December 4, 2025 • 30 mins
The John Kobylt Show Hour 3 (12/04) - Nick Gerda from LAist.com comes on the show to talk about a nonprofit scandal in the homeless industry. There are so many bad people in government. Eric Swalwell is the leading Democratic candidate for California Governor.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I am six forty. You're listening to the John Cobelt
podcast on the iHeartRadio app. We are on every day
one until four o'clock and every day right after four.
Whatever you missed in the show, you can hear on
the podcast John Cobelt's Show on demand. In our first
hour today, we spent a lot of time in the
La Times investigation into that Kruk Ricardo Lara, the insurance commissioner,
(00:24):
and he has gone on thirty two international trips to
twenty three countries, spending either tax money or insurance industry money,
and he has really partied and enjoyed himself. And he
was behind the insurance disaster, especially in the Palisades where
(00:47):
thousands lost their insurance just two months before the fire,
and some have no insurance. Some were thrown into the
fair plan, which only gives you a fraction of a
regular policy. It was his doing, his incompetence. He is
most incompetent and most corrupt. And this is not the
(01:09):
first time there's been an expose on him, and we
are just counting the days until maybe finally he's forced out.
This is what the governor should do, is demand that
he resigned. I don't care who he gets replaced by.
It's impossible to get somebody who's worse. And well, that's
the one o'clock hours. You have to listen to that
on the podcast. Now, let's talk to Nick Gerder. We've
(01:31):
had on Nick before. Nick is with LAist dot com,
a journalist and he has done a lot of investigative
pieces on the nonprofit homeless industry, the companies that build
homeless housing, and a lot of money that has evaporated,
both state money and la money. A quick rundown of
(01:54):
this story. Actually he's done a number of stories lately,
but this is that a homeless center that they were
building in chevy At Hills where you had one guy
named Stephen Taylor. He's a Brentwood developer. He bought the
property for eleven million dollars two years ago and then
(02:18):
ten days later so resold it for twenty seven million.
He made sixteen million dollars in ten days to a
company called Wininguard. Now Stephen Taylor is being accused of
submitting fraudulent documents to borrow the money to buy the
eleven million dollar property, and then the second company. Two
(02:42):
of their executives have resigned they spent twenty seven million
in taxpayer funds authorized by city and state officials. Karen
Bass and Gavin Newsom touted this purchase as a key
tool in the fight against homelessness. According to Nick gerderlet's
get Nick on the phone here and he can explain
it all. Nick, how are you.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Let's do a basic run through of this story so
people can understand, because I think this story is, this
whole incident is a classic to explain what's going on
with a lot of the homeless money that's disappeared in
this state.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So to take a step back, this is all under
a taxpayer funded programs that emerged out of COVID. It's
ultimately a lot of its federal COVID dollars that were
flowing through the state. And what Governor Newsom set up
with his state Housing agency was a program called home
Key that provided has provided a couple of billion dollars
so far to cities and counties across the state to,
(03:43):
among other things, partner with nonprofit groups to purchase properties, motels, hotel,
senior living facilities, et cetera, and convert them into housing
for unhoused people for long term operation and this is
one of those projects call the Shelby and the nonprofit
group is the Wineguard Center. They're two top their top
(04:04):
executive and top real estate person have been put on
leave according to some news reporting at while the board
commissions an investigation into all of this. But so this
this group, Wineguard Center, they get selected by the city
and what we found in records, we did a deep
dive of the thousands of pages of documents around this transaction,
(04:26):
and what we found in the records public records that
we obtained is that Mayor Mass's office had a big
role in the selection of this property, the Shelby property.
That's according to an email at city Hall at the
Housing Department. And there was thirty one applications. Three projects
were chosen. This is one of them. And there was
this purchase agreement signed that had to use tax payer
(04:49):
money twenty seven million dollars in tax payer money to
buy this property that acknowledged they were not buying it
from the actual owner at the time. That someone who
was in Escro's the Steven Tamer guy you mentioned who
was in Escro to buy it. Turns out he was
an Escro to buy it or ultimately bought it for
a company link to him, bought it for eleven million,
and then completed turned around and completed the twenty seven
(05:10):
million dollars sale financed by tax payers. There's a lot
of questions around how this all went down, and as
we went through the records, a number of things stood
out which we reported out. What was the secrecy in
this taxpayer funded agreement was something that I can't recall
ever seeing in the you know, fourteen years I've been
covering local government, which is that the taxpayer agreement to
(05:31):
pay twenty seven million dollars for this property stated that
the buyer, taxpayer funded buyer. Wineguart Center can never tell
the public or the news media who the celerates, who
was getting the twenty seven million dollars. That's that's the
level of secrecy. Again, it's highly unusual. I can't even
think of another time I've seen that in local government
for such a large contract.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Is that legal?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Good question? I mean, they did, oh, go ahead, are
you going? I haven't looked specifically into that question, but
what I can say is it was disclosed in a
public records request when we when we you know, demanded
the records through the Public Records Act. We got a
copy of it from the city. But what's what's also
(06:15):
interesting is the name of this middleman, Stephen Taylor. You know,
normally that something that you would likely see in the
property purchase the public property purchase records. But what ended
up happening is he assigned his role as the seller
later on to a different entity that did not have
his name on its registrations uh and on the real
(06:37):
estate records.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
But we found other links with him to it, and
the pro peder of federal prosecutors say he is ultimately
behind all of us. But so so there was this
other move that also, you know, did not provide the
kind of transparency that that we're used to saying. But
but again it's there's a lot of questions here about
who knew what when. Additionally, the appraisal that was used
(07:00):
to justify the twenty seven million dollars purchase here by
taxpayers was commissioned and submitted by Wineguart Center to the
state for funding approval. That appraisal had inaccurate information. As
we reviewed it, we discovered that the appraisal omitted that
this property was in escrow to be basically Wineguart was
(07:23):
buying it from someone who didn't own it. The appraisal
incorrectly said that Wineguart was buying it from the owner
for twenty seven million, but the agreement at the time
was clear Wineguart was not buying it from the owner.
