Cody Holmes, whose greed and the position of trust bestowed upon him at the age of 27 combined to threaten the viability of two of the more promising homeless rehabilitation programs undertaken in San Bernardino County and, indeed, the state of California, has been charged by federal authorities with fraud, more than two years after the extent of the embezzlement and other depredations he engaged him became publicly known.
Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, was arrested Thursday morning on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud, a felony offense that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
Holmes made his initial appearance this Thursday afternoon in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles. No plea was taken.
Holmes perfidy undid the efforts of dozens or scores of local officials in four municipalities in California and San Bernardino County’s governmental structure, and destroyed or nearly destroyed benefits intended for hundreds of people living on the streets.
Redlands and the cities of Salinas, King and Thousand Oaks were among  dozens of California cities that moved to take advantage of money being offered by the State of California through its Department of Housing and Community Development via the so-called Homekey Program, which was being pushed by Governor Gavin Newsom at around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. San Bernardino County also sought to make use of that program.  Continue reading →

Approaching three years into the Helen Tran Administration, San Bernardino City officials have now resolved to deal with one of the vestiges of the mayoral reign of John Valdivia. While there is relief among many that the city is at last dealing with a hazard and an eyesore that has gone unaddressed for too long, there is far from universal satisfaction with the means that will be used to make the fix, which a good cross section of the impacted public feels represents an environmental danger in and of itself.
The circumstance came about as part of an untoward arrangement that involved money passing into the hands of Valdivia, who was mayor from 2018 until 2022.
On June 5, 2020, a fire broke out in the 600,000-square foot Kuehne & Nagel warehouse, located in the 2200 block of West Lugonia Avenue in Redlands. The structure had served as a holding/distribution/dispatch facility for large items sold by on-line retail behemoth Amazon. The fire gutted the building, which was a total loss.
The concrete walls were torn down. Initial plans were to haul them off to whatever landfill would take them changed when Eric Cernich, the principal officer with Newport Beach-based Oxbow Communities, Inc. indicated he had a use for the over one thousand tons of fragmented concrete.
Some but not all of what occurred next is known, with some events opaque. Cernich ingratiated himself with Mayor Valdivia, first with a $750 donation to Valdivia’s campaign fund on July 14, 2020, which he followed up with another $750 installment on September 8, 2020. Greenleaf Engineering of Huntington Beach, owned by Tim Greenleaf, who had the contract for the demolition of the Kuehne & Nagel warehouse and relocating its concrete walls to San Bernardino, made an effort to get on Valdivia’s good side, providing his election fund with $2,000, likewise provided in two increments, in Greanleaf’s case, $1,000 each, one on October 2, 2020 and the other on October 7, 2020. Continue reading →

Apple Valley, which over the course of its 37-year history has proven itself to be among the most stable of San Bernardino County’s 24 current municipalities, has selected as its next manager an administrator who has never overseen an entity with as much as one eighth of the town’s population.
The Apple Valley Town Council recently chose Todd S. Bodem, who has been the top administrator for the city of Guadalupe for the last six years, to replace outgoing Town Manager Doug Robertson upon his retirement as of December 1.
Robertson is the fourth town manager that Apple Valley has employed since its founding in 1988. When Bodem succeeds him, he will step into a position in which the holder of the title has averaged a tenure of nine and a quarter years or 111 months.
Throughout the vast majority of its time as an incorporated town, Apple Valley has been relatively free from political or operational dissension. Shortly after its incorporation in 1988, the maiden town council hired Bruce Williams to serve as the senior administrator at Town Hall. He lasted in that position 19 years. He was replaced by longtime Victorville City Manager Jim Cox, who came out of retirement to guide the city for two years, whereupon he was succeeded by Frank Robinson in 2009. Robinson remained in place for nine years. He was replaced by Robertson, who took a pay cut to leave his seven-year long assignment managing the larger and far more complex and challenging assignment of running Victorville. Continue reading →

