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On a Friday afternoon in June 2017, Anthony Flores and his girlfriend, Anna Moore, decided to go out for vegan ice cream at Kippy’s. Though the pair lived 220 miles away, in Fresno, California, they were regulars at the Venice Beach ice-cream shop. “They came in all the time. They were striking,” says the owner, Kippy Miller. The couple did have a distinct look. Even for a casual trip, they tended to wear matching suits and ties. “I just don’t ever remember seeing them with another person,” Miller adds. As the couple looked at the flavors, a middle-aged man with closely cropped gray hair approached. Dr. Mark Sawusch, an ophthalmologist, had a question for the duo: “Do you know anything about this alkaline water?” They did, as it turned out.
As far as anyone seems to know, the meeting at Kippy’s happened entirely by chance. Sawusch’s office was nearby, but otherwise he and the couple traveled in different circles. He examined eyes; they owned a yoga studio. In any case, by that evening, they had the keys to the doctor’s silver Tesla. A week later, Flores texted Sawusch to offer his and Moore’s help: “Our desire is to add ease and flow to your life and be of great service.” Sawusch responded, calling the couple “the BEST friends I have ever met in my entire life.” They moved from their apartment into his Malibu beach house that same day. In a few months, the doctor would be dead. For the next six years, people would wonder: Were Flores and Moore scammers who stumbled upon the perfect mark in a vegan-ice-cream shop? Or were they simply trying to help a man coming off the worst year of his life?
The version of the couple Sawusch met that day was just their latest iteration; they had both reinvented themselves several times over. Flores was raised in a lower-middle-class Mexican American family in Clovis, a conservative agricultural city outside Fresno in the humid Central Valley. In 1994, he graduated from Clovis High School, where he was voted both prom king and “Most Artistic.” Instead of going to college, he started a window-washing business, targeting clients in wealthy neighborhoods and winning them over with his warm and engaging demeanor. People simply liked him. “Word just got out,” says his childhood best friend, Dave Brose. “He was actually making a lot of money.” In 2005, a strange situation put him in the public eye: He learned that he’d been unnecessarily paying his ex-girlfriend Amber Frey child support — $175 of his hard-earned window-washing money every month for four years. Frey had just been outed as Scott Peterson’s mistress, which meant the alimony situation landed Flores all over the news, looking foolish. “He got swindled big time. That hurt him. It really, really did,” Brose says.
Whether out of humiliation or a desire to escape Clovis and live like the clients whose windows he washed, he got to work developing a new persona: Anton David, “Global Hairdresser,” a roving artist with shears who liked to cut and color with a cold beer in his back pocket. He got a job at the Lotus Salon in Fresno and soon after was quoted in the Fresno Bee about his classic runway-style hairdos — meant “to be creative and show the artistic side of what we do.” He wrote on LinkedIn, “I’m in love with making things more beautiful.” The new name, the quotes, the elevated title — all of it made his friends laugh. “Flores was a budding hairdresser. He was just starting out,” says fellow hairstylist Atila Vass. Still, in 2007, Flores graduated from the Sassoon Academy, a prestigious hair-cutting training center. “It’s crazy to think Flores ever made it through Sassoon,” Vass says. “It’s very structured over there. And he’s not structured at all in any way.” Nor was he financially savvy. “There was never a price,” a former client remembers of Flores’s freelance hair-cutting services. “It was just ‘Send me what you feel is the right amount.’ And he would show up in a coat and tie to do it.”
In 2009, Flores made the move to Los Angeles to an apartment in Playa Vista. He promptly converted the place into a salon. “He removed the carpet, we did plumbing in there, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, you know all of this is illegal and they’re going to charge you?’” says his friend Octavio Solis. “He was too much about partying, not about work. He was always trying to live up to that Hollywood lifestyle, to give off that successful perception.” Indeed, Flores was evicted soon after and moved in with a girlfriend who later claimed in court that Flores withheld a portion of the rent on their Marina del Rey apartment. Still, others were impressed with his natural charm and his connections — or his connections to connections. “I would get the most random call, like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me and Octavio at Eddie Murphy’s house to put oil on these bikini models?’” says Nathan Love, a blockchain specialist who met Flores in a hot tub in L.A. “He is one of the most charismatic people I know.”