They were buying it from a middleman and who did
not own it yet. So a lot of questions here.
We continue to pursue answers. There's really not been any
answers forthcoming from the state, from the city, from the
(07:45):
mayor's office, from Wineguart Center. They've all been citing the
investigation by federal authorities into what went down here. And
I'll add that the top federal prosecutor in the region,
Bill A. Saley, did a press conference referenced this deal
in October and said there is an active federal investigation
into who knew what in all of this.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Well, it's such an overwhelming amount of money, I mean,
a sixteen million dollar profit in ten days. Clearly something
corrupt is going on here. Clearly there are people who
are going to be running away with bags of money.
Stephen Taylor on both ends, he buys the property and
he's accused of submitting fraudulent documents to borrow the money.
(08:31):
So he borrows and buys the property for eleven million.
Ten days later, he's selling it for twenty seven million. Now, obviously,
nobody in the right mind can justify a property value
appreciating that quickly sixteen million in ten days, and all
this secrecy around it. I mean this, I mean there's
(08:53):
got to be a lot of hands in this pie.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
You know, you got the city authorizing funds and actually
selecting this. You've got the state authorizing money and a
lad as well. As we were digging into this, we
found something else that ended up being its own separate
article than in story that we ran, which is that
during all of this and since then, Wineguard Center has
been failing continuously and failing to comply with the requirements
(09:20):
in federal law for it to be submitting to audits
and turning in audits on time. These are required in
federal law. They're called single audits. They have to be
turned in within nine months of the end of a
fiscal year, and they've been continuously overdue on those since
early twenty twenty two. So it's a time the money
was getting awarded here it appears that this group was
(09:42):
out of compliance with the sort of the most essential
tool that the federal government says it has to ensure
that organizations are properly tracking and accounting for taxpayer funds.
And when some of these audits did get turned in
very late, they were finding a whole host of problems
with how Wineguart Center was accounting for money, you know,
failing to have enough accounting staff to track it properly enough,
(10:06):
experience on the accounting staff, failing to include tens of
millions of dollars in federal funds on its balance sheet
that was provided to the auditors. So there's there's a lot,
a lot that I think people want to get explanations
for as far as what's going on here and how
this money was getting awarded amidst this non compliance.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Nick, thank you for coming on, and I hope we
can talk again about this and other other matters.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
You Bett, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Nick Gerda, go read his pieces at last dot com,
l A I SD dot com and we've we've got
more coming up. This is a massive fraud. Here.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
M six forty.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
We're on from one to four every day. If you
want to subscribe to our YouTube channel, it's YouTube dot
com slash at johnco Belt Radio. YouTube dot com slash
at johnco No, I do that wrong. I did that wrong.
YouTube dot com slash at John Cobelt's show. To subscribe
to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash at John
(11:10):
Cobelt Show. And we're putting up longer video segments these days.
We just had Nick Gerda on. I have been telling
you for years that there is massive fraud, hundreds of
millions and billions of dollars being stolen, and you don't
need an investigation. Well you do need one if you
want to put the guys into prison, but just use
(11:31):
your eyes. You know that billions of dollars were raised
in taxes, They get huge donations from corporations and do
gooding rich people, and the homeless situation got worse and
worse and worse. So I don't think you need to
be the sharpest investigator on the planet to say, wow,
(11:54):
I guess a lot of the money is getting stolen. Huh.
Of course it was. And over time I realized, and
I think it's obvious now that the nonprofit industry when
it comes to these kinds of charities, is filled with
a lot of criminals, theft, and corruption. They know that
(12:14):
there is little to no oversight, and that was really
the case during COVID. That's why they could steal thirty
two billion dollars from Gavin Newsom from the unemployment payouts
he was making. That's why they could steal ten billion
a billion dollars from Tim Waltz in Minnesota for nutritional
(12:36):
assistance programs and autism programs. They know the bad guys
know that there is no oversight, and a lot of
the bad guys work in government. There are really bad
people that work in government. There are really bad people
that you elect to hold office, like the insurance commissioner
(12:56):
Ricardo Lara, a really bad person who is happy stealing
tax money so he can travel and live a great life.
I mean, there are shysters and grifters and fraudsters all
over the place, and they're attracted to government work and
(13:17):
they get involved in charity work and they get involved
with nonprofits because they know nobody's looking, nobody cares. We
vote for homeless taxes because everybody wants to feel good. Yes,
we have to do our part. It's so unfortunate what
happens to these people. We vote for these welfare programs
(13:37):
that yes, yes, we have to offer a helping hand,
and voting for welfare programs, or politicians who promote welfare programs,
you know, voting for homeless taxes, supporting nonprofits with donations. Oh, yes,
(13:59):
they do so good work. No, a lot of them don't.
