We Investigated Magic Johnson, Mark Walter... and Your Nest Egg

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is In the end, they are taking money from retail investors and that's the money ultimately that's being invested in funnel into these loans that should get screwed right after this I mean, this is a story you can just like never stop reporting. I think that's the problem. Yes Yeah, I mean, it's the problem of my summer vacation, which you helped ruin Sam compliments I waited like two days. I waited two days to bother you But it's not every summer vacation when a multi-billionaire has their phone and laptop seized on their private jet And then it comes out that that same billionaire is selling the Lakers a year After buying the team that felt like break glass in case of emergency Pablo's music. Yeah Apologize to your daughter Because the Lakers got sold for a record 12 and a half billion dollars to Josh Custer and Bob Eiger And this week the NVA handed out arguably the biggest punishment in pro sports history while the SEC is also now probing dectronics and oh, yeah Mark Walter is a guy that people should probably be aware of Mark Walters insurance companies are shuffling billions of dollars of investments as he faces an intense federal investigation into allegations of multi-billion dollar loan fraud the Department of Justice and the SEC are investigating whether Walter Allegedly used money from insurance companies. He controls to fund his massive sports investments without proper disclosure When a billionaire sports owner is accused of self-dealing. I'm pretty sure you're gonna pick up the phone Yeah, the federal whistleblower parallel investigations by the DOJ and the SEC Couple grand jury subpoenas and violet. I'm sorry that I'm on the phone this much while we're on the beach Mark Walters is a very successful financial services Tycoon from the US and he co-founded a financial services business called Guggenheim partners What has gone on to become an enormously successful fund-based asset manager huge amounts of assets under management Los Angeles Dodgers the Chelsea Football Club Cadillac f1 team and up until recently to Los Angeles Lakers I don't think people realize how crazy this story is like there is a scenario in the multiverse where the guy that owns the Dodgers goes to jail Like it's crazy The number of podcasts I've listened to where people properly pronounce Finance finance finance All of it feels way too complicated for sports fans at first wrap their minds around Because there's all this financial engineering and there's insurance stuff and bond documents Most people aren't Tidilated by insurance bond documents Pablo. I mean look I never assume that my kink is others But there is I think a simple idea At the core of this which is that the public and this is like the throughline of our show it turns out the public does need The insanely and probably impossibly wealthy owners of sports teams to tell us the truth by law About what their money is really doing Sports teams used to be owned by like the richest guy in a town and they love their team so much And they became successful or their parents were successful and then they used that money to buy the team But the thing is that sports teams have become this incredibly expensive asset And so these owners have to go to incredible extremes to raise money to buy these teams And that's how you end up with a laker sale at 12 billion dollars And the term people just need to understand here briefly is leveraged they are leveraging other assets to pay these insane prices on price-added prices and leveraging Sam just means they're using the money that they have to borrow more of it Right and with Mark Walter the big pool of money that he has access to is insurance money The way this works is basically Americans buy life insurance policies They come in two forms one is if something tragic happens to you You've paid into these insurance plans and money will be paid out to your family members who are left behind The other way is while you're working you can pay money into a life and share something called annuities And you end up getting paid out annuities later in your life So you're investing today for some kind of payout tomorrow But the way insurance companies actually work is that they invest those upfront payments That's your parents and your grandparents give them this money with the insurance that they will get Something back and returned as time goes on. This is the nest egg Exactly and historically the insurance companies would invest in safe assets. They'd buy bonds or real estate The kinds of things you could bet on to reliably over time go up But the problem with those things Pablo is that they're boring way more boring than sports teams because they don't enable the owner of an insurance company To keep that much after they distribute to their policy. Yes, so insurance companies they start buying more and more Out there kind of stuff higher upside investments Exactly and a lot of this to be clear is legal the thing is there's one category of investment You're not allowed to make without proper disclosure and that's if you're using insurance money to invest in another one of your own businesses Like say I owned an insurance company and also a Szechuan fish stew soup dumpling restaurant I couldn't use your parents and grandparents insurance payments to invest in my dream of succulent soup dumplings filled with Szechuan fish stew Unless I disclosed that very clearly because people would then be able to understand the kinds of things their money is being used for And that disclosure would be called an affiliate transaction which is basically a deal with yourself Yes, and to regulators an undisclosed affiliate transaction much like the purely hypothetical stew that you've been pitching us Can start to smell You can smell like self-dealing and at a certain point allegedly fraud Allegedly that is allegedly what seemed to have happened with Mark Walter and his firm Guggenheim partners Right, but instead of the fish stew he was investing your parents and grandparents nest egg In sports and so this is where we got to say for the record that Mark Walter's personal holding company TWG global TWG stands for the Walter group has denied any fraud allegations saying last week that quote As it relates to Guggenheim while the investigations originated with the whistleblower concern TWG and Guggenheim have demonstrated there was no wrong doing that there is no victim here That affiliated transactions are common across the insurance industry in that they're not looking to sell their sports assets Including the Los Angeles Dodgers at fire sale prices to raise capital for its