Taxpayers stomped on in latest EBT scam

Ex-Gov. Deval Patrick always knew how to summarily dismiss any welfare scandal, no matter how bad.

“Anecdotes.”

That’s all a welfare rip off was for Small Deval, just an anecdote. Same as drunk-driving illegal aliens killing US citizens – mere anecdotes.

So this is a column about what happened at a storefront on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. But remember, it’s only an anecdote, or should I say, anecdotes, plural.

In all, this is about 6,916,380 anecdotes.

All of which have George Washington’s portrait on them.

That’s how much food stamp money the feds say was taken out of this tiny little storefront, Jesula Variety Store. The feds call it JVS in their indictment of two newcomers to western civilization, Antonio Bonheur, age 74, a naturalized US citizen from Haiti, and his apparent protégé, Saul Alisme, age 21, a “lawful permanent resident.”

They were both charged this week, in the beginning of a long-overdue crackdown on the billion-dollar illegal alien welfare industrial complex in the “Gateway Cities,” formerly working-class communities now overrun by the non-working classes from parts unknown.

First, a brief overview of JVS, according to a 50-page affidavit by the feds.

As an American who works for a living, you are probably familiar with a certain kind of supermarket. Think Market Basket. Spacious, clean, lots of cash registers.

Then there’s the new, Democrat type of supermarket in the Gateway Cities. Like JVS on Blue Hill Ave.

Here are some of the features in this quaint Haitian bodega, according to the feds.

No freezers, no refrigerated sections, no meats, no seafood, no eggs, no dairy products, no shopping carts or hand baskets, a single cash register with no barcode readers.

Yet the place was thronged by locals, many of them brand-new arrivals to civilization. Business was absolutely booming!

Bonheur opened his store in September 2021, as the Democrats began flooding the country with millions of shiftless, criminal aliens. Bonheur seen his opportunities and he took ‘em. That first month in operation, his store processed $872 in food stamps.

In January 2023, as Maura Healey became governor, he still only grabbed $7,207. But then came her beloved foreign freeloader flophouses, the Healey hotels. He was off to the races.

Three years later, in August of last year, Bonheur grabbed $540,870 in welfare payoffs. Overall, Maura has so far squandered $4 billion on the Haitian criminals, so this is just the tip of the fraud iceberg.

It was amazing, the throngs of customers coming into that little storefront, spending so much more in every transaction than at larger supermarkets.

For instance, the feds say, less than 2 percent of all food-stamp transactions are over $95. Yet at JVS, approximately 90 percent of the “purchases” were for more than $95. More than 70 percent were for more than $150.

The feds put up a camera outside the Third World reparations redemption center to see what the illegal aliens, er the patrons, were getting for their pesos.

“No customers,” the G-men wrote, “emerged from that storefront carrying groceries or bags consistent with these large-dollar value transactions.”

This is not to say that no products were for sale. Liquor, for instance. But not bonded distilled spirits. No, they were selling bootleg rum from the Third World bleepholes all the criminal grifters had fled in 2021, in search of a lifelong vacation in America.

And JVS also had something called “MannaPacks,” which are supposed to ever be sold in the United States. They are manufactured by a charitable group called Feed My Starving Children, to go to as charity to failed countries, like Haiti, the home country of the defendants here.

The only way MannaPacks could have been for sale in JVS, the feds say, is if they were “illicitly obtained.”

To repeat, as Deval Patrick told us so often, these are just anecdotes.

There have always been places like this, especially in urban areas. Back before the Lottery, in the cities, there would be similar storefronts, with a few dusty cans of tomato sauce in the fly-specked front window, along with maybe a few other canned products.

Of course no customers went to those places to shop, they went there to play the daily number. The storefronts were drops. In the evening, Jerry Angiulo’s runners would come around and picked up the slips.

But there were a lot of differences between those long-ago drops and JVS. For one thing, there were no taxpayer subsidies of the numbers game. Everyone at Sal’s Corner Store was using money he had earned, not welfare. Approximately 100 percent of those playing the number had jobs, compared to approximately zero percent of the JVS patrons.

Another difference: Sal’s clientele had immigrated to America because they heard there was work. The freeloaders at JVS arrived here for just the opposite reason. They heard there was no work here. Ever.

One more difference: whatever his other character shortcomings, Jerry Angiulo was never on welfare. Antonio Bonheur, Haitian immigrant, got himself an EBT card several million dollars into the scam.

And why not? As the feds noted, Maura Healey’s Department of Transitional Assistance “apparently did not compare the income BONHEUR actually received” with what he claimed he was making, which was nothing.

And he cashed his own food stamps out as his own store, as the alleged theft topped a half a million a month.

Why did the illegal aliens on welfare go to JVS? Because Bonheur gave his fellow foreign freeloaders a better cut than the competition, the cholos doing business in the supermarket parking lots.

“He would charge you $120 off the card,” US Attorney Leah Foley told me this week, “and you would get back $100.”

That’s not bad. If you’re a junkie, or a gangbanger looking to buy a new machete to use on your “fiancé,” chances are you won’t do much better than 50 cents on a dollar. Of course it is free money, but then, for illegal aliens, that’s the only kind there is.

We started with a cliché about welfare from a Democrat, Deval Patrick. Let’s close with one from a Republican, George W. Bush. He used to say, the illegals are only here to work the jobs Americans don’t want to work anymore.

On Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, the illegals are only here to steal the welfare Americans don’t want to steal anymore.