Jurors on Thursday heard from a man who directly tied Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock to the over $5 million he and his wife stole from the government.

As previously reported, Bock and co-defendant Salim Said are accused of using the Federal Child Nutrition Program to defraud the government out of millions of dollars.

Mohamed Hussein founded Somali American Faribault Education (SAFE) in 2009. His wife, Lul Ali, previously testified that a Feeding Our Future employee visited her business, Lido Restaurant, and said he had an opportunity for her.

Both Hussein and Ali have pleaded guilty to their roles in the fraud scheme and, as part of their plea deals, agreed to testify at the jury trial.

Ali claimed to have served over 700,000 meals to children at Lido Restaurant, for which she received more than $2.9 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds.

Hussein told jurors that his wife, at the direction of Bock, was claiming to serve 1,000 meals per day.

“She was saying, ‘If you do 1,000 meals every day, you’ll get more money, you’ll get a big check… you’ll be living an American life… American dream,'” he said about Bock.

In reality, Lido Restaurant and SAFE didn’t come close to those numbers — something Hussein said Bock was aware of. But together, they defrauded the government out of over $5 million.

“She was monitoring us,” he said. “She knew this money coming from the government was lies.”

But to stay in the program, Hussein said he and Ali had to pay kickbacks to Feeding Our Future — the money was collected by an employee who later fled the country. Hussein admitted that Bock never came to visit the Faribault sites in person, but still communicated with them via Facetime to confirm that the kickbacks were being paid.

In other testimony, jurors heard from John Senkler, a bartender listed as Feeding Our Future’s secretary.

He said Bock would regularly visit the bar he worked at.

Senkler told jurors that Bock asked him if he wanted to be on Feeding Our Futures Board of Directors and that he initially said no, thinking it was a joke. But he agreed once Bock said she just needed board members to get the organization started and was planning to dissolve it and create a new one when it was an established nonprofit. Senkler added that he and Bock never spoke about Feeding Our Future again and that his initial understanding was that he’d have to do “absolutely nothing.”

But minutes from several board meetings listed him, the secretary, as being in attendance. At one meeting, the minutes claim he called a motion.

“I don’t even know what a motion is,” Senkler told jurors.

Attorneys also finished questioning Joshua Parks, a special agent with the IRS and called FBI Special Agent Travis Wilmer to the stand once more and recapped major points brought up by the prosecution during the trial.

You can find KSTP’s full coverage of the Feeding Our Future investigation here.