insurance operations End quote you'll note that Walter's company to not deny there that it's selling the Lakers in order to raise capital for his insurance operations But he did say pretty clearly that the Dodgers are not for sale. He's saying that we're not going to give this away at a discount No, no, no, yeah, we're gonna charge very high prices of anything unlike normal options where people say up front Hey, you're going to get a really good deal on this because I desperately need money. That's not what's happening here No fire sale prices period. Yeah, yeah, to be clear we have not proven fraud here But what I can say is that our team at Hunter Brook Media as well as the Wall Street Journal and the financial times and Bloomberg A lot of financial journalists have been very deep in those titillating bond documents this summer What it seems like happened is that Mark Walter and Guggenheim partners severely underreported Just how much money was mislabeled and never disclosed as an affiliate transaction And that total the total of affiliated transactions has gone from what his insurance had estimated to be around three billion dollars To now tens of billions of dollars 20 billion dollars some people say significantly more and so this is the smell And the feds have been investigating and and we should also disclose here for people who have not been following how you guys at Hunter Brook media Approach really complicated stories like this. Yes. So here's how Hunter Brook works Hunter Brook Media my team is a team of incredible journalists and truth seekers of all kinds who go figure out what's happening in the world Hunter Brook funds all of this reporting with an affiliate Hunter Brook Capital that supports our journalism And sometimes based on our reporting the fund will take positions in the financial market And right now Hunter Brook Capital does have some positions related to this Guggenheim investigation Which you can see disclosed on our website hunterbrook.com And I want to be clear that in my personal opinion what's so interesting about Mark Walter Is not just that there seem to be all these affiliated transactions that he didn't disclose But that actually a lot of these transactions seem to have worked out He bought sports teams at discounts and as in the case of the Lakers got some pretty crazy upside returns Yeah as an investor the bet being sports will go up Is what his earlier statement was fundamentally alluding to and and look The thing that I did not appreciate about that Increase over time until I start reporting the story myself is that the biggest reason for that increase the biggest catalyst behind this centuries boom in sports team valuations Americans is arguably Mark Walter himself. He bought the Lakers at a then record $10 billion valuation last fall. Before that, 2022, he bought a chunk of Chelsea in Premier League football at a then record valuation of well over $3 billion alongside his partner Todd Bowley, who is also now looking to sell. But the very first time Guggenheim Partners bought the most expensive sports franchise ever. It was 15 years ago, it was 2012, it was Major League Baseball, and Mark Walter bought the Dodgers at $2.15 billion. And in fact, Sam, even the people who had heard of Mark Walter had no idea in 2012, how would the hell he was reaching up to buy the Dodgers in the first place? In your folder in front of you, you will find our pal Andrew Ross Orkin writing in the New York Times Dealbook section in 2012, this, "A quick background check and some back of the envelope math raises an obvious red flag. How on earth can this group of individuals afford to pay $2 billion in cash? The answer is that they probably can't, at least not by themselves." In addition to their own cash, Mr. Walter plans to use money from Guggenheim subsidiaries that are insurance companies, some state regulated, to pay for a big chunk of his purchase of the Dodgers. But I think there's an even bigger reason that Mark Walter was able to dodge all sorts of scrutiny, especially from the world of sports, despite paying more than double, double, the previous record for an American pro sports team, which was the dolphins. And the reason was somebody else on his team. That's a beautiful day to be out here, and a ballpark that I've spent many days eating Dodgers dogs and eating popcorn and watching the Dodgers win world series and watching some of the greatest baseball players in history play for this great organization. I remember being at Sports Illustrated in 2012, Sam, and we did a cover shoot with Magic Johnson. He was on the cover of SI behind home plate at Dodgers Stadium. And it will be unsurprising to anybody's listen to the show, which has investigated Magic Johnson's Twitter account before that Pablo Torrey finds out they do everything from potential insurance fraud to an investigation of Magic Johnson's Twitter account. And then somehow the two of them finally, finally, they overlap in all of his tweets about the Dodgers, a couple of which also happen to be in the folder that brought you. On November 2nd, 2025, Magic tweeted a bunch of trophies. Yes. Find them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, sorry, do we know how, is it his total trophy count? I believe it is. In fact, trophies. Yeah. I mean, that's explained in the next tweet, incidentally, what do you have in front of you? It says 18 championship rings for me and CIA championship with MSU 11 Lakers, five playing five as an owner. And one is an executive. One L.A. Sparks, one L.A. FC. One team liquid. That's an esports team, not a community brand for the whole story we're talking about. And now three with the Dodgers. Yeah. This was all after the Dodgers won that Second Straight World Series last November. But to the employees, the actual people inside of Guggenheim Partners, Sam, which is Mark Walter's investment and advisory financial services firm, it was always clear that the actual controlling owner of the Dodgers was, in fact, their boss, Mark Walter himself. In part, because the Dodgers were part of Walter's recruiting pitch for his company. Because one former Guggenheim insider, an attorney who agreed to talk to me on the condition of anonymity due to the ongoing federal investigation, explained. In 2014, I was working in compliance at a hedge fund and I got a call from the compliance officer who I worked with at a previous firm. And she basically described her new role and mentioned that the job was pretty tough. But, you know, these people over there were a very different breed than what she used to. So she was responsible for working with her billionaires. She was looking for somebody who had my kind of experience looking at