Truer words were never spoken. The six-week-long second trial of Feeding Our Future defendants wrapped up late this afternoon. Now the matter is in the hands of the jury to render a verdict. Your correspondent was there.
This round, the defendants are Aimee Bock, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future at the center of the scandal, and Salim Said, a co-owner of Safari Restaurant, her largest vendor.
The jury has a lot to consider. Just the closing arguments alone in the case ran to a combined four hours or so. Prosecutors assembled a 175-page Power Point slide show to present for jurors, which included this gem of a quote on page 60,
The above quote is from a prosecution witness in the case, a former pro boxer who runs a gym in St. Paul. He was asked to comment on the large number of meals being claimed as served out of an unrelated office suite upstairs from his gym.
He’s right, either the sums add up or they don’t. Either the accused really did serve 100 million meals to low-income children during the pandemic years or they engaged in industrial-scale overbilling of the taxpayer-funded, free-food programs.
Prosecutors portrayed Bock as the alleged ringleader/gatekeeper of the massive fraud, controlling who had access to the program to which they could overbill. Prosecutors say it resulted in a $250 million fraud, the largest single Covid-related fraud in America.
In her defense, Bock, now aged 44, claimed to have been duped by (1) crooked employees working in cahoots with (2) clever and unscrupulous food vendors, while being ignored by (3) an uncaring and racist state Dept. of Education (MDE), the program’s nominal regulator.
As for MDE, that agency’s staggering incompetence has been on full display for the past six weeks. That Bock places the ultimate blame for the scandal on MDE for approving Feeding Our Future’s site applications and requests for payments does not get Bock off the hook, in my view.
Similar to the O.J. Simpson saga, Bock claims to still be on the search for the real fraudsters in the case.
Bock’s live-in boyfriend, Empress Watson, Jr., comes in for his share of blame. But Aimee sure looks happy standing in his rented Rolls Royce in Las Vegas (p. 115),
Looking past the Rolls Royce, and the Lamborghini (plural), Bock’s lawyer attempted to argue that Bock’s relative lack of greed, when compared to her co-defendants, was somehow exonerating of her conduct.
Contributing some $32 million to that fraud total were “the Safari group” of defendants, centered around a south Minneapolis ethnic restaurant by that name. Prosecutors portrayed Salim Said, now aged 36, at the top of that pyramid. From p. 5,
Testifying in his own defense, Said assigned all the blame to the man at the lower left above, Abdulkadir Nur Salah. Salah was one of Said’s business partners and he acted as a CFO of sorts for the larger enterprise. Said portrayed himself as a hands-off, passive investor, merely trusting his partners to do the right thing.
Said’s lawyer portrayed his client as a restaurant manager miracle worker. In this version, Said took his Safari Restaurant from a conventional sit-down restaurant cranking out 600 meals on its very best day to a 12,000-meal-per-day industrial kids meal powerhouse. The lawyer says that Said flawlessly executed “an easy transition” to a “new business model” at the Safari site.
Under Said’s management, Safari was able to hit this mark, on the number, day-after-day, month-after-month, rain, snow, or shine, in the middle of the century’s worst pandemic. If true, Said should be teaching at Harvard Business School, rather than standing trial in Federal court.
Mr. Said personally signed off on these fantastic meal claims every month. Hurting his cause in one memorable month is an obviously fake milk purchase invoice (from Afro Produce) showing the one-time sale of 16,000 gallons of milk. That works out to a whopping 68 tons of milk. Having been shown, extensively, the restaurant layout in defense exhibits, there appears to be no room for 68 tons of anything, much less something perishable. Said claims no knowledge of that or of any of the other fake invoices shown in court. He stands by his signed meal counts, however.
Said’s attorney says that it was the business partners who “corrupted” Said’s business model.
Then there were the fake attendance rosters of nonexistent children. “Putify Nop” is my new favorite, who appears variously as both aged 8 and 16.
Fake invoices, fake children or not, forensic accountants working for the prosecution document how the corporate entities operating food distribution sites spent anywhere from zero to five percent of their revenue on purchasing food. I’m guessing that works out to profit margins of at least 80 percent, which leaves a lot of money on the bottom lines for frivolous spending.
Prosecutors took the jury on a tour of Mr. Said’s 2020-21 spending sprees. You’ve already heard of his truck, Mercedes, and $1.1 million Plymouth home (with an indoor basketball court).
Today, the focus during Said’s continued cross examination was on his multi-million-dollar purchases of commercial real estate in Minnesota and Ohio. Then we went through his Discover credit card statements. Tens of thousands of dollars went to Nordstrom and other fine retailers for clothes and shoes. He kitted out his new home with tens of thousands of dollars in new TV’s and furniture. He booked an 8-day river cruise.
[As an aside, I fear that a similar tour through my credit card statements would reveal just how embarrassingly downscale a life I lead. Sample dialog: “Mr. Glahn, can you explain this $15 credit card charge at that convenience store in rural Nebraska? A: “No, I will not, your honor.”]
As in the first trial, defense lawyers went on at length on the concept of “reasonable doubt.” They, again, imagined an alternate universe where the FBI had conducted a different sort of investigation, one where copious evidence was uncovered exonerating their clients.
At the end of the day, everyone agrees that massive fraud took place through Feeding Our Future. The only difference in this trial is that defense lawyers argue that blame does not fall upon their clients.
We’ll soon find out what the jury thinks.