A lot of them are stealing the money. The whole
Black Lives Matter movement was a scam. They built a
lot of guilty, rich white liberal women. Out of tens
of millions of dollars, Black Lives Matter here in La,
ninety million dollars disappeared. It's amazing how easy it is
(14:24):
to manipulate people's psychology to make them feel guilty, to
feed the desire to want to do good. You're not
helping anybody by notating this money. You're not helping anybody
by voting for these taxes, paying these taxes. Why at
the very least understand human nature? Half a human nature
(14:46):
is bad, and the bad people get in government. The
bad people have infiltrated the nonprofit world. The bad people
are involved in these welfare programs. Whether it's the non
profit end, it's the bureaucrat end, it's the politicians themselves.
That's their business, that's the way they earn a living.
(15:09):
And I'm just fascinated how people won't accept it. Oh no,
you know, they really do good work. I mean, you know,
even when you lay out a case, people will go, well,
you know, not all nonprofits, Like why are you so
emotionally invested? No, one's suggesting all nonprofits, but way, way,
way too many more than you want to admit to.
(15:30):
You don't want to admit that you've been scammed. You
don't want to like face the facts that a lot
of your tax money has been stolen when you voted
for the homeless tax here in La City and County,
all of the money you give to a lot of
these nonprofits has been stolen. A lot of this welfare
money is not going to poor people who deserve a break.
(15:52):
It's just taken by criminals and fraudsters and shysters. And
they do it because they can manipulate your emotion. You're
afraid of being called racist or homophobic, or hardhearted or
cruel and mean, all the names they use to emotionally
manipulate your brain. So you give away the money and
(16:14):
no good comes of it. Fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
All right?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
We come back. I'll be honest, I didn't expect this.
There's a new poll coming out. Well, it is out
Emerson College on the leading candidates for governor. I didn't
expect this guy to be at the top. Good lord,
we'll tell you about it. We come back.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
You know, over the years we spent I spent a
lot less time on polling because it's it's a busted,
broken industry. And I could go on for half an
hour as to why it's busted. But it's simply very
difficult now to get people to cooperate so that you
can pull and get an accurate result, which is why
(17:08):
there's so many false results that come out every election day.
I'm going to talk about this poll if nothing else,
to show you just how terrible the list of candidates
are on the Democratic side, and really how unknown the
Republican candidates are. It's for governor, you know, having Arnold
(17:32):
Schwarzeneinger and Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom as governor over
the last twenty years. Each one of them have their
own particular star quality, big names, very well known. And
now we have a bunch of people and it looks
like you you just pulled people out of the stands
at a Lakers game. Hey what's your name? Okay, we're
(17:53):
going to list you as a as a candidate for governor. Yeah,
that's not fair to all these people here. Some of
them are somewhat known, some of them have accomplished things
in life. But there's a lot of retreads and wannabes
and never weirs, and especially on the Democratic side. Now
what you have here is Emerson Emerson College, and they
(18:16):
did polling and first thing you got to know is
that there's thirty one percent says they're undecided. They don't
not impressed, I guess with any of the candidates. And
we've got a jungle primary in California, and that term
means that all the Democrats and Republicans run against each
(18:37):
other in June, and the top two candidates, regardless of party,
get in. Mathematically, it's possible that you can get two
Republicans because the Democratic vote as it stands now is
split so many different ways. I imagine as we get
close to June, if there is a risk there's going
(19:00):
to be two Republicans at the top, that you're going
to end up with a lot of Democrats dropping out.
Right now, it's bunched up. The Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bionco.
We've had him on the show many times, good Man.
He's technically on top at thirteen percent, followed by the
(19:21):
top Democrat, Eric Swalwell at twelve percent. Swalwell is a
complete joke, and he's been dogged for ten years because
he had a Chinese spy working for him in his
congressional office and he was on the House Intelligence Committee,
and there've always been rumors that Swalwell had an affair
(19:43):
with the Chinese spy who self deported, she got out,
went back to the home country, and the reason that
Swalwell was suspected, and there's no proof that he had one,
but he has never denied it, which I think I'm
curious he neither confirms or denies sleeping with Christina Feng
(20:07):
whose nickname was Feng Feng, and she was a spy
and she was sent to infiltrate and she actually worked
for a series of politicians in the Midwest and infiltrated
their offices and campaigns, and she had sexual relationships with
at least three of the politicians. She targeted two of
(20:28):
them we know from FBI surveillance, a third because he
described her as his girlfriend. Made a mistake there. And
then you have Swallwell, who refuses to talk about his
relationship with her. Now she left his office and self
deported to China, but it's clear she was trying to
(20:49):
get close to Smallwell because he's on the Intelligence Committee
and has access to a lot of classified materials. He
also made a name for himself, and I think this
is why he's pulling his high as he is. You know,
twelve percent is not a big deal, but he's pulling
as high as he is because he was leading a
leading voice to impeach Trump. Now he made the rounds
(21:11):
of TV shows in the past week, and he's got
a new stupid idea that we should all be allowed
to vote by phone. And I'm not going to waste
any time explaining why that is the stupidest idea imaginable
that we all vote by phone. He sounds kind of
dumb when he talks. He's really kind of a meathead,
(21:32):
and you could see how he might end up in
bed with a Chinese spy even if he didn't. So
he's at twelve percent. Steve Hilton, who's the we've had
him on and he's he's a real sharp guy, worked
with Fox News, worked with the British Prime Minister David Cameron,
a tech entrepreneur, He's at twelve percent, and Katie Porter
(21:55):
missus potato head, eleven percent. Dropping. We had four candidates
at thirteen, twelve, twelve and eleven. Basically they're all tied.
Then you have the hapless Tony Vallar still running the
guys in his seventies. Nobody wants him. He's at five percent.