things forensically. I was an auditor in my past, you know, with money laundering expertise, re-diving in and you trying to understand financial transactions and who's at the bottom of things. So that's always got my start working at Guggenheim Partners. This source under voice modulation, I should also add, brought decades of experience in compliance to Guggenheim when they got hired. But this job, the new job that they got had another particularly difficult dimension to it because they had to help build a compliance program for Guggenheim from scratch. And, history, we did not know the real reason. We know we were just hired to do this and we don't really told us. But then we came to understand, there was a SEC investigation while we were hired into Todd Bowley borrowing $50 million from one of the clients that client was Michael Milken who was famous for some of the insider trading back in the 80s, those cases resulted in a $20 million fine as part of that settlement. Guggenheim agreed to create this group that was the group that we were there for. So we're designing this program. Part of it is to make sure people like Mark Walter, Todd Bowley do not borrow money from clients. Guggenheim did not have your typical client base, high net worth or businesses, their client base were primarily insurance companies. There was equitrust, there was security benefit, their real life, those were the clients. Pablo, we were supposed to tell this story in a digestible way. And now we're on insurance company. Of course fans can learn to love compliance. And compliance were on Michael Milken. The junk bond king of the 80s, who took a plea deal, admitting to securities fraud and reporting violations, but not officially insider trading to be clear. And at this point, I can just hear people begin to glaze over because I get it, but I just need to assure people Sam that the journey we're about to go on here that yes involves everybody from the dodgers and magic Johnson to the Lakers and LeBron James. This journey is going to simplify what does seem admittedly quite complicated. That's the thing about these kinds of stories, these kinds of arrangements. They are often intentionally inscrutable. It's very hard to understand what's happening because billionaires are very good at making LLCs and entities and making money flow in a way that's much less direct than you sending money to your friend on Venmo, but it's not actually that different. It's actually people paying money to other people to get something in return and what these people got in return in this story. Why this matters is that this story helps explain why Mark Walter sold the Lakers just a year after buying the team. It helps explain how magic Johnson got caught up in a news cycle about potential insurance fraud and why magic Johnson should be concerned based on the new findings we're about to share here today about the federal government's ongoing investigation. It helps explain what happens to your every day investments. What happens when you buy a life insurance policy? What happens with every single one of those dollars between when you pay and when you get that money back and the truth is in the background, billionaires are doing all kinds of creative things with your money that we will explain in this episode if you stick with us. So, one thing I realized after spending the last few weeks talking to our compliance attorney source is that their job at Guggenheim as mandated by Mark Walter's SEC settlement wasn't quite set up to succeed. It wasn't easy, even when a transaction smelled like bulls**t. This transaction that came in late 2015 in December, this one really looks strange. There was a hundred million dollar loan and the other piece to it is there was pressure, there was a lot of pressure on this one, they needed the money fast. Instead of giving us documentation on who beneficial owners or they would give us shorts, very few shorts that you could make on, like our PowerPoint type thing, our policies and procedures that we were developing were like no we can't just rely on some handwritten short that somebody owns an entry, literally no handwritten shorts and so forth. And at first, the compliance department tried pushing back on these weird charts, requesting more documentation and further disclosure on this nine figure transaction. Regrettably, according to our source, the compliance people gave in to what their bosses ultimately wanted, and they let the loan through. Whenever you compromise yourself and do something like that, you know it's eventually gonna get to come back and watch it, because we just promised that to the SEC that we're gonna stop this, which is ridiculous actually when you think about it, because I was feeling pressure and you know, it paid really well. This was the upper echelons of any financial firm I had ever been with. People really wanted to be part of the team, who wants to be the outsider there. Guggenheim's head of compliance for the record would tell the financial press that his department examined all the loans during this time period. That none were handled improperly and all had no your customer due diligence. But the reality of Guggenheim compliance, as our source explained it, it just can't be stressed enough here. The team that these insiders were all invited to be a part of was not only high flying Guggenheim partners. It was also the literal Los Angeles Dodgers, which brings us to yet another source with a very good memory, who had to vet the most astonishing Mark Walter transaction of all. David Samson, can you tell our audience what you were doing back in 2012? In 2012, I was the president of the Miami Marlins, one of 30 teams majorly baseball, one of the 30 teams who votes on all sorts of things, including anytime a team is sold. And you get a memo written by the commissioner's office that explains every deal. But what's always more interesting at owner's meetings are the conversations that happen on the side of what is really going on. The Dodgers were in chapter 11 bankruptcy back in 2012 because the owner was Frank McCourt, who is involved in a divorce from his wife, Jamie McCourt. They're arguing, figuring out how to split up assets. And baseball wanted to get out from under the McCourt. So, there was a sale process. There were several bidders. Mark Walter and Guggenheim were a bidder. The now owner of the Metz, Stephen Cohn, San Cronkey, was a bidder for the Dodgers. The result was that all three parties were right around the same number. Let's call it one and a half billion dollars. Had you heard of Mark Walter before he bid on the Dodgers? I had not. He didn't have a sports empire at that time. We assumed that Magic Johnson was