NEW: Magic Johnson’s Life Insurer Backed Magic Johnson’s Investment Fund — and a Dodgers TV Deal

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short bonds issued by Sammons Financial Group and short $GOF. Positions may change at any time. This article is not investment advice or any recommendation. See full disclosures below.

If one person can be credited with the assist on Magic Johnson becoming a billionaire, it may be Mark Walter.

Johnson earned about $40 million during his NBA career. He built a successful business with theater, restaurant, and healthcare assets under the banner of Magic Johnson Enterprises. But when Forbes declared him a billionaire in 2023, it attributed most of his fortune to one investment: EquiTrust Life Insurance Company.

EquiTrust was not a classic Magic Johnson business. It sells annuities and life insurance to ordinary Americans, then invests their premiums to meet promises that could stretch decades into the future.

Johnson bought control of it from the same group that brought him into baseball: Guggenheim Partners, the firm co-founded and run by Dodgers and Lakers owner Mark Walter. Guggenheim continued managing EquiTrust’s investments after the sale.

That history is suddenly … pretty interesting!

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining whether Walter or his companies improperly failed to disclose that billions of dollars in insurance money were loaned to other businesses Walter controlled, according to The Wall Street Journal. TWG Global, Walter’s holding company, said it “acted in good faith.”

The investigation reportedly began centered on two Walter-controlled life insurers: Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life & Annuity. Then, The Wall Street Journal reported that four intermediary entities are also under scrutiny: ABS Capital, Bradford Allen, Hudson Trading, and Amistad.

Amistad purchased Johnson’s insurer, EquiTrust, last year and is run by Johnson’s longtime business partner, Eric Holoman.

The Journal later reported that EquiTrust lent large sums to vehicles tied to some of the other intermediaries under investigation.

A Hunterbrook Media review of EquiTrust’s statements, insurance statutory filings, and SEC documents found that Johnson’s insurer invested in businesses tied to Johnson and Holoman, EquiTrust’s longtime CEO.

This includes an investment of more than $100 million in JLC Infrastructure, a fund whose principals are Johnson and Holoman. EquiTrust also holds $350 million of debt issued by the television company that has the media rights for the Dodgers, an MLB team co-owned by Johnson and Walter. These positions are listed in EquiTrust’s filings as unaffiliated investments.

That may be appropriate. Ultimately, regulators will need to decide, and Hunterbrook does not have access to complete information. But the stakes of an improper disclosure could be high.

“When you misrepresent whether an entity is affiliated or not, that is serious business, because it’s the only way the regulators can determine if a deal is fair and reasonable,” Tom Gober, a former insurance regulator, told Hunterbrook. “The only way for us to know is if they report it as affiliated. You’re kind of counting on them.”

“It's my professional opinion that it certainly appears that all of these groups, frankly, EquiTrust, Group 1001 [another Walter insurer], Amistad, I feel like all of those share a common thread that's greater than just having asset management work at Guggenheim,” he said.

Asked specific questions about their conduct, representatives for Johnson, Holoman, Equitrust, and others did not reply.

The Dodgers Deal

In 2014, EquiTrust acquired $350 million of debt issued by Walter’s American Media Productions (AMP), the company behind SportsNet LA — a television network with a multi-billion-dollar deal for the right to air Dodgers games.

At the time of the loan, Guggenheim owned EquiTrust, but Johnson’s planned purchase of the insurer had been announced.

The network was in trouble: It had launched that February, but the region's TV providers had refused to pay its asking price, leaving roughly 70% of Los Angeles unable to watch the games. The mayor got involved. It was a whole thing.

Amid this chaos, EquiTrust acquired AMP’s debt.

What makes the deal notable in the context of the federal probe is that Walter and Johnson appear to be on all sides of it. EquiTrust was apparently using policyholder money to finance Walter’s embattled television company, which in turn would pay the team Walter and Johnson owned together.

It’s the kind of ouroboros one might expect to be disclosed to ordinary Americans paying for policies from life insurers like EquiTrust — to say nothing of insurance regulators. (Iowa's insurance holding company law, for instance, states that material transactions between an insurer and its "affiliates" must be fair, reasonable, and reported so as to “clearly and accurately disclose the precise nature and details of the transactions.")

But across EquiTrust filings reviewed by Hunterbrook, this transaction was not disclosed as being between related parties.

And according to an analysis from Mispriced Assets author Nick Nemeth, it wasn’t just EquiTrust buying debt from Walter’s television holding company. In total, five insurers tied to Walter reportedly held approximately $1.45 billion of AMP notes.

None of this establishes wrongdoing. Johnson may not have known of or approved the deal, which predated his ownership of EquiTrust. And because Johnson owns just a minority interest in the Dodgers, and does not control the team, this investment may indeed have been properly categorized as unaffiliated. (Perhaps this is a reason Walter sold Johnson the insurer in the first place! Perhaps not!)

But either way, it is an example of how fluidly money seemed to move between the various organizations under the control of the Dodgers’ owners.

And what Hunterbrook is reporting today is that it’s not a one-off.

The Infrastructure Deal

Johnson, Holoman and others including investment firm Loop Capital manage a fund called JLC Infrastructure, which invests in utilities and transportation assets.

A document filed with the SEC put the first capital raised for JLC Infrastructure Fund I on July 27, 2017.