That buffoon billionaire Tom Speier is four percent. Xavier Bisera
(22:17):
who's connected to a big scandal up in Sacramento, used
to be the attorney general four percent. And then there's
a smattering of other losers, you know, bianco In Hilton. Hopefully,
you know we'll get one non Democrat. I mean we
don't have any. You don't have any decent Democrats running.
(22:40):
You know, someone who's business oriented, no nonsense, not woke,
not gonna blow tons of money on illegal aliens. Not
gonna blow tons of money on climate change garbage. Somebody
who's going to look at the average price of gas
in this country being two ninety nine and our average
four point fifty two and say, you know what, this
(23:04):
has got to end. We can't be paying four point
fifty to five a gallon when the rest of the
country is largely under three dollars. The rest of the
country is paying in the twos. I want that guy
to run. I know that Beyonco and Swellwell, Beyonco and
Hilton will excuse me. I don't know why this is
(23:26):
so so. I mean, there's got to be an indictment
of this ruling party that people can connect with and
believe and want changed. We do have the highest inflation
rate in the country. We have the highest unemployment rate
in the country. We have the highest homeless percentage in
the country, the highest poverty rate in the country, the
(23:49):
highest taxes in the country, the highest gas prices, the
highest electricity prices. I can go on, but you get
the point. I did go on one day and I came
out with nineteen different categories where we were the worst,
Like we're the worst business climate, we have the worst
school scores. Mississippi has better school scores than we do.
(24:12):
It's got to be something better than what we have now.
Beyonco and Hilton are better, but they're Republicans, and there's
only a quarter registered as Republicans in the state. And
then you look at this Democratic crew. It's like swallowell.
It's dumb enough to let a Chinese spy into his office,
dumb enough to think voting by phone is not going
(24:34):
to lead to massive corruption. This missus potato head maniac
Tony Lallar, he's a cartoon character. Tom Steyer is obsessed
with climate change. That's over. The climate change era is over.
That's done. I just this is bad. I mean, we
(24:55):
really need an excellent governor in the next forty eight
yearsately needed. All the stuff I tell you is true.
It's the most expensive state. It's the highest real estate,
highest highest rental, most regulations, I mean, every bad statistic.
(25:17):
We're at the top. All right, we've got more coming up.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
For four o'clock. Well, release the podcast and you can
listen to whatever you missed one o'clock hour. You got
to hear us going through the La Times expose on
Ricardo Lara, the insurance commissioner, and he's been on thirty
two international trips to twenty three countries, and he has
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tax money and
(25:52):
money from insurance industry interests and also insurance companies, and
basically it's bribery. And he's also stupid, and he engineered
a very bad deal at the last minute, just weeks
before the fires in the Palisades that resulted in the
(26:13):
Palisades residents and many thousands of others losing their fire
insurance coverage or throwing them into the fair plan, the
last resort that the state runs where you end up
getting a fraction of the benefits that you'd get from
private insurance. It was a colossal blunder. He is stupid,
(26:33):
he's destructive, he's corrupt, and it's in the La Times page.
Saint John is the name of the writer and part
two of what she did, because she talks about of
the dysfunctional, broken insurance market that has been that way
for years, long before the fire. We're going to talk
about that tomorrow, but you want to hear part one
today in the one o'clock hour on the first hour
(26:57):
of the podcast. Yeah, you remember when Gavin Newsom insisted
that every student must get a COVID shot to a
tend school in person. That was October of twenty twenty one,
and that's before they had done enough, they gathered enough
(27:19):
data on its safety to kids. Well, it turns out
the FDA reviewed that at least ten children likely died
in this country because of the vaccine. Now that's a
small number, obviously, and there were a small number of
(27:41):
kids that died of COVID who didn't get the shot
because there was no shot that first year. But the
idea that the shot did actually kill ten people and
the government's willing to admit it. It was a leaked
internal FDA memo. Who's by a man named Vena Prosad.
(28:02):
He's the new director of the Center for Biologics of
Valuation and Research at the FBA FDA, And yeah, it's
what people suspect. It is true that the COVID shot
did kill some kids. And you can argue all day
about the risk of COVID versus the risk of the
COVID shot, but the bottom line is a only parents
(28:23):
should decide what gets injected into their kids systems. Let
them decide what kind of risk to live with. That
wasn't Gavin Newsom's business, and no other state required that.
In fact, then a persad who wrote the memo, he's
(28:44):
a liberal guy from the Bay Area. He spent a
decade at uc San Francisco and initially supported vaccination for
high risk adults. But he wrote explicitly, this is the
first time that the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID
nineteen vaccines have killed American children. And again, California is
(29:05):
the only state to pursue statewide mandatory k through twelve
COVID vaccine mandates. And all this has been covered by
Californiaglobe dot com if you want to read the story.
And a lot of people pulled their kids out of school,
they went to private school, moved out of state, homeschooling.
(29:27):
Four hundred thousand residents left California, many of them families
who didn't want to comply with the mandates. According to
Rita Barnett Rose of The Globe, and this is a
basic freedom that I think everybody should have, basic freedom
that you should have from the government. The right not
to be forced to inject your child with a vaccine
(29:48):
or anything else, and California was the only one to
mandate it, and that that should be held against Gavin
Newsom as well. You talk about dictatorial, Is there anything
more dictatorial than insisting that your child be forced to
(30:11):
have a needle jabbed in with a substance that hasn't
been entirely tested that people aren't entirely sure is safe
for all. Of course not, And that's why the other
forty nine governors and the other forty nine legislatures didn't
do a stupid thing like this. But are when we
(30:32):
come back? Well, Conway's up next, and we'll be back
tomorrow at one o'clock. We got Michael Krazer with the
news live in the KFI twenty four hour newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
can always hear the show live on KFI Am six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
I am six forty. You're listening to the John Cobelt
podcast on the iHeartRadio app. We are on every day
one until four o'clock and every day right after four.
