How much of the $250 million in taxpayer money stolen in Feeding Our Future fraud case will prosecutors recover?

Salim Said liked to shop at Nordstrom, where he would spend as much as $9,000 a month on clothes and other luxury goods in 2021.

Aimee Bock took two trips to Las Vegas with her boyfriend, where they spent thousands of dollars in 2021 renting exotic sports cars and shopping at high-end retail outlets such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton.

Other conspirators in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud scam wired a large portion of their fraudulent income from federal taxpayers overseas, with international transfers totaling more than $1.2 million from about a dozen people involved in Said’s meal sites, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s analysis of bank records presented in the recent federal trial of Bock, the Feeding Our Future leader, and Said, who co-owned Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis.

That money is gone. How much of the $250 million that prosecutors say was diverted by dozens of fraudsters in 2020 and 2021 with the help of Bock’s St. Anthony nonprofit will ever be returned to taxpayers?

“That is hard to say,” said Joe Thompson, the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future case and chief of the fraud and public corruption section of the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In an interview with the Star Tribune this week, Thompson said the government has seized about $75 million in assets so far, but money spent or hidden can be hard to recover.

“Going shopping at Louis Vuitton or going out for a steak dinner is not something you can generally seize,” he said. “We are always looking for assets. But it gets harder as we go.”

Recovery efforts are expected to gear up now that Bock, Said and other conspirators have been convicted of felonies for their roles in what prosecutors have called the largest U.S. pandemic-related fraud.

Altogether, 45 of the 70 people charged with defrauding federally funded meal programs meant to feed children in need have been convicted by a jury or pleaded guilty to crimes related to the scam. A sentencing date has not been set for Bock and Said, who were convicted of all charges against them by a jury last week. Each of the counts of wire fraud for which they were found guilty carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

So far, Thompson said, investigators have seized $35 million in cash plus cars and real estate that originally cost $40 million. But he said those cars have been depreciating for three years, and real estate values are fluctuating.

It also will cost money to liquidate those assets, Thompson said, a process that can’t start until defendants have been convicted and sentenced.

He said it’s possible the government will recoup no more than $50 million for the property it has already seized, or about 20% of the $250 million said to have been stolen.

“I hope we are going to recover millions more,” Thompson said. “Where we end up is hard to say.”

Former federal prosecutors said they were impressed with the government’s work on the case, noting that agents seized bank accounts the day the investigation went public in January 2022 when the FBI raided more than a dozen sites.

In other cases, former prosecutors said, agents haven’t started seizing property until late in an investigation, allowing conspirators to squirrel away most, if not all, of the proceeds.

“The government has done a very good job in recovering a significant amount of money in this case because they got in quickly,” said Tom Heffelfinger, who served as U.S. Attorney in Minnesota twice, most recently from 2001 to 2006. “It’s hard to recover assets in any white-collar investigation.”

Thompson said he is usually satisfied if he can recover 10% of the proceeds in a fraud case. But Heffelfinger said there really is no “gold standard.”

“You are never going to get 100%,” Heffelfinger said. “The idea here is to recover as much as you can with minimum expense.”

By comparison, more than $120 million was spent to liquidate the assets of Tom Petters following the Wayzata businessman’s 2009 conviction for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in Minnesota history, a liquidation process some critics dubbed a “fee fest.”

Attorney Doug Kelley, who oversaw the case as the court-appointed trustee, noted it took 14 years to untangle Petters’ finances, which involved 150 corporations. To collect $722 million, Kelley and his attorneys filed dozens of clawback lawsuits against investors who profited from the scheme. Altogether, Kelley’s team recovered 38% of the $1.9 billion stolen from victims across the country.

Kelley said it’s commendable if prosecutors recover 25% of the money in the Feeding Our Future case.

“I don’t think people should expect to be made whole at all,” he said. “There is just too much dissipation in these kinds of cases.”

That point was made repeatedly during the trial of Bock and Said, who enriched themselves off the scam and spent much of their loot before they were caught, according to bank records.

Though prosecutors said the records showed Bock personally walked away with $1.9 million, she had $185,000 left in her bank account at the time of the raids, plus another $13,462 in cash at her Rosemount home.

Her former boyfriend, Malcolm Watson, received about half of her money and spent much of it on shopping, entertainment, travel and luxury cars. Just $30,103 was left in the account when agents seized it in 2022, bank records showed.

Bock frequently teased her former boyfriend about his financial dependence on her, according to records shown to jurors.

“The reality is I honestly believe you love the life I can afford for you as opposed to loving me,” Bock said in one of her final texts to Watson in January 2022.

Other conspirators were also living large off their fraudulent proceeds, not feeding kids in need, according to records shown during the trial. Of the $103 million tracked through the bank accounts of a dozen defendants, fraudsters funneled more than than $50 million to other shell companies and accounts controlled by themselves or their accomplices, prosecutors said.

Just $2.9 million was spent on food, or about 3% of total food program revenues, records show.

“Clearly, their intent was not to feed children — it was to line their own pockets,” Thompson said. “That was the foundation of the whole case.”

Thompson, who detailed Said’s credit card bills during his cross examination of the former restaurant owner, said he thought the spending at Nordstrom’s and other high-end retailers shocked the jury more than Said’s multimillion-dollar real estate purchases — including his $1.1 million Plymouth home with an indoor basketball court.

“The brain struggles with those numbers, but everybody knows what it means to spend $6,000 at Nordstrom’s,” Thompson said. “It resonates more because people know what it means ... to be so reckless and irresponsible.”

While millions of dollars have been siphoned off, Thompson said prosecutors will try to recover additional money by getting defendants to agree to restitution orders that will allow agents to pursue assets not directly connected to the scheme.

Prosecutors have already obtained restitution agreements totaling more than $30 million from 16 defendants who pleaded guilty or were convicted, records show. The latest defendant to plead guilty, Abdihakim Ali Ahmed, 39, of Minneapolis agreed Monday to pay $2.2 million in restitution.

One of the most surprising revelations during Bock and Said’s trial involved the scope of the scheme. Instead of proving that all or most of the $250 million was fraudulently diverted, prosecutors focused on a smaller group of players and related schemes.

No evidence of wrongdoing has been produced involving dozens of the 299 meal sites the nonprofit oversaw, and just $117 million has been directly tied to fraud.

So was $250 million really stolen? Thompson said the figure could be closer to $300 million, noting that many of the defendants were also under the supervision of Partners in Nutrition, a St. Paul nonprofit whose leaders have not been charged with any crimes.

Thompson said prosecutors believe a “small fraction” of legitimate sites were operated, sponsored by Feeding Our Future.

“Our investigation is ongoing and we expect to charge more people,” Thompson said. “I can’t say how many.”

He declined to comment on whether prosecutors were pursuing a case against anyone who worked for Partners in Nutrition.

In previous interviews, Partners in Nutrition leaders have denied wrongdoing, saying they never knowingly submitted a fraudulent claim. The nonprofit shut down in 2022. An attorney for the nonprofit did not return calls for comment.