The Investigative Journal’s daily review of federal enforcement activity, drawn from Justice Department press releases, U.S. Attorney announcements and public court filings. Charges described below are allegations unless a conviction, plea or judgment is noted. Defendants in pending matters are presumed innocent.
Arizona nurse practitioner sentenced to 14 years in $69 million Medicaid scheme
The largest single enforcement outcome of the past 48 hours came out of the District of Arizona, where Rita Ntusa Anagho, 54, of San Tan Valley, was sentenced on Sept. 17 to 14 years in prison for orchestrating a scheme that billed Arizona’s Medicaid agency more than $69 million in under a year. According to the Justice Department’s announcement (Release No. 26-1072), Anagho was also ordered to pay nearly $55 million in restitution and to forfeit approximately $9.5 million seized from seven bank accounts along with roughly $7 million in real estate.
Court documents describe a targeting pattern that distinguishes this case from routine health care fraud. Anagho, a licensed nurse practitioner who owned Tusa Integrated Clinic LLC, is described in the filings as having deliberately recruited patients covered under the American Indian Health Care Program — a fee-for-service plan within the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System that reimburses at higher rates than standard Medicaid plans. Prosecutors say the clinic billed for addiction treatment services that were either never delivered or not delivered as billed, paid kickbacks to sober-home operators for patient referrals, and falsified treatment notes. Records indicate Anagho later instructed former employees to fabricate medical records after the clinic received a document subpoena. She pleaded guilty in May 2025 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud.
“This sentence sends a clear message — if you take advantage of vulnerable populations to steal from the American taxpayer, you will pay the price,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. The FBI Phoenix Field Office and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General investigated. The case is a product of the Health Care Fraud Strike Force program, which DOJ says has charged more than 6,200 defendants over roughly $45 billion in claimed billings since 2007.
Former Syrian prison warden receives 60-year sentence for torture and immigration fraud
In the Central District of California, Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 74, a former warden of Damascus Central Prison and later a provincial governor under the Assad regime, was sentenced to 60 years on Sept. 17. A jury convicted him in March 2026 on one count of conspiracy to commit torture, three counts of torture, one count of visa fraud and one count of attempted naturalization fraud.
Trial evidence indicated that Alsheikh ordered and participated in the torture of detainees at Adra Prison between approximately 2005 and 2008, including through a device witnesses called the “Flying Carpet,” as a means of suppressing political dissent. He entered the United States in 2020, obtained lawful permanent residence and had applied for citizenship before his arrest in July 2024. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division said Alsheikh “is the highest-ranking former member of the Assad regime to be tried and convicted in person outside of Syria.” Homeland Security Investigations, its Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, and the FBI investigated, with assistance from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office.
The significance here extends beyond a single defendant. The case establishes that the extraterritorial torture statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2340A, remains a viable instrument for prosecuting foreign officials who resettle in the United States — and that immigration fraud counts provide a reliable secondary hook when the underlying conduct occurred abroad and decades earlier.
Federal court orders behavioral relief against Google in ad tech case, stopping short of a breakup
The Antitrust Division announced on Sept. 16 that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia had ordered substantial relief against Google LLC in the government’s advertising technology monopolization case. Per the Department’s summary, the ordered remedies require Google’s AdX exchange and DFP publisher ad server to integrate with competing products, including the open-source real-time bidding standard Prebid; require AdX to submit real-time bids into rival publisher ad servers; mandate data portability so publishers can export their own DFP and AdX data; and bar AdWords from bidding preferentially into AdX or directly into DFP. A monitor and technical committee will oversee compliance for the six-year term of the Final Judgment. The court declined to order the structural relief the Department had sought: the Justice Department asked for divestiture of AdX and a 15-year term, and the court instead adopted behavioral remedies for six years.
Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. called the ruling “a significant victory for this Department’s efforts to protect and restore competition,” while noting the Department “will continue to review the opinion to consider the Department’s options” — language that leaves open the possibility of an appeal seeking the divestiture relief the government originally sought. Publishers and advertisers should expect implementation disputes; the behavioral remedies described are technically intricate, and the six-year monitorship suggests the court anticipates friction.
Los Angeles homelessness funds: three new cases, one plea agreement
The Central District of California’s Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force announced arrests and charges in a cluster of cases on Sept. 16. All are allegations; the Department states expressly that defendants are presumed innocent.
Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills, founder of the Culver City nonprofit Home At Last, was arrested on a wire fraud complaint. The complaint alleges the organization received more than $118 million in public funds from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the city and county of Los Angeles, and HUD — with LAHSA alone paying more than $75 million — and that Young misappropriated over $7.5 million through sham vendors, including more than $1 million spent on a nightclub and restaurant venture. LAHSA cancelled the organization’s contracts in June 2026. Separately, Lakiya Malone, 48, was arrested on a 21-count indictment alleging she accepted more than $180,000 in kickbacks for referring so-called ghost clients into HUD- and LAHSA-funded housing. Donye Mitchell, 55, charged by complaint with wire fraud over roughly $315,000 in allegedly misused grant funds, is described as a fugitive.