Whatever you missed in the show, you can hear on
the podcast John Cobelt's Show on demand. In our first
hour today, we spent a lot of time in the
La Times investigation into that Kruk Ricardo Lara, the insurance commissioner,
(00:24):
and he has gone on thirty two international trips to
twenty three countries, spending either tax money or insurance industry money,
and he has really partied and enjoyed himself. And he
was behind the insurance disaster, especially in the Palisades where
(00:47):
thousands lost their insurance just two months before the fire,
and some have no insurance. Some were thrown into the
fair plan, which only gives you a fraction of a
regular policy. It was his doing, his incompetence. He is
most incompetent and most corrupt. And this is not the
(01:09):
first time there's been an expose on him, and we
are just counting the days until maybe finally he's forced out.
This is what the governor should do, is demand that
he resigned. I don't care who he gets replaced by.
It's impossible to get somebody who's worse. And well, that's
the one o'clock hours. You have to listen to that
on the podcast. Now, let's talk to Nick Gerder. We've
(01:31):
had on Nick before. Nick is with LAist dot com,
a journalist and he has done a lot of investigative
pieces on the nonprofit homeless industry, the companies that build
homeless housing, and a lot of money that has evaporated,
both state money and la money. A quick rundown of
(01:54):
this story. Actually he's done a number of stories lately,
but this is that a homeless center that they were
building in chevy At Hills where you had one guy
named Stephen Taylor. He's a Brentwood developer. He bought the
property for eleven million dollars two years ago and then
(02:18):
ten days later so resold it for twenty seven million.
He made sixteen million dollars in ten days to a
company called Wininguard. Now Stephen Taylor is being accused of
submitting fraudulent documents to borrow the money to buy the
eleven million dollar property, and then the second company. Two
(02:42):
of their executives have resigned they spent twenty seven million
in taxpayer funds authorized by city and state officials. Karen
Bass and Gavin Newsom touted this purchase as a key
tool in the fight against homelessness. According to Nick gerderlet's
get Nick on the phone here and he can explain
it all. Nick, how are you.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Let's do a basic run through of this story so
people can understand, because I think this story is, this
whole incident is a classic to explain what's going on
with a lot of the homeless money that's disappeared in
this state.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So to take a step back, this is all under
a taxpayer funded programs that emerged out of COVID. It's
ultimately a lot of its federal COVID dollars that were
flowing through the state. And what Governor Newsom set up
with his state Housing agency was a program called home
Key that provided has provided a couple of billion dollars
so far to cities and counties across the state to,
(03:43):
among other things, partner with nonprofit groups to purchase properties, motels, hotel,
senior living facilities, et cetera, and convert them into housing
for unhoused people for long term operation and this is
one of those projects call the Shelby and the nonprofit
group is the Wineguard Center. They're two top their top
(04:04):
executive and top real estate person have been put on
leave according to some news reporting at while the board
commissions an investigation into all of this. But so this
this group, Wineguard Center, they get selected by the city
and what we found in records, we did a deep
dive of the thousands of pages of documents around this transaction,
(04:26):
and what we found in the records public records that
we obtained is that Mayor Mass's office had a big
role in the selection of this property, the Shelby property.
That's according to an email at city Hall at the
Housing Department. And there was thirty one applications. Three projects
were chosen. This is one of them. And there was
this purchase agreement signed that had to use tax payer
(04:49):
money twenty seven million dollars in tax payer money to
buy this property that acknowledged they were not buying it
from the actual owner at the time. That someone who
was in Escro's the Steven Tamer guy you mentioned who
was in Escro to buy it. Turns out he was
an Escro to buy it or ultimately bought it for
a company link to him, bought it for eleven million,
and then completed turned around and completed the twenty seven
(05:10):
million dollars sale financed by tax payers. There's a lot
of questions around how this all went down, and as
we went through the records, a number of things stood
out which we reported out. What was the secrecy in
this taxpayer funded agreement was something that I can't recall
ever seeing in the you know, fourteen years I've been
covering local government, which is that the taxpayer agreement to
(05:31):
pay twenty seven million dollars for this property stated that
the buyer, taxpayer funded buyer. Wineguart Center can never tell
the public or the news media who the celerates, who
was getting the twenty seven million dollars. That's that's the
level of secrecy. Again, it's highly unusual. I can't even
think of another time I've seen that in local government
for such a large contract.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Is that legal?
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Good question? I mean, they did, oh, go ahead, are
you going? I haven't looked specifically into that question, but
what I can say is it was disclosed in a
public records request when we when we you know, demanded
the records through the Public Records Act. We got a
copy of it from the city. But what's what's also
(06:15):
interesting is the name of this middleman, Stephen Taylor. You know,
normally that something that you would likely see in the
property purchase the public property purchase records. But what ended
up happening is he assigned his role as the seller
later on to a different entity that did not have
his name on its registrations uh and on the real
(06:37):
estate records.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
But we found other links with him to it, and
the pro peder of federal prosecutors say he is ultimately
behind all of us. But so so there was this
other move that also, you know, did not provide the
kind of transparency that that we're used to saying. But
but again it's there's a lot of questions here about
who knew what when. Additionally, the appraisal that was used
(07:00):
to justify the twenty seven million dollars purchase here by
taxpayers was commissioned and submitted by Wineguart Center to the
state for funding approval. That appraisal had inaccurate information. As
we reviewed it, we discovered that the appraisal omitted that
this property was in escrow to be basically Wineguart was
(07:23):
buying it from someone who didn't own it. The appraisal
incorrectly said that Wineguart was buying it from the owner
for twenty seven million, but the agreement at the time
was clear Wineguart was not buying it from the owner.
