Feeding Our Future fraud ringleader Aimee Bock took the stand to testify in her own defense toward the end of her trial this past March. Lead prosecutor — now Acting United States Attorney — Joe Thompson cross-examined Bock about the use of the nonprofit’s funds for personal purposes by Bock herself and by her “live-in boyfriend.” The estimable Mr. Thompson must have incorporated the “live-in boyfriend” phrase 25 times into his questions — a live-in boyfriend named Empress Watson.
His name reminded me of the humorous Shel Silverstein song that Johnny Cash turned into a hit with the live version he performed for the inmates of San Quentin in 1969. “A boy named Empress” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “a boy named Sue,” but it might have appeared in an early draft of the song. A boy named “Empress”? No. A boy named “Princess”? Not quite. A boy named “Queen”? Getting closer. A boy named “Sue”? That’s it!
Bock’s live-in boyfriend set up what appears to have been a shell company — Handy Helpers — that Bock used to share the wealth with Watson. Bock funneled more than $1,000,000 of federal food program funds to Handy Helpers and to Watson. Bock wrote a series of $10,000 checks and transfers to Handy Helpers that Watson used for personal purposes. Most of the more than $1,000,000 that Bock funneled to Watson went through Handy Helpers.
Bock and Watson are depicted in happier times in the photo at right. Watson was convicted of felony domestic assault in 2017. According to the dissolution action initiated against Feeding Our Future by the State, program funds were sent to “a Wells Fargo account in the name of Handy Helper’s [sic] LLC between March 2020 and July 2021. Watson was the sole signatory on the account.”
The Daily Mail picked up on Watson here in its story on the indictments when they were unsealed in 2022. The Daily Mail story includes a photo of Watson with a caption noting that he “is accused of spending thousands of [Bock’s] ill-gotten gains on flash cars and designer items.” The caption added that Watson has not been charged in the case.
Well, someone was paying attention to the evidence in the trial of Aimee Bock. Watson is described as a “North St. Paul man” in the press release posted by the Minnesota Department of Revenue yesterday:
The Minnesota Department of Revenue announced that the Dakota County Attorney’s Office recently charged Empress Malcom Watson Jr., of North St. Paul, with two felony counts of filing false or fraudulent individual income tax returns, one count of failing to file individual income tax return, and three counts of failing to pay income tax.
According to the complaint, department investigators began looking into Mr. Watson’s tax history after receiving a tip related to a separate criminal investigation of his significant other. The complaint states that in tax years 2020 through 2022, Mr. Watson earned over $1 million for work he did as an employee of his significant other’s business as well as work his own remodeling company did for that business. This money is considered taxable income in Minnesota. During that time, Mr. Watson allegedly spent over $680,000 on travel, jewelry, and vehicles or by making cash withdrawals or transfers to other financial accounts. The complaint states that for tax years 2020 and 2021, Mr. Watson significantly underreported his taxable income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and failed to file a return or pay any income tax in 2022. Mr. Watson allegedly owes over $64,000 in income tax.
Following a recent sentencing hearing in the Feeding Our Future case I asked Mr. Thompson if Governor Walz or Attorney General Ellison has thanked him for his work on the case arising from the massive fraud that took place under their noses. He declined to respond, but from his silence we can infer that the answer is negative.
This vague acknowledgment in the Department of Revenue press release may be as close as we get: “[D]epartment investigators began looking into Mr. Watson’s tax history after receiving a tip related to a separate criminal investigation of his significant other….” The “separate criminal investigation” was of course the work in the Feeding Our Future case performed by Thompson and his colleagues in the Office of the United States Attorney for Minnesota along with their colleagues in the local field office of the FBI.
In September 2022 a Somali friend sent me the photo of Watson below with the explanation that it was circulating among the Somali community. My memory of the details is fading, but I think it shows Watson on vacation with Bock in Las Vegas. He rented the car for something like $1,000 a day.
As I recall, Thompson introduced the photo into evidence and scored some points with it during his cross-examination of Bock. I thought the jury seemed particularly disgusted with her evasive answers to his pointed questions regarding the good times with Empress Watson that were documented in several such photographs. The photo gives visible form to the in-your-face quality of the Feeding Our Future fraud that somehow escaped the attention of Walz and Ellison.