While Flores was turning himself into Anton David, Moore was trying to become an actor. The daughter of two academics in the Bay Area, she graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and completed a summer course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Afterward, she quickly landed a promising role as “blonde student” in the Uma Thurman drama The Life Before Her Eyes. But from there, her projects never seemed to work out. In 2009, she got the lead in Fighting Fish, a dark meditation on incest that was meant to be her big break. “She was definitely the star of that movie,” says director Annette Apitz. “I think she felt like it was going to jump-start her career.” The film failed to find distribution. Undeterred, Moore moved to L.A., where she fell into a serious relationship. “I believed it was love at first sight,” her new boyfriend wrote in an unpublished essay about their time together. “So she moved in.” Moore could be hot and cold. She didn’t want him to post about their relationship on Facebook because, she said, “it’s not good for my acting career.” A few weeks into cohabiting, he overheard her talking about him to an ex on the phone, saying, “He does have a really nice place near the beach, but he’s a big dork.” “Then she hung up and saw me standing there,” he writes, “and looked at me and said, ‘I am not a bad person.’” The relationship lasted only three months.
Moore packed what few personal items she had and began house-sitting for a friend in Beverly Hills. But soon after she moved in, she started dating an “acroyogi” named Wayne Hoover, who invited her to come live with him in a communal house in Santa Monica called the Little Kingdom. The three-bedroom was home to a rotating cast of aspiring artists, healers, and Hollywood-adjacents, all of whom agreed upon a strict vegan, alcohol-free living environment. When their relationship fizzled, Hoover continued to pay his ex-girlfriend’s rent. “I was very trust driven,” he says. “I never felt like she was taking advantage of me.” Things soured as he watched her bring other men into the room.
Fortunately, soon after, Moore met Flores at a vegan potluck in Santa Monica. It was 2012. “I think she spilled some food or something and he came to her rescue,” Flores’s friend Michael Johles says. The relationship got serious fast. With her help, he returned to his window-washing business in Fresno. Moore became the company’s manager. She was protective, often posting rebuttals to unflattering Yelp reviews (“Your attempts to extort our small business will fall on deaf ears to the thousands of customers that value our ethical business practices,” she wrote to a woman who accused them of not showing up for an appointment). Eventually, the couple decided to open a yoga studio. They found a mixed commercial space and launched the Fulton Yoga Collective in 2015. On the second floor, they offered classes: new-moon meditations, chakra-activation flows. On the top floor was a for-rent “wellness room” reserved for visiting therapists or traveling musicians. They stocked a fridge with homemade juices and $65 organ cleanses. Flores’s persona evolved at the collective. He often appeared in Facebook videos with his long hair loose, chanting in Sanskrit. “He was doing more of a guru thing. He was reminding me of Jared Leto,” Brose says. He was still occasionally cutting hair, too. At one point, he brought a pair of his shears to Lake Shrine, a Buddhist temple in L.A., to be blessed by a monk.
The couple soon became Fresno microcelebrities — the local kid turned spiritualist and the on-the-rise starlet — complete with a multigenerational crew of yogis. En masse, the crew would attend Burning Man or show up at local art nights. They had been at it for five years when, in June 2017, they met Sawusch.
