Operation Never Say Die: Inside the $50 Million Hospice Fraud That Rocked California

By [Your News Organization] Staff | April 9, 2026

Prologue: A Federal Dawn Raid Unveils a Dark Industry

Before the sun rose on April 2, 2026, a convoy of federal agents swept through the quiet suburbs of Los Angeles County. The targets weren’t cartel bosses or arms dealers. Instead, they were medical professionals—doctors, nurses, psychologists—living in tidy neighborhoods, driving clean cars, and holding legitimate licenses. By sunrise, eight were in federal custody. Fifteen indictments had been unsealed across Southern California, marking the climax of Operation Never Say Die, a federal crackdown on an industry built around death.

The operation’s name read like dark comedy: Never Say Die. But the stakes were deadly serious. The federal government estimated more than $50 million had been siphoned from Medicare, with some internal reports pushing the figure closer to $60 million. All of it was stolen from funds earmarked for end-of-life care—money meant to ease suffering, not to fuel luxury lifestyles.

Inside the raided properties, agents cataloged evidence: mortgage documents for second and third homes, luxury vehicle registrations, international flight itineraries to Manila, Seoul, and Dubai. Every asset traced back to a single revenue stream: American taxpayer dollars.

Scene 1: The Shocking Scale—How $50 Million Was Stolen from Medicare

The physical evidence was damning enough. But when federal auditors turned from the properties to medical records and patient files, they found something that defied every known standard in hospice medicine—a statistical impossibility buried inside the data.

Investigators first examined a facility in Glendale registered as 626 Hospice, also known as St. Francis Palliative Care. Behind the license sat Dr. Gladwin Gil, 66, and his wife Amalu Gil, 70, a psychologist and nurse. On paper, their operation looked routine—a modest hospice serving terminally ill patients. But federal auditors pulled five years of Medicare claims and cross-referenced them against patient outcomes. Over 97% of patients admitted to 626 Hospice survived. By definition, a hospice exists for people expected to die within six months. Nationally, about 17% of hospice patients are discharged alive. The Gils were running a facility where almost nobody died.

Thirty miles south in Artesia, another anomaly surfaced. Lolita Baronila Minard, 65, a licensed vocational nurse, operated Topanga Hospice Care, Inc. out of a nondescript commercial suite. Her facility posted an 85% live discharge rate—nearly five times the national benchmark. Auditors flagged the pattern immediately. Patients admitted under terminal diagnoses were walking out weeks later with no change in condition, no decline, no treatment consistent with end-of-life care.

In Simi Valley, a third facility completed the picture. Ivan Vern Lurson, 50, CEO of Valley Pacific Hospice, had already drawn federal scrutiny. Medicare revoked its billing license in 2024 after audits exposed massive false billing patterns—claims submitted for services never rendered, for patients never examined, for conditions never diagnosed. The revocation should have been a warning shot. The data confirmed what prosecutors suspected from the start: these were sham facilities, engineered for a single purpose—enrolling patients who were not terminally ill, and in many cases, who had no serious medical conditions at all.

Scene 2: Inside the Sham Hospices—Patients Who Weren’t Dying

Each name attached to thousands of dollars in automatic federal reimbursements. Enrolling them was only the entry point. The real architecture of the crime revealed itself in what happened next.

The speed and precision with which every fraudulent claim converted into cash was staggering. The pipeline ran like a billing factory. Fraudulent claims entered the Medicare system under terminal diagnoses. Federal payment processors approved them within days, and wire transfers landed in operator accounts before any human reviewer touched the file.

Between July 2020 and April 2025, Lolita Minard submitted over $9.17 million in fabricated claims through Topanga Hospice Care. Medicare paid out more than $8.5 million—a conversion rate above 92%. For every dollar she billed, 92 cents came back clean.

In Glendale, Gladwin and Amalu Gil pushed $7.45 million in fraudulent claims through 626 Hospice. Federal payment records show they collected over $4 million, deposited directly into accounts they controlled.

Across Tarzana, nurse Evelyn Tindy Mobuna, 51, operated Comfort Choice Hospice Incorporated, billing $3.8 million between 2022 and 2025. Medicare returned $3.44 million—almost 90% for patients who were never dying.

