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A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a woman awaiting sentencing for trying to 

 in the first Feeding Our Future trial to undergo regular alcohol testing after she was charged with drunk driving.

Ladan M. Ali pleaded guilty in federal court in September to delivering a Hallmark gift bag containing $120,000 to the home of a juror and promised more cash in exchange for an acquittal. The juror called 911 and was excused from the trial. 

 in Minneapolis of Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock and former restaurant owner Salim Said, are the first trials to stem from a sprawling federal investigation into an alleged $250 million scheme to defraud taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Five months after Ali entered her guilty plea, Hennepin County prosecutors 

 with DWI for allegedly driving with a blood alcohol concentration of .284, more than three-and-a-half times the legal limit.  

Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko ordered Ali to stay away from bars and liquor stores, undergo alcohol treatment, and submit to periodic breath tests as conditions of her release. 

Ali, 32, has not been charged in the wider fraud case. But in a search warrant for her cell phone that was unsealed on March 4, FBI special agent Kevin Kane writes that Ali was a signatory on a bank account for Afro Produce, a St. Paul company named in the investigation. 

The company, which listed an address on Como Avenue, “is a purported food vendor that received millions of dollars from entities involved in the fraudulent scheme to obtain federal child nutrition program funds,” Kane writes. 

On the same day that a judge unsealed the warrant, FBI forensic accountant Pauline Roase testified at Bock and Said’s trial that invoices and payments recovered from Afro Produce “didn’t even come close” to matching. 

“I just could not quantify whether there was any food purchased at all, or if these were just fabricated invoices,” Roase said. 

According to the search warrant, Ali also received multiple checks from Afro Produce in 2021 and 2022 for $10,000 and $20,000 each. The memo lines indicated that the payments were for her “salary” and “consulting.” 

Ali’s personal bank records allegedly show that she received checks from Gar Gaar Family Services, which was also known as Youth Leadership Academy. The Minnesota Department of Education barred the nonprofit from participating in the child nutrition programs in December 2021 after finding it “seriously deficient.” 

The following month, the FBI raided Feeding Our Future’s offices, Bock and Said’s homes, and two dozen other locations.

In an email to MPR News, defense attorney Eric Newmark declined to comment on the allegations in the search warrant.

Matt Sepic

Author

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a woman awaiting sentencing for trying to bribe a juror in the first Feeding Our Future trial to undergo regular alcohol testing after she was charged with drunk driving.

Judge orders alcohol treatment, testing for Feeding Our Future bribe courier charged with DWI

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