FBI: Minneapolis restaurant granted lucrative ‘favors’ by Feeding Our Future

If Aimee Bock had a favorite among the hundreds of people she dealt with as the leader of Feeding Our Future, it was Salim Said, according to witnesses who testified Thursday during the federal trial of the two Minnesotans.

Said, co-owner of the defunct Safari restaurant in Minneapolis, was there from the beginning of a sprawling meals fraud scheme, and he got special treatment, prosecutors told the jury in the fourth week of testimony in the trial.

Unlike almost 300 meal distribution sites overseen by Feeding Our Future that weren’t paid until they submitted their monthly reimbursement claims, Said’s sites often were moved to the front of the line, with Bock prepaying $2.9 million in claims, said Pauline Roase, an FBI forensic accountant.

That was a big deal. Such prepayments, Roase testified, were against state rules and could have caused Bock trouble with Minnesota regulators. Roase said Bock rarely prepaid claims and that Safari got more than half of all the funds that were paid in advance without proper documentation.

The federal meal programs at the center of the case reimbursed nonprofits and schools for feeding low-income children after school and during the summer.

Bock and Said are among 70 people charged in the $250 million fraud scheme, one of the largest pandemic-related fraud cases in the country. Prosecutors accuse the defendants of grossly inflating the number of meals they claimed to serve in order to rake in millions of dollars to spend on luxury homes and cars, and kickbacks to one another, not feeding kids.

When Bock paused such prepayments in January 2022, Roase testified, a bitter dispute followed between the two long-time partners. The dispute was documented in a text Bock sent to Said a day before FBI agents raided her Rosemount home and office.

In the text, Roase testified, Bock admitted to prepaying Said as a “favor.” She said Bock admitted she had done it for “almost two years ... so you didn’t have to worry about money.”

But now, Bock said, Said was threatening to move his meal operation to another sponsoring organization, which would have cost Bock her biggest operator. In 2021, prosecutors said Feeding Our Future received nearly $18 million in federal funds for its 10% cut of the action for all 299 of its sites, allegedly camouflaged as “administrative fees.”

“To be honest I’m tired of helping people with money and doing appeals to get sites approved and then in return I get attacked and my company gets attacked,“ Bock wrote in text, which was shown to the jury. ”I’ve gone above and beyond for your sites.“

The conversation was never finished, Roase testified, because the alleged conspirators stopped talking to each other after the federal investigation became “overt.”

The relationship between Bock and Said took center stage in the prosecution’s final day of testimony Thursday, with witnesses showing how Said benefited from his favored status. In less than two years, Roase testified, Said personally earned $5.9 million through falsified claims, more than any of his partners. His wife got an extra $219,500, records showed.

Altogether, the dozen or so sites and vendors controlled by Safari’s owners hauled in $44 million, making them the biggest beneficiaries of the scheme, Roase testified.

Sonya Jansma, another FBI forensic accountant, testified that Said spent most of that money on personal possessions. Among them: a $47,000 Chevrolet Silverado, a $60,000 Mercedes and a $1.1 million home in Plymouth — a residence with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and an indoor basketball court.

Along with his partners, he also bought a $2.7 million mansion in the Minneapolis Uptown neighborhood that Safari’s owners used to oversee their financial affairs.

The government has seized all of the property.

Witnesses said bank records showed that Said earned more money from the operation than his sites spent on the meals they served. Typically, food costs accounted for less than 5% of the funds received by site operators. By contrast, Safari’s food costs consumed 26% of total revenue in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic when the Minneapolis restaurant was not involved in the food program, according to records shown to the jury.

“They are not buying enough food. It’s not even close,” testified Roase, whose review showed that some meal distribution sites could not provide legitimate invoices for any food.

Neither Bock nor Said’s attorneys challenged the food cost analysis during their cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses.

Bock’s slice of the pie was much smaller than Said’s, according to the prosecution’s witnesses. She received a total of $1.9 million, including nearly $900,000 that went to her then-boyfriend’s construction company, according to a summary of her bank records shown to the jury.

Bock also received $339,672 in salary and close to $600,000 in alleged kickbacks and “donations,” Roase testified. The government seized another $3.5 million from the Feeding Our Future bank account Bock controlled, Roase said.

Two of her employees enriched themselves even more, according to the bank records shown to the jury.

The biggest winner: Ikram Mohamed, who worked as a consultant to Feeding Our Future and pleaded not guilty to federal charges. She collected more than $11 million through what prosecutors call a sham vendor operated by her brother and by operating several meal sites with her family.

During a brief interview outside the downtown Minneapolis federal courtroom Thursday, Bock’s attorney, Ken Udoibok, pointed to the gulf between what Bock is alleged to have earned from the scheme compared with her alleged accomplices.

“Show me the money,” said Udoibok.

He said the most “outrageous” thing Bock is alleged to have done is spent a few thousand dollars on trips to Las Vegas and Memphis while her alleged accomplices were buying expensive real estate.

Udoibok said Bock wants to testify when the defense starts presenting its case on Friday. But he said he hopes to persuade her to stay away from the witness stand. Still, he noted, “It’s up to her.”