Sheep’s Head Soup
Inside Portland’s EBT card ring
by Robin Rage
“The Obama administration … looks the other way as billions of taxpayer dollars finance a steady diet of Mars bars and Mountain Dew.”
— Paul LePage, in a June 2016 letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
“I’m homeless. What am I gonna do with three heads of cabbage, some parsley and a potted petunia?”
— Kosmo, on a program that allows the use of SNAP-EBT cards at farmers’ markets
Not long after I became homeless five years ago, I was hanging around in pre-gentrified Congress Square Park when I met a well-dressed older fellow feeding birds in brazen disregard of the signs posted nearby declaring that practice prohibited. Old Man Ali was a kind, jovial guy, an Iraqi Kurd and a Shiite. He was eager to talk and willing to listen, despite his broken English and my ignorance of any of his several native tongues. After our first few encounters, he invited me over to his place, a modest apartment off Congress Street, where he cooked dinner. We ate it while sitting on the floor, passing around communal bowls full of Middle Eastern food, using newspapers in lieu of plates or placemats.
When Old Man Ali moved to a pad on the West End, he knew I was living in squats, so he invited me to sleep on his floor, anytime. I’d arrive at Old Man Ali’s each night sometime after 10 p.m. and ring the bell to get in. Even if it was three in the morning, he’d still come down and bring me up, and he always made sure I ate. One night during Ramadan I spied a covered pot on the stove and when I lifted the lid and looked inside a sheep’s head stared back at me, simmering in what turned out to be a delicious broth.
Old Man Ali was so generous to me that I eventually began relating to him as if he were a slightly crazy father. I overlooked or made excuses for any off-kilter behavior he may have been engaged in, and I’m still inclined to do that, even though I now suspect he was part of a welfare-fraud ring that allegedly scammed Uncle Sam out of several million dollars.
Old Man Ali was just “Ali” to me until I met his friends. There was Black Ali, a.k.a. Ali Afrique, a dark-skinned metropolitan who’d been in the U.S. for years, married to an Anglo; Taxi Cab Ali, so nicknamed for the obvious reason; and Al, who was also an Ali, but who’d shed the “i” while doing time in an American prison on an assault charge. Old Man Ali was once a colonel in the Kurdish forces, yet the others still regarded him as a country bumpkin of sorts. They were all quite friendly to me, but like everyone on, or close to, The Street, I knew all these guys were engaged in some kind of racket.
One day in the park Old Man Ali asked me how much I got each month in food stamps (known these days as SNAP — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — benefits provided via EBT — Electronic Benefit Transfer — cards).
“You need food stamps?” he asked with a shrug. “Why you need food stamps?” He pointed this way and that. “You have soup kitchen, food bank, food bank, paper church [the church on State Street that gave out toilet paper from their clothing closet on Tuesdays]. You no need food stamps.” Then he made hand gestures to indicate that if I were to give him my EBT card I’d soon have cash-money in the front pocket of my shirt. “How much you want to spend?” he asked. “You give me eighty, I bring you back forty. Is good, huh, Robin?”
Quite used to being agreeable with whomever owned the couch, I handed over my card. Old Man Ali called Taxi Ali and they headed off to a store to meet up with yet another Ali, Westbrook Ali, then returned with the yen. I’m still not sure how they divided their half of the money. I later learned that most people on The Street had to deal with a go-between who might charge you an additional $10 or more for arranging the transaction.
Of course, Old Man Ali was right. With or without a SNAP-EBT card, I still got most of my nutrition courtesy of the soup kitchen and the local food banks. You can’t buy prepared foods with your EBT card, and there are no open barrel fires in Portland — yet. You can’t cook on The Street, can’t wash dishes you don’t have, and can’t store, freeze or refrigerate food, so you either eat convenience-store crap with SNAP money or you sell your card.
Last summer, our Governor made national news when he threatened to end Maine’s participation in the SNAP program, which is funded by the Feds, who also set the rules. LePage’s beef wasn’t about EBT cards being sold for cash, a common practice that’d been happening right under his nose for at least half a decade by then. No, LePage was outraged by the idea that recipients can use their cards to buy junk food and sugary drinks. Like, God forbid a poor kid gets a bag of Doritos and a Coke with SNAP money instead of, say, baby carrots and a bottle of Poland Spring. (A few months later, it was revealed that rather than rely on self-discipline or other family values to lose weight, LePage and his wife both had their guts cut open and reconfigured through bariatric surgery. I doubt the nearly 200,000 Mainers with EBT cards have health insurance good enough to cover that elective procedure.)
