What happens when you cross a Third-World tribal culture with an urban Democratic establishment? You can probably guess the outcome, but in Minnesota we don’t have to guess. We have seen it on display in the sprawling Feeding Our Future case that represents the largest COVID fraud discovered so far in the United States.
A cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants is charged with siphoning some $250 million from the federal child nutrition program administered by the Minnesota Department of Education into their own pockets between March 2020 and January 2022, when federal agents assembled from around the United States to raid the many scenes of the crime around the Twin Cities. Since then 70 defendants have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted in the two trials conducted in the case so far. The others have yet to be tried.
Minnesota—mostly the Twin Cities area—is home to some 100,000 Somali immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America. Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell reported in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota affords these refugees "some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs." Riddell quoted Professor Ahamed Samatar of St. Paul’s Macalester College: "Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state." After a dip in 2008, the inflow of Somalis has continued unabated and augmented by Somalis from other states. If it takes a village, Minnesota has what it takes.
Minnesota’s Somali community has been a fertile source of recruits for ISIS and al-Shabab. The FBI’s Minneapolis field office has accordingly devoted substantial resources to terrorism-related issues.
The Feeding Our Future case represents old-fashioned corruption of two federal nutrition programs. Feeding Our Future was a small nonprofit that served as a "sponsor" of "sites" such as day cares that participated in the programs. In the COVID era, from April 2020 until January 2022, Feeding Our Future along with its sites and site vendors found it remarkably easy to bilk the programs out of millions of dollars a month by filing false claims for reimbursement supported by false meal counts, fake rosters, and bogus invoices.
The programs were administered by the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and funded by the United States Department of Agriculture. With regulatory "waivers" adopted by the department on account of COVID, the MDE proved a remarkably easy mark. It didn’t take much more than absurd claims of racism to scare the agency off its suspicions while "sites" proliferated and funds kept rolling out the door. In 2021 alone, Feeding Our Future siphoned nearly $200 million to fraudulent sites and vendors.
A frustrated MDE official, however, tipped the FBI to her suspicions in April 2021. FBI forensic accountant Pauline Roase followed up in the ensuing months by collecting relevant bank records. FBI special agents Jared Kary and Travis Wilmer investigated in the field. In the last six weeks of the investigation they posted surveillance cameras outside 12 sites. The videos depicted a sleepy time at the sites that were supposedly feeding thousands of kids a day.
On January 20, 2022, the investigation "went overt" when federal authorities raided sites around the Twin Cities in the largest such operation ever conducted in Minnesota. The following September then-United States Attorney Andrew Luger announced the first indictments handed up in the case.
Aimee Bock was the founder and executive director of Feeding Our Future as well as the ringleader of the fraud scheme. As the sponsor of more than 250 sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future around the state, Bock certified the accuracy of the ludicrously inflated meal claims she submitted for reimbursement on behalf of the sites she enrolled in the program with the approval of MDE. Unlike the Somali players at Feeding Our Future’s sites and vendors, however, Bock was white. She introduced a multicultural liberal element to the massive fraud she oversaw.
The fraud in this case is gross, disgusting, and despicable. In financial terms, Bock herself may have profited the least from it. Defendants expended proceeds intended as reimbursement for meals served on cash purchases of luxury automobiles, deluxe homes, and commercial properties in Minnesota, Ohio, Kentucky, Turkey, and Kenya. Bock appears to have been compensated mostly in the form of the autocratic coin and the adoration of her Somali co-conspirators. Still, the amount she received in the scheme—$1.9 million, according to FBI accountants—is nothing to sneeze at.
Bock was the star defendant in the second of the two trials conducted so far. Her trial concluded with the jury's guilty verdict on all counts this past Wednesday. Bock was tried along with Salim Said, whose fraud netted him $5.5 million. Said’s Safari Restaurant off Lake Street in south Minneapolis reported approximately $600,000 in annual revenue in each of the three years prior to the onset of COVID. In April 2020, Safari enrolled in the federal child nutrition program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. By July 2020, Said claimed to be serving meals to 5,000 children per day, seven days a week, every month. In total, Said claimed to have served over 3.9 million meals to children from the Safari Restaurant food site between April 2020 and November 2021. Said profited from claims that associates provided more than 2.2 million meals at other food sites involved in Feeding Our Future’s fraud scheme.
