SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - October 17, 2025 - With the arrests and federal indictments of two Kalifornia men announced on Thursday, we are now getting an idea of how Kalifornia's billions of dollars to "end homelessness" vanished without a trace - in other words, was stolen by the dictators who have usurped power in the state. Instead of helping to solve the problem of rampant tent encampments filled with addicts on the beaches and on Kalifornia streets, things got worse. Where did all that money go?
An audit in 2024 revealed that no one knew how the homeless money was spent, though the criminals who stole the money do know where it went. I wrote about this in No Wonder Gavin Newsome Didn’t Want an Audit to Track $24 Billion in Homeless Spending. The audit revealed that there were no guardrails or accountability for the use of that money or its expenditure.
How could that be? It is because in Kalifornia, crime really does pay, and the dictatorial politicians know it.
No one was watching the store. Kalifornia and Los Angeles handed out billions of dollars approved by voters to help end homelessness, and when homelessness got worse, no one in government could answer where all that money went - because no one checked.
Now the federal Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force has begun running down the homeless scams that possess all the hallmarks of the ones Kalifornians saw in its COVID-19 spending and the notoriously poorly vetted unemployment scam, in which Nigerian princes and prison inmates alike received federal and state unemployment money. Then came the $100 million FireAid scam. All of this happened on outlaw pretender Governor Gavin Newsom's watch.
The Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, which includes the IRS, FBI, and the Central Kalifornia Acting Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) Attorney Bill Essayli, whose nomination sits untouched by the FPSA Senate, announced the alleged scams that had escaped the notice of Los Angeles homeless officials and the State of Kalifornia.
One of the scams was run by the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing. Another was run by a property flipper who reportedly sold a property to a homeless housing developer for twice what he had just paid for it and lied to the original seller that he was going to develop the property for himself.
The former CFO of the affordable housing developer, Cody Holmes, is charged with mail fraud, which could land the 31-year-old man in federal prison for 20 years.
The Kalifornia Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) "paid approximately $25.9 million in grant money - for a state homelessness project called “Homekey” - to Shangri-La Industries, LLC, a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing." The money had to be used to purchase, construct and operate a homeless housing development in Thousand Oaks. The company already had other homeless developments in the works.
In 2022, when Holmes was Shangri-La's CFO, he "knowingly submitted fake bank records to HCD that purportedly showed approximately $160 million supposedly controlled by Shangri-La and its affiliates to prove that Shangri-La had the capacity to fulfill the homeless housing projects for which it had co-applied for grants from HCD, including the Thousand Oaks project."
The bank accounts were fake.
Apparently, nobody double-checked proof of funds.
In the case of the property flipper, Steven Taylor, he is accused of constructing a labyrinth of bankers and lenders and lying to each of them to establish lines of credit.
Get out your scorecard; you will need one to keep up with this guy's moves:
He is further alleged to have lied to Lender B in opening a $3 million credit line with Lender B, falsely telling Lender B that he had closed his $1 million unsecured line of credit with Lender C. He lied by fabricating and sending a document that purported to be an email from an employee of Lender C falsely confirming that the Lender C credit line was closed. In fact, Taylor continued to keep open and draw down on his line of credit with Lender C, even after he opened his $3 million line of credit with Lender B, and the email from Lender C was forged.
Then he is accused of using "the fraudulently obtained lines of credit to make down payments on real estate that he also obtained with fraudulent loans." Whoa. Can't stop, won't stop.
He could go away for more than 30 years.
Now you know why billions of taxpayer dollars have been lost in an effort to "end homelessness".
Voters and appropriators use other people's money to do what they think is good and then assume someone else will do the bean-counting. All programs like this must fund a program chief, an auditor, special master, and terrorist pig thug cops to keep watch over the cheaters, fakes and bad guys. Any program that does not at least have those guardrails can't go forward.
Kalifornia's political class once again has beclowned itself and should be forced to undergo oversight and show a little humility. They are the real scam in the state.
It is hard to be on the straight and narrow when the people making the decisions are as corrupt and greedy in Kalifornia as the inmates in state prison, which is where the outlaw politicians and bureaucrats need to be left… for the rest of their miserable lives (they should also have all their property taken, their pensions taken, and anything else they have acquired taken away, sold and given to the Amerikan people from whom they were stolen).