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The U.S. Department of Justice has accused two Los Angeles-area real estate executives of stealing money from California’s Homekey Program, which is intended to fund housing for the homeless.<\/p>\n
Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced the charges Thursday.<\/p>\n
Cody Holmes of Beverly Hills has been arrested. Federal prosecutors say the state granted his company, Shangri-La, more than $25 million in Homekey money to buy and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks.<\/p>\n
That has not happened. Prosecutors are now pointing to where some of the money went.<\/p>\n
“Our investigation has shown at least $2.2 million was diverted to pay Mr. Holmes’ American Express bill, which includes purchases at luxury retailers,” said Essayli.<\/p>\n
Another man, Steven Taylor, has been charged with bank fraud and money laundering related to a building in Cheviot Hills.<\/p>\n
Journalist Jamie Page of the Westside Current has been investigating and reporting on this for years.<\/p>\n
“Kind of the red flag we had seen was within a nine-day period, it went from an $11 million price tag to more than double that, so that raised red flags for us,” said Page.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Taylor used fake bank statements to get the loan to buy the property, then sold it to housing developer Weingart for $27 million using city and state funding.<\/p>\n
“We put in our first story that some realtors were bragging about the price tags that they were getting for these Homekey locations,” said Page.<\/p>\n
Essayli indicated there is a lot still under investigation, including others who may have been involved.<\/p>\n
“We are tracking billions of dollars of public money coming into our seven-county district that is intended to be going to address homelessness. Too often this money has been wasted, mismanaged or outright stolen,” said Essayli.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles<\/a>Homeless Crisis<\/a>Crime and Public Safety<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. Department of Justice has accused two Los Angeles-area real estate executives of stealing money from California’s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":309525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,6082,14957,2961,224,6080,5337,50,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-309524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-crime-publicsafety","11":"tag-homeless-crisis","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-county","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115386982617183070","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}