The highly anticipated trial of Feeding Our Future’s former executive director is set to begin Monday amid a cloud of concern about jury security.
Aimee Bock, who led the nonprofit at the center of an alleged multi-million dollar fraud scheme, is the lead defendant in the trial. She’ll be jointly tried with defendant Salim Said, who formerly co-owned the now-shuttered Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis.
Testimony over the coming weeks may provide a unique window into how the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country unfolded. The trial comes on the heels of a trial last year that blew up with shocking accusations of alleged jury tampering, and several previous convictions and guilty pleas in the case.
“I suspect a lot of these people who made plea bargains, who have direct knowledge of sending her money or making payments to her, will testify against Bock,” said Joe Daly, a professor emeritus at Mitchell Hamline University who has defended criminal cases in state and federal court.
Bock is charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery and bribery, and three counts of wire fraud. Prosecutors allege that she and 69 other defendants stole $250 million in federal food-aid money meant to feed children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bock’s previous public statements suggest a defense that might blame state government for mismanagement of federal food-aid dollars, maintain that she didn’t know about the fraud and emphasize that her living conditions are a far cry from the expensive homes and luxury cars many other defendants in the case purchased with stolen money.
Bock will also have to decide whether to testify at trial, which would give her an opportunity to tell her side of the story but also open her up for a cross-examination that promises to be heated.
“It’s a high-stakes decision,” said Susan Gaertner, a white collar defense attorney who formerly served as Ramsey County attorney.
Bock allegedly took just over $1 million for herself by contracting with her boyfriend for maintenance work on Feeding Our Future’s office for $900,000. She also allegedly took a $310,000 kickback in exchange for enrolling a nonprofit into the federal food program.
Bock has long denied that she did anything wrong, arguing that the contract with her boyfriend was legitimate and that the $300,000 was for selling a daycare business that she owned at the time. Prosecutors, however, allege that these were actually laundering money.
Neither Bock nor Salim Said’s attorneys returned phone calls and emails seeking comment for this story.
Bock has previously stated that she was never aware of wrongdoing at Feeding Our Future. She has also blamed the fraud on mismanagement from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), which distributed the federal food-aid money to Feeding Our Future and a second nonprofit, which then funneled the money down to food sites that were supposed to serve meals to children.
Bock has also alleged that the investigation and case are retaliation by MDE because she previously filed lawsuits against the education department when it tried to stop the flow of federal dollars to her organization.
All of those arguments will likely come up in her defense, Daly said.
“Saying that, ‘I didn’t know my employees and others were offering bribes and trying to hide money,’ is going to be difficult,” Daly said.
Another possible part of Bock’s defense could involve her current living conditions. Her attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, told reporters last fall that Bock is in a tough spot because of fallout from the charges against her. Bock’s bank accounts were frozen and she can’t find work to pay her bills.
“She lost her car, lost her house, doesn’t have a job,” Udoibok said at the time. “A grown woman with children is living with her parents. That’s tough.”
Daly said Bock’s attorney will likely raise the issues at trial to elicit sympathy from the jury and differentiate Bock from other defendants in the case who spent stolen money lavishly.
“This has broken her, and she was trying to do good with children and she hooked up with bad people and didn’t do anything that was illegal,” Daly said, summarizing the defense’s potential argument. “You’re trying to say she got caught up in this and it’s a horrible thing. She didn’t walk away with any money, she didn’t buy any fancy houses or fancy cars like these other people did.”
Will Bock call witnesses or testify?
Shortly after the allegations against Feeding Our Future became public in early 2022, Bock was unusually vocal in public about the matter, maintaining her innocence and giving her side of the story to several media outlets.
Still, multiple attorneys who are not associated with the case say it would be a risky move for her to take the stand at trial. Bock is not obligated to testify, and her constitutional rights require jurors to abstain from inferring her guilt or innocence should she decide not to testify.
“The risks are great because however well the defendant’s initial testimony goes, cross-examination can make them look really bad,” Gaertner said.
Bock’s attorney can call his own witnesses to the stand after prosecutors first present their witnesses and evidence to jurors.
Were Bock to testify, her cross-examination would give prosecutors another opportunity to restate and summarize to the jury all the charges against her, forcing her to say “no” over and over again, Daly said.
When defendants and their attorneys decide it’s worth testifying, it’s because “they have a story to be told that can’t be told through the documents or through the witnesses,” Gaertner said. But simply telling the truth in testimony isn’t necessarily enough to justify the risks, she said.