San Bernardino County’s second most populous and its 12th most populous municipalities appear headed in diametrically opposite directions in terms of their acceptance of warehouse projects large and small.
In both cities, a predominant contingent of the city’s residents appear adamantly opposed to the construction of further warehouses, which are cataloged by both cities as light industrial uses. In Fontana, elected officials and the planning/land use division employees who are answerable to the management echelon at City Hall who are in turn at the beck and call of those politicians feel that popular sentiment can be disregarded with relative impunity. In Redlands, where the city council for more than two decades has been far more aggressively in favor of growth than the majority of constituents who voted them into office, city officials are more sensitive than those in Fontana with regard to the type of development that is going on within their city limits. They sense that while, on average, citizens in their city would prefer that as little new construction take place as is possible, those residents are far less tolerant of factories, foundries and warehouses than they are of houses or commercial buildings.
Throughout San Bernardino County and the Inland Empire in general, the expansion of warehousing over the last two decades has been intensive.
There is more than 940 million square feet of warehousing in San Bernardino and Riverside counties at present, with more being built. That includes 3,052 warehouses in San Bernardino County. In Ontario alone, there are 290 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet. Reportedly, there are 143 warehouses in Fontana larger than 100,000 square feet. In Chino there are 118 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet, 109 larger than 100,000 square feet in Rancho Cucamonga and 75 larger than 100,000 square feet in San Bernardino. Since 2015, 27 warehouse project applications have been processed and approved by the City of San Bernardino, entailing acreage under roof of 9,600,000 square feet, or more than one-third of a square mile, translating into 220.38 acres. After Ontario, Fontana, Chino, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino, the city in San Bernardino County with the next largest number of warehouses of more than 100,000 square feet is Redlands, with 57, followed by Rialto with 48. In addition to those 48 larger warehouses, Rialto has another 125 warehouses of under 100,000 square feet. Continue reading →

The most recent Hail Mary thrown by the conservative values/Republican/Christian contingent on the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees failed to strike paydirt, nine years after a similar quixotic attempt by the coalition’s predecessors went to hell.
This time around, the long-range effort to reverse the 1962 Supreme Court ruling banning prayer in public schools ran into the same federal judge who had thwarted the effort in 2016. The petitioners’ hope that changes on the U.S. Supreme Court and some rulings on related or peripheral issues that had signaled a change in attitude and a tolerance for expressions of religiosity in public forums would weigh in their favor did not pan out. Once again, it appears the district will need to pay the legal fees of the advocates of religion-free public education environments as a consequence of the unsuccessful legal maneuver. This most recent setback and the expense associated with it does not seem to have dimmed the enthusiasm of the Christians on the board for engaging in the good fight, as they consider themselves, the district and the district’s taxpayers to be in for the long haul, from which they are praying they will emerge with a just and Christian victory.
In 2012, Andrew Cruz, a member of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Congregation, was elected to the school board. Cruz joined James Na and Sylvia Orozco, who were also Calvary Chapel parishioners on the panel. The pastor at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills is Jack Hibbs, a denominationalist, who holds that Christians have a duty to stand up for their beliefs by either running for election to public office themselves or supporting other Christians who do run, and then, upon taking office, Christianize public policy. Continue reading →