It hadn’t been a banner year for Sawusch. Eight months before he met Moore and Flores, he failed to show up at the office where, for decades, he had treated generations of wealthy Pacific Palisades families. (“I remember some Spielbergs,” says a former colleague.) When sheriff’s deputies performed a wellness check at his Malibu home, they found the doctor stark naked and in a manic state. It wasn’t the first time they’d discovered him this way. In previous wellness checks, he’d had cuts and scrapes all over his body, his hands badly burned. This time, as the waves crashed outside his cantilevered beach house, he turned to the officers and said, “I am God. My birthday is when the universe was created.” In the months that followed, Sawusch attempted suicide. He drifted in and out of addiction facilities where he was treated for bipolar disorder. An attending psychiatrist described him as “grossly psychotic.”
This all seemed wildly out of character to people who knew Sawusch as the gentle technical wizard who had attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine before completing an ophthalmological residency at Johns Hopkins. Some of his work was groundbreaking — in the ’90s, he “performed the first finite element modeling of the effects of surgery on the cornea,” says his former supervisor Dr. Peter McDonnell, who watched in awe as his young protégé advanced methods for surgically reshaping the outermost layer of the eye to treat vision problems like nearsightedness and astigmatism.
Still, he was often alone. He had been divorced twice. His first wife was an anesthesiologist; she wanted children, he wanted a quiet life and a beach house in Malibu, and their divorce was finalized in 2001. His divorce from his second wife was finalized in 2014. He was seemingly estranged from the limited family members he had: a mother and a sister in Florida. “He was a little bit odd. He was very quiet is what he was — didn’t say a lot,” says former patient Janet Anderson. Like many doctors, he was obsessed with patterns and data. He liked weather, sneakers — his latest acquisitions, often still in the box, neatly lined the floor of his bedroom — and jazz trios. “I know he was fascinated with the chords and how they fit together,” says a former colleague. By the spring of 2017, after numerous hospitalizations and mounting concern at his medical practice, he was tweeting regularly about being a victim of what he called “Anthropogenic Global Warming fraud.” On May 17, he wrote, “I MARK RAYMNOND SAWUSCH AM THE ONLY HACKER IN THE UNIVERSE OF AGW!!!”
Flores and Moore seemed unconcerned about uprooting the lives they’d painstakingly built in Fresno to abruptly move in with a man they’d met a week before. The opposite, in fact. They quickly settled into the house, a bungalow on the Pacific Coast Highway, and began inviting their friends over, people they knew from the collective or L.A. Vass remembers the first time Flores asked him to the beach: “It was literally just a text that said, ‘If you’re up in Malibu, I’m having a sunset gathering. There’ll be food here.’ He goes, ‘Bring something if you want.’” When Vass would ask Flores what he was doing in Malibu, “it sounded like Anton was using big words. He said he was essentially the ‘curator’ of somebody, something or another. He’d been ‘entrusted to watch the estate,’” he says. “I didn’t understand he was living there.”
They were. And they quickly fell into routines with the doctor. The three hiked, watched sunsets under fleece blankets, and dined at Nobu with Moore’s pretty actor friends. In one undated photo from their time together, the doctor sits at his black piano while Moore stands next to him singing, the entire scene framed by cresting ocean. In another photo, later introduced as evidence by Flores’s defense, all three roommates smile broadly, side by side in matching blazers. That November, a club-promoter friend named Herman Town posted an Instagram video filmed beneath the beach house’s crosshatched stilts. “I finally made it down to Anton and Anna’s house,” Town says within earshot of Sawusch, who stands back a bit, smiling in blue jeans and a gray hoodie.
More often than not, Sawusch was in the background of Flores’s and Moore’s social lives. Friends who spent time at the house say they never saw him or, if they did, describe him as being a bit off, or quiet, or shy. Although the couple were purportedly there to help heal Sawusch, his mental health seemed only to get worse. On July 4, he was arrested on the Santa Monica Pier for assaulting a stranger. Flores used the arrest as an opportunity to secure power of attorney over Sawusch. He told the doctor it was only temporary so he could get the funds needed for bail. But later that day, he texted a friend something damning. “I got control of the beach house,” he wrote. Soon, Flores was signing medical-consent forms as Sawusch’s guardian. The doctor, meanwhile, officially retired via phone calls with office staff. The door to his office began to collect notes from patients looking to obtain medical records.