a celebrity endorser. He's an icon in L.A. It's like having a friend of the court. It's like walking around with the Pope. And Mark Walter definitely was walking around with Magic Johnson a lot. We spoke to a former Guggenheim employee who said sometimes magic would just show up in the office. Yeah. And one of people in those offices was our Guggenheim compliance attorney who pointed out wearing Magic Johnson as this brand and or costume while entering the world of sports. Kind of made sense. Mark Walter seemed very shy and quiet. They're like magic. Everyone's going to gravitate towards everyone's going to want to talk to you. You never have to be the center of attention. But establishing sports credibility in Los Angeles was just step one. I think the most fascinating part of this story is what happened after all of those bids that Samson mentioned came in around one and a half billion dollars. All three parties bidding for the Dodgers were in the same neighborhood. Then one day we got information from baseball that a deal had been struck that we needed to approve where the Dodgers would be sold for over two billion dollars to Mark Walter and Guggenheim. The first question that everyone in the owner's room asks what happened. The reason Mark Walter increased his bid for the Dodgers was that at the same time, Mark Walter and Guggenheim got and deal themselves from Major League Baseball where they had a cap given to them of how much broadcast revenue would be subject to revenue sharing. Which essentially means that the MLB allowed the Dodgers to keep more of the money it was making from its TV rights deal in exchange for Walter buying the team at a higher price and that very special arrangement you'd imagine would be very infuriating to say the Miami Marlins. So why would we not be furious? What would be told to us by the commissioner that would make us say, oh, you know what? I understand why you're doing that deal. Hold on. And one big reason it turns out that David Samson was not as mad about that deal was the sheer amount of broadcast revenue that Mark Walter's Dodgers were about to get in their new halivision deal. A regional television deal which would also set a record. And even if it was limited in terms of sharing, was still going to be a significant amount of revenue to share with, yes, the David Samson's of the world. Yes. And right away in December of 2012, shortly after being approved as the new owner of the Dodgers voted in by the likes of the Marlins, Mark Walter starts a new limited liability company called American Media Productions LLC, which has precisely one publicly known asset to this day. And it's a regional television channel, the exclusive home of Dodgers games in the Los Angeles market with Vin Scaldi doing play by play and it's named SportsNet LA, which debuted in 2014. And so how much Sam did SportsNet LA owned by Mark Walter agree to pay the Dodgers, also owned by Mark Walter to broadcast Dodger games exclusively? Walter agreed to pay Walter $8.35 billion over 25 years. Oh, that's the impetus for the increased bid. It was all concurrent. It's not being reported correctly. People are thinking because the TV deals started in 2014 that it was not thought about in April of 12. It makes me laugh. Like all of a sudden, Mark Walter paid $2 billion for the Dodgers and said, Hey, let's negotiate a TV deal. Give me a break. $334 million a year for a local rights deal in Major League Baseball. Tear of my eye. How does that compare to other regional TV deals? I negotiated my Tushy off with Fox to get 80. To this day, an average of $334 million a year doing the math over the course of those 25 years remains by far the largest regional sports television contract that there has ever been. Perhaps because as you point out, Mark Walter was negotiating with Mark Walter. And yet the sheer amount here was not even the most insane part. Sam of this historic deal. Yes, because in addition to the deal between Mark Walter and Mark Walter, there was a third party involved here, and that's Time Warner cable, which guaranteed the entire $8.35 billion 25 year contract. In the event that SportsNet LA, also known as Time Warner SportsNet LA, couldn't make their payment to the Dodgers. Time Warner essentially agreed to backstop the deal. Yes. Like Derek Cheater against the ace. Or your parents guaranteeing the purchase of your first apartment. As in, if Mark Walter could not come up with the money to pay Mark Walter that record setting some of TV money, Time Warner cable would, and this part, I did not understand at all from the perspective of Time Warner cable. And so I once again turn to an MLB team president who was hoping to use this new Time Warner deal that the Dodgers got as precedent to extract a better offer from the Dodgers previous television partner, Fox Sports. You're asking whether it makes sense what Time Warner did and you're talking to someone who was in the room with Fox executives when news of this had come out like the day before and the guy was negotiating with looked at me and said, don't, don't. Don't, David. Do not bring up the Time Warner deal. We're not using that as anything. That is an overpay that they're going to live to regret from the day they sign it. We're pissed that we lost the Dodgers, but we wouldn't have paid that no chance. And yet, if you go to the LA Times, you can find this photo. We're going to show it here. Take it in February, 2014, because there is a grinning magic Johnson who with his right hand, if you look closely, is eating a handful of grapes off a paper plate with a Dodgers logo. And with his left hand, is giving a celebratory pound to a Time Warner executive who is wearing a blue suit and tie. A Dodgers blue suit and tie. But there was, as always, with this story, yet another very important reason that magic and Mark Walter and team Guggenheim were celebrating. They were able to use that guaranteed $8.35 billion deal with Time Warner to offset the $2.15 billion Guggenheim paid for the Dodgers in the first place, as in the actual baseball team. All of which is to say, Mark Walter basically made money the second he bought the Dodgers. It was a win-win-win for team Guggenheim. But there was, because there was no free lunch, A problem. Yes, usually when it seems like there's a bunch of free money, someone is in a tough spot. And in this case, Time Warner cable sports still had to figure out a way to fund their unprecedented TV contract with the Dodgers, which proved almost impossible for a time because Time Warner sports in that LA only aired in a third of the LA market. And all these other major pay TV operators, like the ones David Samson was begging to make a deal with, they refused