Gentle reader,
Hello, it’s us again, your friendly historic Los Angeles true crime, architecture and cultural history tour operators, breaking a real-life L.A. noir story because it seems like nobody whose job it is to do so is paying attention.
This should scare the heck out of you. It does us. Because without a robust press that holds those in power accountable and knows the difference between eyeball-catching sleaze and systemic rot, there will never be any accountability, just more decay, pain, trouble, and loss.
The city we love has been left open to be fleeced by sloppy, small-time scammers—and both people currently running to be Mayor share equal responsibility for leaving the doors unlocked, by failing to conduct proper oversight of the nonprofits allegedly providing homelessness services in Los Angeles.
On September 16, the DOJ sent out a press release about a quartet of local homelessness nonprofit fraud cases.
Most interesting to us was the arrest of Michael Young of Home at Last (HAL), a shelter operator tied up in the ongoing prosecution of sitting South Los Angeles councilmember Curren Price, a case we’ve been covering since 2023.
BACKGROUND: In August 2025, the Los Angeles District Attorney filed two additional public corruption charges against Curren Price. The charges relate to council votes awarding a city lease and authorizing over $2 million in federal COVID-19 grants to HAL, which was a paying tenant of the Urban Healthcare Project, a now-suspended Inglewood nonprofit for which Price served as CEO.
The city lease is Council Motion 19-0106, advanced by confessed racketeer Jose Huizar in January 2019, to create a bridge housing facility at 1426 Paloma Street.
The excessive lease terms and lengthy failure to actually provide shelter at this site were the subject of an investigation by journalist Jerry Sullivan, before he left Los Angeles to become national managing editor for The Real Deal.
And that brings us to mid-September 2026, when Michael Young was arrested, posed for this striking image, then sent home on a $500,000 surety bond provided by his mother and two friends.
The specifics of the charges against him were not immediately published, due to a request from the Government that the documents remain under seal.
Those charges have now been unsealed; we publish them here in the public interest, followed by a breakdown of the allegations in the 47-page document.
We’re also sharing the video at the top of the newsletter, taken from the public-comment segment of a public meeting. You can also hear in that same meeting from some of the players mentioned in the complaint embedded above.
The person expressing such healthy skepticism during public comment appears to be an ordinary Inglewood citizen who went down to City Hall one evening in late 2023 to join her neighbors in expressing concern to the Planning Commission about a proposed mortuary operation that sought to move into a light industrial building adjacent to a residential neighborhood.
It was a long agenda, so the audience was split between the main chamber and an overflow room. This citizen, listening in another room, felt compelled to race upstairs and express opposition to granting a Special Use Permit to a business entity that now appears prominently in a serious public corruption case.
If only the elected and appointed officials who authorize millions in taxpayer dollars transferred to nonprofits that are supposed to help the homeless were half as skeptical as this one good citizen, who simply paid attention, thought what she was hearing smelled pretty bad and said something about it.
Raymond Chandler wrote, of the golden age of Los Angeles corruption in the 1930s: “It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.” We consider Chandler a guide to navigating our own 21st-century silver age rot, and we believe all it takes to clean up a dirty town is for good people to take a deep breath, admit that it stinks and do something about it.
These are the allegations in the government’s complaint against Michael Young:
The core scheme: Young allegedly set up shell vendors disguised as independent third-party contractors, then used them to bill LAHSA (and, by extension, the City, County and HUD) for homeless services that were never performed at HAL shelter sites. The funds diverted represent an estimated $7.5M+ out of $118M+ in public funding HAL received since 2019.
Shadow contractors: HAL allegedly contracted out services to keep its shelters clean and its residents fed to SABLE Enterprises LLC (catering), Bleu Diamond Services Inc. (janitorial) and C&C Catering (catering).
Deliberate concealment: LAHSA was allegedly provided with fake competitive contractor bids using stolen identities of real, unrelated companies; forged signatures on vendor contracts; fabricated W-9s and invoices. This sham paper trail was designed to conceal self-dealing, which LAHSA apparently took at face value. But when investigators searched for employee records, payroll or tax filings for these vendors, nothing was found. The government alleges this is because all were shams, operated by Michael Young and his associates.
An accountant’s suspicions: In 2025, HAL’s outside auditor flagged an outstanding accounts-payable balance to SABLE of $1.4M and asked for clarification. Unsatisfied with the answers provided by Young, the auditor refused to complete their work and quit.
Cash on the move: LAHSA paid HAL to house and feed people in its shelters, which should have necessitated regular payments to caterers and cleaning services. And indeed, millions were transferred by HAL into the accounts of the shell vendors. But instead of going to payroll and expenses, the money was pulled out via “structured” cash withdrawals. These transactions, at just under the $10K reporting threshold, appear to have been intended to avoid regulatory scrutiny, which is itself a separate federal crime (31 U.S.C. §5324).
Personal enrichment and outside business interests: The Feds allege that LAHSA funds intended for HAL’s homeless shelters were converted to a variety of other uses that provided personal benefit to Michael Young, including a $48K family vacation in Tahiti, $140K to restore a vintage 1959 Chevy Impala…
and over a million dollars for the purchase, licensing and decoration of the Six Seven Five Lounge nightclub and adjacent bingo-hall complex just down the block from Curren Price’s wife Del Richardson’s tenant-displacement office.