Bock’s fakery occasionally had an unintentionally comic component. Except for the checks it issued to sites and vendors, everything about Feeding Our Future was fake. Feeding Our Future listed three key outside board members who had no idea they had been so named. Two were bartenders and one was a small-engine mechanic for the city of Eagan, Minnesota.
Called as witnesses by the prosecution, they radiated blue-collar charisma. When Assistant United States Attorney Joe Thompson displayed a Feeding Our Future organization chart with St. Paul bartender Ben Stayberg at the top, he commented laconically: "Yeah, big shoes." They all testified to their lack of qualifications to serve on a nonprofit board and their lack of knowledge that they were (allegedly) on the Feeding Our Future board. The board held no meetings. Bock’s board minutes were fake. She never communicated by email with any of her purported board members. She never sent them any documents to review. There is a Coen Brothers movie lurking in the facts of this case. Frances McDormand could play Aimee Bock.
Minneapolis’s Lake Street runs east-west through the city from St. Paul to St. Louis Park. Feeding Our Future sponsored 21 sites in 2021 (including Safari) on a 1.8 mile stretch of Lake Street. Together these sites claimed to be serving as many kids as populated the Minneapolis public schools.
Bock and Said were charged on 28 counts of wire fraud, federal programs bribery, money laundering, and related conspiracy counts. In the course of the six-week trial federal prosecutors introduced a massive amount of evidence in support of the charges. The jury convicted Bock and Said on all counts within five hours of commencing their deliberations. More trials are scheduled this year, but in part thanks to the result in this case there will probably be more guilty pleas as well.
Sitting through every day of the trial I wondered if there was a single Somali who elected not to participate in the fraud when he or she was presented with the opportunity. Everyone who heard about it seemed to want to get in on the action.
One Somali immigrant, however, spoke up when he saw something shady. His name is Abdihakim Osman Nur. He was my first Somali source on Ilhan Omar’s fraudulent marriage to her brother. Coincidentally, in his defense Salim Said sought to introduce a campaign video of Omar serving meals at Safari. Judge Nancy Brasel asked Said’s counsel to edit Omar from the video and it was never introduced, but it would have been perfect—one pioneering fraudster speaking up for another.
In January 2022, just before the raids that brought the fraud to an end, Abdi commented in Somali on a video in a Facebook post that a mutual friend translated for my use on Power Line. Prosecutors introduced both the video and a version of Abdi’s commentary into evidence. Abdi’s was the voice of decency in this case:
The most amazing incident that you all witnessed happened last night in Minneapolis. We all witnessed a wedding of a young Somali woman who works at the office of Feeding Our Future—a nonprofit that helps provide meals to indigent children who need supportive food programs. … [Vendors] are contracted in that program to distribute that food.
Last night what happened at that staff member’s wedding was shocking to the entire city. The contractors gifted the young woman in charge of coordinating the program gold worth 10,000 dollars each—so much gold that it was wheeled in on a gold tray. The people who gifted her that entire tray are the very contractors in charge of that delivery.
Can someone tell me how and with what funds they were able to gift an office person that expensive gift individually and collectively almost $100,000? These same people, some of whom are under investigation for forging names of young children they are supposed to serve!
We cannot close our eyes to such corruption which will put our entire community’s name in the news as fraudsters and criminals when we only have a few bad apples. These women who are gifting this have been submitting names of thousands of children who are in no data base anywhere and are still being audited for those invoices.
I’m saddened that this same bride was once asked why she had signed people as vendors who were clearly unqualified and unable to follow the program’s rules. These are the same characters who did a song and dance event for the lady contracted to manage this program whose name is Amy [i.e., Aimee Bock]. I would like the entire community to be aware that we are following these events very closely as they unfold.
Sitting through the trial I also wondered where state authorities were while the funds continued to roll out the door from MDE to Bock and her co-conspirators through 2021. Governor Tim Walz has bragged with respect to the colossal fraud in this case that "we caught it very early." He declined to respond to any of the related questions I submitted to him in writing—twice, the second time in response to an email asking me to submit my questions to another email address.
Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison has recently been quoted bragging (about President Donald Trump): "I know a scam when I see one." He too declined to answer my questions asking when he saw that Feeding Our Future and its sites were operating a scam and what he did about it.
In a post-verdict press conference, Thompson, the assistant U.S. attorney, aptly called the Feeding Our Future fraud "the shame of Minnesota." Thompson and fellow AUSAs Matthew Ebert, Harry Jacobs, and Dan Bobeir should be the pride of Minnesota.
Scott W. Johnson is a retired Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line. He is also the father of Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson.