BOSTON — One of two Haitian-born store owners charged in a sweeping federal food stamp fraud case in Boston has agreed to plead guilty, court documents filed this week reveal.
Antonio Bonheur, 74, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Haiti, admitted in a federal plea deal to unlawfully trafficking Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for cash and to wire fraud. As part of the agreement, he has consented to forfeit $1 million in proceeds from the scheme, according to CBS Boston, which first reported the development on March 12, 2026.
Bonheur owned the Jesula Variety Store on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, a neighborhood in Boston with a large Haitian community. He shared the storefront with Saul Alisme, 21, a Haitian national and legal permanent resident of the United States, who was also charged in the case when federal prosecutors announced the indictments in December 2025. Alisme has pleaded not guilty and his case remains pending.
A Closet Masquerading as a Store
Federal prosecutors painted a stark picture of what the two storefronts actually were.
The Jesula Variety Store, according to U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley, occupied less than 150 square feet — smaller, she noted at the December press conference, than some bathrooms. Yet records showed the store was processing up to half a million dollars in SNAP redemptions per month, a volume that would be extraordinary for a full-service grocery store, let alone a space barely large enough to qualify as a convenience store.
Surveillance video gathered during the investigation told the story clearly: customers walked out the door without grocery bags despite records indicating they had supposedly purchased more than $100 worth of food.
The mechanics of the scheme, prosecutors said, were straightforward. Customers holding EBT cards would exchange their benefits for cash, receiving less than face value in return — with the store owners pocketing the difference, CBS News noted.
According to the original indictment, undercover agents documented paying $120 in food benefits and receiving $100 in cash. Alcohol was also reportedly exchanged for SNAP funds, a practice that is categorically prohibited under federal law, since the program is restricted to food purchases only.
Among the more unusual elements of the case, prosecutors said the stores were also selling MannaPacks — prepackaged meals intended for free distribution in food-insecure countries, including Haiti — which are not authorized for retail sale in the United States.
“These were not supermarkets. They were not full-service groceries. It would be a huge stretch to even call them convenience stores,” Foley said in December. “The only thing convenient about these stores was how easy it was to commit SNAP benefit fraud.”
Scale of the Alleged Fraud
When federal charges were first announced in December 2025, prosecutors alleged that Bonheur had diverted approximately $6.8 million in SNAP benefits since 2022. Alisme, the younger co-defendant, was accused of diverting roughly $122,000 beginning in May 2025.
Under the terms of the plea agreement accepted by Bonheur this week, he admitted to personally profiting by $1 million from the scheme — the amount he has agreed to forfeit to the government.
The charges to which he pleaded guilty carry a combined maximum sentence of up to 25 years in federal prison, though the U.S. Attorney’s office indicated it would recommend a sentence on the lower end of the federal sentencing guidelines.
The case also reignited a political dispute over the adequacy of Massachusetts’ monitoring of the SNAP program. Foley was direct in her criticism when charges were announced, arguing that the fraud was neither sophisticated nor difficult to detect, and that inadequate state oversight had allowed it to continue unchecked for years.
“This was not a sophisticated fraud scheme, and it didn’t have to be because a lack of oversight was all that was needed to allow it to happen,” Foley said, according CBS News.
Governor Maura Healey pushed back, asserting that her administration had flagged suspicious activity at the Jesula store to federal authorities more than a year before the arrests.
“As a former Attorney General and now Governor, I will always support prosecution to the fullest extent of the law for anyone who engages in fraud or abuse of a federal program or any program,” Healey said at the time of the December announcement.
The case unfolded amid a broader political confrontation between the state of Massachusetts and the Trump administration over SNAP data. The federal government had demanded that states provide information about SNAP recipients, including their immigration status, as part of what it described as an anti-fraud initiative. Massachusetts declined, and the state is party to ongoing federal litigation challenging that demand. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s data-sharing requirement in October.
A spokesperson for Healey was clear that the Mattapan fraud case had no bearing on the state’s decision to withhold private data from federal immigration authorities. “Massachusetts will continue to stand with families in our state by not turning over their private information to President Trump and ICE,” the statement read.
A Broader Pattern
The Bonheur case is not an isolated incident in Massachusetts. Last month, four individuals in the state were accused of using more than 100 stolen identities as part of a separate $1 million multi-state SNAP fraud scheme, underscoring the ongoing challenge federal and state authorities face in policing a program that serves more than 42 million Americans nationwide, including over one million in Massachusetts alone.
A sentencing date for Bonheur had not been announced as of the time of publication. Alisme’s case continues.
