A Mysterious Nursing Home Money Bomb

On a single day in March, from a single address in Richmond, Kentucky, at least ten New York and New Jersey nursing home investors donated $329,000 to congressional Republicans, more than $180,000 specifically to sophomore Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) and another $106,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee with notes indicating the donations should be attributed to a Langworthy-associated PAC. The Buffalo-area congressmember also received $59,600 from four other related nursing home owners, three of whom are partners or former partners in entities that contributed to the March 19 Kentucky cash dump, on other days of the campaign season.

The other two primary recipients of the nursing home cash were Kentucky Reps. Brett Guthrie, who collected an additional $28,000 from the same group of nursing home owners 12 days after the initial cash dump, and James Comer, who collected $42,000. Guthrie and Comer are the respective heads of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Oversight Committee, the two primary panels that could perform oversight over the nursing home industry, but thus far have refrained from doing so. Just last week, for example, Langworthy took to X to tout Guthrie’s committee’s efforts to fight Medicaid fraud. But a report that committee published on September 29 detailing those efforts contained nary a single mention of “nursing homes,” which constitute nearly a quarter of New York Medicaid spending.

One perhaps unrelated link between all three Republicans: All have used their committee leadership and social media profiles to investigate and portray as exemplars of government fraud, waste, and abuse the Somali community of Minnesota, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in particular, who Langworthy said in July should be banned from holding public office, on account of her supposed allegiance to a foreign government.

“We know from the whistleblowers in Minnesota when we had the hearing with Tim Walz and Keith Ellison to prove they were covering up this Somali fraud,” Comer, the Oversight Committee chair, told Fox News anchor Jesse Watters last week, repeatedly pronouncing her national origin as “So-moley” as he referenced one of the multiple hearings he had convened on the topic of the fraud perpetrated by the now-defunct nonprofit Feeding Our Future, 47 of whose conspirators the Biden administration indicted in 2022. “We now know Ilhan Omar was a key player in all of that, and [potentially] a huge beneficiary of that massive fraud there in Minnesota.” (Omar indeed received campaign donations from men who were charged in the scandal; she donated their funds to three housing and food assistance organizations back in February 2022.)

Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Guthrie, for his part, launched his own investigation into Medicare and Medicaid fraud in Minnesota back in January, with a harsh letter to Gov. Tim Walz accusing him of failing to “ensure finite taxpayer dollars are being used responsibly, and that the most vulnerable Americans are not being exploited to the benefit of fraudsters and foreign actors.” Citing the cases of eight health care, housing, and addiction recovery frauds alleged to have stolen a combined $55 million from various state-administered programs, the letter also announced that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) would be freezing enrollment and deferring payments on 14 programs it deemed “high-risk,” in an unprecedented withholding of funds now reported to total at least $550 million.

Langworthy, a mere second-term congressman who sits on both committees, has played attack dog, posting frequently throughout the year about the “massive frauds” committed by “Somali-linked networks” and raising a characteristically bad-faith social media shitstorm when Somalia’s turn on the rotating international flagpole outside Buffalo’s City Hall arrived a few days before July 4th. The evening after Langworthy’s diatribe, in which he wrote, “At a moment when our nation should be celebrating 250 years of freedom, those in charge sent a clear message about what they value, and it wasn’t America,” as-yet-unidentified individuals phoned in a bomb threat to City Hall and stole the flag. The saga earned Langworthy a withering rebuke from The Buffalo News, which admonished the congressman for disseminating “partisan propaganda with more than a touch of racism” that “fanned the flames of fake outrage enough to bring forth the possibility of deadly violence.”

Read: Corporate Media Advances Conservative Narrative About Minnesota Fraud 

But lost in the three congressmen’s culture warmongering about Somali welfare cheats in Minnesota was an exponentially bigger and more extensive network of profiteers failing to deliver needed services—and they were lurking right in their donor reports.

