Prosecutor to Feeding Our Future jurors: ‘You have the power to end this story’
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The jury in the trial of Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock and restaurant owner Salim Said will begin deliberations Wednesday morning after prosecutors and defense attorneys gave their closing arguments Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors say Bock was the ringleader of a $250 million scheme to rip off taxpayer-funded food programs for children in need during the COVID pandemic. She’s charged with wire fraud and bribery. Salim Said faces the same charges plus money laundering. He was a co-owner of Safari Restaurant along Lake Street.
Bock and Said are among 70 defendants charged in the case since late 2022
Investigators say that Safari was a major player in the scheme, and siphoned $16 million from the food programs by running a fraudulent meal site and operating as a vendor to other fake sites.
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The two allegedly spent lavishly. At trial, jurors saw photos of Bock posing with rented Lamborghinis while on a trip to Las Vegas with her boyfriend. Prosecutors presented evidence that Said bought new vehicles including a Mercedes with cash, and purchased a $1.2 million home in Plymouth.
In his closing argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs took jurors back five years, to the confusion and fear of the early days of COVID. He said everyone from nurses to grocery store clerks were putting others ahead of themselves, but Bock and Said set out to enrich themselves by exploiting reimbursement programs for feeding children from low-income families.
“While everybody else was trying to flatten the curve, they were fattening their wallets,” Jacobs said.
The prosecutor called the crimes a “fraud of epic proportions,” and told jurors that Bock and Said signed off on increasingly absurd claims of having served thousands of meals per day from small restaurants that had nowhere near the capacity to prepare that much food.
He also noted that Said and his business partners spent $2.7 million to buy a mansion on Park Avenue in Minneapolis that they used as their headquarters.
“It was a fake document chop shop, a fraud factory all paid for by fraud proceeds,” Jacobs said.
Bock’s attorney Kenneth Udoibok focused on his client’s claims during her testimony last week that she tried to prevent fraud in child nutrition programs.
“This whole case is about meal counts," Udoibok told the jury. “You cannot hold Ms. Bock responsible for someone else’s actions.”
Udoibok reiterated his argument that Bock was unaware of the fraud because she didn’t see the fake meal count forms and meal site attendance sheets that meal site operators had submitted to her and that Feeding Our Future employees processed. The claims were used as the basis for the reimbursement requests that Bock submitted to the state.
Udoibok said his client was obligated under contracts with meal site operators to submit those requests and forward the payments from the state to the site operators.
He also noted that Feeding Our Future kept meticulous, organized records and invited scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which operates the federal food programs on the state level.
“If you want to commit fraud, that’s how you do it? Get the evidence ready for the government to seize it?” Udoibok argued.
Said’s lead attorney, Adrian Montez, focused most of his closing argument on the real food that Safari Restaurant served early in the pandemic.
Montez showed jurors photos of meals being prepared for delivery and said that just because there was fraud at other restaurants, it doesn’t mean there was at Safari.
“They’ve taken that narrative and they’ve tried to transpose that onto Safari Restaurant to create a false narrative that Safari Restaurant was doing the same thing,” Montez said.
He said that other defendants in the case took Said’s business model and “corrupted it.”
The prosecution got the final word. In his rebuttal, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Ebert reminded jurors this was the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country and that they “have the power to end this story.”