The jury was shown a series of payments made by Said to (alleged) shell companies controlled by Eidleh. All were located at the same multi-tenant office building south of Uptown. For his part, Said claimed that he was told by “Fish” to make these payments to Eidleh, for reasons never explained to Said.

In addition to Nur Salah/Fish, Said’s other business partners, in various combinations, included Defendant Nos. 5, 7, 13, and 14.

Much of the testimony today involved Said’s 1/3 investments in two other corporate entities. ASA Limited was founded in September 2020 and claimed to operate a food site in St. Paul.

This being St. Patrick’s Day, it turns out the ASA site was located in a strip mall named Shamrock Plaza. The food site was located near a mosque in Shamrock.

Founded on or about the same day as ASA, Olive Management operated a food site in St. Cloud at this address.

It turns out that Olive’s landlord in St. Cloud, who operated the small market shown above, hosting the Olive site, was convicted in an unrelated $4 million SNAP fraud. Again, by sheer coincidence, the Safari-related nonprofit Stigma-Free International operated their St. Cloud distribution site at the next-door restaurant, also shown above. Said claims to have no connection to Stigma-Free.

Prosecutor Thompson showed Said the payouts made to the three owners of Olive Management. Said took home more than $1.2 million, more than twice the next larger amount. In fact, his take was more than his two co-owners’ combined take. Said’s reply came in the form of question, something along the lines of “How did I make more than the other two owners? They’re brothers!” Thompson agreed that it was a very good question.

Thompson had began his cross-examination earlier in the day with a review of Said’s more-than-a-decade-old felony conviction for forgery, fraud, and theft back in Indiana. The incident involved a couple of laptops stolen at a Walmart. Said related that he was arrested in the case trying to cross the Canadian border. I will point out that Canada is nowhere near Indiana.

Said blames the incident on an unscrupulous uncle and perjured testimony against him at trial. Sound familiar?

Thompson showed Said pre-Covid tax returns filed by Safari. Thompson’s point was to demonstrate that the free-food program proved to be far more lucrative than paid-food sales.

Said suggested that was an unfair comparison, in that in the pre-COVID Safari was a cash-heavy business and the IRS totals were under-reported. What, what? No, this really happened.

For his part, Said invested his share of the scam/hard-won profits in pickup for him, a Mercedes for his stay-at-home wife, and a $1.1 million home in Plymouth (with an indoor basketball court).

He and his partners spent $2.7 million in buying the office building housed in a historic mansion on Park Ave. in south Minneapolis.

All of this while the banks were constantly shutting down his corporate accounts on the unfounded, racist basis of suspected money laundering.

Speaking of money laundering, Thompson walked Said through a series of financial transactions where money moved from Company A to Company B to C to D and then returned to C. Said agreed with Thompson’s description of the transactions and their chronological order. Thompson then posed the rhetorical question, “Isn’t that money laundering?”

I could go on. Said’s cross-examination resumes at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. The jury could get the case as early as tomorrow.