THE TUSSLE OVER THE SOMALI FLAG went down the very same week that the Lexington Herald-Leader broke the news that the Kentucky attorney general was opening a “law enforcement investigation” into the death of an 81-year-old former cafeteria cook who died just a month after being admitted to a rehabilitation facility in Salyersville—part of Rep. Guthrie’s district—following a sepsis surgery that caused a bedsore on her lower back around the incision wound. The dinner plate–sized sore is one of the biggest and most spectacularly gruesome I have ever beheld, and it was just one of perhaps thousands that patients had suffered in the desperately understaffed and underresourced nursing home since its 2018 sale to the same group of investors that bombed the three congressmen with cash in March.

Wanda Delaplane had tried to warn Kentucky. A longtime assistant attorney general for consumer protection, she’d published a Herald-Leader op-ed eight years ago this month warning: “A Texas firm’s bankruptcy could hurt care in 21 Kentucky nursing homes.” Delaplane’s father had died in a nursing home owned by the once-dominant Beverly chain in 2002, and she’d won a $20 million jury award. But the nursing homes had figured out a cheat code, and by the time a Kentucky jury awarded $28.5 million to a 61-year-old stroke victim who had been grievously neglected by a Paducah facility, the chain that ran the nursing home immediately filed for bankruptcy protection, whereupon it emerged that the chain had amassed 163 such lawsuits, most of them in Kentucky. The chain had also been sued repeatedly by whistleblowers who alleged it systematically billed both Medicaid and Medicare for hundreds of millions of dollars of nonexistent or “worthless” services despite maintaining skeleton staffing levels. The bankruptcy enabled the chain to “resolve” two whistleblower cases for just $540,000.

But what worried Delaplane was the prospect that conditions in the nursing homes might get even worse, because the judge was also on the precipice of approving a transaction by which control of the 21 Kentucky homes would be transferred—at no cost—to an entity called Sapphire Care, which “a simple Google search” revealed, Delaplane wrote, to have a “disturbing track record of poor care, widespread abuse, chronic understaffing, and other problems too numerous to list in this column.”

Back in Langworthy’s neck of the woods and just weeks before Delaplane published her op-ed, Erie County executive Mark Poloncarz had held a press conference to address Sapphire Care’s neglect of a Buffalo nursing home called Emerald South, where the mother of his high school friend had been beaten to death two years earlier. Then that May, an 87-year-old resident had been found unconscious on the ground outside the home, following a valiant attempt to fashion a rope from bedsheets and clothes and escape out his third-floor window; apparently, no one had heard his screams. A subsequent review of the facility’s inspection records found that no registered nurse had clocked into the nursing home for several days leading up to his attempt to flee.

Then Poloncarz was told the nursing home’s laundry room hadn’t had water for at least two months, that the staff had been forced to haul soiled sheets to a coin laundromat down the block, and that an administrator was under state investigation for sexually assaulting a patient. “Let me just tell you that what is happening here with these residents, these current owners need to be brought to justice,” a 40-year staffer of the facility told reporters. “It is abuse at its highest level, and something needs to be done.” Poloncarz implored the state to shut down the home: “If I had the power to shut it down I would. Force the sale of Emerald South from its current deadbeat downstate owners who neither care about the patients and residents nor the employees at this facility.”

A few months after that, one of the owners Poloncarz described as a deadbeat, Judy Landa, sued him for defamation. The case was eventually dismissed, much like other defamation cases the Landa family has brought against journalists over the years. The lawsuits, however, successfully quieted at least some of the attention Sapphire might have otherwise garnered for the egregious practices Poloncarz and many others say they witnessed.

Poloncarz told the Prospect he had not heard from the Landas since the lawsuit, but that it did not surprise him that Langworthy, who chaired the GOP state campaign committee when the Landas sued him, had been the recipient of such a noteworthy money bomb from the nursing home lobby. “[Langworthy] is smart and ambitious but not an attention seeker,” Poloncarz said. “I think he sees himself as a behind-the-scenes operative.” The month before Judy Landa sued Poloncarz back in 2019, she and two of her children, Sheya and Deana, donated $162,300 to the New York state Republican Party, of which Langworthy had just been named chair; that same month, Kentucky nursing home donor Mayer Fischl donated $90,000, and two other related nursing home owners pitched in $115,000, making for a grand total of $357,300.