With free rein over Sawusch’s accounts, the couple amped up their studio offerings in Malibu, a luxurious beachfront offshoot of their humbler Fresno space. There was yoga on the sand in front of the house and “Zen Sundays” with guided sound baths and lunches cooked by private chefs. There was always plenty of on-demand Kippy’s, which the couple would have delivered, hundreds of dollars at a time, from Venice. All this made a truly excellent backdrop for Moore. She hired photographers to take bikini pictures of her on Sawusch’s balcony. With the doctor’s money, she booked hotel rooms in L.A. and finagled her way into movie premieres, then took selfies with the biggest celebrities she could find — Oprah and Reese Witherspoon among them. Her social media took on a more polished, glamorous edge.
Early in May 2018, 22-year-old Amanda Tardif responded to an ad for a massage therapist at what she’d seen described as “the Athena Spa” in Malibu. It would be her first job since graduating from massage school earlier that year. When she arrived at the address on the PCH, a woman came out. It was Moore and Flores’s executive assistant, Saranda Halitaj, whom they had recently hired to help keep up the house. The vacancy was at a doctor’s private beach house, she said. “Then she said, ‘The next step is you are going to go to the doctor’s house, give him a massage, and talk to Anton,’” Tardif says. She liked the job at first; the 1,200-square-foot home seemed to hum with purpose. In her journal, Tardif documented everything happily. “It’s all starting,” she wrote. “My destiny as a healer. The client is catered to like royalty.” But things turned fast. Flores yelled at her over the smallest missteps, frightening her. He frightened Halitaj, too; she described him as controlling and paranoid. Still, Halitaj got the impression that he and Moore were trying their best to take care of Sawusch, who seemed severely mentally ill. She says she felt he would have been institutionalized if they weren’t looking after him.
Over the months, Moore and Flores had transformed the house into a sort of Canyon Ranch on steroids, a seaside holistic center focused only on its single and permanent guest. And though Flores’s behavior could be erratic, and the couple argued frequently, they were deferential to the doctor and united in the ad hoc regimen they prescribed. Tardif was far from the only masseuse working on the doctor; he was given up to eight hours of massage daily by a rotation of four or five therapists. If a therapist questioned the treatment, they were told it was designed to help ease the symptoms of his bipolar disorder. They hired a chef who’d purportedly worked for Gordon Ramsay to cook for them and the doctor and bought a steady stream of expensive groceries for those meals, regularly spending thousands of dollars at Moon Juice and Pacific Coast Greens. “Flores and Moore were really gung ho on everything natural, everything organic, everything non-GMO,” Tardif says. Once, the chef used an unapproved food item and Flores pulled him aside. “He says, ‘Do you see these ingredients?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Those are poison. You’re not allowed to buy those anymore,’” Tardif recalls. They took beach walks with Sawusch every day to make sure he was getting fresh air. Once a week, Flores would drive him an hour south to Marina del Rey to receive a ketamine infusion for his depression. Even for a person who typically seemed distant and depressed, his disposition after the infusions alarmed some of the staff. “When he came back, he would wear his sunglasses and just walk straight past us,” Halitaj says.
Besides the ketamine — well, there seemed to be some sort of system. Tardif arrived at work one day to see Flores sorting through a mound of hallucinogenic mushrooms, arranging them into a daily pill organizer. Masseuse Valerie Cheatham says she saw Flores and Moore give Sawusch what she was told were “experimental drugs from overseas.” By the spring, they were providing him with LSD. “Sometimes when I would massage him, he would just start talking about the universe and ‘things coming together,’” she says. “Flores and Moore told me from the get-go, ‘If he starts talking about something weird, don’t really interact. Just smile and keep doing what you’re doing.’”