to carry this new channel according to Los Angeles Times, citing its hefty distribution fee, which basically just means Time Warner paid a certain amount of money for the Dodgers rights, and then they were going to try to charge the other channels some kind of profit, and those other channels were like, absolutely not. Which means that there was another loser worth considering in this story. The people who live in LA, 70% of the fans in LA lose. No one would pay the Dodgers network, the fee that the Dodgers network was asking for. This struggle between Time Warner cable and direct TV and Dish and Uverse, I think basically they've said we're not paying, Time Warner cable says we're not lowering the price. So if you're a Dodgers fan, good luck, you're probably out of luck. It's wild that this happened for years. A majority of Dodgers fans could not watch their favorite team because of the deal that had enabled Mark Walter to own their favorite team. I just can't get over how long this blackout lasted. And you'd think that in a situation like this, things might start getting hairy for Mark Walter, the new owner of this team who's got this entity with this giant TV rights deal, Time Warner Sportsnet LA, but less than two months after the channel's debut in February 2014, something fascinating happened. While the games were blacked out, someone provided a huge capital infusion to Time Warner Sports net LA and its parent company, American Media Productions, whose only known asset again is Sportsnet LA. And this part, and there's always another part in this story, I do not realize until we, along with your team of truth seekers at Hunter Brook Media, started examining a trove of insurance company financial statements, because in your folder now, Sam, is this annual statement filed with the Arizona Department of Insurance, which shows that this special someone who came to help out Sportsnet LA was equitrust life insurance company. Which you may recall as the very sexy sounding company that our insider was talking about earlier, and down on page 93 of equitrust's financial statement, down near the bottom of the page, there's a table full of loans that equitrust is made, you will see what other name, Sam. American Media Productions, LLC, AKA AMP, AKA Mark Walter's company that own Time Warner Sportsnet LA, and when these loans were made, Sam, on April 25, 2014, when equitrust was using the payments from America's parents and grandparents to loan AMP this money, how much money did they loan? A combined total of $350 million. And so it's probably important that we now point out who the owner of equitrust life insurance company was, as of this date, April 25, 2014, as of April 25, 2014, equitrust owner was Mark Walters, Guggenheim partners. And was this transaction disclosed as an affiliate transaction by either side here? No, even though either side is the same side, making this yet another apparent example of the kind of alleged self-dealing that the federal government has been interested in, raising the question of how Mark Walter justified this lack of discretion, which does seem now potentially relevant to the ongoing federal investigation, raising a question for us of how did Mark Walter justify this lack of disclosure? Unfortunately, his company has not responded to Hunter Brooks repeated requests for comment. And they have not responded to ours either. But what we did find is a press release, Sam. This is from one month before the launch of sports in that LA. We are now in January of 2014, and this press release is from the governor of Illinois. But governor Pat Quinn today joined equitrust life insurance company to announce that the company is opening new offices in Illinois that will create 200 jobs in the coming year. Equitrust also announced that Irvin Johnson is becoming a controlling shareholder of the company. Oh yeah, just BT Dubs, Magic Johnson is going to be controlling the life insurance company that Mark Walters AMP would soon be borrowing $350 million from. Which takes us to an article from Forbes, Sam, it's been waiting in your folder because this also meant what? Magic Johnson is now a billionaire. Quote, equitrust is now the biggest asset in the Magic Johnson Enterprises portfolio and with Johnson as its majority owner and it represents just how far he's come as a businessman. Do we know how much Magic Johnson paid to acquire equitrust? We do not. And the deal for the record was not completed until June 24th, 2015. And so if you're not wondering, as we're in 2015, how much the business of Time Warner Sports Net L.A. was losing that same year, the answer, reportedly, was more than $100 million a year. Sounds like a great time for Magic Johnson's life insurance or Mark Walters life insurance to give them hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2015, for those scoring at home was also incidentally the year when Todd Bowley, Walters partner, aforementioned, co-owner of the Dodgers, left Guggenheim and he did not respond to a request for comment. And so just to recap, our new reporting here, Sam, for those who do not find insurance quite as sexy as you and I do, equitrust, which is this life insurance company, was being sold by Mark Walters to Magic Johnson, his fellow Dodgers co-owner. And it was also loaning $350 million to Mark Walters media company. The media company he had started to pay his and Magic Dodgers an average of $334 million a year through this record setting local TV deal that Mark Walters gave to Mark Walters. And in the process, Magic Johnson transformed into a billionaire. I have to ask Pablo, what did your inside source in the compliance department of Mark Walters Guggenheim say about this deal was the sale of equitrust from Guggenheim to Magic Johnson approved by legal was the loan from equitrust to the Dodgers TV station approved by legal were the terms deemed fair? Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. And so I asked our compliance attorney at Guggenheim, who was ostensibly doing the KYC reviews. To know your client due diligence, would your group have been asked to do a KYC on Magic or on that deal for equitrust or no? No, we did not. No, we did not. We did not know it. No one saw that. That probably should have been something that was escalated internally and cleared or wouldn't you know, that's what our group was designed to do to know just to clear any kind of conflict or transaction. So probably should have been. Do you have a sense as to what the primary motivation would be for why Mark Walters sold equitrust to Magic Johnson? I think that Magic Johnson helped them out with the Dodgers deal. That's what I ultimately ate the way they did trying to help out a friend, you know, give him a level of wealth that he'd maybe eaten out before, equitrust put him on the map of being a billionaire who's a massive increase. Right. That's an incredible friend to have. Yeah. I don't know how many friends they've ever been on the planet that have effectively gifted friends acted an entire insurance company to someone else. None of my friends ever gave me. And so we did. Sam was, we took these allegations from this insider at Guggenheim compliance. The Mark Walters company and they did not reply. When we reached out to Magic Johnson, his spokesperson did not respond to our request for comment, but there was another entity, of course, that we had to go request Cabette from. And that entity, I think is the most inexplicable of all of the characters we've discussed so far. And that's Time Warner cable. Everybody acted kind of rationally here if they wanted to make a lot of money, except for Time Warner cable, which made a deal that on day one looked bad. Crazy. And in fact, before day one in 2012, Fox expressed that same view before the team was officially sold to Mark Walters and Guggenheim and Magic Johnson in court, Fox sought ridden affirmation as the previous rights holder for the Dodgers games. That Time Warner cable incorporated or an affiliate is not part of the group buying the equity interest of the Dodgers. And Fox also sought affirmation that the buyer Mark Walters and Guggenheim had not already made formal or informal agreements with Time Warner Cable or any other media outlet for a new contract. - To be clear, this is Time Warner Cable's competitor being like, this makes no (beep) sense. And the Dodgers, according to the LA Times, ultimately did provide Fox with both of those affirmations that they requested. - Although David Samson, once again, for the record, remembers it quite differently. People are thinking because the TV deals started in 2014 and was announced in January of '13 that it was not thought about in April of '12. It makes me laugh. - But a funny thing happened when we went to go look for comment from the Time Warner executive who was responsible for this deal. This is David Rohn, who was the president of Time Warner Cable Sports at the time. - David Rohn, of course, being the same executive, we saw smiling and fist bumping magic Johnson in that photo of the grapes in the LA Times when they launched SportsNet LA in 2014. - This is the man in the Dodger blue suit, whose comment, it turns out, would prove difficult to obtain Sam for a particularly relevant reason. - Because David Rohn, who brokered this big TV deal, the biggest in history of its kind, he has since perhaps unsurprisingly left Time Warner. And where did David Rohn wind up going? (laughs) - David Rohn was hired by none other than Mark Walters, Guggenheim partners, as a senior managing director, serving as the, quote, company wide head of strategy. This despite, according to the Financial Times, him having, quote, no direct investment management experience. - Which is all to say that David Rohn, in so many words, officially became part of the team. - Who wants to be an outsider? - And the title that David Rohn now has at Guggenheim, you may not be shocked to learn, is Managing Partner. - Not a bad place to land after making what seemed to be one of the worst TV deals of all time from Time Warner's perspective. A deal so bad, Time Warner had to report it in its filings repeatedly as a real risk to its business before Time Warner eventually sold to charter communications. - But there was some good news for Time Warner cable, which had, again, guaranteed the full length of this more than $8 billion deal to the Dodgers, which is that American media productions, they got that loan from Equitrust for $350 million from Mark Walters' life insurance. - Yes, and it wasn't the only Mark Walter linked life insurance to give a loan to American media productions. In total, according to the author, Nick Nemeth, of the mispriced assets sub-stack, who reviewed some even more sexy bond filings, there were four other life insurers tied to Walter, who loaned a grand total of $1.45 billion to American media productions, which provides some cushion for Time Warner before it needs to guarantee the proverbial first apartment on that deal. - And so we had lots of questions, of course, for David Rowne and for Time Warner, about all of these payments, but when we asked about how we felt about the deal for Time Warner Sports and L.A., that infuriated these other teams about any of these conflicts of interest potentially, about whether his deal making with the Dodgers influenced his eventual landing spot with Mark Walter at Guggenheim, he did not respond. Not overlinked in where I sent the messages, and a spokesperson for Guggenheim partners did not respond either. - But Rowne did say way back in 2013 that the deal quote, "Ferthers are efforts to attain greater certainty and control over local and regional sports programming costs." - Be collapse of regional sports television aside, which is a larger story, perhaps a sequel to this saga. I do wanna take us back to the present tense, because it is worth noting, Sam, that veteran sports business journalist, John Orrand recently reported something kind of perfect, which is now maybe a bit of a coda to this part of the story that we have since confirmed, which is that before Mark Walter agreed to sell the Lakers to Josh Cuscher and Bob Eiger, the whole deal that kicked off the news cycle that got us interested in this in their first place. Mark Walter first tried to do something else. He approached the company, which now owns Time Warner Cable, and thus sports net L.A.'s multi-billion dollar Albatross of a deal with the Dodgers. This is charter communications, and Walter offered to terminate that beautiful television contract early, even though it runs through 2038, if charter would just give him a lump sum payment right now. - Unfortunately for Walter, according to that reporting, those talks went nowhere, and that's when Walter decided he would sell the Lakers for $12.5 billion instead. - Although Dodgers president and co-owner Stan Kasten has repeatedly told reporters, quote, "The Lakers sale had nothing to do with the Dodgers, "it has not impacted the Dodgers, "and is not going to impact the Dodgers." - With Mark Walter's company also adding last week in part quote, the allegation that the Los Angeles Dodgers were acquired or have been funded improperly is false and not supported by the facts. The Dodgers transaction was subject to significant scrutiny and complied with all rules and regulations that govern the purchase of major league baseball teams. End quote. - It brings us to one last question for our