The leader of Feeding Our Future sold vulnerable immigrants on a “perversion of the American dream,” persuading dozens of Somali business owners to join her $250 million pay-for-play scheme that made them millions of dollars before federal investigators caught up to the fraud, prosecutors said in their closing statement Tuesday in the monthlong trial.
“They just wanted to work hard and provide better lives for themselves and their families,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs, who presented the government’s closing argument to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, that was the American dream. It should have been enough ... But what Aimee Bock sold them was a perversion of the American dream: lie, cheat, steal, do anything to make more money. And look at them now.”
After five weeks of testimony, the defense rested its case Tuesday morning after both Bock, the founder of the nonprofit at the center of the scheme, and her alleged co-conspirator, Safari Restaurant co-owner Salim Said, testified in their defense, denying any wrongdoing or kickbacks and saying food was served to kids.
Prosecutors spent four weeks calling 30 witnesses who testified that Bock ignored concerns about the ballooning fraud, knew about kickbacks between associates and even requested kickbacks herself.
“This program is about making meals, not millionaires,” Jacobs said Tuesday.
Jacobs told the jury in his closing argument that the pandemic brought out the best in many Minnesotans. But, he said, Bock and Said, who personally earned $5.9 million from the seven meal sites he allegedly controlled, used the crisis to “enrich themselves” by exploiting a federally funded meals program that is supposed to provide food to children in need.
Prosecutors say defendants in the massive scheme submitted fake attendance sheets and phony invoices to inflate the number of meals they claimed to serve to children to get millions of dollars in government reimbursements.
Said took the stand Monday and defiantly claimed he was entitled to make millions in profits off the food program. But on Tuesday morning, as prosecutors finished questioning him about documents, he admitted that at least some of the invoices that were used to support the claims of some of his sites appeared to be fabricated.