There are certainly tens of thousands of Mainers who rely on SNAP benefits to put food on the table, but the thousands who don’t have a table typically find other means to feed themselves. The homeless are not starving in the streets — again, not yet. The only skinny people you’ll see at the soup kitchens are the junkies or spice-heads who’ve forsaken food for Nirvana, and even some of them are on the heavy side. Most of Portland’s homeless population are quite well fed. When I was among them, it wasn’t uncommon to find lunch bags discarded with only the dessert eaten. There was talk a while back about combining the shelter with a soup kitchen, thus eliminating even the modicum of exercise involved in shuffling from mat to meal. The more paranoid among this population may wonder whether the government is purposefully trying to fatten them up for some sinister purpose — tramp-head stew, anyone?
More constructive solutions to the junk-food issue would include providing secure space and communal stoves for homeless people to store and cook food, or allowing EBT cards to be used to purchase prepared items. Alternately, the government could hip Homeless Nation to some good recipes for sushi and steak tartare.
This past April, the FBI busted two brothers living in Westbrook — 40-year-old Ali Ratib Daham and 21-year-old Abdulkareem Daham — on charges that they exchanged EBT cards for cash at a shop they operated on Forest Avenue, Ahram Halal Market. “From June 2011 until about April 2016, the two Westbrook brothers allegedly allowed welfare recipients to exchange their aid vouchers for cash and pocketed some of the proceeds,” the Bangor Daily News reported. “They are also accused of allowing people to purchase ineligible goods and letting people use welfare vouchers to pay down credit accounts at the grocery store.”
I never dealt with Westbrook Ali in person, so I can’t say for sure if he’s Ali Daham (whose lawyer told the BDN he expected his client would plead not guilty). But having been inside this scene for a spell, I can offer some street-level insights into the people involved and their motivations, details the mainstream media doesn’t even attempt to delve into, focused as they are on telling stories about angels and demons that don’t exist in the real world.
“Harami no good”
Old Man Ali was an honorable and spiritually devout man. He woke me up at night with his prayers and dutifully attended the local mosque, despite the presence of Sunnis. He taught me to say As-Salaam-Alaikum (“Peace be unto you”) each time I entered his apartment or ran into one of his peeps, and another word, Alhamdulillah (“Praise be to God”). “Robin,” he’d say, “when the sun is out, Alhamdulillah. When it rains, Alhamdulillah. Always Alhamdulillah.”
He allowed another streetnik to stay at his place for a few nights, a teen-center kid tag-named Cable. As he’d done with me, he fed Cable, gave him a mat and blankets to sleep on, and let him return his bottles. One night I was in Deering Oaks and got a panicked, angry call from the old man: Cable had stolen a watch of his. In fact, Old Man Ali said, the kid was asleep on the floor, wearing the watch, as we spoke! So I went back to Ali’s, confronted Cable, got the watch and kicked him out.
Days later, Old Man Ali saw me talking to Cable on the street and rebuked me. “Harami, Robin,” he said, pointing at Cable. Thief. “Harami no good!” He feigned the act of spitting on the ground.
•••
I used to hear complaints from my fellow street peeps about immigrants using the freesources available in Portland. “They’re at every food bank, every clothing closet, every free public supper,” one told me.
“Brother man,” I replied, “these guys aren’t doing anything more than your own Irish ancestors did. And yes, the Americans hated them, too.”
The immigrants who’ve arrived here from Iraq are refugees fleeing the chaos our empire created in their country essentially by mistake. Back in 2007, the United Nations estimated there were about 50,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes every month. That year there were roughly 2 million Iraqi refugees in exile and 1.7 million internally displaced, according to the U.N. That’s 3.7 million people robbed of their homes, their jobs, their communities, and every worldly possession they couldn’t stuff in their pockets or carry on their back. So who’s the real harami here?
Old Man Ali, the clever ex-soldier, managed to make it to a refugee camp in Egypt; Taxi Cab, Afrique and Al ended up in vile, overcrowded and underfunded camps in Syria. Camps like these develop their own black-market economies, and food aid is commonly sold for cash to buy goods and services inside the wires.
Old Man Ali and his cohort didn’t consider it dishonorable to help the homeless in the open-air camps of Portland get some desperately needed dough. And despite all they’d been through, they weren’t bitter. “If things were so bad for immigrants, I’d be sleeping on your floor,” Old Man Ali told me while we watched a demonstration for immigrants’ rights in Monument Square.
These men were not demons, but they weren’t angels, either. Old Man Ali had to leave town one day in a hurry — word was that during previous trips down south to visit his ex-wife and kids, he’d been the courier for something illegal — and I moved in with Al. Black Ali ended up wearing an ankle-bracelet monitor for transgressions unrelated to food-stamp fraud. Then Al, who was as much a lapsed Muslim as I was a lapsed Catholic, started drinking while watching basketball games on TV at night. He became convinced that Black Ali was going to drop a dime on him. One evening he left the apartment to confront Black Ali and ended up in the Cumberland County Jail.
I grabbed the big, furry Santa Claus blanket and got my stuff together to begin living in Sherwood Forest. For a while after that I still saw Taxi Ali around town, looking for food-stamp sellers or miscellaneous medications, but then he, too, disappeared.