They made sure his care was entirely under their control. “I remember Mark would have to go to some specific psychological evaluations,” says Halitaj. “Anton would always be there for those appointments. And if any of those therapists wanted to talk to Mark alone, Anton would immediately fire them. And I only know that because I think I saw some email exchanges where one of the therapists requested that and Anton was like ‘nope.’” Their friends saw this as devotion to Sawusch’s well-being. “Their whole world revolved around the doctor,” the stylist Johles says. “It would always be like, ‘Hey, you wanna hang out and do this?’ And it would be like, ‘Oh, dude, we gotta do this for the doctor.’ Sawusch told me a bunch of times, ‘Man, the best thing that ever happened to me was Anna and Anton.’” Maybe that was true. Before they came, he’d been alone: estranged from his family, secluded in his house, slowly losing his mind. But it’s not like he was getting any better.
On the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend in 2018, Cheatham arrived for her usual shift to find Sawusch hiding under his bed. He didn’t recognize her, she says. “I was like, ‘Mark, I’m here to give you your massage.’ He was like, ‘Massage? I never get massages. Why are you here?’” Flores and Moore weren’t there; they had decamped to the Huntley, a beachside hotel in nearby Santa Monica. Sawusch’s behavior was devolving, but having recently installed CCTV cameras in the house, they could keep an eye on him from afar. “Anton could hear and see everything,” Cheatham says. “He called me on my cell phone and said, ‘Val, are you okay? I’m sorry, Mark’s been having an episode. Me and Anna moved to the hotel because the episodes have been a lot.’” The cameras were on when, on May 27, Sawusch spent his last hours acting erratically, then slumped down between the couch and the coffee table and closed his eyes. Eventually, Flores — still at the Huntley — called 911. “Hi, I do believe that my friend has died in our house. I’m not there at the location,” he said calmly. “You’ll probably be there before me. The door is unlocked.” Later, an autopsy would show the presence of ketamine and alcohol in Sawusch’s system.
Around a week after his death, Moore and Flores held a seaside funeral for Sawusch. Cheatham went, as did several other employees from the house. Everyone was bereft and unnerved at the loss of this soft-spoken person they had been tending to near constantly for months. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cheatham says. “I was so sad that he died. They were telling me that they were hoping he would get over the spell that he was in.” But that day, Flores and Moore also managed to spend $7,017.73 at Ted Baker, $289.85 at Erewhon, $220.50 at Tory Burch, $992.25 at Coach, and $2,477.90 at the Apple Store. They dined at Nobu, too. Later, Flores wrote an obituary for the doctor that ran in the Malibu Times. It said Sawusch died “peacefully, watching wildlife from his seaside balcony and listening to the waves of the Pacific.”
As Sawusch’s mother and sister attempted to settle his debts — including months of rent owed on the abandoned Palisades practice — they saw something strange. There were two creditors’ claims for $1 million each, one from Flores and one from Moore. These late-in-life caretakers were claiming they were owed one-third of his vast estate, including the beach house, which would together amount to around $20 million. The family filed a civil suit alleging dependent abuse, undue influence, and fraud and alerted the FBI, which began to look into charges of mail and wire fraud. By then, Moore and Flores had already gotten to work ensuring they could hold on to the house. Shortly after Sawusch died, Flores texted his friend Nathan Love, the cryptocurrency specialist: “I am reaching out for some investment advice,” Flores wrote. “Any chance you can help steer me in the right direction? It’s a very new, unfamiliar situation for me.” Love remembers taking Flores’s call. “My only conversation was trying to help him understand how cryptocurrencies work, layering, cold storage versus hot storage versus 401(k)s,” he says. “I didn’t think he was smart enough to do any of that.” What they did instead was open more bank accounts, including one in South Dakota into which they moved more of the doctor’s money.
