LA TImes: Finding LA's hidden homeless

(image courtesy of LA Times)

By Jessica Garrison
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 23, 2008

Kanagi and her co-workers at the nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless have become experts in the creativity and resourcefulness of homeless architecture, in the surprising and heartbreaking ways that thousands of people -- up to three-quarters of them suffering from mental illness or physical disabilities -- manage each evening to protect themselves from the elements and from predators and tuck into bed, often in plain sight.

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The Village Kitchen Story

(photo courtesy of LA Times)

By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 25, 2008

"The cafe is staffed by 10 women, nine of them mothers, all of them recently homeless, imprisoned or both. There are former addicts, dealers, thieves and old-fashioned down-on-their-luckers -- some of whom have eaten out of garbage cans -- being trained in classic cuisine and, on the best days, learning to love themselves again...
The cafe is the latest project of the Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children. Over the last 25 years, the organization has provided thousands with food, clothes, housing and counseling, all under the steady hand of Sister Julia Mary Farley, its founder and a saintly sort in local social work circles...
But even the best ideas come with red tape and permitting snarls, so the cafe has been nearly 10 years in the making. It didn't get any easier once Executive Chef Jaime Turrey, a former Bay Area chef, was hired last fall...
"I'm not training them for this job. I'm training them for their next job," Turrey said. "I don't want them to learn to pop something in the oven. I want them to be able to go to a nice restaurant and meet the expectations of that job from Day One. If the manager says, 'Blanche me some haricot vert' -- French green beans -- "they will know what that means. These women are ready for anything."

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NY Times: Alleged Scheme Involved Homeless

Image courtesy of J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

By Solomon Moore
NY Times
Published: August 9, 2008

LOS ANGELES — An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee.

The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people.

“Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered what was going on, so I called the state authorities.”

Mr. Johnson said security cameras on the mission building captured what he initially thought were ambulances illegally discarding patients.

His tip in 2004, and those recordings, prompted state and local officials to investigate.

In October 2006, Los Angeles police officers videotaped an ambulance “dumping” five homeless patients. They later determined that the patients had been recruited as “human pawns in a scheme by hospitals, doctors, ambulance companies and others to defraud” health insurance programs, according to the city attorney’s complaint.

And on Wednesday, federal agents raided three private for-profit hospitals — Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, City of Angels Medical Center, and Tustin Hospital and Medical Center in Orange County — in connection with an alleged fraud scheme involving federal Medicaid and state Medi-Cal health insurance programs. Agents arrested Dr. Rudra Sabaratnam, owner and chief executive of City of Angels Medical Center, and Estill Mitts, who is accused of recruiting patients from his Skid Row storefront church, the 7th Street Christian Day Center. Mr. Mitts posted $25,000 bond and is confined to his home. Dr. Sabaratnam posted $700,000 bail Thursday night.

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