The Bee-Watcher Watcher - Fraud in Minnesota
This article from September 2024 examines the fraud connected to Mayor Frey and CM Jamal Osman.
Brief Overview
Today, I’m republishing a piece first shared on September 22, 2024, outlining several Minneapolis connections to the massive fraud uncovered in Minnesota. We’re bringing it back because it’s striking to see a surge of attention to these issues now, even though the warning signs have been documented for years. That’s the media cycle for you—sometimes a story only catches fire when the right person tosses a match at the right moment.
Since this article first ran, our subscriber base has more than doubled, yet it remains one of our most-read pieces—proof that even when we were smaller, readers recognized the importance of the story.
Original Story on Fraud in Minnesota and Its Connection to Minneapolis
This piece required extensive research, drawing on multiple sources including The Reformer, The Sahan Journal, and the Star Tribune. The impetus for this investigation was the report that Sharmarke Issa pleaded guilty to committing $7.6 million in fraud as part of the Feeding Our Future case. His guilty plea stands out because he was first appointed by Mayor Frey in 2019 to serve as Chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA). To secure this position, he was granted a waiver from the residency requirement. Issa has also been implicated in the ongoing investigation into autism center fraud.
If Issa were the only person connected to the mayor involved in fraud, it might be easy to dismiss this as one bad apple in a larger pool of appointments. But he isn’t. Consider Abdi Nur Salah, former senior policy aide to Mayor Frey, and Abdi Warsame, former Ward 6 council member and current Executive Director/CEO of MPHA. Salah was dismissed by the mayor after being named in federal filings related to the Feeding Our Future fraud. While serving as the mayor’s aide, Salah became co-owner of Stigma-Free International, a shell company transferred to him by its founder, Jamal Osman. The company was used to siphon off millions intended to feed children. A year before Salah’s indictment, Mayor Frey had appointed him to the Joint Airport Zoning Board for Crystal Airport.
Additionally, Abdikadir Ainashe Mohamud, another co-owner of Stigma-Free International, was appointed by Mayor Frey to the Minneapolis Community Safety Workgroup. (Mohamud was convicted of fraud in February 2025 for stealing $5.3 million.)
Abdi Warsame resigned from the city council to lead the MPHA, and Jamal Osman won a special election to replace him as Ward 6 council member. During Osman’s re-election campaign, it was revealed that his wife, Ilo Amba, had her nonprofit, Urban Advantage Services, shut down by State Attorney General Ellison for falsifying records and obtaining $461,533 in federal reimbursements to enrich herself and her family. Although a reasonable assumption might be that Jamal Osman benefited from these funds, no one has been charged with fraud—yet. Osman won his re-election (he was re-elected again this year, 2025, and currently chairs the Business, Housing, & Zoning Committee on the city council), and Amba is now a realtor.
We found these multi-layer connections confusing and difficult to track, so we created this chart to help.
It’s possible that Mayor Frey was as surprised as anyone when his senior policy aide, his appointment to Chair the Public Housing Authority, and his appointment to the Minneapolis Community Safety Workgroup were accused of fraud. Perhaps his staff, responsible for vetting these individuals, did a poor job. It’s also possible that over the years of working with Abdi Nur Salah, both Frey and Warsame had no idea he was inclined toward fraud. And perhaps Jamal Osman did not know that the company he founded and later transferred to these men would be used for fraudulent purposes. It’s even possible that when Osman’s wife’s nonprofit was shut down, he was genuinely upset, unaware of her actions.
Degrading Trust
(We’re deleting projects that were highlighted from the 2024 budget.)
The Mayor and Council are entrusted with spending hundreds of millions of dollars on essentials and non-essential contractual services. We place enormous trust in Council Members like Jamal Osman and Mayor Frey to ensure fraud isn’t happening. We count on them to ensure that contracts aren’t inflated due to relationships with friends or donors and that services are delivered efficiently and economically.
Raising taxes and increasing spending while firing key staff members for fraud and passing shell companies to friends is not how good governance works, nor is it how trust is built.
In Dr. Seuss’s story of the bee-watcher, the town of Hawtch-Hawtch hires a bee-watcher to watch the town bee. However, because they don’t trust the bee-watcher to stay alert, they send someone to watch the bee-watcher—and then another, and another. This story encapsulates how we feel about city government: there aren’t enough watchers watching the watchers.
Thanks for re-posting.
My insight from the revived Minnesota and Minneapolis social services fraud story is that it is more than Walz's incompetence, Frey's bad judgment, or Somali fraudsters. Having worked my whole career in banking, I know how many resources we devoted to fraud prevention and fraud prosecution. It takes an attitude, but it also requires significant investment in people, systems, and physical security (the old bank vault).
There is another problem you often talk about: the government’s outsourcing. When you outsource, you need to have many controls and checks in place to manage the vendor (the bee-watcher watcher). Vendor management is a serious skill set, and I assume the government (from local to federal) does not take vendor management seriously.
“The Government” is huge, with very few resources devoted to things like fraud and vendor management. This has to change, or the whole system will crumble. We need to approach fraud prevention and vendor management with urgency.
One correction, Jamal Osman does not chair the Budget Committee; he chairs the Business, Housing, & Zoning Committee.