I

Jake Haro, in an unanticipated move during a court hearing to finalize arrangements for his preliminary hearing and that of his wife and co-defendant, pleaded guilty this morning, Thursday October 15, in Riverside Superior Court to second degree murder in the death of his infant son.
The plea provides some but not all of the answers to a set of evolving questions that have been extant for more than two months. It seemingly confirms what investigators and prosecutors and a significant portion of the public has believed and alleged for some time, which is that the original story about the disappearance of 7-month Emmanuel Haro told by the child’s mother, Rebecca Haro, was patently untrue.
In that version of events, provided to members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department on August 14, she, her husband, Jake, Jake’s two-year-old sister and his ten-year-old half brother had driven to Yucaipa from the Haro home in Cabazon in Riverside County so the ten-year-old could partticipate in a football scrimmage/practice at the large sports facility there. According to Rebecca Haro, she went to the Big 5 Sporting Goods Store several blocks from the sports facility to purchase a mouth guard for her stepson, where in the parking lot she stopped to change Emmanuel’s diaper. As she was doing so, sometime 7:44 p.m. and 7:54 p.m., with the 7-month-old on the backseat of the family vehicle, she said, she was sucker-punched by a man who had greeted her in Spanish. When she came to on the ground moments later, she said, Emmanuel was gone.
Initially, her story was lent credibility by the consideration that she had a blackened right eye. An all points bulletin went out as an intensive search was initiated, which resulted in a report that the child had been sighted in Kern County near Bakersfield.
Within a few days, however, contradictions in Rebecca Haro’s story emerged, as video footage from cameras in the area either did not confirm her version of events or seemed at odds with it. A social media frenzy ensued, which entailed the relatively new brand of citizen journalists, among whom were both amateur and professional videographers, staking out the Haro’s home, following them and tracing their previous movements in the days and weeks prior to Emmanuel’s disappearance. Some of those efforts churned up information that went beyond what sheriff’s department investigators were able to obtain, such as indications that Rebecca Haro’s eye was blackened as early as August 3.
Both of the Haros were confronted with this information and other details gleaned by detectives when they were interviewed, reinterviewed and interrogated over the course of the next three days, at which point Rebecca Haro grew uncooperative. The investigation at that point made a crucial shift, with the parents now suspects in what was believed to be the death of their child.
Late in the evening on Sunday, August 18, an identification of Jake Emmanuel Haro and Jake Mitchell Haro as being one and the same was received through a backchannel to several media organizations and social media outlets. Riverside County Superior Court records showed that a conviction against Jake Mitchell Haro had been entered against him in June 2023, stemming from his arrest on charges of child cruelty in Hemet four years and 8 months previously. Both Haro and his then wife, Vanessa Avina, were arrested on October 13, 2018 after their 10-week-old daughter, Carolina Rose, was admitted to Hemet Valley Hospital. Doctors reported to police that the girl had a “fresh” and “acute” fractured rib, six previously fractured ribs, a previous leg bone fracture and a previous skull fracture, all of which were in a state of “healing,” swelling of the neck and a brain hemorrhage.
Carolina Rose, who was severely disabled after having had to undergo a tracheotomy and was rendered blind, unable to walk or speak, with three to seven percent brain function because of the beating to her head, making her entirely dependent upon her caregiver, was adopted by Vanessa’s sister, who changed the child’s name to Promise Faith.
A criminal case against Jake Mitchell Haro and Vanessa Avina was pursued by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office and dragged out for nearly five years, which concluded with his 2023 conviction for willful cruelty to a child.
It was incidentally mentioned that Haro had been arrested while in possession of a gun, and was yet facing charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The already pointed suppositions on multiple social media sites that were suggesting the parents were involved in the child’s disappearance reached a cacophonous crescendo thereafter, at which point the involved law enforcement entities echoed those accusations, albeit in less sensationalistic terms, and without disclosing the basis for that conclusion. A wide cross section of the traditional press and media, hamstrung by the standard limitations relating to sourcing and the production of verified specifics, while taken aback by Jake Haro’s criminal history that consisted of extreme abuse of a child, noted, without publishing as much, that the presumption of the Haros’ guilt was unaccompanied by any specific hard evidence to support the inferences being drawn.
Yet another corner on the case was turned when both Jake and Rebecca were rousted at 6:59 a.m., on August 22 by San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies and detectives, who arrested them on suspicion of the murder of their son. They were entrusted to the custody of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which delayed in booking them. Rebecca was not booked into official custody at the jail until 12:32 p.m., more than a half hour after noon, five-and-a-half hours after her arrest. Jake was not booked until 5:33 p.m., a full ten-and-a-half hours after his arrest.
During that time, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department used the opportunity to place undercover officers into the inmate population in the holding cells where both were being detained. Those officers, in the guise of individuals who had just been arrested themselves, attempted to befriend the Haros in an effort to gain their confidence and thereby obtain statements from them that further implicated them in the murder of their son, together with possible hints with regard to where the child’s remains were located.
Within days, word of the undercover operation became public knowledge, as did investigators inability to locate the body of the child. Whereas previously, the detectives with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in investigating the matter had embraced the opportunity that the widespread public interest and accompanying social media scrutiny provided them in pressuring the Haros to further their effort to learn what the actual circumstances surrounding Emmanuel’s disappearance were, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and in particular Sheriff Chad Bianco, with the couple in their custody, proved to be far less adept at harnessing the glare of attention that attended the case for any positive effect. The public, expectant as a consequence of the arrests of the parents that at minimum an explication of the facts with regard to the killing of the child by his parents would be provided and anticipating an even more comprehensive detailing of what had occurred, found themselves stonewalled as the Riverside Sheriff’s Department showed itself to be far less forthcoming than the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Bianco and his crew grew even more coy when it was pressed about the most basic element of the murder, i.e., how the child had died. It was at that point that it was intimated that the child’s body had not been found. Two days after the arrests, amid reports that Jake Haro was cooperating with his jailers, what was hoped would prove to be a succesful shaping of the narrative, news outlets and agencies were tipped off about an out-of-jail excursion that Jake Haro was taking to the badlands outside Moreno Valley…