On Facebook, Poloncarz used the revelation to reiterate his endorsement of Aaron Gies, the Working Families Party–endorsed theology professor currently running against Langworthy.

NURSING HOMES OWNED BY LANDA and his associates, many of whom participated in the Langworthy money bomb, have faced numerous public and private lawsuits over financial misappropriation and neglect of residents. Because the wheels of justice in this country have ground to a halt, few of these have led to anything resembling accountability. But the stories in those cases are harrowing and deserve to be cited.

For example, Mordy Lahasky, a protégé of Landa’s, saw his company Comprehensive, which operated the Orleans home, criminally charged in 2022 in Pennsylvania over Brighton Rehab in Beaver, where 300 residents and workers contracted COVID-19 during the first months of the pandemic, to the point that the nursing home accounted for 53 percent of the confirmed cases in the entire county. While individuals were not found guilty, the company was ultimately ordered to pay $15 million, after which the nursing home predictably filed for bankruptcy protection. An appeals court upheld the conviction in July. The court-appointed trustee subsequently sued Lahasky and other owners arguing that insiders had taken at least $17 million out of the facility in just the four years that had passed since the pandemic had died down.

Another example: A Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General audit of a Bronx nursing home named Pinnacle Multicare, co-owned by Kentucky donors Mayer Fischl, Eli Grinspan, and (until a few months ago) Benjamin Landa, found $31.2 million in Medicare overpayments between 2021 and 2022 alone, stemming from reimbursement claims in which the agency found an error rate of 99 percent. Pinnacle is suing the government to contest the audit.

State attorneys general like New York’s Letitia James who have sued Landa and his colleagues invariably focus complaints on single facilities. But at their peaks, Landa and Lahasky maintained direct public ownership stakes in at least 150 homes apiece, without much overlap. The flows of funds in and out of single facilities are complex enough that most of James’s complaints have consumed at least 200 pages, but it’s hard to argue that these are one-off problems and not a network with the same clique of operators using the same basic blueprint. And it’s a lucrative play: Since the pandemic, aggregate nursing home spending has grown between 8 and 10 percent a year, even as the number of skilled nursing facilities, the number of staffers working in them, and quality of care provided at any given time have all plunged.

So many of the deals have been brokered in private, and so have avoided public scrutiny. Thanks to a heavily redacted adversary proceeding filed in August in the second recent bankruptcy of the detritus of a company once known as Consulate Health Care, for instance, we now know that Landa, his Kentucky collaborator/donor Richard Platschek, and other New York and New Jersey nursing home network affiliates secretly controlled Consulate, then Florida’s biggest nursing home chain, no later than January 2020, when the chain suddenly reorganized under an entity called FC XXI, likely in anticipation of an impending appeals court ruling in a high-dollar legal battle with one of its former nurses, Angela Ruckh, who had painstakingly detailed in a whistleblower complaint the methods her superiors used to massively inflate its Medicare billings even as it routinely denied basic accommodations to residents. Ruckh and the Department of Justice were eventually forced to settle a $257 million judgment for just $4.5 million.

On paper, Consulate was owned by Atlanta private equity firm Formation Capital, which owned or controlled close to 1,000 nursing homes at its peak through Consulate, the mega-chain Genesis HealthCare, the by-then-largely-defunct Extendicare—former owners of the 21 Kentucky homes—and others. But Formation’s “down-and-dirty” co-founder, the accountant Steven E. Fishman, had been secretly using the name to conceal funds. In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Fishman had secretly funded his contributions to Formation acquisitions using at least $26 million in other people’s money, and the New York courts are littered with complaints from Fishman’s various creditors, among them Landa’s longtime partner Bent Philipson. In any event, during the pandemic the Genesis and Consulate nursing homes largely ended up under the control of Fishman’s creditors and their cronies.

