A person accused of fleecing L.A.’s homeless providers paperwork for $23 million was arrested at his Westwood house early Friday morning as a part of an ongoing multi-agency probe into the county’s multi-billion greenback efforts to tamp down encampments and produce extra folks in off the streets.
“There was no vetting course of, there was no accounting occurring,” mentioned Invoice Essayli, who leads the U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Los Angeles. “We are going to discover out the place each greenback went. We need to resolve the fraud.”
Alexander Soofer, 42, of Westwood was charged with wire fraud amid allegations he used his Hyde Park-based program Ample Blessings to line the pockets of his $2,450 Hermes trotting jacket with tens of millions in taxpayer {dollars} from Inside Secure and Measure H.
Soofer has not but entered a plea in response to the fees and his lawyer, Hilary Potashner, declined to remark Friday.
Based on the indictment in opposition to him, Soofer charged L.A. businesses to feed and home greater than 600 folks, then funneled the money right into a $7-million house in Westwood, non-public college tuition, White Lotus-style holidays, a second house in Greece and dear Hermes goodies.
To backstop his spending, officers say Soofer falsified invoices to assert he was serving recent meals and renting out rooms whereas his “shoppers” had been left with breakfast bars, canned beans and bulk packs of Ramen noodles to arrange in a microwave oven.
When confronted in regards to the lack of meals by a county monitoring crew, the indictment alleged, Soofer “ran to a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant and got here again with baggage of meals to provide members for lunch.”
“We have now supplied actually billions of {dollars}, trusting that LAHSA would discover contractors that would supply meals and rooms for the homeless,” mentioned Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman, who unveiled associated state costs from a parallel, impartial investigation. “Slightly 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 referred to as his firm Ample Blessings, however the one considerable blessings had been the blessings he gave himself,” Hochman mentioned.
The arrest caps the second main operation to emerge from a activity pressure Essayli introduced final spring to analyze potential fraud and corruption involving native homelessness funds.
In October, federal prosecutors introduced their first circumstances, charging two actual property executives with misappropriating tens of millions.
Even earlier than the duty pressure’s launch, there was rising concern from the general public and a few elected officers that the billions spent to fight homelessness hasn’t meaningfully shrunk the variety of folks sleeping on the road.
The variety of homeless folks throughout L.A. County dropped 4% final yr, in line with the annual depend launched in July. An estimated 72,308 folks had been dwelling in shelters or on the streets within the county, together with 43,699 folks within the metropolis of L.A.
Final yr, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to take away county funds from the Los Angeles Homeless Companies Authority and arrange its personal division. The transfer adopted two important audits that discovered LAHSA, a joint city-county company, didn’t correctly observe its funds and packages, leaving them susceptible to waste and fraud.
At a press convention Friday, federal officers characterised these failings as endemic to the county’s homeless providers paperwork.
One Ample Blessings facility in a residential Mid-Metropolis neighborhood beforehand drew complaints from neighbors, who advised The Occasions in 2024 that folks staying there have been loud and aggressive.
On the time, LAHSA advised The Occasions that Ample Blessings had at one level been contracted to offer housing on-site to folks exiting jail and jail, however that use had stopped.
Ample Blessings knowledgeable the company {that a} county psychological health-funded program was working there, however the county psychological well being division mentioned they’d no file of that.
In a quick interview in 2024, Soofer declined to inform The Occasions what his group at the moment used the property for.
However in line with the indictment, he paid himself above-market price to “lease” properties he already owned, falsifying data to point out he’d paid market price to made-up landlords to be able to home his shoppers.
At one level, a lodge the place Ample Blessings shoppers had been staying threatened to evict them over nonpayment, forcing LAHSA to pay straight for the rooms, regardless of already having shelled out to Soofer to lease them.
If convicted, Soofer may resist 20 years in federal jail and as many as 17 years in state lockup, officers mentioned.
“We all know the general public needs arrests, it needs accountability,” Essayli mentioned. “Be affected person. I can guarantee you, justice is coming.”
