Feeding Our Future ‘mastermind’ sentenced to over 41 years in prison

Aimee Bock, convicted for leading a $242 million pandemic relief fraud scheme known as Feeding Our Future, has been sentenced to 500 months — over 41 years — in prison.

“This was a vortex of fraud, and you were at the epicenter,” said U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel to Bock during the sentencing hearing on Thursday morning at the Minneapolis federal courthouse.

The sentence is less than the 50 years that federal prosecutors sought as well as the maximum 100-year sentence Bock faced after Brasel overruled Bock’s attorney’s arguments for a shorter sentence. It’s the longest sentence of any Feeding Our Future defendant so far; Brasel sentenced Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 36, to 28 years in prison in August.

Bock, 45, was the founder and executive director of Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that recruited people to open over 250 child nutrition sites, which were eligible for federal money. The sites fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day almost immediately. Feeding Our Future submitted fraudulent claims to the Minnesota Department of Education, which was tasked with overseeing the program. Feeding Our Future disbursed the money in exchange for $18 million in kickbacks, prosecutors said.

In their Monday court filing arguing for a 50-year sentence for Bock, prosecutors said that Bock was “not just central to the scheme but was routinely celebrated as its lynchpin.”

“The brazen and staggering nature of her crimes has shaken Minnesota to its core, leaving lasting damage and eroding public trust. Her actions have permanently altered the state, and not for the better,” the filing reads.

Feeding Our Future has become a cataclysmic event in Minnesota’s government and politics, drawing national scrutiny to Minnesota and indirectly leading to the onset of Operation Metro Surge late last year, in part because the vast majority of the defendants are Somali-American. Gov. Tim Walz’s campaign for a third term wilted under the pressure of ceaseless national scrutiny of Minnesota’s safety net programs.

An hour after Bock’s sentencing, seven floors down, federal officials, including Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, announced sweeping fraud charges in Minnesota’s Medicaid program, as well as the expansion of the Midwest Healthcare Strike Force team with additional prosecutors in Minnesota and the creation of a new national Medicaid strike force team.

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Court sketch by Cedric Hohnstadt via Minnesota Reformer

The federal investigation into Feeding Our Future has led to over 70 indictments and 66 convictions, including the conviction of Bock and codefendant Salim Said in 2025 at a trial with multiple cooperating defendants. Bock was found guilty on all counts by a federal jury, including wire fraud, conspiracy and bribery. Prosecutors said the overall scheme ran upward of $246 million, though that was limited to the $242 million defrauded after April 2020 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funded the pandemic relief.

Kenneth Udoibok, Bock’s defense attorney, has argued that Bock should only be sentenced based on her personal gain from the scheme, which he said was $1.2 million, less than her codefendants. He also wrote in a court filing that Bock’s codefendants “used Bock’s unfamiliarity with Somali (language) to isolate her from uncovering their fraud.”

Udoibok also blamed the Minnesota Department of Education for not conducting the “necessary oversight.” The department had stopped payments for meal sites and asked for more documentation to verify that meals were being served, after which Bock and Feeding Our Future sued and payments resumed.

The Star Tribune reported this week that the Department of Education was susceptible to political pressure: Legislators called the agency on behalf of Feeding Our Future to encourage the resumption of payments, while MDE leadership discouraged frontline workers from investigating further for fear of being accused of targeting the Somali community.

Prosecutors argued that Bock should be responsible for the $242 million siphoned out of hunger relief funds by Feeding Our Future.

In the Monday court filing, prosecutors wrote, “Bock personally submitted all of the site applications, monitored all of the sites, and signed each and every claim for reimbursement and check to participants in the program. Bock also controlled Feeding Our Future’s bank account and the organization as a whole.” The filing includes examples of checks and claim reimbursements signed by Bock. Prosecutors also said that Bock warned others in the scheme not to make conspicuous purchases that drew attention — which they did not heed — and routed her own spending of fraud money through “her live-in boyfriend Empress Watson’s company Handy Helpers.”

“Aimee Bock did not merely participate in fraud …. She orchestrated it, protected it, and profited from it,” said U.S. Assistant Attorney Rebecca Kline at the sentencing.

Udoibok reiterated his arguments in court to no avail — the judge upheld that Bock was responsible for the full $242 million in losses.

Prosecutors provided a slew of other reasons for a severe punishment for Bock: They alleged that she obstructed justice by suing MDE; that she used sophisticated means to carry out the fraud scheme, including selling a nonexistent daycare to launder money; and that she misrepresented acting on behalf of a charitable organization.

Brasel upheld the additional penalties, which gave Bock a longer maximum sentence, though Brasel used what she said was Bock’s perjury in her trial — instead of the MDE lawsuits — as evidence of her obstruction of justice.

Joe Thompson, Matt Ebert, Harry Jacobs and Daniel Bobier — four former prosecutors who had a central role in the Feeding Our Future prosecution — were present at the sentencing hearing. Three of them left in January, reportedly over how the Justice Department was handling the killing of Renee Good, leaving the office without its top fraud experts. Ebert and Thompson addressed reporters after the hearing.

“It’s a long sentence, and Bock did everything she could to earn it,” Thompson said. “But the judge found what we all knew, which was that Feeding Our Future was entirely fraudulent. All the sites under its sponsorship were fraudulent. And she carried out the scheme every step of the way, including by threatening MDE in lawsuits and accusing them baselessly of racism when they tried to shut down the program.”

Bock, wearing a lime green jail uniform, delivered a speech through tears after finding out her sentence.

“I made mistakes, so many mistakes. If I could go back, I would do everything differently. I don’t have the words to express just how horrible I feel,” Bock said.

Kline said that Bock has spent the months since her trial “prominently pushing her narrative of lies in the media and in the public forum,” giving interviews to multiple news outlets and allegedly sending protected court documents to reporters through her son. Bock’s conduct, the prosecutors said in the court filing, was evidence of “someone who has zero respect for the law and no remorse for the untold harms she has caused.”

When asked whether he was moved by Bock’s words, Thompson said, “I don’t take anything Aimee Bock says at face value,” then acknowledging that it’s “hard to watch someone being sentenced, regardless of the crime.”

Read the prosecutors’ full court filing arguing for a 50-year sentence for Bock. 

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.