Also alleged to have been diverted: $402K to pay off a loan on 9219 S Central Ave and $118K to the owner of 124-128 N Market St, Inglewood where Young opened the fast-food restaurants Strips N’ Dips and Soul Food Shack, before becoming the recipient of more than half a million dollars in Destination Market Street facade improvement grants. The complaint implies that some of the $1.7 million paid out from the SABLE account to food-service wholesaler Sysco and others might have supplied the Inglewood restaurant kitchens.
The charges: A single count of wire fraud (18 U.S.C. §1343), tied to a 12/13/2023 reimbursement request routed through LAHSA’s cloud-based grants system. But the case laid out in the complaint contains the potential for more charges, suggesting the government may be betting Young would rather cooperate than see the counts pile up. This single count alone could, if proven in court, result in a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
And finally, a few observations, in the lead-up to Councilmember Curren Price’s and Michael Young’s next court dates, both falling in mid-October, a period that coincides with election season.
When homeless people refuse to be placed in specific shelters, or when they leave an assigned housing placement in a hurry, it would be wise to ask why.
Yes, some people living on the street are truly resistant to being sheltered, for reasons too complex and too individual to guess at here. Others do want housing, but are not willing to live in an unsafe environment operated by unethical people, a place where they feel even less secure.
We believe many criminal syndicates masquerading as homeless services nonprofits could be shut down if those in power would simply listen to people who have seen these rackets in action and found them lacking.
The November election is a referendum on the homelessness crisis, yet neither candidate has used her considerable powers to make a difference for Angelenos.
It’s not too late for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman to do better.
Listening to people with real lived experience, which includes the homeless (like Ruth) and the service providers working in good faith to house them, and using their powerful platforms to amplify these voices, would be a good start.
But nothing will change until the people of Los Angeles take a good, strong sniff and say, “enough!”
When that happens, just as in Raymond Chandler’s time, the rats will be run out of town and once again decent people will be able to follow their dreams in the greatest city we’ve ever known.
Saturday’s tour! The spooky season starts with a bang as we’re joined by Nathan Marsak, the twisted mind behind the red-hot true crime zine Bunker Noir! on a stroll through a lost Bunker Hill world of sinister sirens, lurid love dens and... lizard people?!
But it’s not all vice and freaks: you’ll also hear directly from Bunker Hill native son Gordon Pattison about the sweet people who were his friends in this special neighborhood that was destroyed by misguided redevelopment agents and your tax dollars. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles’ past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city’s soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Bunker Noir! True Crime on Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill with Nathan Marsak (10/3) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (10/10) • Highland Park Arroyo Time Travel Trip (10/17) • Film Noir / Real Noir (10/24) • Hallowe’en at Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (10/31) • The Real Black Dahlia (11/7) • Richard’s Birthday Weird West Adams Tour & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (11/14) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (11/21) • Hollywood Noir (11/28) • Know Your Downtown Los Angeles (12/19) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sun. 12/20) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases (12/26) • The Real Black Dahlia (1/16) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (1/23) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (1/30)
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS
On the Know Your Downtown LA tour (next date: December 19), Richard stepped into the imaginary world of S.C. Mero’s Chateau Broadway installation—pirates, public corruption, severed dragon heads, royal intrigue!—to draw attention to the real busted safe pushed out of the burned-out building.
Wild, sad quote in this CalMatters story on Tanner Blackman’s SD-based LA building-permit consultancy: “After having been inside the beast for a while, I was less convinced that I was on the side of good. I felt like the villain in a Kafka novel.” Not mentioned: he was Jose Huizar’s Planning Director, got out long before the raids.
Marilyn Monroe house landmarking lawsuit drama advances, as the Hon. Percy Anderson reviews the arguments. Is the world-famous property worth just $820k? Could the owners get a demolition permit (or a house-move permit) if they tried? Who will prevail? Watch this space!
You are not hallucinating—well, maybe you are, but there really are a lot more Circus Liquor stores around L.A. as the family business expands its footprint. The terrifying neon clown is now a brand ambassador here at Laurel Canyon and Saticoy.
New, highly restrictive grave-decoration rules at Hollywood Forever could make it impossible to keep the beautiful artificial floral sprays that are love offerings for the great exotica vocalist Yma Sumac and her fans who come from all over the world. What a pity that would be! The living need to be able to show their love for the dead. (See the new rules page, calling for only fresh flowers—and no stones, a Jewish memorial custom!—on mausoleum crypts, here.)
Bunker Hill historian Nathan Marsak hadn’t visited the tabletop Downtown model in years, so he went to the Natural History Museum and was shocked to find wall labels packed with lies about his beloved Los Angeles. The truth is messy, but we need that mess.
Still digging around in the sofa cushions intending to make an offer on HCM #145, the Christian Anderson-Balthazar Madrid Residence that is on sale for the first time in almost a century? Sorry: it’s under contract now.