Read: The Corporatization of Nursing Homes

An upstart investor named Eliyahu Mirlis, for example, grabbed nearly three dozen homes in New England, including many former Genesis homes, after winning a $20 million jury award from the New Haven yeshiva that employed a rabbi who was convicted of sexually abusing him starting when he was a 14-year-old boarding school student. But Mirlis found it almost impossible to collect the award, so Landa loaned Mirlis the funds to launch his nursing home chain RegalCare while his own legal team attempted to hunt down his settlement. The loans came with serious strings, and RegalCare’s homes were so desperately underfunded that a five-star home in Taunton, Massachusetts, wound up on the list of “Special Focus Facility” candidates—essentially, the worst nursing homes in America—within a year or two of the acquisitions. Following a series of harrowing Boston Globe stories featuring tales of patients left to rot in urine and feces for seven hours and longer, Massachusetts revoked all 12 of Mirlis’s licenses to operate in the state.

Separately, the SEIU Pennsylvania published an astonishing 32-page report over the summer focused on the collapse in care standards at 23 unionized nursing homes that had been acquired by chains affiliated with Landa protégé Mordy Lahasky. At Maybrook Hills Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center, health inspectors in 2023 found a single certified nursing home assistant responsible for 47 patients; among the listed owners of the nursing home is Yaakov Sod, with whom Landa partnered to lend Mirlis startup funds a decade ago. “Our members are so over trying to fight for higher wages and benefits,” a representative of the union told the Prospect. “All they want at this point is accountability for their patients. They want somebody to pay for the death and misery they have inflicted.”

SOMETHING LIKE THE OPPOSITE of accountability has transpired in the nursing home industry since President Trump took office, and especially since Landa donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. in August 2025. Last October, Trump nominated Benjamin Landa ambassador to Hungary, at the time run by future U.N. secretary-general candidate Viktor Orbán. A vote has yet to be scheduled on his confirmation, but a diplomatic passport and the impunity that comes with it seem far more problematic in the hands of an elder care tycoon than even, for example, in those of Kimberly Guilfoyle.

On the other hand, far less formidable nursing home owners have enjoyed astounding impunity right here at home. In November, alongside fawning social media posts from Laura Loomer and “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson—whose own pardon lobbyist, you’ll recall, was none other than Kim Kardashian—Trump pardoned the jailed New Jersey nursing home owner Joseph Schwartz, and forgave the restitution payment he owed for withholding but failing to pay $38.9 million in employee payroll taxes. Then in December, the administration formally repealed a Biden-era CMS minimum-staffing rule (already basically killed off by the Big Beautiful Bill) that Langworthy and comrades had for years invoked industry talking points to slur.

Last Christmas, MAGA YouTuber Nick Shirley and the covert Pentagon operative who posts under the handle DataRepublican launched what would become a yearlong campaign to smear the Somali American population of Minnesota as the poster children for systemic government fraud. In January, Landa’s close friend Bruce Blakeman, who until recently employed his son Sheya and to whose gubernatorial campaign he has donated more than $40,000, could not resist weighing in on Facebook:

Fraud in Minnesota followed a pattern.

Ignore warnings. Delay action. Admit failure after billions are lost.

That same pattern is playing out in New York under Kathy Hochul.

Leadership is about stopping fraud before it explodes.

Investigate Kathy Hochul.

Hochul, for her part, has accepted more than $300,000 in campaign donations from nursing home owners since becoming governor in 2021. (She’s not alone among Democratic governors: Richard Platschek donated $100,000 to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear last year.) Many of those donations came in weird single-day money bombs like Langworthy and company’s. Hochul has also repeatedly acted to slow-walk or stymie the strict financial regulations the state legislature passed in the aftermath of the pandemic. And we’d be remiss if we failed to mention that Landa’s longtime attorney and business partner Howard Fensterman served for years as the Long Island finance chairman to one Chuck Schumer, who once personally intervened with the president of the Philippines to get Landa’s staffing agency license restored when more than 200 of his former nurses accused him of labor trafficking. Unfortunately, the incredible success nursing home owners have had in resisting accountability is not due to payouts to just one party.