It took until November 2018 for a judge to formally freeze their personal bank accounts, so all summer and fall, they lived in the beach house and spent Sawusch’s money. Even after the accounts were locked down, their lifestyle appeared unaffected. They stayed in the house. Nearly a year after Sawusch died, Moore posted a photo to Facebook of her sitting on top of the doctor’s piano gazing out onto the Pacific. “Living in L.A. is like being in a giant jam band,” she wrote. “Everyone knows when it’s their time to shine and also when it’s time to hold down a rock-solid rhythm.” By then, according to the charges that would eventually be filed against them, they had stolen $2.7 million of the doctor’s money.
During the pandemic, the couple decided to decamp to Tulum. They moved into a seaside suite at the Selina hotel, where they became known for their lavish events — mezcal was served, blunts were passed, and celebrities even popped by, according to photographer DaVida Sal, who remembers seeing Rose McGowan. In Mexico, they shifted slightly from their yogi-burner personae. Moore began to post less about organ cleanses and rolled out a series of characters on TikTok, including “Bunny Mala,” a Spanish-speaking assassin. “In my humble opinion, it got weird,” says Susan Boud Leeper, her longtime friend and yoga student. Moore filled her days recruiting models to appear in the music video for a new song she’d recorded called “SOUL,” a sultry, layered rap track featuring DJ Sri Kala. Flores started doing haircuts again, charging $100 for a cut and a mezcal. He bought Moore a chestnut doodle, which she named Sebastian von Fluff.
The Feds arrested Flores first in 2023 in Fresno. A few days later, Moore was apprehended while flying from Mexico through Houston. Flores posted a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his lawyer. In the post, he wrote, “I’m currently in jail and I need your financial support. I can assure you, on my soul, that I am innocent. The charges against me are non-violent.” Friends from Fresno — some from high school, some from the collective — donated what they could. The effort raised $9,300 of a $30,000 pledge. Moore pleaded guilty first, to seven felonies including mail fraud and money laundering. Weeks later, Flores signed a plea agreement and copped to nine charges including wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. Somewhere amid the stress of concurrent civil and criminal cases, they broke up.
In June, Flores arrived for his criminal sentencing in courtroom nine at the First Street U.S. Courthouse in Los Angeles, a Brutalist glass-and-limestone high-rise downtown. (Moore’s is scheduled for October 28.) Anton David was long gone. Flores now wore a white short-sleeved prison jumpsuit with a chain around his hips and cuffs around his wrists. His hair, once expertly teased, lay limp in a messy braid down his back. About two dozen supporters, including his mother, his father, his half-sister Viviana, and some yoga students, filled the benches. His former assistant Halitaj watched from the front row as his lawyer worked to defend the dynamic between Flores and Sawusch as “a symbiotic mutually beneficial relationship in which they planned several business ventures for many months.” In a letter intended to support Flores’s character, Stephen A. Mintz touted his friend’s prodigious street smarts. “Anthony and Moore were not psychiatric experts, and the doctor refused to see any professionals no matter what,” he wrote. “Could anyone else have scored massage therapists and ketamine in helpful doses in mere days?”
Before the judge made his pronouncement, Flores removed his surgical mask to read a letter he’d written to Sawusch. “We were like brothers,” he said in a voice Halitaj didn’t recognize — higher, sweeter than the one she’d known from her time in the house. “I feel so ashamed standing here and admitting that I wronged you, brother, for even a second losing sight of the true nature of what we had.” It would always bring him peace, he said, to know he’d seen “life and fire in your eyes.” He dropped his head. “I am sorry for my crimes,” he said. “My sincerest apologies to the Sawusch family.” U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson was unmoved. “When Flores met that victim at the ice-cream parlor, there was only one thing on his mind,” he said, “a scheme to hijack this man’s fortune.” Flores turned to the front row to face his mother, who remained stoic behind sunglasses as her son was sentenced to 188 months in federal prison, or more than 15 years. As the hushed galley emptied out, Flores’s closing words hung in the stale air: “I love you, Mark. And I will never forget you. I wish we could have had more time together.”
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