‘Emergency landing’ for shelters
When embezzling at nonprofit put residents at risk, Heading Home saved the day
When Manuel Duran was indicted, the approximately 150 families who relied on him for housing were suddenly at risk of losing their homes.
“We were very worried,” said Odette Duluc, a single mother from the Dominican Republic, who had lived for a year with other families in a shelter in Jamaica Plain run by Duran’s nonprofit, Casa Nueva Vida. “Our children were in school here.”
But Duluc’s future was in doubt after Duran was indicted for embezzling more than $1.5 million from the organization he then ran.
As Duran’s case wound through the courts — and his network of homeless shelters hung in the balance — another nonprofit, Heading Home, raced to take over nearly a dozen of Casa Nueva Vida’s shelters and assume responsibility for the hundreds of residents, including dozens of children, who lived there.
“We describe it as an emergency landing,” Heading Home’s chief executive, Danielle Ferrier, said.
The story of that emergency landing involves government officials and nonprofit leaders taking it upon themselves to protect a community that is often voiceless. It also shows how some of the state’s most vulnerable families have become dependent on a network of nonprofits funded by taxpayers though subject to little oversight.
Linda Johnson, Casa Nueva Vida’s former program director, discovered her boss was in trouble when she got a call in May 2021 from the Attorney General’s office asking her to come in for an interview, she recalled.
At 1 Ashburton Place — a government office building across the street from the State House — Johnson met with four investigators, she recalled: two from then-Attorney General Maura Healey’s office and two from the Office of the Inspector General, a watchdog agency that investigates corruption.
The investigators asked about her job responsibilities and how Casa Nueva Vida was run, she said. Other colleagues were called in for interviews, as well, Johnson said.
“We were blindsided and shocked,” she said, when they learned Duran was the target of the investigation. “He was always nice to everyone. I didn’t suspect anything.”
The investigation had begun after an anonymous tipster called in a complaint to the Inspector General’s office, according to the Attorney General’s office.
A few months later, in September, Healey’s office accused Duran of funneling state money into his own pockets by charging Casa Nueva Vida above-market rates to rent properties that Duran himself secretly owned, among
The future was in doubt for hundreds of residents, including dozens of children, after Manuel Duran, whose nonprofit ran a network of homeless shelters, was indicted for embezzling more than $1.5 million
other schemes.
Duran later pleaded guilty to perjury, larceny, and accounting crimes, and was sentenced to a year in jail. He also agreed to pay a $6 million penalty to settle a civil complaint from the Attorney General’s office.
Duran’s indictment threw Casa Nueva Vida into disarray. The nonprofit operated approximately a dozen shelters in Boston and Lawrence — and now it was revealed that Duran personally owned four of them. The state forced him to sell the properties to pay a portion of his $6 million debt.
Casa Nueva Vida’s shelters were part of the state’s emergency system for homeless families. The Department of Housing and Community Development paid the nonprofit more than $13 million from June 2018 to June 2020 to house approximately 150 families, according to the group’s tax returns. (Duran earned nearly $280,000 a year as executive director, according to the returns.)
Duran, 71, was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Miami, he said in court. During nearly 20 years in leadership roles at Casa Nueva Vida, he emerged as a charismatic leader who connected with the group’s mostly Spanish-speaking client families. He threw summer barbecues for the nonprofit’s staff and families where he could often be found cooking meat in a smoker, Johnson said.
“He did a lot of great things in his life, but at some point he lost his way,” Duran’s lawyer, Thomas Dwyer, said, paraphrasing remarks made by Judge Michael Doolin at Duran’s sentencing. (Dwyer said his client is scheduled to be released next month after serving half his sentence.)
A prosecutor from the Attorney General’s office had asked the judge to sentence Duran to four to six years. “Again and again ... he took advantage of people who were poor and less powerful than him,” Assistant Attorney General Mindy Klenoff said at the hearing, according to a transcript. She added: “Mr. Duran killed Casa Nueva Vida.”
Last spring, after Duran’s wrongdoing came to light, DHCD said it would not renew Casa Nueva Vida’s contract — panicking many of the families who lived in the nonprofit’s shelters.
The state soon relocated families who had lived in the Duranowned properties, the DHCD spokesperson said. But Duluc, the single mother in Jamaica Plain, said in an interview in Spanish that she was nervous when those families disappeared because she didn’t know where they had been sent.
“We thought the same thing was going to happen to us,” she said. By then, Duluc had been living in the Jamaica Plain shelter for a year and one of her sons was enrolled in school nearby.
Behind the scenes, an effort was underway to save the Casa Nueva Vida shelters.
Last April, as Duran prepared for trial, DHCD reached out to Heading Home, which also runs shelters for the state, and asked if the group could take on some of Casa Nueva Vida’s shelters and employees, Ferrier, the chief executive, said.
It was a fraught proposition. “If you take another nonprofit in a merger, you assume their liabilities,” she said. And the potential liabilities of Casa Nueva Vida — fleeced for years by Duran — was something of a black box.
Then in May, Ferrier read a Globe story about Casa Nueva Vida’s families and employees worrying about being displaced. One mother of a newborn son said she was especially concerned about losing contact with Casa Nueva Vida’s Spanishspeaking staff.
The next day, Ferrier said, she decided to take over all of the remaining families and shelters, as well as hire every Casa Nueva Vida employee who wanted to stay on.
DHCD, meanwhile, agreed to transfer Casa Nueva Vida’s funding to Heading Home. The DHCD spokesperson said the transition had been underway since April and was finalized in May.
In her Jamaica Plain apartment recently, Duluc said she does not want to stay indefinitely in the shelter where she has lived for two years. She is hoping to get a public housing voucher soon. As she spoke, her teenage son, Ricardo, returned from school. Duluc said they faced challenges in Boston. And on her salary as a cleaner, it is hard for her to imagine how she will afford housing on her own.
But she is grateful to those who have helped her, including her caseworker, a fellow Dominican immigrant who worked for Casa Nueva Vida and moved over to Heading Home. “Thanks to them,” Duluc said, “at least we are able to have a home.”