friend David Samson, who was a part of major league baseball's own scrutiny and compliance process with Mark Walter. - Do you think any part of Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, any part of you and your fellow owners feels a little silly given that maybe this all wasn't exactly how it was presented? - I would do it again and twice on Sunday, well silly. It's the opposite, it was the springboard from which these amazing valuations have come. If you asked Bud and he were honest with you, he would tell you that his main job was not the fans, it wasn't the players, his main job was to increase the value of the 30 teams. And he did it with this deal that was cut with Mark Walter. If the Dodgers sell for $2 billion, you get to walk into the bank and say, "Look what the Marlins are worth right now." - And Bud Selig, for what it's worth, did tell the athletic that he does not recall whether he was concerned at the time about all of this insurance money flying around. - Which is to say, nobody was mad at Mark Walter and Magic Johnson for allegedly making these deals with Mark Walter and Magic Johnson because that deal meant everyone who owned an MLB team was richer. - Yes, it is the same reason why Adam Silver and NBA owners, several of whom we have investigated together are incredibly excited that Mark Walter's Lakers just sold for 12 and a half billion (beep) dollars. - I don't know what's gonna happen to people's insurance policies, I hope that they're okay, but I do take comfort going to sleep at night, knowing that the billionaires are even richer because of Mark Walter. - Thank God. - I'll drink to that. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - But the story is not over yet. Sam, because while all these billionaires who own sports teams are thrilled about all of these developments, the question of how Magic Johnson himself has been operating a life insurance company. The thing that Forbes pointed out is the biggest asset in his portfolio. The thing that made him a billionaire. That question remains interesting to both our Guggenheim compliance source, as well as it seems the federal government. - Yes, and I wanna start by saying, Magic Johnson did not run equitrust alone. To be the president and CEO of equitrust, Magic entrusted and appointed one of his closest friends, a guy named Eric Holleman, who before getting into the life insurance business, was the president of a company called Magic Johnson Enterprises. - And if you're a fan of the WNBA, you may recognize him also as the governor of Mark Walter's WNBA team, the LA Sparks. - This is Magic's Guy. - And I know that because if you go to @MagicJohnson over on Twitter, you can pour over his many exclamation points to see that he has mentioned Eric Holleman at least 20 times that we saw. - Including two tweets about how Magic brought Holleman to hang out at the White House. A decade apart, including as Magic's plus one, when he won the presidential medal of freedom from Donald Trump alongside Denzel Washington. - Yeah, quote, I wanna congratulate my great friend, Denzel Washington, on receiving his presidential medal of freedom today as well is just a great humble break. (laughing) - The kind that we've come to appreciate from @MagicJohnson, which has, by the way, likewise tweeted about equitrust, more than a dozen times with commentaries such as, quote, I want to introduce my team at Equitrust to the world. Exclamation mark, quote. - It wasn't some kind of secret that he owned a life insurer. And for that matter, it wasn't a secret that he was tight with Mark Walter, who he also tweeted about again and again and again. - Yes, the guy who sold Equitrust to Magic in the first place, spring us to this tweet in your folder, Sam, from the same month that the FBI, I'm excited about the new L.A. Sparks State of the Art Practice Facility, which will be the best in all of the WNBA. I want to congratulate my Sparks partner and new Laker's owner, Mark Walter, as well as my business partner, Eric Holleman, for making this Dream Facility come to fruition. Just three months before this tweet, speaking of Dream Facilities, Walter had announced, you may recall, that he was buying the Lakers at that record setting, $10 billion valuation, which magic, yes, also tweeted about. Quote, Laker's fans should be ecstatic. A few things I can tell you about, Mark. He's driven by winning, excellence, and doing everything the right way, and he will put in the resources needed to win. But in terms of what you can tell us, Sam, about how equitrust did things, what resources they were using to win, what did the insurance filings tell you when you poured over them in terms of their SEC disclosure? My team looked through all of these filings and found an insurance company that seemed to resemble Mark Walter's approach. We found one example, for instance, where equitrust had made an investment in an entity called JLC. And then when you look up JLC, you see that it's an infrastructure-focused investment business, where magic Johnson is a co-owner, and Holleman is a managing director. That's insurance money from Magic Johnson's insure going into a totally separate investment fund run by Magic Johnson and Holleman. It's all one big spider-man meme. Which feels very obviously affiliated, in other words. It sure seems affiliated, but if you look at equitrust 2025 annual statement, just like its prior statements, it places JLC positions in the unaffiliated section and reports no affiliated invested assets in the relevant totals. And the reason this all matters, Pablo, isn't because like we love regulations and rules and disclosures, it's because when you buy an insurance policy, it's a contract. One that says, if anything happens to you, your loved ones will be all right. That's sacred, and you want to make sure that between now and then, your insurer isn't taking that trust and using it to enrich themselves through a totally separate business. This is ostensibly what the federal government would be interested in, and yet as Magic's personal responsibility here is concerned. I do think it was important for us to note, near the end here, another note about equitrust life insurance company. Which is that as of last November amid this ongoing federal investigation, Magic did something else reminiscent of Mark Walter. He stopped being the controlling owner of equitrust. When you look at the documents, you see very clearly that last November, equitrust was sold to another company called Amistad Financial, which is notable if you follow finance, because right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amistad Financial is one of the four entities, linked to Mark Walter, that have been