The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday that it had made two arrests of people accused of defrauding the California’s homelessness program, Project Homekey, by using funds for their own purposes.
Project Homekey, dating to the coronavirus pandemic, has been an effort to move homeless people off the street by paying for hotel and motel rooms for them — and sometimes by buying properties outright.
It has met with mixed success, reducing homelessness in some areas but hardly making a dent in the problem overall, as it fails to deal with the underlying causes of homelessness, including mental illness and drugs.
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli announced Thursday that the federal government had made two arrests — both in cases where fraud was uncovered by the local Westside Current:
Federal agents arrested Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, early Thursday morning. Holmes, the former chief financial officer of Shangri-La Industries, a downtown Los Angeles affordable-housing developer, is accused of defrauding the state’s Project Homekey program — a multibillion-dollar initiative that converts motels into homeless housing.
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In a separate case, a federal grand jury returned a nine-count superseding indictment against Steven Taylor, 44, of Brentwood, charging him with defrauding lenders and concealing real-estate transactions involving a Cheviot Hills property — another deal Westside Current first exposed in 2023.
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Essayli said Thursday’s cases are “just the beginning.” Agents from the FBI and IRS executed multiple search warrants in Beverly Hills and Century City connected to the investigations.
There is also suspected wrongdoing in local homeless programs in Los Angeles, with billion of dollars unaccounted for in recent investigations of spending on programs similar to Project Homekey.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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