On sweltering days, of which there are plenty in these parts, the interior of Mongos Ice House in Montgomery, Texas, stays dark and cool behind big, reflective glass windows. Video gambling machines line the walls, cigarette smoke hovers in the air, and the crowd at this strip-mall dive 50 miles north of Houston leans local but friendly, in a Texas way.

Mounted on a post by the bar is a bell with a handwritten sign: “Ring the bell, buy a round for the house!”

An occasional ebullient video jackpot winner might give the bell’s rope a tug, patrons say, but it didn’t ring often.

That is, until the Californian with the big bank account came to town.

Michelle Patino, founder of a Sonoma County-based company called DEMA Consulting and Management, purchased a condo next to Lake Conroe, one of Montgomery’s chief attractions, in November 2022. She soon developed a reputation as a big spender at the local watering hole.

It became one of the better bets at Mongos that if Patino was there, “that bell was going to ring once or twice a night,” one patron said last fall. He, like two other regulars who shared their recollections for this story, asked to remain anonymous. They didn’t want to be labeled gossips in a small town, and they worried about retribution or harassment from Patino.

“It’s her way of showing off ‘I got money,’ and people congregated to her,” the regular said. “She’s throwing it away.”

Another person who saw Patino’s bar tabs said that each ring of the bell would cost hundreds of dollars, sometimes more than a thousand, depending on the crowd. Patino tipped well, regularly adding $300 to $400 to the already hefty tabs. That person said Patino would buy rounds for the bar as often as once a week over the course of a year and a half. And she paid for other fun too, renting party buses for birthdays or to take a group to the world-famous rodeo in Houston.

It wasn’t all frivolity. At a charity auction to help a local woman with her medical bills, Patino ran up the bids, donating $2,000 for a cowboy hat and as much as $5,000 for two handguns.

Her largesse, according to the three people, also insulated Patino.

When two bartenders sought to ban Patino for aggressive behavior in August 2024, the owner overruled them, inviting her back despite a police restraining order, a copy of which was reviewed for this story.

Ultimately, the two bartenders, one a Mongos fixture for years, quit rather than deal with Patino, according to the three bar patrons.

Before all that, Patino was leading a startup homeless services company with a lucrative no-bid contract in Sonoma County and had expanded its operations into Harris County, Texas, after Sonoma County’s former health director had taken over the top health services job there.

The former emergency room nurse started her company in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, hoping to aid local governments responding to disasters. The name DEMA reflects its mission: Disaster Emergency Medical Assistance. Two years ago this summer, The Press Democrat — now part of Media News Group, also the parent company of Sonoma magazine — published the first installment of a wide-ranging investigation into Patino and her company. Initially discounted by some county officials, that investigation triggered a probe that led to the discovery that $11 million or more in public money wasn’t properly accounted for.

Additionally, The Press Democrat identified two cases in which Patino’s relationships with county officials pushed ethical boundaries.

In one, Patino briefly hired the daughter of Tina Rivera, the then-Sonoma County Health Services director who oversaw DEMA’s contract. Patino said she paid Rivera’s daughter only about $600 during that short-lived work stint. But Rivera did not inform county officials of her daughter’s employment by DEMA, county administrator Christina Rivera, who is not related to Tina Rivera, told The Press Democrat.

In the other, Patino extended a consulting offer to the husband of Barbie Robinson, the former Sonoma County Health director who helped propel DEMA’s rise before moving to Texas and overseeing DEMA’s government work there. That instance, documented as part of a criminal case against Robinson in Texas that has since been dropped, came on top of previous reports that she had offered a consulting contract to Robinson.

In a September 2021 email to Robinson, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, Patino expressed frustration that she had been blocked from a contract to provide meals at Sonoma County homeless services sites DEMA had been managing. County officials told her DEMA’s proposal represented a conflict of interest. “I can guarantee we came in cheaper with more benefits with our bid,” she wrote to Robinson.

In other emails, Patino suggested hiring Robinson as a consultant for help with “legal issues we may have in California.” The offer came as DEMA was competing for a major contract to run a crisis response program in Harris County. Robinson sat on the selection committee, and that contract later became a focus of the now-ended criminal investigation in Texas.

In California, Patino has faced scrutiny from law enforcement, along with civil lawsuits filed by former employees.

FBI agents in February descended on her Santa Rosa home with a search warrant — part of a federal investigation about which little is known. No criminal charges related to DEMA have been filed.

Separately, Patino faces misdemeanor charges in Sonoma County after repeatedly violating a restraining order obtained by her estranged domestic partner and former business partner, Mica Pangborn.

In an interview with The Press Democrat late last year, Patino sought to blame the company’s accounting shortcomings on her ex, saying it was Pangborn that handled the company’s billing. But Pangborn has alleged in court it was Patino who controlled the company’s money. And in an acrimonious divorce proceeding, Pangborn has repeatedly sought spousal support from Patino.

