The federal courthouse in downtown in Minneapolis where Bock and Said were tried and convicted. Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer.
Aimee Bock, the mastermind of a $250 million pandemic relief fraud known as Feeding Our Future, was found guilty on all counts by a jury Thursday, including wire fraud, conspiracy and bribery. Her co-defendant Salim Said was also found guilty on all counts after a relatively quick five-hour deliberation.
“Aimee Bock and Salim Said took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to carry out a massive fraud scheme that stole money meant to feed children,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick, in a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. “The defendants falsely claimed to have served 91 million meals, for which they fraudulently received nearly $250 million in federal funds. That money did not go to feed kids. Instead, it was used to fund their lavish lifestyles.”
Bock, 44, was the founder and executive director of Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that recruited people to open child nutrition sites, which were eligible for federal money. The sites fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day almost immediately. Feeding Our Future submitted fraudulent claims to the Minnesota Department of Education, which was tasked with overseeing the program here. Feeding Our Future disbursed the money in exchange for $18 million in kickbacks, prosecutors said.
All told, 70 people have been charged and more than three dozen convicted.
The two major trials thus far have involved allegations of significant witness tampering. Five people were charged with attempting to bribe a juror during the 2024 trial, and two have already pleaded guilty. The Star Tribune reported in February that “Abdinasir Abshir was arrested and held in federal custody in Sherburne County jail after allegedly asking to talk to a witness in the courthouse bathroom before the witness testified” in the Feeding Our Future trial. Abshir’s trial is scheduled for August.
According to the DOJ, Said’s Safari Restaurant reported about $600,000 in annual revenue in each of the three years prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, Safari enrolled in the federal child nutrition program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. By July, Said claimed to be serving meals to 5,000 children per day, seven days a week. In total, Said claimed to have served over 3.9 million meals to children between April 2020 and November 2021.
Feeding Our Future went from receiving about $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019, which climbed to nearly $200 million in 2021.
The fraudsters used the proceeds to pay for international travel and to buy luxury cars, jewelry, real estate around the country and in Kenya and Turkey.
Although the child nutrition program was not a state program per se, the flawed oversight by the state Department of Education underscored Minnesota’s failure to prevent widespread fraud in other state programs, including Medicaid. The Reformer reported that half the people indicted in the Feeding Our Future case had other state contracts, for instance.
The Feeding Our Future case seems to have led to another federal investigation, this one looking into whether money intended to help children with autism spectrum disorder has instead lined the pockets of fraudsters; several Feeding Our Future defendants also had autism treatment centers.