The leader of a Minnesota anti-hunger nonprofit was convicted in U.S. District Court on Wednesday of masterminding a brazen scheme that reaped more than $240 million in pandemic relief funds with a network of bogus food kitchens that billed the government for 91 million meals.
The nonprofit’s leader, Aimee Bock, 44, was convicted by a jury of seven counts, including wire fraud and bribery. Another defendant, Salim Said — a 36-year-old who oversaw one of the bogus kitchens — was convicted of 20 counts, also including wire fraud and bribery.
When Ms. Bock was charged in 2022, federal prosecutors said her scheme was the largest known fraud against the government’s Covid-19 relief programs.
At least 70 people were charged in the scheme, and more than 40 have already pleaded guilty or been convicted. Last year, another case related to the same scandal made national news, when someone attempted to bribe a juror in a separate trial by leaving about $120,000 in cash at her home in a Hallmark gift bag. Five people were later charged with bribery in that case.
After Wednesday’s verdicts were read, Judge Nancy Brasel ordered that Ms. Bock and Mr. Said remain in jail to await their sentencing, according to a report from the courtroom by The Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom. The charges carry potential sentences of more than a decade in prison.
The fraud scheme targeted two programs meant to feed hungry children, which were funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture but administered by the state of Minnesota. The system relied on nonprofit groups called “sponsors” to be its watchdogs. They were supposed to oversee individual kitchens and feeding sites and make sure they were not inflating the number of children they served.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the federal government flooded money into the program — trying to reach children who were out of school and therefore unable to rely on school lunches. The government also relaxed oversight, putting even more trust in the watchdogs.
In this case, prosecutors said, one of those watchdogs went bad.
Ms. Bock ran a sponsor nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said she had conspired with dozens of people to set up 250 nonexistent feeding operations around Minnesota and used her oversight power to hide that network from the government. By law, Ms. Bock’s nonprofit got a cut of the money. Prosecutors said it had eventually totaled $18 million.
Many of the fake operations submitted invoices for implausibly large numbers of children: Mr. Said’s operation, for instance, said it had fed 6,000 a day, more than all the children in its ZIP code. In another instance, a man said he was feeding 5,000 children a night — from a location that turned out to be a second-floor apartment.
Prosecutors said that members of Ms. Bock’s network had used the proceeds of the scheme to buy homes, cars and commercial buildings. They said Ms. Bock herself had funneled money to her boyfriend at the time and used it to take trips to Las Vegas and rent Lamborghinis.
The state of Minnesota had grown suspicious of Ms. Bock’s network in 2020 and tried to stop payment to some of the sites. But she sued the state government, saying officials were discriminating against her network because it served many African immigrants and their children. The state then called in the F.B.I., which investigated and raided Ms. Bock’s home and the nonprofit’s offices in early 2022.
In the days after that raid, Ms. Bock told The New York Times that she was unaware that there had been any fraud in the operations she supervised.
If there was fraud, she said, then “every test we have in place and every protection we have in place didn’t catch it. Is it possible? Absolutely. And if they got one over on us, I will help hold them accountable.”
Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting.