They were buying it from a middleman and who did
not own it yet. So a lot of questions here.
We continue to pursue answers. There's really not been any
answers forthcoming from the state, from the city, from the
(07:45):
mayor's office, from Wineguart Center. They've all been citing the
investigation by federal authorities into what went down here. And
I'll add that the top federal prosecutor in the region,
Bill A. Saley, did a press conference referenced this deal
in October and said there is an active federal investigation
into who knew what in all of this.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Well, it's such an overwhelming amount of money, I mean,
a sixteen million dollar profit in ten days. Clearly something
corrupt is going on here. Clearly there are people who
are going to be running away with bags of money.
Stephen Taylor on both ends, he buys the property and
he's accused of submitting fraudulent documents to borrow the money.
(08:31):
So he borrows and buys the property for eleven million.
Ten days later, he's selling it for twenty seven million. Now, obviously,
nobody in the right mind can justify a property value
appreciating that quickly sixteen million in ten days, and all
this secrecy around it. I mean this, I mean there's
(08:53):
got to be a lot of hands in this pie.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
You know, you got the city authorizing funds and actually
selecting this. You've got the state authorizing money and a
lad as well. As we were digging into this, we
found something else that ended up being its own separate
article than in story that we ran, which is that
during all of this and since then, Wineguard Center has
been failing continuously and failing to comply with the requirements
(09:20):
in federal law for it to be submitting to audits
and turning in audits on time. These are required in
federal law. They're called single audits. They have to be
turned in within nine months of the end of a
fiscal year, and they've been continuously overdue on those since
early twenty twenty two. So it's a time the money
was getting awarded here it appears that this group was
(09:42):
out of compliance with the sort of the most essential
tool that the federal government says it has to ensure
that organizations are properly tracking and accounting for taxpayer funds.
And when some of these audits did get turned in
very late, they were finding a whole host of problems
with how Wineguart Center was accounting for money, you know,
failing to have enough accounting staff to track it properly enough,
(10:06):
experience on the accounting staff, failing to include tens of
millions of dollars in federal funds on its balance sheet
that was provided to the auditors. So there's there's a lot,
a lot that I think people want to get explanations
for as far as what's going on here and how
this money was getting awarded amidst this non compliance.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Nick, thank you for coming on, and I hope we
can talk again about this and other other matters.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
You Bett, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Nick Gerda, go read his pieces at last dot com,
l A I SD dot com and we've we've got
more coming up. This is a massive fraud. Here.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
M six forty.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
We're on from one to four every day. If you
want to subscribe to our YouTube channel, it's YouTube dot
com slash at johnco Belt Radio. YouTube dot com slash
at johnco No, I do that wrong. I did that wrong.
YouTube dot com slash at John Cobelt's show. To subscribe
to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash at John
(11:10):
Cobelt Show. And we're putting up longer video segments these days.
We just had Nick Gerda on. I have been telling
you for years that there is massive fraud, hundreds of
millions and billions of dollars being stolen, and you don't
need an investigation. Well you do need one if you
want to put the guys into prison, but just use
(11:31):
your eyes. You know that billions of dollars were raised
in taxes, They get huge donations from corporations and do
gooding rich people, and the homeless situation got worse and
worse and worse. So I don't think you need to
be the sharpest investigator on the planet to say, wow,
(11:54):
I guess a lot of the money is getting stolen. Huh.
Of course it was. And over time I realized, and
I think it's obvious now that the nonprofit industry when
it comes to these kinds of charities, is filled with
a lot of criminals, theft, and corruption. They know that
(12:14):
there is little to no oversight, and that was really
the case during COVID. That's why they could steal thirty
two billion dollars from Gavin Newsom from the unemployment payouts
he was making. That's why they could steal ten billion
a billion dollars from Tim Waltz in Minnesota for nutritional
(12:36):
assistance programs and autism programs. They know the bad guys
know that there is no oversight, and a lot of
the bad guys work in government. There are really bad
people that work in government. There are really bad people
that you elect to hold office, like the insurance commissioner
(12:56):
Ricardo Lara, a really bad person who is happy stealing
tax money so he can travel and live a great life.
I mean, there are shysters and grifters and fraudsters all
over the place, and they're attracted to government work and
(13:17):
they get involved in charity work and they get involved
with nonprofits because they know nobody's looking, nobody cares. We
vote for homeless taxes because everybody wants to feel good. Yes,
we have to do our part. It's so unfortunate what
happens to these people. We vote for these welfare programs
(13:37):
that yes, yes, we have to offer a helping hand,
and voting for welfare programs, or politicians who promote welfare programs,
you know, voting for homeless taxes, supporting nonprofits with donations. Oh, yes,
(13:59):
they do so good work. No, a lot of them don't.
A lot of them are stealing the money. The whole
Black Lives Matter movement was a scam. They built a
lot of guilty, rich white liberal women. Out of tens
of millions of dollars, Black Lives Matter here in La,
ninety million dollars disappeared. It's amazing how easy it is
(14:24):
to manipulate people's psychology to make them feel guilty, to
feed the desire to want to do good. You're not
helping anybody by notating this money. You're not helping anybody
by voting for these taxes, paying these taxes. Why at
the very least understand human nature? Half a human nature
(14:46):
is bad, and the bad people get in government. The
bad people have infiltrated the nonprofit world. The bad people
are involved in these welfare programs. Whether it's the non
profit end, it's the bureaucrat end, it's the politicians themselves.
