On Dec. 18, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said as much as half of the roughly $18 billion allocated to 14 Minnesota-run aid programs since 2018 may have been stolen. By Jan. 7, 2026, federal investigators had charged 92 people with fraud. According to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), 85 of them were Somali immigrants or American-born Somalis. On Jan. 5, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) reversed his plans to run for a third term. He insisted that “the buck does not stop with me,” but the bucks are long gone.
“Take the gun. Leave the cannoli.” The Minnesota scandal is classic ethnic crime. Though The Godfather has become the national epic by popular demand, no one wants to live in it. We want to live in high-trust, low-crime societies where justice is blind but does not turn a blind eye. We want immigrants who want to integrate into that kind of life. Instead, sweeping tracts of American life are low-trust, high-crime societies, managed by a contract between ethnic blocs and pandering politicians. Minnesota was shaped by Swedish moralists. It was undone by Somali pirates. Minnesota Democrats let it happen. This, too, is as American as Michael Corleone.
In 1955, the sociologist Edward C. Banfield went to Chiaromonte in southern Italy. Banfield found that Chiaromonte was not a society at all. Family and clan units competed against one another. They distrusted a hostile government and one another. They pursued selfish, short-term interests and lacked a concept of the common good. In his 1958 book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Banfield put Chiaromonte in witness protection and called it Montegrano. He called its way of life “amoral familism.” You don’t have to be Italian to do it. Look at the grifting Clintons, the grafting Bidens and the bitcoin-vending Trumps.
The Minnesota Somalis are the new kids on the block. They have made a strong start, but as Matthew McConaughey’s character tells Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, “You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.” The corporate family incentives another kind of amoral familism. Enron, which went down in 2001, misled investors about its debts and earnings and owed $74 billion. In 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed after disguising $50 billion in loans as sales, precipitating a global crisis and the Great Recession. By the time Bernie Madoff fell off the top of his pyramid scheme that year, he had bilked investors out of more than $60 billion. A rich country creates easy marks and big pickings.
This question of social incentives and opportunity is where the Minnesota Somalis part company with classic ethnic crime. In Banfield’s Chiaromonte and Don Corleone’s Little Italy, the state was distant, uncaring and hostile. The ordinary Chiaromontese, Banfield thought, lacked “social capital,” and that incentivized them to repurpose their families as criminal gangs and their clan structures as a business network. In modern America, however, the liberal state is close, caring, and generous. It offers immigrants every conceivable means of accumulating social capital, and it hands out billions of dollars in real capital, too. The Minnesota mob defrauded federal and state funding for daycare facilities, housing programs, support for children with autism and COVID-19 food subsidies.
The fraudsters spent the proceeds on lakefront houses, luxury cars, jewelry, and trips to exotic places such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Millions of dollars disappeared overseas to Kenya, China, and Somalia, whose economy is sustained by remittances. Federal investigators suspect that some of it ended up with Islamist militias. Meanwhile, Somalis became a key Democratic bloc in Minnesota. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the then-speaker of the House, posed on the cover of Rolling Stone with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). “Look at me,” Barkhad Abdi’s hijacker tells Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. “I am the captain now.”
It is easy for the Trump administration to denounce the Democrats, talk of deporting and denaturalizing criminals, and, as President Donald Trump did, call the Somalis “garbage.” The hard truth is that this kind of corruption is much bigger than Minnesota and more than a Somali vice. The Minnesota scandal is like Blackhawk Down: a Somali disaster that shows how America operates too casually and sentimentally for its own good. Decades of dumb immigration policies and deliberately slack enforcement have eroded the common interest of American society. A colossal welfare system has incentivized both politicians and voters to form amoral families and political clans, and turned state and local government into partners in graft.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency experiment saved taxpayers billions of dollars. But there is no point in improving the efficiency of the pump if the spigot at the other end is jammed open and the bucket has a hole in it. The Trump administration should expand federal inquiries into every state, red or blue. It should use the RICO Act to prosecute federal and state employees, as well as politicians. But unless the federal government alters the incentive structures of immigration, welfare policy, and law enforcement, the grifting and graft will continue — until moral bankruptcy leads to the real thing.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.