Patino concedes she might have made mistakes as a novice government contractor. But she has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing regarding DEMA’s work. “I didn’t know all the rules, I didn’t know everything, but I also know that there’s ethical things and there’s morals and you don’t cross the line. I didn’t cross those lines,” she said late last year. “I’m a person of honesty and integrity. I don’t lie, cheat, or steal.”

In emails and remarks to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, Patino held herself up as a hero of the pandemic.

“This company [DEMA] fell in my lap, literally, and I was completely unprepared and had no idea what it all entailed except I knew how to save lives,” she wrote to county auditor Erick Roeser and other officials. “Did you actually think I was occupied with anything else? No. Too many people were dying (in the pandemic). I did not have a business plan and sought the county’s direction and advice on all matters.”

Indeed, Patino didn’t operate in a vacuum. Sonoma County officials pushed $27 million to Patino’s company, well above other homeless service provider contracts, with county auditor Roeser confirming flawed oversight over those funds.

Sonoma County officials have yet to publicly account for what went wrong. Nor have the county supervisors announced any internal inquiries beyond the limited financial investigation that uncovered $11 million in billing unsupported by records.

Tina Rivera, who directed the Sonoma County health department for much of DEMA’s tenure after inheriting oversight of the company from Barbie Robinson, resigned in August, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family.

Robinson was fired by Harris County a week after Rivera’s last day in California. Her dismissal came amid an investigation by former Harris County top prosecutor Kim Ogg, whose office filed its criminal case against Robinson during Ogg’s last months in office. Ogg, who lost her reelection bid in November, had often been at odds with Democratic Harris County commissioners, and her charges against Robinson added to other corruption cases she’d brought against government officials tied to Harris County Democrats.

Ogg’s successor, Sean Teare, dropped all the charges against Robinson in May, saying there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the allegations of bid-rigging and corruption — including a lack of evidence that Robinson or her husband accepted any money from Patino.

In a statement announcing his decision, Teare suggested the case had been politically motivated. In response, Ogg suggested Teare dropped the cases to protect the county commissioners.

“Ms. Robinson is thankful that the truth has come to light and that this politically driven case is finally behind her,” Robinson’s attorney told Houston Public Media.

While the Texas case is over, the activity in February at Patino’s Santa Rosa house indicates continued interest from law enforcement here. FBI officials have declined to comment on the scope or thrust of their investigation in Northern California, which began in partnership with Santa Rosa police.

The vast majority of the money Sonoma County paid DEMA was to be reimbursed by the federal government through pandemic response funds. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. Department of Justice criminally charged more than 3,500 people and seized more than $1.4 billion in assets as it chased down fraud across the spectrum of unprecedented government spending during the pandemic. It’s unclear what impact the Trump administration, which has brought significant changes to both the FBI and Federal Emergency Management Agency — the body county officials hoped would ultimately reimburse Sonoma County taxpayers for DEMA’s bills — could have on the situation.

Like so much of Sonoma County’s recent history, DEMA’s roots trace back to the fateful and deadly North Bay firestorms in 2017.

Back then, before the investigations and resignations, and before the bar tabs and luxury cars and new homes, Patino was an emergency room nurse and a hero.

She had only recently moved to the county from San Jose and was working in Kaiser Permanente’s Santa Rosa emergency room. Patino wasn’t on shift at the hospital during its dramatic evacuation in the early morning hours as the Tubbs Fire bore down on the facility. But waking up and learning the hospital was closed, she looked for a way to chip in. She and Pangborn were renting a home next to the Petaluma Fairgrounds at the time. The couple had just moved in together, Patino recounted in an August 2023 Press Democrat interview, and had duplicates of household items like pillows and blankets. They gathered bedding and brought it to an evacuation center coming together at the fairgrounds.

When they arrived, Patino found refugees who had fled their homes — many were elderly and had left without critical medications. They needed help. “I started going around talking to every single individual, getting all their medical history,” she recalled. She returned every day for weeks, bringing in other nurses and paramedics, and organized them into a health clinic with 30 beds. She worked 12- to 16-hour days, for days on end, she said.

“I’m one of those people that I just can go,” she said. “You get in those situations … I’m an adrenaline junkie, that’s why I work in the ER and those high [intensity] areas, and I just go, go, go, go.”

Two years later, she did the same thing during the Kincade Fire, she said. This time she responded to a call from a doctor who, according to Patino, told her, “Get over here … they don’t know what’s going on. We need to get this place up and going or people are going to die.”

Those experiences sparked the idea for DEMA.

In spring 2020, as public health officials scrambled to give people without stable housing infected with Covid-19 a place to ride out the virus, Petaluma Health Center enlisted Patino, this time at a county-run shelter at Sonoma State University.

Patino and Pangborn had filed paperwork to start DEMA as a nonprofit but didn’t complete the process. Soon after Patino started at the SSU site, Petaluma Health Center’s leadership decided it could not continue to run it.

