This is part six of “Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “personal services” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own relatives.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — In 2008, the Amvets Post No. 89 sold its lodge on Westerville Road in Ohio’s capital city of Columbus to a Somali. The location, once a home for Americans who sacrificed for their country, soon housed dozens of trucking and Medicaid businesses.
The owner, Ali Jama, went to prison for defrauding the government, but an examination of businesses in the area finds that his empire may have simply been taken over by his associates — other African immigrants who amassed riches at a shocking scale through billing poverty programs.
This sixth installment of The Daily Wire’s investigation into Medicaid home health details the convoluted networks used to move money and assets between Somalis, making it difficult to stop or even identify abuse, and turning enforcement into a game of whack-a-mole.
In January 2018, one of Jama’s Medicaid businesses, Alpha Star Health Care, was busted for defrauding the medical program of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even as he got rich off taxpayer money, Jama also filed tax returns claiming he made $0, resulting in a loss to the American treasury of at least $700,000.
His defense was that he was a polygamist funneling money abroad, with his lawyer telling a judge, “Almost every penny he earns he sends to his families.” A year later in February 2019, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was released in May 2020.
Jama owed restitution but told the government he was broke. On December 10, 2020, prosecutors wrote that he “failed to comply with the special conditions of supervised release by not making consistent monthly restitution payments (having only made four payments of $200 since May).” His lawyer replied that “the defendant works as a dispatcher at a trucking company. He has very limited resources.” He was let off supervised release early, court records show.
If bank accounts in Jama’s name said zero, the same couldn’t be said of his neighbors and closest associates, who, despite coming as refugees from one of the poorest countries in the world, now control unfathomable wealth. Their wealth raises questions about whether Jama was just one pawn in a massive scheme that easily adapts to the occasional prosecution by shifting resources among its participants.
A walk down Morality Drive
Three doors down from Jama on Morality Drive, in the middle-class neighborhood where he lives, is a man named Omar Said Omar. He owns six buildings, one of which houses nine Medicaid businesses that collectively billed the government program nearly $20 million, according to government records.
Omar was also an owner of Serenity Home Health Care, which has separately billed $33 million to taxpayers in recent years, at times exceeding $600,000 a month.
Down the block in the other direction on Morality Drive is Ahmed Duale, who worked as Serenity Home Health Care’s administrative assistant and separately owns 11 properties in Columbus. Duale told The Daily Wire over the phone that he moved to Wisconsin to create a Medicaid group home there called Serenity Place, and that Omar sold the business to new management.
A building owned by Omar that is the headquarters of Serenity Health Care Plus lists business hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but when The Daily Wire arrived, a notice from fire marshals said they had repeatedly found it vacant.
Jama’s home on Morality Drive was owned by Abdulkadir Mohammed, who ran a Medicaid firm at the former veterans hall and now runs a daycare in a building owned by a man named Ali Gelle, who was once arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a woman (the charge was dropped for insufficient evidence).
According to property records, Mohammed got the home for free from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and later transferred it to an LLC he co-controls with someone who runs a firm called Care Homehealth Care LLC in another building Gelle owns.
The veterans hall is now owned by Central Ohio Investment Properties LLC, which was created in 2018 by Gelle but consists of numerous people tied to Jama. LLC paperwork was sent to Jama himself, which, according to the Secretary of State’s office, means Jama’s online login was used to submit the forms.
The real estate LLC’s address is the same as Accurate Home Healthcare, another Medicaid firm founded by Jama that is still operational. It billed taxpayers $10.6 million in recent years, including for “home visits” that a state audit found could not have occurred. Accurate’s CEO, Abdiweli Shiekhdon, is a partner in the veteran hall’s holding company.
Another partner is Osman M. Issa, who registered to vote using Jama’s address and incorporated Pacific Home Health Services LLC, which billed Medicaid $8.1 million, according to the spending records. In 2006, Issa was charged with a fraud offense and paid a fine.
The final partner is Abdirizak Bulshale, who is listed as running a home health firm out of an apartment, and is co-owners of another real estate LLC along with Ahmed Duale, Jama’s neighbor.
Some of the participants used the same lawyer to form their various LLCs: Dwight Hurd, who was once convicted of felony fraud, before his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the state Supreme Court.
Meet Ali Gelle
With Jama sidelined by his conviction, it appears Ali Gelle became the new Medicaid magnate of the Midwest.
Gelle has a lien against him for failure to pay his taxes, yet he owns or co-owns at least 14 properties in Columbus valued together at more than $4 million. The real estate is the site of far more lucrative operations.
Most notable of the properties is a two-story building claimed as the address of 65 different companies registered to bill Medicaid, which collectively billed $35 million in recent years.
The building at 2021 East Dublin Granville Road in Columbus might as well be called Gelle’s Medicaid emporium. Tenants take advantage of Ohio’s “personal services” expansion of the federal program, which allows non-medical professionals to bill the government for cooking and cleaning in private residences — often their own, since the workers can simply be the relatives of elderly people enrolled in the program.
When The Daily Wire visited the property, a directory in the building’s lobby listed 28 home health care companies. Sitting on top were two ID cards, both for Somali men: A paper ID that expired 20 years ago, and a Nebraska commercial driver’s license issued to an Ali Abdi, with a birthday of January 1 — a common phenomenon among Somalis, suggesting his birthday is not known.
Some of the Medicaid companies in the emporium are owned by Gelle, while others appear to be owned by people with ties to him, from a cab driver with whom he shared an apartment in California 20 years ago to a woman to whom he once sold a house.
The Medicaid emporium building was purchased for $2.1 million by a partnership between Gelle and Ahmed Farah Mohamed, who also owns one of the companies inside: Accessible Home Healthcare LLC.
