Aimee Bock, Salim Said found guilty on all counts in Feeding Our Future fraud trial

A federal jury found Feeding Our Future leader Aimee Bock and her alleged accomplice, Minneapolis restaurant owner Salim Said, guilty on all counts Wednesday after only about five hours of deliberation.

Jurors had a mountain of evidence to sift through after listening to more than 30 witnesses testify over five weeks in the high-profile case — part of a sprawling $250 million federal investigation that’s charged 70 people, the largest pandemic-related fraud in the country.

The trial, which started Feb. 3, was widely watched because Bock was the face of the fraud scheme. She was executive director of the St. Anthony nonprofit that had ties to many of the defendants.

The jury’s swift decision found Bock, 44, of Apple Valley, guilty of seven crimes while Said, 36, of Plymouth, was found guilty of 21 crimes, including wire fraud and federal programs bribery. Each of the counts of wire fraud carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

“The fact that they returned a verdict so quickly I think speaks volumes to the job that our team did,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, the lead prosecutor on the case, said after the verdict.

Last year, a jury in the trial of seven defendants in another Feeding Our Future case took four days to deliberate before convicting five defendants and acquitting two.

After the verdict was read Wednesday, Bock cried and was comforted by her attorney before she and Said were handcuffed and led out of court. They will remain in custody; a sentencing date hasn’t been set.

Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, said he will appeal. He said the speed of the verdict told him that the jurors' minds were made up before they began deliberating.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “[They must have thought] it was a slam dunk for the government. I didn’t think it was.”

“I’m disappointed, very disappointed,” he added. “I didn’t think the government met its burden [to prove guilt], let alone that Aimee Bock would be found guilty on all counts.”

The trial was only the second to take place since charges were first filed in 2022. Of 70 people who have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty.

Just a couple weeks in, the trial was rocked by a witness tampering allegation when a defendant slated for trial at a later date was accused of trying to corrupt the proceedings by talking to a witness about to testify.

After that, the judge barred other defendants from being on the floor of the downtown Minneapolis courthouse during the trial. Security measures were also increased due to the attempted bribery of a juror in last year’s trial.

Throughout the more than monthlong trial, attorneys introduced hundreds of exhibits, including secret camera videos, meal count sheets, bank records, invoices and spreadsheets produced by government agents who documented how little money was spent on food and how much was spent on luxury homes, cars and other items.

The one thing all witnesses and attorneys agreed on was that widespread fraud took place within a federally funded program meant to provide food to children in need after school and during the summer.

Feeding Our Future was a “sponsor,” overseeing paperwork and federal reimbursements to nearly 300 food-distribution sites in the program. It quickly grew from receiving about $3 million in federal funds in 2019 to nearly $200 million in 2021.

Prosecutors said some of the nonprofit’s employees, food sites and vendors were involved in an extraordinary pay-for-play scheme of kickbacks and bribes, relying on fake attendance sheets and phony invoices to inflate the number of meals they claimed to serve, raking in millions of dollars.

Bock told jurors that she rarely looked at the inflated reimbursement claims and falsified invoices that were central to the scheme. She maintained that she trusted her employees to handle that work properly and was betrayed when some of her employees approved fraudulent claims in exchange for six-figure kickbacks.

“I didn’t have a clue,” Bock testified when asked about an employee’s enrichment scheme.

Prosecutors said Bock’s “willful blindness” was not a defense, noting she personally confirmed the accuracy of millions of dollars in allegedly fraudulent payments when she submitted payment requests to state regulators. Prosecutors essentially argued that the fraud perpetuated by many of her meal providers was so obvious that anybody would have spotted it — especially someone such as Bock who has years of experience with government-funded meal programs.

“You can’t say, ‘I didn’t know,‘” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs, one of two prosecutors who presented the government’s closing arguments. “You can’t close your eyes to the obvious to avoid responsibility ... If you do that, you’re still guilty.”

Both Bock and Said took the witness stand to testify in their own defense. After the verdict was read, Udoibok said he didn’t think it was a mistake for Bock to testify because she would have had “regrets” if she hadn’t told her story. Said’s attorney, Adrian Montez, declined to comment after the verdict was read.

Thompson said it was obvious that the jury did not find Bock or Said credible, telling a Minnesota Star Tribune reporter that he thought the jury “hated” Bock.

