Daryl Hagler and Kenny Rozenberg: The Care Con

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1:30Daryl Hagler:It was June of 2023 in Hamilton, New Jersey, a small town between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Quaint on the surface, Hamilton calls itself the blueberry capital of the world. Every June on the last Sunday of the month, it leans into that identity by hosting the Red, White, and Blueberry Festival, complete with live music, a car show, and a pie-eating contest. Blueberry, of course. The tagline, the more, the barrier. That June was warm, with temperatures outside the Hamilton Center Nursing Home reaching into the 70s. But inside, it was a different story. The temperature never seemed stable.

2:21Daryl Hagler:Some days too hot, other days too cold, but always uncomfortable, with no relief for the residents. On one of those June days, a call came in to the local police station less than five minutes away, and it wasn't the first. There had been others over months and years, each one pointing to the same conclusion. Something was wrong inside that nursing home. This time, the call came from a family member of one of the home's residents, panicked and desperate. Their loved one was experiencing chest pains, and repeated attempts to reach nursing staff had gone unanswered. For 40 minutes, they had tried to get someone, anyone, to respond.

3:17Daryl Hagler:No one did. When police arrived, they could not find a single nurse on sight. As they moved through the facility, they heard loud unsettling screams coming from more than one patient, while repeated cries for help went unanswered.

3:44Daryl Hagler:This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Daryl Hagler and Kenny Rosenberg, The Care Con. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we follow the story of longtime friends and business partners, Daryl Hagler and Kenny Rosenberg. One brought experience in healthcare. The other, real estate acumen. Together, they believed it was a business combination made in heaven. But as you'll hear in this episode, it was much, much closer to hell.

4:35Daryl Hagler:Kenny Rosenberg and Daryl Hagler are longtime next-door neighbors in Rockland County, New York, just west of the Hudson River. They've been friends for more than 30 years. Rosenberg built his career in healthcare and Hagler in real estate. Rosenberg earned degrees in art and psychology from Yeshiva University in New York and a Master of Science and Public Health from Columbia University. He says he first got into healthcare in the late 80s as a volunteer emergency medical technician. In 2001, he claims he was even called out to tend to victims of the September 11th attacks. After earning his master's degree, Rosenberg worked as a hospital administrator for a nursing home chain.

5:23Daryl Hagler:When the owner of the chain fell ill, Rosenberg bought one of the branches from him. Then he bought another. And another. In the late 90s, he founded a company called Centers Healthcare to provide operations consulting and management support for nursing homes and related health care facilities. Here's Rosenberg in a video message from March of 2017, honoring National Social Worker Month. He's representing Centers Healthcare.

5:56Kenny Rozenberg:Social workers are the ones who consistently put a human face, a human touch, on any number of difficult situations and make them a little bit more bearable. Let's face it, no one comes to the hospital or arranges for home health care because everything is fine. Believe me, I speak for many years of experience. I started this company as a nursing home administrator, and I'm an active volunteer paramedic. I see the positive impact of social workers every day. And if I can offer a word of advice as someone who's known a lot of social workers, never stop improving yourself, never stop learning, and never, ever stop giving.

6:32Daryl Hagler:Les is publicly known about Hagler. According to his website, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and became a certified public accountant. Then, he went on to build real estate portfolio of properties spanning a variety of sectors, including commercial, industrial, residential, and hospitality. Throughout their long friendship, Hagler and Rosenberg have completed numerous business deals together, most notably involving nursing homes. Historically, health care and real estate were treated as separate sectors. But as the U.S. population ages, that line has started to blur. In the year 2000, one in eight Americans, which is roughly 35 million people, were at least 65 years old.

7:25Daryl Hagler:By 2040, that number is projected to be about 1 in 5, which is around 80 million people. The demand for specialized senior care is on the rise, which also means that partnerships between healthcare professionals and real estate specialists are on the rise too. There's even a term for this phenomenon, healthcare real estate, which explains Hagler and Rosenberg's collaboration. So it's no surprise really that they went into business together. In 2014, they bought three nursing homes in New Jersey, including the one in Hamilton. This is Dana DeFilippo, senior reporter at the New Jersey Monitor, who is familiar with their story.

