Feeding Our Fraud: On Lake Street

After a day off on account of inclement weather, trial resumed yesterday with the (continued) direct examination of FBI forensic accountant Pauline Roase. Ms. Roase is the second of three FBI forensic accountants to testify in the trial. She was followed at the end of the day yesterday by Sonya Jasma, who is the last witness the government will call before resting its case later today.

Let me digress for a moment here. The FBI witnesses in this case have been incredibly impressive — Special Agents Jared Karey and Travis Wilmer and FBI forensic accountants Lacra Blackwell, Pauline Roase, and Sonya Jasma. They all serve in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office.

The government is represented by a team led by Joe Thompson. Joe is the chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption Section of the Office of the United States Attorney for Minnesota. He is supported by fellow Assistant United States Attorneys Matt Ebert, Harry Jacobs, and Dan Bobeir. Bobeir is a new addition to the trial team, but the Feeding Our Future fraud case has otherwise consumed a few years of their lives. It is a significant case to the state of Minnesota and the federal government with a huge cast of mostly Somali defendants. They are prosecuting the massive Feeding Our Future case (including the trials to come) without fear or favor.

Merrick Garland made the expression “without fear or favor” a joke, but the prosecutors in this case are rescuing it by making it real. They have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. The quality of their work on behalf of the United States should be duly noted. It’s a tough way to make a living. Joe is in addition extremely accessible to the press. I am grateful to him and his team.

Readers may recall that the first Feeding Our Future trial resulted in the convictions of five of the seven defendants. As the trial concluded, however, a juror was bribed by four defendants working with a co-conspirator. After trying the case for a month they had to go back to work with their FBI colleagues to solve the bribery case so that they could charge it on an expedited basis. One of the perpetrators was a defendant who had been acquitted. In that sense, the story had a happy ending.

Governor Walz claims to have been made aware of the Feeding Our Future fraud early on. As usual, Walz has deflected blame to others, including Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann. Judge Guthmann responded here. Attorney General Keith Ellison has recently claimed that he knows a scam when he sees one. Where were they? Neither has responded or even acknowledged the related questions I sent to them this past Monday.

Ms. Roase followed the money and crunched the financial numbers involved in this case, the second of the two that have gone to trial so far. I will only mention what struck me as the highlights of her testimony here.

Ms. Roase paid special attention to the so-called Safari Group of sites in which defendant Salim Said had a hand, starting with the Safari Restaurant itself, just off Lake Street in south Minneapolis. Safari was barely breaking even as a restaurant, but it struck gold with as a site for the school nutrition program. Approved by the Minnesota Department of Education as a free lunch “site” in April 2020, it must have been the one that started the gold rush. Star Tribune reporter Jeff Meitrodt spotlights the special business relationship that Feeding Our Future executive director Aimee Bock seems to have had with Salim Said, including generous prepayments in what was supposed to be run as a reimbursement program.

By July 2020 Safari was filing meal claim forms for 5,000 meals a day seven days a week. Safari seems to have given up the restaurant business for the business of free meals under the auspices of the federal child nutrition programs and their system of reimbursement. Safari partners opened additional sites that became a lucrative group.

Ms. Roase noted the group’s sources of funds and the uses to which they were put. In a seeming miracle of husbandry, they kept food costs down to less than five percent while the partners became millionaires on the “reimbursements.” Their Tunyar Trading site spent 1.5 percent of the proceeds on “food.” Their Horseed Management site spent 3.4 percent on food. Perhaps it’s a miracle they didn’t drive food costs to zero.

Ms. Roase summarized her financial analysis on a few charts, including one that singled out the “sites” that quickly populated Lake Street in 2020 and 2021 over a 1.8 mile stretch south of downtown Minneapolis. Lake Street runs some six miles through Minneapolis from the Lake Street Bridge on the Mississippi River across from St. Paul to St. Louis Park at the city limit on the west end.

Feeding Our Future came to sponsor an astounding 21 “sites” on the 1.8 mile stretch of Lake Street singled out by Ms. Roase. Even more astounding, the “sites” allegedly came to serve 59,000 meals a day to 30,000 beneficiaries. The total enrollment of the Minneapolis School District is 33,000 students. Total meals served on this stretch allegedly reached 12.8 million by November 2021.

In his cross-examination of Ms. Roase, Bock defense attorney Ken Udoibok made only a point or two. One was that they Minnesota Department of Education approved the “sites” to operate under the free meal programs. Another was that Bock did not have access to Safari accounts and wouldn’t know what they spent on food. Their meal claims were supported by (fake) invoices. Feeding Our Future only paid claims based on the (fraudulent) meal counts submitted to it. Mike Colich and Adrian Montez represent Salim Said. They had no cross-examination of Ms. Roase.

Sonya Jasma only began her testimony at the end of the afternoon yesterday. I will get to her tomorrow when she has finished up.

Like Joe Thompson, Ken Udoibok is also extremely accessible to the press. Reporters hung around with him for 15 or 20 minutes after the trial was adjourned for the day to talk with him, mostly about whether Bock would testify. He said he has never had a client testify on his own behalf in a criminal case. He stated that he advised Bock against testifying in this case but that it was up to her and she wants to tell her story. If she chooses to testify in this case contrary to his advice, he said, it would “open too many windows or doors.” I think it would open too many windows, doors, and vents, or blow her house down, but we shall see.

Below is KSTP 5 Eyewitness News reporter Eric Rasmussen’s hit from the courthouse on yesterday’s proceedings. It includes a view of part of the stretch of Lake Street featured in Ms. Roase’s testimony.