Alexander Soofer, executive director of Abundant Blessings, has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, and under the agreement acknowledges obtaining $23 million in public homelessness funds and diverting at least $2 million to personal and unrelated business use. The plea has not yet been entered or accepted by the court, and Soofer remains a charged defendant until it is. FBI Director Kash Patel said the Bureau “will act to hold those responsible accountable for their fraud.” The FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation and HUD-OIG investigated. Taken together, the cases suggest that oversight of pass-through nonprofit spending at LAHSA merits continued scrutiny — a question TIJ intends to pursue.
ISIS-K operative sentenced to 20 years over Abbey Gate role
Mohammad Sharifullah, an Afghan national and ISIS-K member apprehended in 2025, was sentenced on Sept. 16 in the Eastern District of Virginia to 20 years for conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Trial evidence indicated that on Aug. 26, 2021, Sharifullah conducted surveillance to confirm that a route to Hamid Karzai International Airport was clear of Taliban checkpoints ahead of the Abbey Gate suicide bombing, which killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 160 civilians. Filings also connect him to a 2016 embassy-adjacent bombing in Kabul and to the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack outside Moscow.
FBI Assistant Director Jarod Brown said: “No matter where you are, and no matter how long it takes, we remain steadfast in our duty to bring to justice those who have harmed our citizens.” Twenty years is the statutory maximum for the single count of conviction, conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B. A life sentence would have been available only if the jury had found unanimously that the support caused the Abbey Gate deaths; it deadlocked on that question.
Russian national sentenced over synthetic identities and fraudulent voter registrations
Dmitry Shushlebin, 45, a Russian citizen residing in Miami Beach, was sentenced Sept. 16 to six years in prison and ordered to pay $458,839.69 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in July 2025 to conspiracy to give false information in voter registration, wire fraud, false statements and aggravated identity theft.
Court records indicate Shushlebin hired co-conspirators to submit more than 100 fraudulent voter registration applications to the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections in February and March 2023. The filings describe the registrations as a mechanism for manufacturing synthetic identities, which were then used hundreds of times to obtain credit cards and loans. That distinction matters: the public record here describes financial fraud that exploited voter registration as a credentialing step, not an effort to cast ballots. Assistant Attorney General Duva said those “who engage in fraud and deception in our election processes will be investigated and prosecuted.” The FBI Tampa Division, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service investigated.
Civil enforcement: two health care matters and a foreign asset return
The Civil Division filed a False Claims Act complaint against laboratory executives Jay Johnson and Austin Whiles over conduct at Atlanta-based Capstone Diagnostics, alleging two kickback-driven testing schemes — one routed through church health fairs and religious conferences, the other through senior living communities during pandemic-era COVID-19 testing demand. The complaint alleges physician names and signatures were improperly used to generate genetic and respiratory pathogen panel orders without individualized clinical judgment. DOJ previously settled related claims with Capstone and its owner for $14.3 million and with billing vendor VitalAxis for $300,479. Johnson was separately indicted in December 2025 in the Northern District of Georgia; that prosecution is pending. The Department states the civil claims “are allegations only,” with no determination of liability.
Separately, Remedi SeniorCare Holding Corp. of Towson, Maryland, agreed to pay more than $5.3 million to resolve allegations that it billed Medicare and Medicaid for drugs dispensed without valid prescriptions between January 2015 and March 2021. The settlement, reduced based on ability to pay, resolves a qui tam action brought by two former employees. No liability was determined.
Finally, the Department announced it will return approximately $29.7 million to the Government of Curaçao — proceeds of an eight-year lottery fraud, money laundering and tax evasion scheme, recovered from investment accounts at a Miami bank. The repatriation follows the defendant’s conviction in Curaçao and includes audit conditions barring any disbursement to him or entities he controls.
What warrants a closer look
Three threads from this cycle merit sustained reporting. First, the Arizona and Georgia cases both turn on provider schemes engineered around differential reimbursement rates and trusted community access points — tribal health programs in one, churches and senior housing in the other. That is a targeting methodology, not a coincidence, and it raises the question of what program-integrity controls exist at the payer level before fraud reaches the prosecution stage.
Second, the Los Angeles homelessness cases involve an aggregate of well over $140 million in public funds flowing through nonprofit intermediaries, with alleged diversions surfacing only after years of disbursement. The audit and contract-monitoring record at LAHSA is a legitimate public-records target.
Third, the Google remedies order will generate a compliance record — monitor reports, technical committee filings — that becomes the primary public window into whether behavioral antitrust relief works in digital markets. TIJ will track those filings as they enter the docket.
Right of reply: TIJ extends an open invitation to counsel for any individual or entity named in this digest to respond. All characterizations above are drawn from Justice Department press releases and cited public filings; corrections will be published promptly.