Rizza Islam defiant as his trial on Medi-Cal fraud begins today

It’s been more than seven years since we first broke the news at the Underground Bunker that several Scientologists were facing felony charges for an elaborate scheme to defraud California’s Medi-Cal health insurance.

According to state investigators, the scheme was run out of a rehab called “American Health and Education Clinics” at the World Literacy Crusade, a notorious Scientology front operation in Compton, California. Hanan Islam (who had founded AHEC), three of her children, two other counselors at the rehab, and three local high school educators were all arrested and charged.

The scheme allegedly made use of unwitting high school students who were put through a Narconon program (Scientology’s brand of rehab) — even though they didn’t have drug problems — so the state could be fraudulently billed.

The high school educators who supplied those students to the scheme lost their jobs, two of Hanan’s children pleaded guilty, and Hanan herself died of cancer last year while awaiting trial.

That leaves only her son, Ronnie “Rizza” Islam, 33, still facing charges. And after years of delays, jury selection for his trial begins today at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, just down the hall on the ninth floor where the Danny Masterson rape trial ended on May 31 with his conviction.

Unlike Masterson’s two trials, which were heavy with testimony about Scientology, we don’t expect that Scientology will be mentioned very much during Rizza Islam’s trial. At a preliminary hearing during which the scheme was laid out in detail, Scientology didn’t get mentioned.

But still, we’re interested in how this proceeding goes, and Jeffrey Augustine, who attended that preliminary hearing, will be going to the trial and sending us reports.

Over the weekend, Rizza and his attorney Jeremy McLymont let it be known that Rizza remains defiant and sees his prosecution as politically motivated. McLymont put out an eye-opening press release that we thought you’d want to see…

And Rizza himself took to social media to rally his fans…

As we pointed out in our first story about this case in 2015, the World Literacy Crusade had quite a checkered history as a Scientology front operation, founded in 1993 by Alfreddie Johnson, a Baptist minister who had turned to Scientology following the 1992 LA riots. Hanan Islam became Alfreddie’s partner and opened the AHEC rehab there in 2004. According to the WLC website, the clinic used the Scientology Narconon program, and in photos from the website Rizza could be seen using an e-Meter.

But Rizza is an interesting figure because he was also a prominent member of the west coast branch of the Nation of Islam.

In fact, NOI, under its leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, was becoming more and more involved with Scientology, a crossover that reached a new urgency in 2010 thanks to one of Scientology’s well-known celebrities: Leah Remini.

Remini later regretted donating money to help Nation of Islam figures, and in particular key NOI Los Angeles figure Tony Muhammad, to become involved in Scientology.

Today, Tony Muhammad is known as Abdul Malik Sayyid Muhammad, and he is a Freedom Medal winner, the highest award a Scientologist can receive. Just this week, the church put out this mailer showing that Muhammad has reached the level of OT 3, which contains the infamous material about a galactic overlord named Xenu.

Rizza Islam, on the other hand, has played down his Scientology involvement since his arrest, but his notoriety has only grown. In 2021, he was named one of the twelve biggest sources of online disinformation about vaccines in the country, a distinction that won him admiration from Infowars host Alex Jones.

Even then, however, facing felony counts for health insurance fraud, and notoriety for being a major national source of vaccine disinformation, Rizza and this felony case had never been mentioned in the Los Angeles Times.

We are curious to see if that changes today.

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