That's their business, that's the way they earn a living.
(15:09):
And I'm just fascinated how people won't accept it. Oh no,
you know, they really do good work. I mean, you know,
even when you lay out a case, people will go, well,
you know, not all nonprofits, Like why are you so
emotionally invested? No, one's suggesting all nonprofits, but way, way,
way too many more than you want to admit to.
(15:30):
You don't want to admit that you've been scammed. You
don't want to like face the facts that a lot
of your tax money has been stolen when you voted
for the homeless tax here in La City and County,
all of the money you give to a lot of
these nonprofits has been stolen. A lot of this welfare
money is not going to poor people who deserve a break.
(15:52):
It's just taken by criminals and fraudsters and shysters. And
they do it because they can manipulate your emotion. You're
afraid of being called racist or homophobic, or hardhearted or
cruel and mean, all the names they use to emotionally
manipulate your brain. So you give away the money and
(16:14):
no good comes of it. Fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
All right?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
We come back. I'll be honest, I didn't expect this.
There's a new poll coming out. Well, it is out
Emerson College on the leading candidates for governor. I didn't
expect this guy to be at the top. Good lord,
we'll tell you about it. We come back.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
You know, over the years we spent I spent a
lot less time on polling because it's it's a busted,
broken industry. And I could go on for half an
hour as to why it's busted. But it's simply very
difficult now to get people to cooperate so that you
can pull and get an accurate result, which is why
(17:08):
there's so many false results that come out every election day.
I'm going to talk about this poll if nothing else,
to show you just how terrible the list of candidates
are on the Democratic side, and really how unknown the
Republican candidates are. It's for governor, you know, having Arnold
(17:32):
Schwarzeneinger and Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom as governor over
the last twenty years. Each one of them have their
own particular star quality, big names, very well known. And
now we have a bunch of people and it looks
like you you just pulled people out of the stands
at a Lakers game. Hey what's your name? Okay, we're
(17:53):
going to list you as a as a candidate for governor. Yeah,
that's not fair to all these people here. Some of
them are somewhat known, some of them have accomplished things
in life. But there's a lot of retreads and wannabes
and never weirs, and especially on the Democratic side. Now
what you have here is Emerson Emerson College, and they
(18:16):
did polling and first thing you got to know is
that there's thirty one percent says they're undecided. They don't
not impressed, I guess with any of the candidates. And
we've got a jungle primary in California, and that term
means that all the Democrats and Republicans run against each
(18:37):
other in June, and the top two candidates, regardless of party,
get in. Mathematically, it's possible that you can get two
Republicans because the Democratic vote as it stands now is
split so many different ways. I imagine as we get
close to June, if there is a risk there's going
(19:00):
to be two Republicans at the top, that you're going
to end up with a lot of Democrats dropping out.
Right now, it's bunched up. The Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bionco.
We've had him on the show many times, good Man.
He's technically on top at thirteen percent, followed by the
(19:21):
top Democrat, Eric Swalwell at twelve percent. Swalwell is a
complete joke, and he's been dogged for ten years because
he had a Chinese spy working for him in his
congressional office and he was on the House Intelligence Committee,
and there've always been rumors that Swalwell had an affair
(19:43):
with the Chinese spy who self deported, she got out,
went back to the home country, and the reason that
Swalwell was suspected, and there's no proof that he had one,
but he has never denied it, which I think I'm
curious he neither confirms or denies sleeping with Christina Feng
(20:07):
whose nickname was Feng Feng, and she was a spy
and she was sent to infiltrate and she actually worked
for a series of politicians in the Midwest and infiltrated
their offices and campaigns, and she had sexual relationships with
at least three of the politicians. She targeted two of
(20:28):
them we know from FBI surveillance, a third because he
described her as his girlfriend. Made a mistake there. And
then you have Swallwell, who refuses to talk about his
relationship with her. Now she left his office and self
deported to China, but it's clear she was trying to
(20:49):
get close to Smallwell because he's on the Intelligence Committee
and has access to a lot of classified materials. He
also made a name for himself, and I think this
is why he's pulling his high as he is. You know,
twelve percent is not a big deal, but he's pulling
as high as he is because he was leading a
leading voice to impeach Trump. Now he made the rounds
(21:11):
of TV shows in the past week, and he's got
a new stupid idea that we should all be allowed
to vote by phone. And I'm not going to waste
any time explaining why that is the stupidest idea imaginable
that we all vote by phone. He sounds kind of
dumb when he talks. He's really kind of a meathead,
(21:32):
and you could see how he might end up in
bed with a Chinese spy even if he didn't. So
he's at twelve percent. Steve Hilton, who's the we've had
him on and he's he's a real sharp guy, worked
with Fox News, worked with the British Prime Minister David Cameron,
a tech entrepreneur, He's at twelve percent, and Katie Porter
(21:55):
missus potato head, eleven percent. Dropping. We had four candidates
at thirteen, twelve, twelve and eleven. Basically they're all tied.
Then you have the hapless Tony Vallar still running the
guys in his seventies. Nobody wants him. He's at five percent.
That buffoon billionaire Tom Speier is four percent. Xavier Bisera
(22:17):
who's connected to a big scandal up in Sacramento, used
to be the attorney general four percent. And then there's
a smattering of other losers, you know, bianco In Hilton. Hopefully,
you know we'll get one non Democrat. I mean we
don't have any. You don't have any decent Democrats running.