Rivera and Robinson each point to the other as the first to bring DEMA on. Whatever the path, Patino stepped into the void. Rushing to get contracted and get to work, according to Patino, they registered DEMA as a sole proprietorship in her name, records show. The business designation gave Patino direct control over the company and, unlike with a nonprofit, limited public insight into revenue and expenses.

Soon, health officials were giving DEMA more and more control over the SSU site and putting other homeless care sites under their supervision.

“I’m one of those people, I don’t say no,” Patino said.

DEMA boomed. By December 2021, Patino had signed a contract with Rivera for up to $21 million, and DEMA would continue to receive expansions on those contracts for the next three years. Because of emergency orders issued during the pandemic, those contracts were issued and extended without competitive bidding, even after the company came under scrutiny.

Internal emails from the first months of the company obtained by The Press Democrat show Patino riding the rush of the company’s explosive growth.

“I am absolutely the luckiest girl in the world,” Patino wrote, closing out an email to her staff in October 2020. “I have an amazing wife, family, career, and now I have an amazing team that impresses and amazes me in every way every day … We are a unique set of professionals, with hearts of gold, and an abundance of varying skill sets. That makes you, that makes Team DEMA, one hell of a force to be reckoned with.”

Patino paid her employees well, according to nearly two dozen people who have spoken to The Press Democrat over the past two years. The high salaries made up for a work environment that was often chaotic, as Patino’s leadership alternated between charming and erratic, according to people who interacted closely with her.

Two former employees, one in California and one in Texas, sued the company over a workplace culture they described as discriminatory or toxic, and nearly all the former employees who spoke to The Press Democrat said they feared retaliation from Patino both during and after their time with the company. Pangborn, who was chief financial officer for DEMA, would ultimately accuse Patino of sustained domestic abuse over years of their relationship. In March 2024, Patino fired her partner days before Pangborn obtained a temporary restraining order from a judge, which has since been made permanent.

Patino spent the first year of the company’s life “saying she never took a paycheck for herself,” said a longtime DEMA employee who asked not to be named because he, like others, fears retaliation or harassment from Patino. But as time went on, he said, she began “boast(ing) about how much money she was making.”

Around the time of the fires, public records show both Patino and Pangborn faced financial difficulties. At least two banks were pursuing judgments against Patino in 2018, according to court records, and the IRS had tax liens on her and Pangborn that stretched into the tens of thousands of dollars.

DEMA quickly reversed their fortunes. According to public records, Patino and Pangborn bought a $628,000 house in Santa Rosa in June 2021, and purchased the Texas condo the following fall. In both cases, the public record holds no indication of a mortgage, implying a cash purchase. There are other signs of significant wealth from their company. DEMA purchased a warehouse in downtown Houston later in 2022, appraised at just under $300,000. Again, there is no public record of a mortgage, and the deed implies a cash purchase.

The couple’s divorce records indicate they also owned a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, a second, older model 4Runner, and a 2018 BMW. Then there’s the $50,000 camper purchased in June 2023 and the 2024 BMW coupe, valued by the California DMV at around $77,000, that Patino registered in April of that year. That last purchase sparked outrage among some of her Sonoma County employees, because it came as the company was collapsing and they had gone weeks without pay.

As the pandemic wore on, Patino sought to move beyond health care, as she put it, and began seeking other contracts involved in the shelter effort. Records and interviews show she tried to shift contracts for both food service and security from other vendors to DEMA.

Despite the county auditor’s findings on DEMA’s flawed accounting practices early last year, Sonoma County supervisors never ordered a deeper investigation.

Supervisor David Rabbitt, the board’s chairman at that time, instead publicly called on the federal government to figure out whether any taxpayer dollars had been wasted in Sonoma County.

Now, DEMA appears defunct.

In April 2024, Sonoma County supervisors voted to cease doing business with DEMA. The company laid off its staff the following month, abandoning its two remaining homeless services sites.

About eight months later, in December, Harris County commissioners voted to sever their ties to the company, ending its last remaining contract in January.

Patino remains in Texas, according to people familiar with her whereabouts. In a March filing, Patino’s Sonoma County lawyer asked to be removed as her counsel in a suit brought by a former DEMA paramedic against Patino and other DEMA officials over allegations of harassment and wrongful termination. The attorney told the judge Patino “has withdrawn to Texas” and stopped communicating with him and his firm. The judge granted his request. The case is currently set for trial in August.

Among Patino’s many troubles in the wake of DEMA is one that hits hard.

The California Board of Registered Nursing in October ordered her to undergo an examination of her mental and physical health after finding there was “reasonable cause to believe that (Patino) was unable to practice nursing with reasonable skill and safety to patients.”

That finding came in response to a complaint that is not public record, according to a board spokesperson.

But the regulator’s website indicates Patino never replied. In January, the board revoked the license she had held since 2001.

The license that enabled her to save lives.

The license that made her a hero.

Read The Press Democrat’s full investigation of the Sonoma County DEMA scandal here.