Antonio Bonheur is this week’s poster boy for rampant welfare fraud in Massachusetts.
A 75-year-old naturalized US citizen born in (where else?) Haiti, Bonheur ran a $7 million food-stamp racket.
The wide-open scam enriched Haitian freeloaders as Bonheur personally netted a million bucks in just two years after Joe Biden rang the dinner bell for every grifter in the Third World.
The Haitian “residents” would give Bonheur $100 in food stamps, and he’d hand them back about $80 in cash.
A 20 percent rake-off in other words. It adds up fast, especially when your “supermarket” has no overhead – no stock, no employees, no spoilage, no shoplifting, etc.
Seven million stolen, $6 million to Gov. Maura Healey’s non-working Haitian “residents,” and a million off the top for the Haitian Mr. Big.
Everything free in America! How’s that Immigration Reform Act of 1965 working out for you?
Bonheur will be sentenced in federal court Wednesday.
His lawyer is a public defender. But you knew that. When was the last time any “resident” ever paid for anything, let alone his own criminal defense attorney?
The food-stamp racket didn’t take off until Joe Biden opened the borders in 2021. The Democrats began flying Haitians into Logan by the thousands, and soon Healey was opening close to 80 flophouses for their permanent relaxation.
Maura provided the “residents” with free everything, including three square meals a day. Incredibly, on top of every other handout she gave them food stamps — disposable income to launder through the likes of Bonheur.
Soon Massachusetts society was groaning under the burden of these hordes of foreign freeloaders. Their influx was terrible news for taxpayers and public safety, but fantastic for Antonio Bonheur’s net worth.
“The defendant’s scheme accelerated in January 2024,” the feds say in their sentencing memo. “Monthly SNAP redemptions routinely cleared $200,000, driven by hundreds of beneficiaries trafficking their SNAP benefits for cash.”
The name of his “store” in Mattapan Square was Jesula Variety.
“To call it a convenience store is rather misleading,” the feds write. “This was a glorified closet with an EBT terminal in about 150 square feet. Jesula has one register, no carriages, no hand baskets, no freezers, no refrigerators and only a few items of food for sale.”
How asleep at the switch were the state’s watchdogs?
At the same time the Haitian highwayman was pocketing hundreds of thousands a month in welfare cash, he was also applying for his own food stamps.
“The Mass DTA kept him on the state SNAP rolls as an impoverished beneficiary. Based on a single, fraudulent ‘self-verification’ in 2022, the defendant was able to pocket roughly $300 per month in public assistance, which he then immediately swiped for cash at his own terminal.”
In other words, Bonheur was stealing so much welfare money he was practically an honorary Somali.
“Put another way: the Defendant was not only the president of a business committing millions of dollars of SNAP fraud, he was also a client.”
What is this Haitian’s background, you ask? His public defender claims he worked at a series of odd jobs over the years, while “marveling” at having made it to the US, “where opportunities exist for immigrants to carve out a life.”
Bonheur carved out a life for himself all right. A life of crime.
According to the pre-sentencing report, until Biden and Healey got into office, “the defendant had remarkably little legitimate to show” for his years here in the US.
“He reports essentially no assets and no income,” the feds state, “and possesses no vocational or technical skills… His SNAP applications further reveal that his healthcare is subsidized entirely by the federal government.”
Another surprise – not!
His public defender paints Bonheur as, you guessed it, a victim, of his unscrupulous countrymen seeking to get a little extra cash to augment their all-expenses-paid vacations in the Healey hotels.
“To his great shame, Mr. Bonheur did not resist the overtures,” says his taxpayer-funded mouthpiece. “Word got around and Mr. Bonheur’s store was soon overrun with SNAP card holders seeking to monetize their benefits.”
Nice word – monetize. His co-conspirator countrymen weren’t monetizing, they were stealing, to get still more free cash, so they’d never have to work like Americans do.
The feds want to put Bonheur away for 30 months, not a draconian request considering that the government can’t even locate $600,000 of his ill-gotten gains, and admit they never will.
His public defender says Bonheur should get home confinement… for running a $7-million racket. He’s old, and has been diagnosed by diabetes. (We paid for that diagnosis of course, like everything in his worthless life.)
As the assistant US attorney Philip A. Mallard notes, “If the only consequence of being caught in a multi-million-dollar fraud is giving back a fraction of the stolen loot while serving time from the comfort of one’s own home, the criminal enterprise remains entirely risk-free.”
Risk-free — that’s exactly the way the Democrats want to keep alien crime – at least as long as you’re a DEI defendant.
The sentencing judge is Indira Talwani. She was appointed by Barack Obama. Not a propitious omen for law and order.
Plus, there’s been a lot of sentencing reparations going on at the federal courthouse lately.
Call it the melanin discount for a certain favored class of felon.
Monica Cannon Grant, a racist grifter and welfare fraudster, didn’t get a day in prison. Tania Fernandes Anderson, an illegal alien Muslim from Africa, got a couple of months. And her husband, a convicted murderer sentenced to “life without parole,” was cut loose from state prison – at age 44.
C’mon, Judge Talwani – can you finally give one of the comrades some tiny fraction of the sentence he deserves for his atrocious misdeeds?
Antonio Bonheur has been enjoying his Haitian vacation at our expense all these decades. It’s time to send him to a different kind of destination spa.
One that we can all track on the Bureau of Prisons’ website.