“The client has to be likeable, appear credible and has to have a reasonable story to tell that you can’t get before the jury in other ways,” Gaertner said.
Added Daly: “There are liars that come across really well and there are truth tellers who come across horribly to a jury.”
Daly said that when he weighed whether it was a good idea for his clients to testify, he first tried to judge how they behaved under stress.
“I would practice with them, putting them under stress in my office,” he said. “Sometimes when I did that, people would get angry — ‘I thought you were on my side!’”
The attorney and defendant need to know whether the defendant “comes across halfway decently,” Daly said.
Only one of the seven defendants in the Feeding Our Future trial last spring testified on his own behalf. Jurors ultimately found that defendant, Mukhtar Shariff, guilty of several crimes.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel sentenced Mukhtar Shariff last month to 17 years in prison, and criticized his testimony at trial as “not credible.”
Protecting jurors and witnesses
One the eve of the day jury deliberations were set to begin in last year’s Feeding Our Future trial, a woman appeared at a juror’s home with a bag containing $120,000 in cash and instructions for her to vote not guilty for all of the defendants.
The bribery attempt rocked the end of the trial, prompting Brasel, who presided over the trial, to detain all of the defendants and sequester the jury. Two of the defendants in that trial were ultimately charged in the attempted bribery, along with three other individuals who are not charged in the Feeding Our Future case. Two of the five have since pleaded guilty.
During the investigation into the bribery attempt, FBI agents found a list of jurors’ names at one of the defendant’s homes. The two suspects who pleaded guilty in the bribery case admitted to investigating the juror’s address and tracking her movements from the courthouse when the trial ended for the day.
Brasel, who will also preside over Bock’s trial, issued orders to protect jurors in Bock’s trial: Bock and Salim Said must hand over their phones, which will be locked in a pouch on all trial days. Both can take notes during jury selection proceedings, but must hand them over to their attorneys before leaving the courtroom.
Juror questionnaires will also only identify jurors by number and not by name. Likewise, potential jurors will only be referred to by number when they are questioned by attorneys and the judge during jury selection.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has said that it may take extra steps to protect jurors in subsequent trials in the Feeding Our Future case, but it’s unclear what that might look like.
“The attempt to bribe a juror was so extraordinary, so unprecedented that I imagine court personnel and the judiciary and the attorneys spent a lot of time thinking about, ‘What can we do consistent with the defendant’s constitutional rights to make sure this doesn’t happen again?’” Gaetner said.
The issue of protecting juror information from defendants is thorny because defendants and their lawyers have a constitutional right to basic information about potential jurors as part of their due process. Lawyers on both sides of any case will ideally walk into jury selection with a good grasp of who the potential jurors are, Daly said, including their names.
“If I was a judge, I’d make it as clear as I could to lawyers that this is part of your ethical responsibility not to let this list of names get released to anybody,” Daly said.
Other defendants plead guilty
Prosecutors and the FBI have spent close to four years building a case against Bock and the other defendants in the case. Five defendants were convicted and two were acquitted in the first Feeding Our Future trial last spring; 29 others have pleaded guilty.
A former Feeding Our Future employee and several other defendants who ran food sites admitted in their guilty pleas to giving bribes to Feeding Our Future in exchange for being enrolled in the federal program to receive food-aid money.
Prosecutors say the fraud started with the Minnesota Department of Education distributing federal money to Feeding Our Future. The organization distributed the money to food venders and sites that were supposed to feed children meals during the pandemic.
But prosecutors say some organizations reported serving more meals than they did in order to receive more money. Some never served any meals at all.
Abdulkadir Nur Salah, the former Safari Restaurant co-owner who is alleged to have given Bock the $310,000 kickback, pleaded guilty last week to one count of wire fraud. He admitted to giving kickbacks to Feeding Our Future. Salim Said also allegedly participated in the same kickback.
Salim Said is charged with one count each of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, and conspiracy to commit money laundering; and four counts each of money laundering, wire fraud and federal programs bribery.
Abdulkadir Nur Salah and his brother, Abdi Salah, a former senior aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, were both scheduled to be tried along with Bock and Salim Said but entered last-minute guilty pleas last week.
Together, Bock, Salim Said, Abdulkadir Nur Salah and Abdi Salah are accused of stealing $47 million from the federal child nutrition programs.
Salim Said allegedly helped $16 million of federal food money flow through Safari Restaurant to various shell companies that he and others created.
Bock and Salim Said’s trial is scheduled to last for four weeks.
