A beleaguered government watchdog in Trenton showed it still has teeth by revealing allegations about two New Jersey nursing homes, just a day after top politicians pulled the plug on a scheme to defang the agency.
The Office of the State Comptroller has laid bare the operations of the Hammonton Center and the Deptford Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare in a story of how avarice, wearing the mask of commerce, constructs a fortress of paperwork and shell companies to besiege the most vulnerable among us.
Just days after political efforts to dismantle New Jersey’s corruption watchdog were abandoned amid a public outcry, the agency proved its indispensable value by exposing a massive, years-long nursing home fraud that diverted care from vulnerable residents into owners’ pockets.
The controversy began when State Senate President Nicholas Scutari introduced a bill, S4924, just before Thanksgiving.
The legislation sought to strip the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) of its core investigative powers and subpoena authority, transferring them to another, less active agency. Critics, including Acting Comptroller Kevin Walsh, called the bill “ill-conceived” and argued it was political payback for the agencys investigations targeting state Democrats and their allies.
The effort backfired spectacularly during a committee hearing.
The chair, State Senator James Beach, kept prominent opponents like U.S. Senator Andy Kim and State Attorney General Matthew Platkin waiting for over four hours to testify, telling Kim he was not “special”.
This behavior, combined with overwhelming public opposition and a signal of disapproval from Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, led Scutari to withdraw the bill. Almost immediately after this political retreat, Walsh released a damning report demonstrating the exact type of oversight the bill would have hindered.
The summary is this: while residents languished in soiled beds, crying out for water or relief from pain, the gentlemen in charge, Daryl Hagler and billionaire Kenneth “Kenny” Rozenberg—next-door neighbors and friends of thirty years—were conducting a meticulous, multi-year campaign of financial alchemy.
The American billionaire is father of Eli Rozenberg, who became controlling shareholder in El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. shortly before Kenny Rozenberg, a US citizen, submitted a request to immigrate to Israel in 2021 and he has since relocated from New York to Jerusalem.
They transformed $134.8 million in Medicaid funds, money earmarked for care and comfort, into a private river of gold.
They diverted $92 million of it into a labyrinth of nine “related entities”—companies owned by themselves, their wives, their children, their in-laws. It was a family business, in the most despicable sense.
The method was a festival of false fronts. They bundled the purchases of nursing home operations and properties into bloated mortgages, then charged their own facilities rent to pay those mortgages off, a snake eating its own costly tail.
They created phantom $15 million promissory notes that never funded a thing, yet demanded the homes pay $451,000 a year in interest on this fairy-tale debt.
They refinanced with government-backed loans, doubling the rent, and siphoned over $27 million in “additional rent” straight into their own pockets and those of their silent partners.
On official cost reports, signed by Hagler’s own hand, they disclosed less than one percent of these related-party payments.
They reported $882,666 when the true figure was $92 million. In the ledger-keeping of deceit, that is not an error; it is a signature.
And what was purchased with this staggering sum, this mountain of public money?
It was not purchase, but deprivation.
The investigators reviewed 146 days of staffing. On 144 of those days, these homes failed to meet minimum legal staffing levels. They were understaffed by more than half, every single day.
Residents received less than half the care the law requires and human decency demands. Registered Nurses were a rarity; unlicensed personnel filled the gaps. The facilities were branded “Special Focus Facilities” – a bureaucratic term for “the worst of the worst.”
Now, attend to the fruit of this barren tree. This is the harvest of those spreadsheets and bank transfers:
In Hammonton, two residents were sexually assaulted.
A Deptford resident, prescribed a pureed diet, was given solid food and died of asphyxiation.
Another, an amputee in a wheelchair, was discharged to a motel that could not take him, then deposited the next morning on the doorstep of a social services office before it opened.
Call logs reveal a symphony of desperation: over 3,400 calls to police from 2019 to 2024.
Residents reported sitting in waste for hours, screaming for ungiven pain medication, being fed what they feared was “dog food,” their severed call-bell cords lying useless on the floor.
Photographs show meal trays scattered amid dirty diapers, flies circling food, toenails grotesquely overgrown.
The owners, summoned to explain, invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Their silence is a louder indictment than any prosecutor’s closing argument.
Here is the brutal arithmetic of our time.
A clever financial scheme, involving mortgages and related-party leases, is not considered violent. It is paper violence. But it funds real violence—the violence of neglect, of abandonment, of a slow, undignified unraveling in a forgotten room.
Hagler and Rozenberg did not wield knives; they wielded ledger entries. The result was the same.
The Comptroller seeks the return of $124 million. It is a number that will be debated in hearings.
But no number can reclaim a life lost to a sandwich or restore dignity to a soul left in feces.
The scandal is not merely the theft, colossal as it is. The scandal is the quiet, sustained, and calculated trade: their profits for our parents’ humanity. It reveals a market where suffering is not a bug in the system, but a feature of the business model.
The report ends with recommendations for legislative action, noting that little has changed since a similar fraud was exposed at another home just last year.
It seems the facts must cry out ever louder, into ears increasingly deafened by the rustle of money. In New Jersey tonight, the books have been audited. The ledger of conscience remains catastrophically unbalanced.