A man accused of fleecing L.A.’s homeless services bureaucracy for $23 million was arrested at his Westwood home early Friday morning as part of an ongoing multi-agency probe into the county’s multi-billion dollar efforts to tamp down encampments and bring more people in off the streets.
“There was no vetting process, there was no accounting going on,” said Bill Essayli, who leads the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. “We will find out where every dollar went. We want to get to the bottom of the fraud.”
Alexander Soofer, 42, of Westwood was charged with wire fraud amid allegations he used his Hyde Park-based program Abundant Blessings to line the pockets of his $2,450 Hermes trotting jacket with millions in taxpayer dollars from Inside Safe and Measure H.
Soofer has not yet entered a plea in response to the charges and his attorney, Hilary Potashner, declined to comment Friday.
According to the indictment against him, Soofer charged L.A. agencies to feed and house more than 600 people, then funneled the cash into a $7-million home in Westwood, private school tuition, White Lotus-style vacations, a second home in Greece and pricey Hermes goodies.
To backstop his spending, officials say Soofer falsified invoices to claim he was serving fresh meals and renting out rooms while his “clients” were left with breakfast bars, canned beans and bulk packs of Ramen noodles to prepare in a microwave oven.
When confronted about the lack of food by a county monitoring team, the indictment alleged, Soofer “ran to a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant and came back with bags of food to give participants for lunch.”
“We have provided literally billions of dollars, trusting that LAHSA would find contractors that would provide meals and rooms for the homeless,” said Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman, who unveiled related state charges from a parallel, independent investigation. “Rather than do his job, [Soofer] ripped off the voters of L.A. County, he ripped off the taxpayers of L.A. County, and sadly and tragically he ripped off the homeless.”
“Mr. Soofer called his company Abundant Blessings, but the only abundant blessings were the blessings he gave himself,” Hochman said.
The arrest caps the second major operation to emerge from a task force Essayli announced last spring to investigate potential fraud and corruption involving local homelessness funds.
In October, federal prosecutors brought their first cases, charging two real estate executives with misappropriating millions.
Even before the task force’s launch, there was growing concern from the public and some elected officials that the billions spent to combat homelessness hasn’t meaningfully shrunk the number of people sleeping on the street.
The number of homeless people across L.A. County dropped 4% last year, according to the annual count released in July. An estimated 72,308 people were living in shelters or on the streets in the county, including 43,699 people in the city of L.A.
Last year, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to remove county funds from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and set up its own department. The move followed two critical audits that found LAHSA, a joint city-county agency, failed to properly track its funds and programs, leaving them vulnerable to waste and fraud.
At a press conference Friday, federal officials characterized those failings as endemic to the county’s homeless services bureaucracy.
One Abundant Blessings facility in a residential Mid-City neighborhood previously drew complaints from neighbors, who told The Times in 2024 that people staying there were loud and aggressive.
At the time, LAHSA told The Times that Abundant Blessings had at one point been contracted to provide housing on-site to people exiting jail and prison, but that use had stopped.
Abundant Blessings informed the agency that a county mental health-funded program was operating there, but the county mental health department said they had no record of that.
In a brief interview in 2024, Soofer declined to tell The Times what his organization currently used the property for.
But according to the indictment, he paid himself above-market rate to “rent” properties he already owned, falsifying records to show he’d paid market rate to made-up landlords in order to house his clients.
At one point, a hotel where Abundant Blessings clients were staying threatened to evict them over nonpayment, forcing LAHSA to pay directly for the rooms, despite already having shelled out to Soofer to rent them.
If convicted, Soofer could face up to 20 years in federal prison and as many as 17 years in state lockup, officials said.
“We know the public wants arrests, it wants accountability,” Essayli said. “Be patient. I can assure you, justice is coming.”
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