A juror was dismissed after she reported how a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash off at her home together with a note urging her to ‘acquit’ the defendants in a trial she was sitting.
The note offered her even more money if she went ahead with the plan to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.
The 23-year-old juror, known as Juror 52, said she immediately turned over the bag of cash to police.
‘This is completely beyond the pale,’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. ‘This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.’
The juror said a woman left it with her father-in-law on Sunday evening with the message that more money would be on the way if she stuck to the plan.
A juror was dismissed after a woman left $120,000 in cash at her home
Juror #52 was offered even more money for voting to acquit seven defendants
Defense attorney Andrew Birrell told the judge that the bag of cash is ‘a troubling and upsetting accusation.’
‘Let’s be honest, it wasn’t someone outside of this room,’ Thompson added who noted how the woman who delivered the cash was identified as Somali. The seven defendants on trial are East African.
Thompson said how a woman, ‘possibly Somali, with an accent, wearing a long black dress’ went to the juror’s house at 8:50pm on Sunday.
The woman gave the juror’s father-in-law a white gift bag and said it was a present for the juror, using the juror’s first name despite her name having not been publicly disclosed.
‘The woman told the relative to tell Juror #52 to say not guilty tomorrow and there would be more of that present tomorrow,’ the affidavit reads.
The gift bag contained $120,000 of cash consisting of rolls of $100, $50 and $20 bills
‘After the woman left, the relative looked in the gift bag and saw it contained a substantial amount of cash’, consisting of rolls of $100, $50 and $20 bills.
When the juror returned and was told about the bag of cash, she called the police.
The cash is now in the possession of the FBI.
The seven who are on trial are the first of 70 defendants expected to go to trial, being tried on a total of 41 criminal charges, including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering, in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million.
Eighteen others have already pled guilty, and authorities said they recovered about $50 million in one of the nation’s largest pandemic-related fraud cases.
Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property.
During the trial that began in April, defense attorneys questioned the quality of the FBI’s investigation and suggested that this might be more of a case of record-keeping problems than fraud as these defendants sought to keep up with rapidly changing rules for the food aid program.
The FBI agents raided the Twin Cities nonprofit Feeding Our Future in January 2022
The office of Feeding Our Future is seen one week after an FBI raid in 2022. The nonprofit was supposed to serve meals to kids
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel has now sequestered the jury for their deliberations
These seven initial defendants were affiliated with a restaurant that participated in the food aid program.
Those still awaiting trial include Feeding our Future’s founder Aimee Bock, who has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing.
Before allowing the trial to continue with more closing arguments on Monday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel questioned the remaining 17 jurors and alternates asking if they had received any bribed, but none had reported any unauthorized contact.
Brasel decided to sequester the jury for the rest of the proceeding as a precaution.
‘I don’t do it lightly,’ Brasel said. ‘But I want to ensure a fair trial. You may wonder why this is necessary. It is necessary for you to stay away from information.
‘The fact that there are only seven defendants and only seven people other than their attorneys that have the information to get to a juror and bribe the juror doesn’t relieve me with the responsibility to protect the community,’ the judge said.
She didn’t decide immediately whether to detain the defendants, but she did order an FBI agent to confiscate all of the defendants’ cell phones.
‘It is highly likely that someone with access to the juror’s personal information was conspiring with, at minimum, the woman who delivered the $120,000 bribe,’ FBI Special Agent Travis Wilmer wrote.
Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money earmarked for Feeding Our Future went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property
Judge Brasel said the juror was ‘terrified,’ and ‘remains at risk for retaliation.’
She also expressed concern that ‘someone obviously has the addresses of the families of these jurors.’
The aid money the defendants are alleged to have misused came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was administered by the state Department of Education.
Nonprofits and other partners under the program were supposed to serve meals to kids.
Two of the groups involved, Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition, were small nonprofits before the pandemic, but in 2021 they disbursed around $200 million each.
Prosecutors allege they produced invoices for meals that were never served, ran shell companies, laundered money, indulged in passport fraud and accepted kickbacks.
‘The reality is you saw overwhelming evidence of the fraud scheme,’ lead attorney Thompson said. ‘Thousands of pages of evidence. Fake invoices again and again and again.’