Feeding Our Fraud: Bock on cross

Defense counsel Ken Udoibok conclude his direct examination of Aimee Bock at trial yesterday morning and lead prosecutor Joe Thompson commenced his cross-examination. Bock is the ringleader of the $250 million Covid fraud with which she and a total of 70 defendants were charged in September 2022. Bock’s is the second Feeding Our Future fraud case to come to trial. This one includes 21 charges against Salim Said, one of Bock’s biggest “clients.” In totality, this case represents the biggest Covid fraud uncovered in the United States so far. Thirty-seven of the 70 defendants have pleaded guilty. The Feeding Our Future fraud is massive, gross, disgusting, and despicable.

Bock took the stand in her own defense this past Friday before a four-day weekend break. It was a moment of high drama that was partially dissipated by Udoibok’s spotty and superficial direct examination as he moved from subject to subject. Yesterday morning Udoibok led Bock through a detailed account of the construction work done on the Feeding Our Future office by Bock’s then boyfriend Empress Watson. This was to rebut the implication that the $800,000 of Feeding Our Future paid to Watson’s Handy Helpers were to help Bock rather than Feeding Our Future.

Udoibok also had her address other self-dealing issues raised in the case. I thought the time spent on this aspect of the case was disproportionate to the gross fraud in the operation over which Bock presided as executive director of Feeding Our Future. She acknowledged that she missed the fraud committed by some of the “sites” and “vendors” with which Feeding Our Future worked because “it’s clear now they were all working together.” Bock also explained her “We may have become the mob” text message to Hadith Ahmed as a sarcastic joke. It meant that she aggressively attacked and eliminated problems. “Fair enough,” Udoibok commented. That was not to be taken as a sarcastic joke.

Bock’s direct examination concluded with other responses to self-dealing issues raised in the government’s case and a direct denial of the charges at issue in the first two counts of the indictment against her. She denied that she had solicited or taken bribes and shed another tear. “Nothing would be worse or worth being separated from my children,” she said as she choked up.

In a courtroom packed with spectators the drama returned with the cross-examination of Bock by Joe Thompson. Thompson’s cross has not broken Bock. She is one tough cookie. However, I think it has demonstrated that Bock is a blatant liar. She has a few rehearsed and formulaic responses to deal with the difficult issues at the heart of her case. These responses have quickly gotten old. To most “yes” or “no” questions she provides a semi-narrative response. To borrow a phrase from the Rolling Stones, she is practiced at the art of deception.

Thompson’s interrogation of Bock is in any event a master class in another art of cross-examination. Whose art will prevail in this case?

Thompson began with the big picture. He had Bock acknowledge the undeniable. There was fraud committed under her auspices to obtain federal child nutrition program funds amounting to millions of dollars. However, that was about as far as he got in terms of agreement. She wouldn’t agree that it took advantage of the pandemic and quibbled about whether the program targeted disadvantaged kids.

Did she sponsor “sites” whose principals bought luxury cars with funds derived from a reimbursement program? She doesn’t know what a luxury car is. But she drove in the Lamborghini rented by her nogoodnik former boyfriend Watson? “I have been an unwilling passenger in a Lamborghini,” she responded. As I say, she is a tough cookie. She only acknowledged they bought “fancy cars.” And real estate, and homes paid for without the bother of a mortgage, and commercial real estate. (Thompson is aiming at Salim Said on these points.) “Entities are allowed to use funds as they please,” she answered.

But it isn’t possible — this is me speaking, not Thompson — to become a millionaire honestly on the federal child nutrition program based on its reimbursement levels. You have to cheat and lie, exactly as Feeding Our Future’s “sites” and “vendors” did. Salim Said represents a case study.

Bock submitted all the fraudulent claims at issue to the Minnesota Department of Education for reimbursement by the United States Department of Agriculture via MDE’s Cyber-Linked Interactive Child Nutrition System (“CLiCS”). We have seen the fraudulent claims submitted by Bock for reimbursement by Bock on CLiCS over and over in the government’s case. Each such submission came with Bock’s paragraph-long attestation that the claim was accurate and that there was no deliberate misrepresentation.

As Thompson reviewed the claims with her, we must have heard Bock’s formulaic response 25 times yesterday. I should have been able to memorize it, but I didn’t even get it down fully. “I certified I had the [meal count] records available, and they were classified in the right category and that there was no deliberate misrepresentation,” she said over and over. If you’ve ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey, this was Bock’s equivalent of Homer’s “wine-dark sea” without the benefit of the dactylic hexameter in the Greek original. Bock had yet another formula to assert her reliance on staff in the claims process. She herself virtually never looked at the absurd meal count claims that we have seen every day in the trial so far. She didn’t find them absurd on their face (which they are).

Thompson carefully traced Feeding Our Future’s sponsorship of each of the Safari Group of “sites” (or sites on which it later acted as the vendor). Salim Said was a co-owner of Safari and split the profits generated by Safari and other sites. In April 2020 Safari helped pioneer the template that produced the Feeding Our Future fraud. Within a month or two it was submitting claims for 5,000 and then 6,000 meals a day twice a day, day after day, seven days a week. She didn’t find the claims suspicious on their face. She wouldn’t even admit that she “knows” Salim Said. She wouldn’t admit her knowledge of his affiliation with the several other sites operated by the Safari Group. Thompson has effectively used the cross-examination to remind the jury of the case against Said with respect to all these sites. Said might otherwise be fading into the background of this case.

Thompson hammered the issue of Bock’s self-dealing on the $310,000 sale of her non-existent daycare center in Burnsville to Said and his Safari partners. In reality, the only business the daycare center ever did was as a Feeding Our Future “site.” Thompson made the point that the daycare center was not a daycare center. It never opened as such. The only revenue it generated came from the federal child nutrition food program. Bock fought Thompson, I thought ineffectively, every step of the way.

Thompson also took up miracle 1.8 mile stretch of Lake Street in south Minneapolis that was eventually populated with 21 “sites” sponsored by Feeding Our Future. Bock testified that the need was great because the area was a “food desert.” The sites allegedly distributed 55,000 free meals a day in a city with a population of 400,000. In April 2021 they allegedly served 1.7 million meals. In October 2021 the number had declined to 800,000 meals. In each case the true number was closer to zero. Thompson got Bock to concede that by February 2021 grocery stores at Target, Aldi and Cub had all reopened. Bock insisted: “It has been a food desert. It remains a food desert.”

Bock testified that she was passionately committed to rooting out fraud in the program. She decried the Minnesota Department of Education’s alleged refusal to follow up on her tips, although Thompson stated in his questions that she sued one MDE officer personally for defamation based on his expressed concerns about fraud at Feeding Our Future. When the FBI raided her home in January 2022, Bock promised agents the would remove anyone operating guilty sites from the program. O.J. Simpson, call your office.

We are advised that closing arguments will take place on Monday. I find that hard to believe, but the end is in sight.

There is a book to be written on this case and the Coen Brothers could make a fantastic movie out of it. It’s got the local Twin Cities angle that they drew on in Fargo and A Serious Man. They grew up in St. Louis Park, close to the scene of many of the crimes committed in this case. They might have the nerve to take up the Somali angle and the white woman ringleader purportedly defending her clients against the Democrat authorities’ alleged “racism.” Francis McDormand is Joel Coen’s wife. She was the star of Fargo and won an Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Marge Gunderson. She would make a perfect Aimee Bock. Minneapolis wouldn’t be a bad title for the film.