8:15Kenny Rozenberg:They own 46 nursing homes in four states, including New Jersey and New York. And New York is where they have most of their nursing homes, and that's where they also live.

8:28Daryl Hagler:Hagler and Rosenberg use what's known as an operating company property company, or Opco Propco, as the business setup with their nursing homes. In other words, the two men split the majority ownership of the homes. At Hamilton and another one of their New Jersey locations, Deptford Center, Hagler owns almost 100 % of the operations company, the side that handles the day-to-day business operations. Rosenberg, on the other hand, is a partial owner of the property company, the real estate size of Hamilton and Deptford. By the end of 2025, Hagler and Rosenberg were involved with more than 40 nursing homes across the country.

9:13Daryl Hagler:On the surface, elder care looks like empathy in action, but we're talking about a business venture. Today, America's collective vision of aging has become, as one historian put it, both medicalized and marketable. Turns out, it wasn't really that commendable in 2017 either. That's the year that Rosenberg gave his video speech on the importance of honoring social workers. It was also the year that the upstanding public images of Rosenberg and Hagler began to unravel.

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12:20Daryl Hagler:For close to three decades, Daryl Hagler and Kenny Rosenberg have built a business alongside their friendship. On the surface, their operation sounds admirable, maybe even noble. But in 2017, their facade started to crack. It began when one of the nursing homes they purchased in 2014 was shut down. Mount Laurel Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, lost its Medicaid certification in 2017 and closed its doors, reportedly because of poor care. Problems for Hagler and Rosenberg intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were not enough staff to properly care for the patients in their New York homes.

13:13Daryl Hagler:staff members were not quarantining patients who contracted the virus. And to make it worse, there was a lack of proper personal protective equipment in their facilities. Across Hagler and Rosenberg's four New York nursing homes, 400 people died. That same year, Rosenberg added a new and curious financial venture to his resume. He bought El Al, the flagship airline of Israel. Not long after, he made Hagler his co-vice chair. Here's Dana again of the New Jersey Monitor explaining the state of Hagler and Rosenberg's New York facilities. When she says CMS, she's referring to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

14:05Kenny Rozenberg:CMS has a rating system that they rate. It's kind of sort of like a Yelp for nursing homes, and they do that so that people who are looking for safe places to put their loved ones kind of know in a more objective way whether the home is good or not. And many of their homes, including the one in Mount Laurel that was closed in 2017, had gotten one, maybe two stars. The homes had been designated as special focus facilities. That's something that the feds reserve for kind of the worst of the worst. And that is supposed to subject them to kind of higher scrutiny, more frequent inspections. So they were these special focus facilities.

14:46Kenny Rozenberg:They were one-star facilities, more frequent inspections.

14:51Daryl Hagler:In June of 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Hagler and Rosenberg and their New York homes, and a$45 million settlement was reached.

15:05Kenny Rozenberg:The owner of four nursing homes agreed today to pay$45 million to settle claims they severely neglected or humiliated people in their care. Attorney General Letitia James says the owner insufficiently staffed the nursing homes and continued to admit new residents, even though they could not care for the existing residents.

15:24Daryl Hagler:But the settlement didn't stop the men from keeping up with their nefarious business model.

15:30Kenny Rozenberg:But they still were operating. They still continued to get more money. Every year they still went unchecked largely until this comptroller's report came out, really exposing things and documenting it.

15:44Daryl Hagler:The report Dana is referring to was conducted by New Jersey's former state comptroller, Kevin Walsh. Here's a video of him explaining what his office does.

16:23Daryl Hagler:Released in December 2025, Walsh's report focused on a period of time between 2019 and 2024. When people started to realize the depth of Walsh's accusations, news stations began picking up the story.

16:41Kenny Rozenberg:New Jersey investigators say two South Jersey nursing homes are accused of cutting corners and care while the owners pocketed millions. In a bombshell investigation, the office of the state comptroller says between 2019 to 2024, residents at both the Hamilton Center and Deptford Center for Rehabilitation and Health Care suffered in deplorable conditions. The comptroller's office in New Jersey is in charge of overseeing Medicaid. And so that office frequently investigates and audits just any kind of Medicaid spending to make sure that there's no fraud, waste or abuse. And so this was already kind of in their wheelhouse.