None of the extracted funds circulated back into patient care. IRS criminal investigators traced the outflows, account by account, transaction by transaction. Minard’s proceeds funded personal mortgage payments on residential properties across Southern California. The Gils routed their $4 million into luxury vehicle financing, international airline tickets, and high-end restaurant tabs documented on corporate cards. Mobuna followed the same template, converting Medicare reimbursements into personal living expenses indistinguishable from a six-figure salary. Money designated for Americans in their final days paid for leather interiors, first-class upgrades, and waterfront dining.

To keep the claims flowing, every operator in the network needed a constant supply of new patient names. Recruiters received illegal kickbacks—cash payments per referral for steering individuals into the enrollment pipeline regardless of medical eligibility. Licensed medical professionals signed off on fabricated terminal diagnoses in exchange for a cut, lending their credentials to paperwork they never verified. Each new name generated thousands in automatic reimbursements, and each kickback ensured another name would follow.

Scene 3: Key Arrests—Nurses, Psychologist & Chiropractor Caught in the Scheme

The financial trail was clean enough for prosecutors to map in weeks. Amounts, dates, and account numbers aligned with surgical precision. The deeper problems surfaced when investigators stopped following the money and started pulling the licensing records behind each facility—searching for who the state of California had actually authorized to operate them.

Every licensed hospice in California must clear a regulatory gate before treating a single patient: background checks, clean records, verified credentials. The network treated those requirements like suggestions. Gladwin and Amalu Gil both carried prior federal convictions for tax evasion—disqualifying marks that should have locked them out of the Medicare system permanently. Instead of walking away, they registered 626 Hospice under their daughter’s name, placed her signature on every state filing, and continued operating the facility themselves. California’s licensing apparatus approved the application without flagging the connection.

In Glendale, the workaround was even more brazen. Nita Almuetti Patt Palma, 76, and Adultho Catbagen, 68, built a small empire of fraudulent care facilities between June 2022 and April 2024: OneUp Hospice Care, Rosewood Hospice, and Advance Hospice. Three separate entities scattered across the same city, all funneling claims into the same Medicare pipeline. Together, the pair submitted $4.8 million in fabricated billing and collected $4.2 million in federal reimbursements—an 87% extraction rate, matching the efficiency of every other node in the network.

Court filings from the Central District of California revealed the detail that federal prosecutors circled in red. Palma did not simply have a criminal record. She was actively incarcerated in a federal prison facility during the period her hospices were submitting claims and receiving payments. A sitting federal inmate convicted on prior fraud charges maintained operational control of three licensed medical businesses billing the United States government for end-of-life care. After her release, she continued the scheme while free on bond, awaiting sentencing on the earlier case.

State regulators never intervened. No audit flagged the ownership anomaly, and no licensing review cross-referenced Palma’s Bureau of Prisons intake number against the Medicare provider enrollment database. The tools existed, the data was accessible, and the overlap between her incarceration dates and her billing dates was visible to anyone who looked.

Part 2: Operation Never Say Die – The Federal Takedown and Systemic Failures

Scene 4: Operation Never Say Die – The Federal Takedown

On April 2, 2026, the hammer finally fell. Federal agents from the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, HHS Office of Inspector General, FDA, and Department of Labor moved in tandem, operating under the Vice President’s Anti-Fraud Task Force. The sweep rolled through Los Angeles County and into surrounding suburbs—Glendale, Artesia, Tarzana, Simi Valley, and Coina. By midday, eight individuals were in federal custody and 15 indictments had been unsealed, spanning the entire network of sham hospices.

The operation was swift, coordinated, and surgical. Agents cataloged evidence from each facility: luxury vehicles, international flight itineraries, mortgage documents, and bank statements. But the most damning evidence came from the medical records and billing data. Each fraudulent claim carried a Medicare beneficiary number—a real person whose end-of-life care had been reduced to a line item on a spreadsheet.

The scope of the crime was staggering. Over $50 million in Medicare funds had been stolen. The extraction rate—how much of the billed amount was actually paid out—hovered above 85% for nearly every facility. The pipeline was so efficient that fraudulent claims were approved and paid within days, with wire transfers landing in operator accounts before any human reviewer could intervene.