Cody Holmes, whose greed and the position of trust bestowed upon him at the age of 27 combined to  threaten the viability of two of the more promising homeless rehabilitation programs undertaken in San Bernardino County and, indeed,  the state of California, has been charged by federal authorities with fraud, more than two years after the extent of the embezzlement and other depredations he engaged him became publicly known.

        Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, was arrested this morning on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud, a felony offense that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

          Holmes is expected to make his initial appearance this afternoon in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles. No plea will be taken today.

          According to an affidavit filed with the complaint, in October 2022, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), a state agency, 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 grant funds were sent with the provision that the money be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks.

These payments followed many millions of dollars HCD had already paid to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands (in San Bernardino County) and King City (in Monterey County), among other California cities.

Holmes – as Shangri-La’s CFO – 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 coapplied for grants from HCD, including the Thousand Oaks project. In fact, the bank accounts Shangri-La and Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.

Holmes and Shangri-La also submitted to HCD balance sheets falsely representing that Shangri-La-affiliated entities held millions of dollars in cash that these entities did not actually have on deposit in the known accounts for those entities. Holmes and Shangri-La submitted these fake bank statements and false balance sheets with the intent that HCD should rely on them and release grant money to Shangri-La.

After these documents were submitted to HCD, HCD paid millions of dollars more in grant money to Shangri-La, including for the Thousand Oaks project.

Some of the Homekey money paid to Shangri-La for homeless housing was used to pay credit card bills for American Express accounts associated with Holmes. In November and December of 2022, more than $2.2 million was transferred from a Shangri-La account to a Holmes-controlled account. Afterwards, from November 2022 to May 2023, more than $2 million was paid towards American Express cards. The charges on those credit card accounts included purchases at well-known luxury retailers. Law enforcement believes these payments were made at least in part for Holmes’s benefit.

The announcement of Holmes’ arrest and the charges against him were made simultaneously with the arrest and filing of charges against Steven Taylor, 44, of Brentwood, who defrauded lenders to aid his property-flipping business, including a Cheviot Hills home that he sold to a homeless housing developer for more than double his original purchase price.

          “Accountability for the misuse of billions of tax dollars intended to combat homeless starts today,” said Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli, “The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable.”

          “In both of these cases, defendants took advantage of funds allocated to assist the homeless, some of the most vulnerable people in society and many of whom may be suffering from myriad conditions, including addiction,” said Akil Davis, the Assistant Director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “The FBI is committed to the Homelessness Fraud & Corruption Task Force to find perpetrators of this insidious fraud and build cases to hold the offenders accountable in court. It is my hope that the charges we’re announcing today send a message to others who may be contemplating similar criminal behavior.”

          “IRS-CI is proud to be an inaugural member of the Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, which was formed to ensure that funds which were committed to aiding California’s homeless population were spent as intended,” said Special Agent in Charge Tyler Hatcher of IRS Criminal Investigation’s Los Angeles Field Office. “Today’s actions show our commitment to ensuring the public that we will investigate missing funds that were intended to benefit some of the most vulnerable Californians.”