Mark Walter’s legal problems are not fading into the background, and neither are the questions around how they could touch the Dodgers.
The Dodgers owner is under investigation by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission over a possible fraud tied to the failure to disclose affiliated transactions among several Walter-owned holdings. He has already sold the Los Angeles Lakers and is trying to unload his shares in Chelsea FC, and there was also a report that he tried to sell the Dodgers’ and Lakers’ highly valuable local broadcasting contracts with Charter Communications for a lump sum.
Now Pablo Torre has added another layer to the story. On the latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, produced with Hunterbrook Media, his reporting connects Dodgers co-owner Magic Johnson and Walter’s friend Eric Holoman to the broader picture.
When Walter sold the Lakers after roughly a year, Stan Kasten insisted the Dodgers were not for sale, brushing it off as a Lakers issue rather than a Dodgers one. Torre’s work suggests the ripple effects may be wider than that.
The biggest piece of the puzzle is the Dodgers’ TV rights. It has been public knowledge, though not exactly common knowledge, that the team’s revenue share does not line up cleanly with the full value of its local television money because of an agreement between MLB and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, made while McCourt was trying to sell the team.
After Walter bought the Dodgers in 2012, he sold TV rights that had been initially valued at $3 billion to Time Warner Cable for $8.35 million. Around the time that deal was going into effect, Walter-owned American Media Productions reportedly got a $350 million loan from Walter-owned life insurer EquiTrust. AMP’s only product is SportsNet LA.
The Time Warner Cable executive who helped put the deal together with Walter and Guggenheim Partners, David Rone, is now an executive at Guggenheim. Torre’s reporting also puts Johnson in a far more troubling light: Walter essentially handed him EquiTrust, a move that pushed Johnson into billionaire territory.
Holoman, Johnson’s close friend and business partner, was later named managing partner at EquiTrust. The company was sold to Amistad Financial Group in 2025, where Holoman is now managing founder.
Taken together, Torre’s reporting points to a pattern: Walter allegedly used insurance money, funded by ordinary policyholders, to support his own businesses without telling those insured parties. And if that’s the shape of it, he may not have been the only one who benefited. His friends appear to have been pulled into the same circle.
For now, Walter has kept repeating the same line: the Dodgers are not for sale.
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