Former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, who wasn’t involved in the case, said he thinks the swift verdict will lead to “more guilty pleas in the near future.”

“The thing that would motivate a defendant who is still awaiting trial would be the number of cases that have already been resolved by a guilty plea and the conviction of the lead defendant, Aimee Bock,” Heffelfinger said.

Of the 42 people who have pleaded guilty or were convicted, only three have been sentenced, their punishments ranging from just over three years in prison to more than 17 years. The federal government has seized more than $75 million in the case so far. A dozen other defendants have trials scheduled for this spring, summer and fall.

Thompson said he hopes this verdict also will be noticed by other would-be fraudsters.

“The Feeding Our Future case has come to symbolize the problem of fraud in our state,” Thompson said. “It has become the shame of Minnesota. Hopefully, today’s verdict will help turn the page on this awful chapter in our state’s history.”

Prosecutors showed jurors profanity-laced texts from Bock that painted a harsh portrait of the nonprofit leader. In one exchange, in which she discussed how best to scare one of Feeding Our Future’s critics, Bock wrote: “We may have become the mob.”

Though Bock claimed she was being “sarcastic,” prosecutors said the remark captured her criminal nature, reminding jurors of the bitter legal fight she waged against state regulators when they tried to slow down her fast-growing enterprise in 2020.

“Aimee Bock used her power to scare and intimidate or challenge anyone who stood in her way,” Jacobs said in his closing remarks. “Do not think for one second this text message was a joke ... When someone tells you who they really are, you better believe it.”

Among the tactics Bock employed to carry out her scheme, according to government witnesses: Filing a defamation suit against the state official who first raised the possibility of fraud at Feeding Our Future; “lying” to state regulators when they questioned whether two food operations could possibly exist within the same Minneapolis building; and threatening site operators with termination if they failed to pay her bribes.

Altogether, FBI agents testified, Bock personally earned $1.9 million from her role as ringleader of the scheme, including nearly $1 million she funneled to her then-boyfriend’s construction company.

Bock testified that her boyfriend earned that money by renovating the nonprofit’s offices. Prosecutors said that arrangement was only possible because Bock created a “sham” board of directors to oversee Feeding Our Future, saying no legitimate board would have ever approved a contract with such an obvious conflict of interest.

The three top officers of Feeding Our Future testified that they did not even know they were on the board of directors, saying they never attended meetings or signed documents submitted to state and federal regulators, suggesting that someone else forged their signatures to make it appear as if Feeding Our Future was meeting its legal responsibilities.

The testimony of those board members seemed to make a deep impression on the jurors, who were left to decide who was telling the truth when Bock insisted all three of the men were actively involved in overseeing the nonprofit. On the stand, Bock did not accuse the men of lying.

For his part, Said described himself as a simple investor who got caught up in a criminal scheme organized by others, and without his knowledge. He testified that Safari Restaurant off Lake Street in Minneapolis, which he partly owned, actually delivered thousands of meals per day in 2020, when he was actively managing the meals program and vouching for the accuracy of the site’s reimbursement claims.

Said said he later turned over management of the restaurant, and other meal sites organized by Safari’s owners, to his partner, Abdulkadir Nur Salah, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud in January. When Salah entered his plea, he admitted that Bock received kickbacks from the program and that he made those payments to her.

Said said he invested $65,000 to $75,000 in each of the new sites, which proved hugely lucrative, earning him as much as $1.2 million in profits off a single meal site in St. Cloud. Altogether, Said admitted to earning at least $5.5 million from his stake in the sites, all of which was funded by the meals program.

“I wouldn’t have participated if I wasn’t making a profit,” testified Said, who used the money to buy two luxury vehicles, a stake in two investment properties and a $1.1 million house in Plymouth with an indoor basketball court.

Early in the trial, a top official with the Minnesota Department of Education — which oversees the meals program and reimburses nonprofits such as Feeding Our Future — testified that the program was not designed to generate profits, and that any leftover funds were supposed to be funneled back into its operations.

The education department has been blasted by state lawmakers for poor oversight of the meal program. Bock has been entangled in lawsuits with the department since 2020, accusing the agency of a cover-up and of discrimination because she worked with mostly East African businesses.

On Wednesday, the Education Department released a statement commending law enforcement and prosecutors for pursuing justice.

Louis Krauss of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.