Target Field wouldn’t have been big enough to hold every child one Minneapolis restaurant falsely claimed to feed every week in the summer of 2020.

That’s the visual a federal prosecutor presented to the jury to start the trial of Safari Restaurant owner Salim Said and Aimee Bock, the founder and former executive director of Feeding Our Future.

Bock and Said are charged, along with dozens of others, of being involved in a conspiracy to defraud $250 million of federal money meant to go toward feeding children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bock is charged with multiple counts of wire fraud and bribery. She’s the accused ringleader of what government officials call the largest pandemic relief fraud case in the country.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Bobier, in the prosecution’s opening statements, said the defendants “came up with a scheme to steal from the federal program.”

He described Bock as the “gatekeeper” to Federal Child Nutrition Program dollars and Said as “one of the biggest players” of the fraud scheme.

According to prosecutors, within weeks during the pandemic, Bock had submitted dozens of food sites for approval, which then began demanding “enormous” amounts of meals. There were several sites claiming to feed thousands of kids per day, despite schools still offering meals.

Prosecutors painted Bock as the mastermind of the scheme, motivated by money and power — adding that she went on vacations and dropped money on renting luxury vehicles.

But Bock’s attorney, Kenneth Udoibok, said her early attempts to call out fraud were ignored by the state, and he blamed others running the sites.

“When you have a clever thief, you don’t blame the person who wasn’t able to catch the thief,” Udoibok told the jury. “Ms. Bock is a convenient target.”

While Bock ran Feeding Our Future, Said ran Safari Restaurant. Authorities say he claimed to serve 5,000 or 6,000 meals per day, seven days a week. This totaled 3.9 million meals, leading him to be reimbursed over $12 million for that site.

He then opened fraudulent sites ASA Limited and Stigma Free International, prosecutors say. He reportedly claimed 1.3 million fraudulent meals for ASA Limited and 5.7 million for Stigma Free International.

“You don’t have to be an expert in the federal food program, a teacher, or administrator to know that is not real, to know that is fraud,” prosecutors said about the meal counts.

Prosecutors say Said used the fraudulent money to buy a $2.78 million mansion to be used for his business, a $1.1 million home, expensive vehicles, and more.

Through it all, Bock’s attorney said she never personally got rich. But as she positioned herself as a hero for underserved communities during the pandemic, prosecutors told the jury the payoff for Bock was not only financial.

“Aimee Bock got money, she got power, but she also got adoration,” Bobier said. “All those people bleeding the state dry? They loved Aimee Bock.”

Among the first witnesses on Monday, prosecutors called U.S. Postal Inspector Matthew Hoffman, who served a warrant on Feeding Our Future offices in 2022. Authorities seized around 270 boxes of documents and even some digital devices.

Prosecutors also called Emily Honer, the director of Nutrition Program Services for the Minnesota Department of Education. Honer detailed how MDE distributed child nutrition program funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She added that both the quick growth in both the number of sites and children attending them concerned MDE. When she told Bock that for-profit organizations, like Safari Restaurant, could no longer be sites for the Child and Adult Care Food Program, Bock reportedly wrote back in an email that the ineligible sites had switched to be under the Summer Food Service Program.

When Safari and other for-profit sites were again deemed ineligible, Bock said that the sites were being run and operated by Feeding Our Future, a non-profit.

Bock later sued MDE via Feeding Our Future for “racial discrimination” after the agency wasn’t approving her applications quickly enough, Honer said.

As reported by 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS last week, nine men and seven women were selected as jurors for the trial, which is expected to last four weeks.

Officials say security is tighter for this trial, as prosecutors say a group of defendants in the first trial tried to bribe a juror last summer. Officials say a juror received a bag of $120,000 cash.

Lawyers for Bock and Said recently reminded the judge that their clients weren’t involved in the jury bribery scheme.

In total, 70 people are charged in the fraud scheme. So far, 33 of those have entered guilty pleas, while another five were convicted at trial.

Out of $250 million in fraud, the government tells 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS they’ve identified about $50 million it should be able to get back through restitution.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has a crew at the courthouse and will continue to update this article throughout the day. You can find KSTP’s full coverage of the Feeding Our Future case here.