17:19Kenny Rozenberg:Well, I think the New York case is what made them finally start looking at New Jersey.

17:24Daryl Hagler:Walsh's 2025 report outlined a number of troubling findings. First, over the course of those five and a half years, Hagler and Rosenberg used the Hamilton and Deptford nursing homes to maximize profits for themselves. They did this by inflating both rent payments and through something called related party expenses. Remember that Opco Propco business setup? That comes into play here. In a setup like this, the Opco, the operations company, or the one that handles the healthcare side of things, pays rent to the Propco, the property company, the real estate side. In this case, Hagler was essentially paying Rosenberg, his friend and business collaborator, rent.

18:15Daryl Hagler:Rosenberg was wildly inflating these so-called rent prices. And the rent payments weren't really rent at all. The money was used to cover the cost of the nearly$60 million mortgage he and Hagler originally got to buy the nursing homes, both Hamilton and Deptford, plus Mount Laurel in the first place.

18:38Kenny Rozenberg:Investigators found that the mortgage was double what it should have been, you know, for market rate, and that Rosenberg's property companies alone pocketed almost$28 million. And so that's, you know, that's a lot of money that possibly, that's a lot of money that could have been supporting direct patient care, right? And that sounds like it should have been.

18:58Daryl Hagler:Now let's get into the related party expenses, the second way that Hagler and Rosenberg allegedly siphoned funds from their nursing homes. Think of all the services that go in the day-to-day operations of a nursing home. There's nursing care, patients' food and medication, the building maintenance, and janitorial services. Nursing homes often contract out these types of goods and services. They also contract them out to companies that own or control part of the nursing home. These kinds of companies are called related parties. The related parties in this case made up at least five other businesses that supplied goods and services to the Hamilton and Deptford homes, all at least partly owned or operated by Hagler and Rosenberg's spouses, sons, daughters, or daughters-in-law.

19:56Kenny Rozenberg:Apparently this is a pretty common problem in the nursing home industry, these kind of use of third-party companies. And it's common and it's legal, but the problem is is that it's ripe for abuse, right? Because there's not a lot of oversight and there's not a lot of regulating there.

20:14Daryl Hagler:When business owners inflate the cost of goods and services provided by related parties, it's called tunneling. And that's exactly what the comptroller accused Hagler and Rosenberg of doing. They inflated the cost of business consulting, information technology services, staffing, building maintenance, and medical diagnostic labs all goods and services provided by these related parties.

20:43Kenny Rozenberg:The comptroller figures that they moved about$92 million through their companies, their third-party companies, over five and a half years that he looked at. And that's more than two-thirds of the$135 million that they got from New Jersey in Medicaid money over that period. So two-thirds of the Medicaid money that they got, they funneled through these third-party companies that were owned by the relatives.

21:07Daryl Hagler:With the majority of Hagler and Rosenberg's funds going to an inflated rent payments and related party goods and services, there wasn't much left to pay for the nursing staff, and that caused some serious harm. The New Jersey state legislature sets minimum staff-to-resident ratios based on the time of day. Day shifts, for example, meaning generally 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., require one certified nursing assistant per eight residents. Facilities with over 150 beds are required to have a registered nurse on duty 24-7. This rule applies to Hamilton and Deptford because they're both licensed for 240 beds.

21:55Daryl Hagler:What the comptroller found in his 2025 report was that not only were both Hamilton and Deptford understaffed, but they were chronically and intentionally understaffed. The numbers were dire. At Hamilton, the minimum staffing requirement was missed by an average of 52 % per day. In other words, the home regularly did not even have half of the minimum required staff on duty. Deptford's numbers were similar. For 62 out of the 64 days the comptroller reviewed, the home did not meet its minimum staffing requirements. And to make matters worse, for 52 of those same 64 sample days, it also had no RN on duty.