By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report | September 24, 2026
MIAMI, Fla. The paperwork looked routine: leases for apartments housing homeless clients, invoices for furniture delivered to them. According to prosecutors, much of it was fiction. Some tenants on the leases were dead, the landlords were shell companies, and the furniture never arrived. On Wednesday, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced charges against a former Citrus Health Network housing director in a scheme that targeted the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust.
Thomas F. Jardon, 42, of Homestead, faces racketeering, organized scheme to defraud over $50,000, dozens of counts of grand theft, and identity theft. Bail was set near $695,000. He has not been convicted, and the charges remain allegations.
What prosecutors allege
Prosecutors say Jardon created companies with names such as Buendia LLC, Coral Key Partners LLC and Tito Management LLC, backed them with fraudulent property leases, forged signatures, and deceased clients listed as tenants. A separate shell company, Express Furniture Solutions LLC, allegedly billed for furniture that was never delivered. WLRN reports more than $559,000 in fraudulent furniture invoices between September 2022 and November 2025. NBC 6 reports about $1.2 million stolen overall, with roughly $600,000 from the furniture scheme. Reports differ on the total, and the charging documents will settle it.
The alleged spending reads like a catalog: two $19,000 Rolex watches, an 18-karat gold chain, Louis Vuitton goods, fine art, luxury vacations, more than $51,000 in cash withdrawals, four vehicles, and over $30,000 in Apple products. “A rogue employee decided to steal from a program designed to help homeless people,” Fernandez Rundle said.
The Trust exists to move people from the street into housing. Money booked against ghost tenants and phantom furniture is money that never touched that mission.
Caught from the inside
The discovery, according to the reporting, came from within Citrus Health. In November 2025, employees reported Jardon as derelict in his duties. NBC 6 reports that a $30,000-plus Apple purchase on the company’s Amazon account surfaced. He was fired December 5. Citrus Health then audited its books, reported the findings to authorities, and repaid the county $1.2 million. That repayment deserves credit, and it means taxpayers were made whole.
But repayment is not detection. The alleged scheme ran roughly 38 months. Charges arrived nearly ten months after the firing. For that entire period, county reimbursements flowed on the strength of documents that a single property-records search or a delivery check might have questioned. Spread over 38 months, the $559,000 in furniture invoices alone averages about $14,700 a month, a steady drip that never triggered an alarm.
The control gap
Homeless-services money often moves on a reimbursement model: a nonprofit spends first, documents the cost, and the government repays. It is efficient, and it depends entirely on someone verifying the documents. In this case, prosecutors describe one director who allegedly established the vendors, generated the invoices, authorized the payments, and requested the reimbursement. That is a segregation-of-duties failure of the most basic kind, the first thing an auditor tests.
Auditors have a phrase for the fix: verify, then reimburse. Pair each claim with independent evidence, separate the people who approve vendors from the people who pay them, and sample repeat and high-dollar vendors every quarter.
The checks that would have exposed it cost almost nothing. A county property-records lookup shows who owns a rental unit. A match against death records shows whether a listed client is alive. A delivery confirmation shows whether a couch arrived. None requires new technology, only a decision to run them before paying.
Miami is not alone. In Los Angeles, six people have been arrested in federal cases tied to homelessness programs over the past year. In San Diego, a former nonprofit chief operating officer faces nine felony counts over county opioid-settlement money. Different agencies, same weakness: public dollars flow through nonprofits largely on trust.
Investigators deserve credit. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office Internal Affairs and the county Office of the Inspector General worked the case together, and the Inspector General’s public docket shows a busy year, including emergency rental assistance arrests and a Water and Sewer scrap-metal case. Enforcement is the last line of defense, though, not the first.
Three questions for county commissioners
First, did county monitors ever test the leases and invoices behind these reimbursements between 2022 and 2025, and if not, why not? Second, will the Homeless Trust require independent verification of property ownership, client status and deliveries before reimbursing any provider? Third, will the Board publish a summary of what the Inspector General’s review found about county controls, not only about the defendant?
Citrus Health repaid the county. The remaining question is whether Miami-Dade’s controls would catch the next scheme without an employee’s tip. Residents who fund the Homeless Trust deserve a public answer. Taxpayers should not have to rely on luck, or on a colleague’s suspicion, to learn where their money went.
Sources: WLRN (Sept. 24, 2026); NBC 6 South Florida (Sept. 2026); Local10 (Sept. 24, 2026); Miami-Dade Office of the Inspector General release (Sept. 23, 2026); Westside Current and Voice of San Diego for out-of-state comparisons.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: Jose E. Navarro selected the topic, directed the research and framing, edited, and approved this article. AI assisted with research and drafting.