Dr. Oz vs. Men with Gold Chains
The Trump Administration's favorite Ottoman is on the warpath against Russian Armenian hospice fraud in the San Fernando Valley.
As of the second quarter of the 21st Century, health care fraud is one of Southern California’s most venerable traditional industries. As I’ve often mentioned, it tends to be impressively multicultural, with, say, Nigerians, Ukrainians, Chileans, Russians, Israelis, etc. putting aside their ethnic differences to gang up to pilfer from the public purse.
Dr. Oz, the Trump Administration’s head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, is drawing attention to fraud in the San Fernando Valley, my home. He’s implying that Russian Armenians tend to be the brains of these operations:
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told me a couple of decades ago that Armenians with surnames ending in -ian (like himself) tend to be respectable, well-assimilated Americans whose ancestors arrived in Fresno and Glendale a century ago. On the other hand, he alleged, Armenians with names ending in -yan tend to be more recent products of the Soviet Union, that vast school for gangsters.
I’ve never methodically studied Mark’s allegation. It kind of seems true, but I’d like to see somebody take a crack at it quantitatively.
Anyway, Passage Press author Rambo van Halen talks about a pattern he noticed during his career shooting movies and commercials on location:
@RamboVanHalen
I’ve written about this before, but I often wonder how much of our “economy” is fake.
Back in the day in Los Angeles there was a prevalence of “Cell Phone Accessory” stores. Sometimes several per block.
We’d film on these dumpy commercial streets, and be working in front of these shops for days. But we wouldn’t see a single customer enter or exit.
The off duty cops we hired for traffic control explained that it’s all money laundering. Same with the bodegas, the vape shops, and most of the restaurants.
In Los Angeles, and many other cities, there are miles and miles of streets full of businesses with no customers. And yes, most of them are owned by immigrants.
Why?
Paywall here.