Accessible Home Healthcare was the “doing business as” name of Jama & Sulub Home Healthcare LLC, which was busted in 2013 for misappropriating $700,000 from Medicaid. Even as it got rich off of taxpayer money, Accessible had liens placed against it for every year for not paying its own taxes, and in 2021 the Ohio Department of Taxation entered a $1.4 million judgment against it to try to collect.
In 2024, Mohamed, Jama & Sulub’s co-landlord, incorporated a company by the same name. The one that owed money to the government operated out of Suite 185; now, the new firm operates out of Suite 188, and there is no Suite 185.
One of the owners of Jama & Sulub, meanwhile, is listed as president of a different home health company founded by Gelle.
Gelle has personally registered at least 16 for-profit companies, including A Plus Academic Achievement LLC and AAG Import & Export Co.
Nonprofits
Gelle and the Medicaid emporium also demonstrate how home health owners often aren’t professionals who have dedicated their careers to health care, but rather opportunists who open businesses in numerous fields, with the commonality typically being that they either bill the government or enable the transfer of money overseas.
The tenants of the Medicaid emporium that don’t bill Medicaid are mainly “social services” nonprofits that extract large sums of money from the government, while being run by the same cast of characters.
Suite 110, for example, houses a nonprofit called Our Helpers, which has received $1.9 million in grants, including $279,000 from the state of Ohio. It shares the suite with both a home healthcare company and a group called Muslim Youth Revival.
Our Helpers listed Hawa Farah, who public records suggest is Gelle’s wife, as treasurer. The organization says it exists to address “the unique struggles facing the Somali immigrant youth in terms of drug abuse, violence, extremism, etc. by creating a basketball program.”
Suite 161 contains the Somali American Museum, funded by a grant from a city arts council. It is a fluorescent-lit room with pictures of the presidents of Somalia and a portrait of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Another nonprofit, Global Social Services, was paid $2.6 million from the state of Ohio using the emporium address. It calls itself “a network that bring doners closer to the most needed of the society” [sic throughout]. The only events listed on its website are “Lorem Ipsum,” the pseudo-Latin phrase used as a placeholder.
Gelle isn’t just landlord to that nonprofit; he is business partners with its founder, Abdinasser A. Omar. Together, the two make up A&A Property Management LLC, which owns a different building that receives rent from a taxpayer-funded “learning center.”
A&A follows a pattern of moving on-paper ownership between family members and friends. The real estate venture was registered first to Gelle’s apparent brother Abdulwahab Ghelle, then to him.
Daycare
Elsewhere in Columbus, Gelle owns two properties occupied by locations of Quality Adult Daycare Center LLC, on Woodland Avenue and West Broad Street. An Ohio government website notes that the taxpayer-funded facility “primarily serves Somali older adults.”
On paper, Gelle doesn’t own the business, only the buildings. The daycare LLC was registered first to Gelle’s apparent wife, then to his apparent brother.
One of the Quality Adult Daycare locations shares its building with Woodland Child Care Center. In Ohio records, the two facilities have different owners. Yet they share the same logo style, and a single graphical banner covers all windows — a choice that deprives any patients inside of natural light, but also conceals from the public whether anyone is actually inside.
The childcare center is registered to Abdulkadir Hassan Mohamed, the roommate of Ali Jama who ran his own Medicaid company in the veterans hall, and Ali Mohamed Sheik. The pair also own a Medicaid company in Gelle’s emporium. (The Daily Wire called a number belonging to an Abdulkadir Mohamed, who said he was not the same person, but that a detective had recently come to his house looking for the other one.)
Gelle also owns another building at 4523 Cleveland Avenue, which just so happens to house the Creator Children’s Center. A state inspection found that it failed to submit background checks on its employees, failed to keep attendance records, and had equipment stained with “blood or bodily fluids.”
The daycare is run by Sarah Ogden, whose husband, David, runs three Medicaid firms that have been paid millions. Previously, the daycare building housed Maxim Therapy LLC, a company registered to Gelle’s apparent brother.
Transportation
The network of financial vehicles used to transfer ownership between Somalis has been decades in the making. The vagaries of Somali names, and the labyrinthine nature of it all make it virtually impossible for the government to know where its money is going when it pays Somali Medicaid businesses.
In 2003, a company called African Auto Sale was incorporated at 1686 E. Hudson Avenue by Ali Ahmed Mohamed — according to court records, an alias of Gelle — and Ahmed Sulub Mohamoud, the owner of the home care company that was later busted. Later, Gelle would be added as a new registered agent, even though he was the same person using a different name.
In 2006, they adopted the doing-business-as name Linden Transportation, writing that its line of work was “Medical Trasportation [sic].” That was a trade name, not the official LLC name. Confusing matters, a different person named Issa Sulub Mahamud — seemingly the brother of the other Sulub — then created an actual LLC called Linden Transportation LLC at the same address.
Issa shows how this convoluted Somali network spans from Columbus to Minneapolis (according to Just The News, Somalis disclosed bringing $130 million in bulk cash on flights from Columbus to Minneapolis or Atlanta between 2023 and 2025, much of it then going overseas). He has been affiliated with a daycare, a feeding site, and a home health company in Ohio. He once had a $32,000 federal tax lien. He eventually moved to Minneapolis, where he owned APlus Health Care LLC, which billed Medicaid $35,000 for a single month, then disappeared.
Gelle denied knowing Ali Jama and declined to answer questions, calling the request “harassment” and saying he would call the police on The Daily Wire.
Instead, following our earlier reporting in this series, law enforcement suspended a firm in the emporium, Comfort and Care Home Health. Its proprietor, Vinna Ugwu, has six houses registered to her name.
Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed reporting.