This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
More From The Fall Fashion Issue
- How Fashion Critic Cathy Horyn Lost (Then Found) Her Personal Style
- The Pampered Life of a Fashion Supershopper
- Escaping With PinkPantheress
