Newly released documents show an entity owned by a top Democratic Party official has taken in $41,642,485 in public funds since landing a gig at a medical group catering to New York City’s most vulnerable—an arrangement that has proved lucrative for both him and his political allies.
The latest tax filings now available for Bronx-based nonprofit SOMOS Community Care show the organization, a network of doctors catering to the Big Apple’s low-income immigrant communities, paid more than $11.5 million in 2021 to a San Antonio-based pass-through company belonging to Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Henry Muñoz. This comes on top of almost $15.8 million The Daily Beast previously reported the group had paid to the party official’s S corporation MSTZO LLC, which does business as Cultural Productions, and upwards of $14.3 million it paid to him directly since he became its consultant in 2017.
These colossal sums place Muñoz, whose professional background is in political fundraising and construction design, among the highest-compensated individuals in the health-care sector in New York City or anywhere else. SOMOS was launched in 2015 to capitalize on a new Medicaid program, which was the sole source of its funding for most of its existence.
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That program expired in 2020, however, and the organization has become increasingly dependent upon contracts to provide COVID-19 testing and vaccination services to immigrant communities, for which SOMOS has received roughly $100 million in city and state funds, procurement records show.
Muñoz’s team has maintained he disburses the bulk of the funds the group allocates him to other contractors, and asserted that $9 million of the $11.5 million sum in 2021 went toward marketing expenses. They highlighted some multimedia material that they had previously sent The Daily Beast as examples of his design work, including a four-page Marvel-produced comic book from August 2021 promoting inoculation against the novel coronavirus, a tie-in pop-up vaccination site in Times Square, and some Spanish-language videos about the return to in-class instruction in public schools that fall. However, his representatives never provided price tags for any of these productions.
In its response to questions from The Daily Beast, SOMOS highlighted these same projects, along with “an Olympics-themed campaign” from 2021 that also targeted children. The group further asserted that all its expenditures got the approval of its fiduciary, Montefiore Medical Center, a politically connected local hospital.
But going just by the accounting the Muñoz team has provided, since he assumed his role at SOMOS, the Democratic official and his company have held on to more than $12.5 million in funds from the group, funds which have come entirely out of public coffers.
And around the time the new SOMOS tax filing dropped, so did a legal notice from one of the contractors Muñoz worked with: a Seattle-based political pollster seeking nearly a quarter-million dollars the it claims Muñoz and the nonprofit failed to pay them. Court records show that Pacific Market Research obtained a default judgment from a Washington State court in December against a Muñoz-run SOMOS entity for welshing on three nationwide polls of Latino Americans in 2020—and recently filed to collect the cash in the Bronx.
SOMOS only includes doctors in the New York City area, and Muñoz’s team would not answer questions about what proportion of the 12,000 people sampled across the country resided in neighborhoods SOMOS serves. But they argued this was a wholly justified expenditure for the organization, because they claimed the survey questions dealt with the medical needs of Hispanics.
“Henry/MSTZO commissioned questions regarding the Latino community's views on healthcare and COVID-related issues,” a person familiar with the situation asserted to The Daily Beast. “Understanding the Latino community's views on relevant healthcare issues is a fundamental part of creating and executing effective outreach and community engagement strategies geared toward serving them, which is exactly the work Henry Munoz and his company was contracted to perform."
However, an affidavit Pacific Market Research submitted in Washington State asserts that two of the surveys it conducted were explicitly political in nature and dealt with the 2020 election.
“SOMOS specifically hired PMR to design and conduct a national poll for Latino citizens based upon current political issues,” the document reads, referring to a poll run in October 2020. “Lastly, SOMOS contracted with PMR for a third time during the fall of 2020 for purposes of gathering voter data ahead of the 2020 election cycle.”
Further, coverage of the first poll in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times quoted Muñoz discussing political issues. Pacific Market Research declined to comment on the record for this story. Muñoz’s team blamed the failure to pay the bills on litigation between the survey firm and the pollsters who conducted the research.
However, a Washington State jury decided that suit in Pacific Market Research’s favor almost a year ago.
For its part, SOMOS itself insisted it “has nothing to do” with the case, and even insisted it was never billed for any of the polls. But one of the invoices in the court file is explicitly addressed to “SOMOS Healthcare,” and multiple media outlets have identified the nonprofit as the underwriter of the surveys, as has one of the pollsters.
As it happens, 2021 was the same year Muñoz purchased the Will Ferrell-founded production house Funny or Die for an undisclosed sum. The company was just one of the flashy acquisitions he’s made since becoming SOMOS’s consultant: In the last four years, he’s also bought a 20-acre estate within the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico; a seven-bedroom mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut; and a full-floor condo on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where he hosted President Joe Biden for a fundraiser last fall. During the same span, his political giving also spiked massively, particularly to the Democratic National Committee and its Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, to which he has given a combined $716,644 just since 2021.
SOMOS doctors, executives, and employees, including some who run companies that the nonprofit contracts with, have also grown increasingly generous toward the party committee. In the first three months of this year alone, they have given the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund a total of $366,687.
This sum makes SOMOS collectively one of the largest donors to the political action committee this cycle, outstripping even such institutional supporters as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.
And more money may yet flow to the group. A new report by the Empire Center think-tank found state politicians, who have also benefited from $1.5 million in donations from Muñoz and other SOMOS-linked figures since 2020, tweaked the rules this year in a way that will grant the nonprofit access to a $1.4 billion fund for medical institutions in “severe financial distress.”