caught up in the DOJ and SEC investigation into Guggenheim partners that we've been talking about this entire time. And who is in charge of Amistad, Sam? Amistad's managing founder is Eric Hollam, Magic's right-hand man. And what was that transaction like? How much did Hollam in pay to Magic for equitrust? There's not that much known about how exactly this purchase went down, how much, if any, of equitrust, Magic Johnson still owns. What we do know is that Amistad took out a big loan to be able to buy equitrust and that fish the ratings agency downgraded equitrust outlook to negative after this transaction. And so what does this mean then for Magic's exposure in terms of the federal government? It's a little bit unclear, but what we do know is that the entity formerly known as Equitrust Magic Johnson's insurance company is now part of an insurance company being actively probed by the Department of Justice. That's run by Magic Johnson's best friend, Eric Hollam. And so we of course reached out to Magic about this part as well and got nothing back from his rep. That's a good note here, just briefly. Something about the name Amistad, because I do think for people who may be familiar with the Steven Spielberg movie, there are some profound meanings that one might infer. One of them, of course, refers to the historic slave revolt that took place on a Spanish ship named the Amistad and the subsequent historic 19th century US Supreme Court case about the freedom of those very brave men. The other meaning, more literally, is in Spanish, friendship. And it's certainly a great act of friendship to buy your friend's life and share. At a time when it may or may not be under the scrutiny of the Department of Justice. And you'd think, given the scale of this transaction, it seems like Amistad raised $3 billion of debt in part to buy equitrust. You'd think that Magic Johnson might celebrate this transaction, the transaction that made him a billionaire, but despite the fact that he tweets about almost every single thing in his life, the sale of equitrust was not mentioned by At Magic Johnson once. Which is conspicuous, given how often he tweeted about equitrust in Eric Hollam in previously, one might say. Conspicuous indeed. Which leaves us wondering, rightfully, I think, about the people who entrusted their money to equitrust in Amistad and Magic Johnson and Eric Hollam in and Mark Walter. Because these people are the ones who helped enable these billionaires to financially reengineer this booming sports landscape. And by these people, Pablo means you, the ordinary Americans whose money has been used to help fund the purchases of these sports teams as they've gotten ever more expensive. And the question that we need to then ask as we assess the risk of these investments is, what if all of this, given how we understand Mark Walter boosted the prices of these teams, what if all of this is also taking the shape of a bubble as our compliance attorney source explains? So it's amazing that this entire system is built on retail investors. So they have an entire retail investor base in these life insurance policies. They've got a constant cash flow into their insurance companies from like John Q. Public or a parents that buy a new reason life insurance. Ultimately, that's what's feeding all this. That's why the government state government regulars are so concerned. They're trying to protect the public who have these life insurance policies and annuities from one day holding the bed. Just in the end, these insurance companies, when we've seen this in the past, but what if everything goes wrong and they blow themselves out? They just go bankrupt. That's what rich people do. They just go bankrupt and leave the individual people, the policyholders. In the end, they are taking money from retail investors, and that's the money ultimately that's being invested in funnel into these loans. That's who gets screwed. Okay, fine. This maybe is not actually a sexy story, but there is grueling. There is screwing. Someone is getting screwed over here. It's not Magic Johnson and it's not Mark Walter. It's potentially the ordinary Americans whose money is being invested in the billionaire versions of Szechuan fish stew soup dumpling restaurants. As the federal government is chasing down that smell, we are in late July. This is after the news for us broke about the investigation into Guggenheim partners. Something amazing happens on television, which is that the man who avoided being the center of attention for so long, Mark Walter decides to visit the man who has always embraced it. Does this man happen to live in the same house Magic Johnson has visited repeatedly with his business partner, Eric Holleman? Not only that, Mark Walter brought to this very special house a very special gift. Thank you. Wow. That looks good. I'd like to present this to you as a thank you. Wow. Oh, you have to be kidding. Wow. Do I have to report this? I don't want to report this. That's beautiful. Thank you very much. That's so good. That's really good. There's Donald Trump wondering if he needs to disclose that he now owns a Dodgers World Series ring, which led me to ask our source what he thought about his old boss in that video. Can you imagine what that conversation was like? It's just been announced that he's under investigation by the Southern District of New York, which is being run by a guy that an M of J Clay news. Now like the head of the intelligence service for entire country. And you know, you'd love to hate Trump. People come to kiss his ring. That's it. Yeah, it's come to get more and then kiss it, right? So he's like, he's had pretty unbelievable actually. For what is worth Sam? Nobody I have talked to in the world of sports can remember the owner of a professional sports. Team awarding a championship ring to a president at the White House ceremony itself, which in retrospect, at least to me, seems something like an invitation for Trump to do something that Maddie Johnson and Eric Holleman and David Rohn and even our voice modulated compliance attorney source at Guggenheim had all done before to varying degrees of regret. It seemed like an invitation to be part of the team. (upbeat music) Publicory Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lomon, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Studio engineering by R.G. Systems, sound designed by Andrew Bursick, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. With additional reporting for this episode, by J.D. John Jacques, Vicus Kumar, and Matthew Termini. You can read much more, by the way, over at 100 Brook Media's site, that is h-n-t-r-b-r-k-dot-com. And our team, we'll talk to you next time. (upbeat music)