The federal government’s response was decisive. Bail conditions locked down passports, froze accounts, and severed contact between co-conspirators. Prosecutors did not need to theorize about sentencing outcomes—a blueprint already existed. In November 2025, a federal judge sentenced Petro Fitchen to 12 years in prison for orchestrating a $16 million hospice fraud. The court ordered $17.1 million in restitution, every cent traced back to fabricated Medicare claims for patients who were never terminally ill. Three of Fitchen’s co-conspirators received their own prison terms, confirming that federal judges had abandoned any remaining tolerance for white-collar medical theft.

That precedent now hangs over the 15 defendants in Operation Never Say Die. Gladwin and Amalu Gil, Lolita Minard, Evelyn Tindy Mobuna, Nita Palma, Adultho Catbagen, and the remaining indicted operators face a judiciary that has already demonstrated its willingness to impose sentences measured in decades, not months. Restitution orders in the Fitchen case exceeded the original fraud amount. Applied proportionally to a $50 million conspiracy, the financial exposure alone could be catastrophic.

Scene 5: Systemic Failure—How California Enabled the Fraud

But the courtroom is only one half of the equation. Outside the federal courthouse, the structural failures that enabled the entire network remain largely intact. California’s Department of Public Health has not announced new cross-referencing protocols between provider enrollment databases and federal criminal records. No emergency legislation has closed the licensing gaps that allowed a federal inmate to operate three hospice facilities simultaneously.

Billions of Medicare dollars continue to flow through the state every single month, processed by the same systems, reviewed by the same understaffed agencies, approved by the same automated pipelines that never flagged a single anomaly across five years of fraudulent billing.

At a federal press conference in Los Angeles, CMS administrator Dr. Memed and First Assistant United States Attorney Bill stepped to the podium, directing their sharpest language not at the defendants, but at the state of California. The state had failed to adequately oversee its own licensed facilities. Missed legislative deadlines for hospice reform had allowed vulnerabilities to persist. Federal investigators had flagged the gaps years earlier. Sacramento received the warnings, acknowledged the risks, and did nothing.

The public rebuke targeted Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration by name. According to federal officials, California’s Department of Public Health possessed the authority and the data to cross-reference provider enrollment records against federal criminal databases. Bureau of Prisons intake logs were not classified. Medicare billing timestamps were not hidden. A single query matching Palma’s incarceration dates against her facility’s active claims would have triggered an immediate revocation. That query never ran. No inspector visited, and no license was suspended.

Three hospice networks operated across Glendale, Artesia, Tarzana, and Simi Valley for years, enrolling patients who were not dying, collecting millions in federal reimbursements, and laundering the proceeds through personal accounts. The state approved every application, renewed every license, and certified every facility without once catching the most basic disqualifying flag in the system. A convicted federal inmate actively running medical businesses from a prison cell.

Sacramento’s inaction did not just allow fraud—it constructed the dark space where fraud flourished unchecked, where operators knew that no one was watching, no one was auditing, and no one would come knocking until the federal government finally did.

Scene 6: What Happens Next—Charges, Prison Time & Systemic Failures

The sentencing precedents already set in California’s federal courts suggest these defendants face consequences far heavier than any state regulator ever imposed. The hammer was satisfying, and the sentences were severe. Operation Never Say Die closed with eight arrests across Los Angeles County and 15 federal indictments spanning Glendale, Artesia, Tarzana, Simi Valley, and Coina. Every defendant faces charges carrying decades in federal prison: healthcare fraud, conspiracy, anti-kickback statute violations, and money laundering.

Yet, the question federal investigators are still asking is how many facilities they have not found yet. Billions of Medicare dollars continue to flow through the state every month, processed by the same systems, reviewed by the same agencies, approved by the same automated pipelines.

Operation Never Say Die exposed not only a criminal conspiracy but a regulatory collapse—a failure of oversight that allowed medical professionals to convert a federal safety net into a personal extraction machine. The betrayal measured something worse than the stolen dollars. It measured the commodification of dying Americans, traded for illegal kickbacks and fabricated diagnoses, billed to a system built to ease suffering in its final hours.

