MINNEAPOLIS — 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 has charged 70 people, one of the largest pandemic-related fraud cases in the country.

The jury reached a swift decision, finding Bock, 44, of Apple Valley, guilty of seven crimes and Said, 36, of Plymouth, guilty of 21 crimes, including wire fraud and federal programs bribery.

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

After the verdict was read, 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 yet been set.

The trial, which started Feb. 3, was only the second trial since charges were first filed in 2022 in the FBI’s massive investigation. Of 70 people who have been charged so far, 37 have pleaded guilty, five were convicted by a jury last year and two were acquitted.

The trial was widely watched because Bock was the leader of the nonprofit at the center of the large-scale case. The trial was rocked by a witness tampering allegation just a couple weeks in, when a defendant slated to be on 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 an attempted juror bribe 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 goods.

The one thing all witnesses and attorneys agreed on this year was that widespread fraud took place within a federally funded meals program meant to provide food to children in need.

Altogether, nearly $250 million was improperly diverted by Feeding Our Future and dozens of site operators who agreed to participate in an extraordinary pay-for-play scheme that exploited a lack of government oversight during the pandemic, according to court records.

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

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

But prosecutors said Bock’s “willful blindness” is not a defense, noting she personally confirmed the accuracy of all $250 million in allegedly fraudulent payments when she submitted payment requests to state regulators.

“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.”

Most of the evidence against Bock has been circumstantial, with prosecutors essentially arguing that the fraud perpetuated by many of her meal providers was so obvious that anybody would have spotted it — especially someone like Bock who has years of experience with government-funded meal programs.

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 the 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 offices of her St. Anthony nonprofit. 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 ever approve 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 that were later submitted to state and federal regulators, suggesting that someone else forged their signatures to make it appear as if Feeding Our Future were 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. Bock told jurors that she was not accusing the men of lying.

“I am not surprised that individuals try to distance themselves from Feeding Our Future as quickly as they can,” Bock testified.

Salim Said’s case

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, which he partly owned off Lake Street in Minneapolis, 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.

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 bought two luxury vehicles, a stake in two investment properties and a $1.1 million million house in Plymouth with his riches.

Early in the trial, a top official with the Minnesota Department of Education— which oversees the meals program and reimburses nonprofits like Feeding Our Future — testified that the meals program not designed to generate any profits, and that any leftover funds are supposed to be funneled back into the meal operation. There were several notable witnesses who did not take the witness stand, including Said’s partner, Salah. Other conspirators who have pleaded guilty in the Feeding Our Future case have agreed to cooperate with the government and testify at trials involving their co-defendants, but Salah was not brought before jurors to address the the defense’s argument that Salah was the one who “corrupted” the meals program, not Said.

When Salah entered his plea, he admitted that Bock received kickbacks from the program and that he made those payments to her.

Adrian Montez, who represents Said, said Salah used Said’s model at Safari to rip off the system once he saw how much money a “legitimate” site could earn. He said Salah took over day-to-day management of Safari’s meal site in late 2020, after the restaurant started earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, and then expanded the fraudulent operation to new sites in Mankato, St. Paul, St. Cloud, Waite Park and Willmar.

Another key witness who did not show up at Bock’s trial: former Feeding Our Future manager Hadith Ahmed, who described himself as Bock’s “right-hand man” in the first Feeding Our Future trial in 2024. Ahmed, who was one of the first conspirators to plead guilty, told jurors last year that he and other Feeding Our Future employees solicited kickbacks from site operators in exchange for overlooking inflated reimbursement claims and fake invoices.

Ahmed, who was in charge of monitoring meal sites to ensure they were following the rules, described how Bock once handed him a plastic bag of cash of $5,000 from another employee. He also testified that Bock knew site operators were falsifying attendance rosters. Ahmed’s credibility was attacked in that trial, which may have persuaded prosecutors to keep him off the stand a second time.

In a pre-trial memo, Bock’s attorney blasted Ahmed as an “unreliable” witness, noting he claimed that he did not know or could not recall basic information more than 80 times while under cross-examination.

Of the 11 former Feeding Our Future employees on the government’s witness list, just one was called, and it was a low-level staffer who did not accuse Bock of engaging in any criminal behavior. Genesis Alonso, who worked as a food program coordinator, testified that Bock promised to take action when she brought questionable invoices and other documents to her boss.

Up next, a dozen other people in the fraud scheme have trials scheduled for this spring, summer and fall. Of the 42 people who have pleaded guilty or were convicted, only three have been given sentences 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.

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