(22:40):
You know, someone who's business oriented, no nonsense, not woke,
not gonna blow tons of money on illegal aliens. Not
gonna blow tons of money on climate change garbage. Somebody
who's going to look at the average price of gas
in this country being two ninety nine and our average
four point fifty two and say, you know what, this
(23:04):
has got to end. We can't be paying four point
fifty to five a gallon when the rest of the
country is largely under three dollars. The rest of the
country is paying in the twos. I want that guy
to run. I know that Beyonco and Swellwell, Beyonco and
Hilton will excuse me. I don't know why this is
(23:26):
so so. I mean, there's got to be an indictment
of this ruling party that people can connect with and
believe and want changed. We do have the highest inflation
rate in the country. We have the highest unemployment rate
in the country. We have the highest homeless percentage in
the country, the highest poverty rate in the country, the
(23:49):
highest taxes in the country, the highest gas prices, the
highest electricity prices. I can go on, but you get
the point. I did go on one day and I came
out with nineteen different categories where we were the worst,
Like we're the worst business climate, we have the worst
school scores. Mississippi has better school scores than we do.
(24:12):
It's got to be something better than what we have now.
Beyonco and Hilton are better, but they're Republicans, and there's
only a quarter registered as Republicans in the state. And
then you look at this Democratic crew. It's like swallowell.
It's dumb enough to let a Chinese spy into his office,
dumb enough to think voting by phone is not going
(24:34):
to lead to massive corruption. This missus potato head maniac
Tony Lallar, he's a cartoon character. Tom Steyer is obsessed
with climate change. That's over. The climate change era is over.
That's done. I just this is bad. I mean, we
(24:55):
really need an excellent governor in the next forty eight
yearsately needed. All the stuff I tell you is true.
It's the most expensive state. It's the highest real estate,
highest highest rental, most regulations, I mean, every bad statistic.
(25:17):
We're at the top. All right, we've got more coming up.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
For four o'clock. Well, release the podcast and you can
listen to whatever you missed one o'clock hour. You got
to hear us going through the La Times expose on
Ricardo Lara, the insurance commissioner, and he's been on thirty
two international trips to twenty three countries, and he has
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tax money and
(25:52):
money from insurance industry interests and also insurance companies, and
basically it's bribery. And he's also stupid, and he engineered
a very bad deal at the last minute, just weeks
before the fires in the Palisades that resulted in the
(26:13):
Palisades residents and many thousands of others losing their fire
insurance coverage or throwing them into the fair plan, the
last resort that the state runs where you end up
getting a fraction of the benefits that you'd get from
private insurance. It was a colossal blunder. He is stupid,
(26:33):
he's destructive, he's corrupt, and it's in the La Times page.
Saint John is the name of the writer and part
two of what she did, because she talks about of
the dysfunctional, broken insurance market that has been that way
for years, long before the fire. We're going to talk
about that tomorrow, but you want to hear part one
today in the one o'clock hour on the first hour
(26:57):
of the podcast. Yeah, you remember when Gavin Newsom insisted
that every student must get a COVID shot to a
tend school in person. That was October of twenty twenty one,
and that's before they had done enough, they gathered enough
(27:19):
data on its safety to kids. Well, it turns out
the FDA reviewed that at least ten children likely died
in this country because of the vaccine. Now that's a
small number, obviously, and there were a small number of
(27:41):
kids that died of COVID who didn't get the shot
because there was no shot that first year. But the
idea that the shot did actually kill ten people and
the government's willing to admit it. It was a leaked
internal FDA memo. Who's by a man named Vena Prosad.
(28:02):
He's the new director of the Center for Biologics of
Valuation and Research at the FBA FDA, And yeah, it's
what people suspect. It is true that the COVID shot
did kill some kids. And you can argue all day
about the risk of COVID versus the risk of the
COVID shot, but the bottom line is a only parents
(28:23):
should decide what gets injected into their kids systems. Let
them decide what kind of risk to live with. That
wasn't Gavin Newsom's business, and no other state required that.
In fact, then a persad who wrote the memo, he's
(28:44):
a liberal guy from the Bay Area. He spent a
decade at uc San Francisco and initially supported vaccination for
high risk adults. But he wrote explicitly, this is the
first time that the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID
nineteen vaccines have killed American children. And again, California is
(29:05):
the only state to pursue statewide mandatory k through twelve
COVID vaccine mandates. And all this has been covered by
Californiaglobe dot com if you want to read the story.
And a lot of people pulled their kids out of school,
they went to private school, moved out of state, homeschooling.
(29:27):
Four hundred thousand residents left California, many of them families
who didn't want to comply with the mandates. According to
Rita Barnett Rose of The Globe, and this is a
basic freedom that I think everybody should have, basic freedom
that you should have from the government. The right not
to be forced to inject your child with a vaccine
(29:48):
or anything else, and California was the only one to
mandate it, and that that should be held against Gavin
Newsom as well. You talk about dictatorial, Is there anything
more dictatorial than insisting that your child be forced to
(30:11):
have a needle jabbed in with a substance that hasn't
been entirely tested that people aren't entirely sure is safe
for all. Of course not, And that's why the other
forty nine governors and the other forty nine legislatures didn't
do a stupid thing like this. But are when we
(30:32):
come back? Well, Conway's up next, and we'll be back
tomorrow at one o'clock. We got Michael Krazer with the
news live in the KFI twenty four hour newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
can always hear the show live on KFI Am six
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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