Rizza Islam’s sisters plead no contest, leaving him last facing trial in Medi-Cal fraud case
By Tony Ortega | August 9, 2022
[Rizza got a boost from ABC last year]
Nearly seven years ago —
seven years! —
we broke the news that several members of Scientologist Hanan Islam’s family had been charged with felonies. California state investigators alleged that the Islams had been ripping off the Medi-Cal program with the use of a jackleg Scientology Narconon drug rehab in Compton, California.
Years later, a detailed preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court featured the state laying out its case, that Hanan Islam was the ringleader and that her son Ronnie (known as “Rizza”) and daughters Zakiyah and Nimat had also taken part in the scheme, which made use of unwitting high school students and some helpful local high school educators, who lost their jobs over it.
According to the state, Hanan and her kids had found a way to use the Narconon rehab they had started at the notorious World Literacy Crusade in order to file false claims that, over several years, amounted to about $4 million stolen from the state. Adding to the court drama was that for a while Hanan and her son Rizza had tried out some bizarre and disruptive sovereign citizen stunts, claiming the court had no jurisdiction over them, which got them both stints in jail.
We couldn’t really understand why the case was put off year after year. The state, after all, said that it had piles of evidence that Hanan and her kids had run the scheme. But there was always some excuse — one of the defense attorneys died, for example, and Hanan claimed that she was dying of cancer.
Well, that did turn out to be true. In March,
Hanan died of cancer at 62, and we wondered if it would take the wind out of the case. She had not only been the ringleader, according to prosecutors, but she had also been convicted of two previous felonies and so was probably looking at a major penalty if convicted.
Rizza, meanwhile, has become quite notorious on his own over these past seven years, an interesting figure who grew up in Scientology but also embraces the Nation of Islam and its leader Minister Louis Farrakhan.
And in 2021, Rizza really hit the big time, being named as
one of the twelve biggest sources of online disinformation about vaccines, at a time when that kind of disinformation was literally killing some people during a worldwide pandemic.
What a mix this story was: Medical fraud charges, Scientology, the Nation of Islam, sovereign citizen craziness in court, and even the notoriety of a major anti-vaxx disinformation campaign.
you dodged a bullet”. 