Part 3: The Aftermath, Patient Impact, Calls for Reform, and Unresolved Questions

Scene 7: The Human Cost—Patients Reduced to Numbers

Behind the headlines and dollar amounts lies the most tragic aspect of Operation Never Say Die: the patients. Each fraudulent claim carried a Medicare beneficiary number, a real person whose end-of-life care was reduced to a line item on a spreadsheet. Many of the individuals enrolled in these sham hospices were not terminally ill. In some cases, they had no serious medical conditions at all.

For families, the consequences were devastating. Loved ones were told their relatives qualified for hospice care, only to discover that the care provided was minimal or nonexistent. In the best cases, patients received routine check-ins and basic support. In the worst cases, they received nothing at all. The emotional toll on families was compounded by the realization that their trust had been betrayed—not just by the operators, but by the system itself.

Medicare, a program designed to protect the most vulnerable, had been exploited for profit. The safety net meant to ease suffering in its final hours was instead used to fund luxury lifestyles and international travel. The betrayal went beyond financial loss—it struck at the heart of public trust in the healthcare system.

Scene 8: Calls for Reform—Will California Respond?

In the wake of Operation Never Say Die, federal officials issued a public rebuke to California’s Department of Public Health and the Newsom administration. The message was clear: the state had failed to protect its citizens from fraud. The tools to prevent such crimes existed, but were never used. Licensing reviews did not cross-reference criminal records, and regulatory audits missed glaring anomalies.

Advocates and lawmakers are now calling for urgent reform. Proposed measures include:

Mandatory cross-referencing between provider enrollment databases and federal criminal records.
Real-time audits of Medicare billing patterns, flagging statistical outliers for immediate review.
Enhanced penalties for medical professionals found guilty of fraud, including permanent loss of licensure.
Increased funding for state regulatory agencies to improve oversight and enforcement.
Legislative deadlines to close loopholes and strengthen hospice licensing requirements.

Yet, as of April 2026, no emergency legislation has been enacted. Billions of Medicare dollars continue to flow through California’s healthcare system, processed by the same automated pipelines and reviewed by the same understaffed agencies.

The question remains: will California act before another criminal network exploits the same vulnerabilities?

Scene 9: National Implications—A Warning for Other States

Operation Never Say Die is not just a California story. It is a warning for every state administering Medicare and Medicaid funds. The vulnerabilities exposed—automated billing systems, insufficient background checks, lack of real-time oversight—are not unique to California. Across the country, billions of dollars are at risk, and the potential for similar fraud schemes remains high.

Federal officials have urged states to review their own licensing and auditing protocols, to learn from the mistakes exposed in Los Angeles County. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced plans to strengthen national guidelines, but the pace of reform is slow.

Healthcare fraud is a national epidemic, and the lessons of Operation Never Say Die must be heeded before more lives are affected and more dollars are stolen.

Scene 10: The Unanswered Questions

As the defendants await trial and sentencing, the fallout continues. Federal investigators are still asking how many facilities they have not found yet. How many more operators are exploiting the same system? How many more patients are at risk?

The betrayal measured in Operation Never Say Die is not just financial—it is moral. Medical professionals, sworn to care for the vulnerable, commodified dying Americans for profit. State regulators failed to intervene, constructing the dark space where fraud flourished unchecked.

The aftermath leaves California—and the nation—with difficult questions:

How can oversight be improved to ensure no convicted felon operates a medical facility?
What safeguards are needed to protect patients from fraudulent hospice care?
Will restitution ever reach the families who suffered?
How can public trust in the healthcare system be restored?

Epilogue: Operation Never Say Die—A Turning Point or a Warning?

Operation Never Say Die closed with eight arrests, 15 federal indictments, and more than $50 million stolen from Medicare. The sentences are expected to be severe, with decades in federal prison and restitution orders that could bankrupt the defendants.

But the true legacy of the operation will be measured by what happens next. Will California and other states enact the reforms needed to protect patients and taxpayers? Or will the vulnerabilities remain, waiting for the next criminal network to exploit them?

The question federal investigators are still asking is how many facilities they have not found yet. The answer may determine whether Operation Never Say Die is remembered as a turning point—or simply another warning that went unheeded.