Just days later, on August 3, 2017, EquiTrust, which was then owned by Johnson with Holoman as its CEO, invested in JLC Fund I. That investment had a carrying value of $100.5 million in the insurer’s 2025 annual statement.

A week after that, a Walter insurer, Delaware Life (a focus of the Department of Justice’s probe), invested in JLC Infrastructure. Its stake was worth $80.5 million as of December 2025.

Neither EquiTrust nor Delaware Life seems to label these investments as affiliated in any of the many filings reviewed by Hunterbrook.

Nor does Clear Spring Life & Annuity, another Walter insurer under scrutiny that invested in JLC Infrastructure in 2020. Its investment had a fair value of just over $100 million as of 2025, similar to EquiTrust’s.

Together, the three insurers reported around $280 million in JLC Fund I positions, an amount equal to almost two-thirds of the fund’s $423.9 million gross asset value in JLC’s Form ADV SEC filing.

Perhaps more striking, that same Form ADV reports that the fund’s manager and its “related persons” are beneficial owners of just 1% of it. Yet EquiTrust, which shares management and ownership with JLC, has a stake equal to roughly 24% of the entire fund.

Should any of these investments be disclosed as related party transactions?

That’s for regulators to decide.

What’s clear: The same Johnson-controlled trust appeared in the ownership chains of both EquiTrust and JLC.

In a 2026 Form ADV, JLC’s manager is listed as 25% to 50% owned by JP3 LLC — an entity that is itself listed as at least 75% owned by the June Bug Lifetime Trust, whose trustee is listed as “Johnson, Earvin” and identified as a “control person.”

EquiTrust’s filing through year-end 2024 identifies the same June Bug trust as the sole owner of the entity through which Johnson controlled the insurer.

Holoman appears to have ended up on both sides, too. The Form ADV says his Presidio Capital Holdings owned 10% to 25% of JLC’s manager. He had been appointed chief executive of EquiTrust by April 2017, before Fund I made its first sale.

On the JLC side, the overlap wasn’t entirely hidden from investors. Its disclosure brochure said that Johnson owned a controlling interest in EquiTrust and that Holoman was simultaneously a JLC managing director and EquiTrust’s president and chief executive.

But just by reading EquiTrust’s statutory filing, you would have no idea that Johnson and Holoman were on both sides of the transaction. EquiTrust’s 2025 annual statement placed the JLC positions in the unaffiliated section and reported no affiliated invested assets in the relevant totals.

Magic’s Closest Business Partner Buys the Insurer

Last year, EquiTrust was sold to Amistad, one of the companies reportedly caught up in the DOJ investigation.

Amistad’s managing founder is Holoman, who used to run Magic Johnson Enterprises and has been Johnson’s longtime business partner, including as governor of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and as his partner in JLC Infrastructure.

The deal appears to have been debt-financed.

Fitch said Amistad and its affiliates emerged from the transaction with approximately $3 billion of debt, replacing an unlevered ownership structure. S&P expects that debt to be serviced primarily through EquiTrust’s own dividends or earnings. Both agencies assigned negative outlooks, indicating Amistad may have had inadequate cash flows to finance the deal on its own.

Whether the transaction freed Johnson of his EquiTrust exposure is unclear.

Fitch says former majority shareholders in EquiTrust retained minority interests in Amistad, whose ownership is now dispersed so that no shareholder owns more than 10%. It does not identify who these shareholders were. Asked directly whether Johnson has shares in Amistad, his representatives did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

But Johnson and Holoman appear to remain close.

In November 2025, around the time of EquiTrust’s sale to Amistad, the two of them hung out in both Las Vegas and Madrid.

A couple of months prior, they went to a USC football game together.

And earlier in the year, Johnson took Holoman with him to the White House when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

That wasn’t the only time the two visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A decade earlier, on February 27, 2014, during the Obama administration, Johnson posted to X: “Hanging out at the White House with Eric Holoman my business partner and president of my company @MagicJEnt!”

That was the same year news broke that Johnson would be buying EquiTrust.

Authors

JD Jean-Jacques joined Hunterbrook from Goldman Sachs, where he worked as an investment banker. He was editor-in-chief of Howard University’s newspaper, The Hilltop, and wrote for The Exonian at Phillips Exeter Academy. Among other recognitions, JD was a White House Correspondents’ Association Scholar and was named Student Journalist of the Year by The National Association of Black Journalists. He graduated from Howard with a B.A. in history.

Matthew Termine is a former corporate lawyer with significant experience advising companies operating within regulated industries. Matt led Hunterbrook’s investigation and reporting on United Wholesale Mortgage. In 2017, Matt was credited by the Wall Street Journal, among others, for identifying suspicious mortgage loan transactions that led to several successful criminal prosecutions, including that of a prominent political operative and the chief executive officer of a federally chartered bank. He is a graduate of Trinity College and Fordham University School of Law.

Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books with former United States Attorney General Eric Holder and former United States Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Sam has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets. He has a BA in Government from Harvard, where he was named a John Harvard Scholar and wrote op-eds like “Shut Down Harvard Football,” which he tells us were great for his social life. Sam is based in New York City.

Editors

Vikas Kumar joined Hunterbrook from The Capitol Forum, where he led the corporate investigations team for a decade as a senior editor. He was previously an attorney at Gordon Feinblatt, a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, and a law clerk for a federal judge. He has a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law and a bachelor's from Emory University. Vikas is based in Maryland.