Mark Walter stunned the sports world in 2012 with a deal that left his wealthy rivals wondering how the chief executive of Guggenheim Partners, little-known outside Wall Street, had funded the purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of the premier teams in Major League Baseball.

Few moguls can now claim they aren't familiar with Walter and his international sports kingdom, which spans every season. His playbook, using loans from insurance companies he controls to finance his other investments, is now under government scrutiny.

In the years after the Dodgers deal, Walter bought stakes in the WNBA's L.A. Sparks, England's Chelsea FC and a Formula One racing team, as well as financing the Professional Women's Hockey League. He also accumulated trophy properties, including music impresario David Geffen's $85 million Malibu beach house, and a roster of business partners that includes former Los Angeles Lakers superstar Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Mubadala Capital, an Abu Dhabi investment fund.

Walter in June 2025 added the Lakers to his sports stable, in a record-breaking deal that was sealed in 72 hours and valued the NBA team at $10 billion.

Exactly three months later, when Walter arrived in his private plane at Chicago Midway International Airport, federal agents stepped forward with a search warrant. They took Walter's phone and laptop, along with devices from his employees who were aboard.

The seizures marked a turning point in a federal investigation of Walter's business empire. Authorities have focused on several entities that served as intermediaries between the Walter-controlled insurance companies that made the loans and the Walter-controlled businesses that received them. The government wants to determine whether Walter and his businesses committed fraud and concealed those financial connections.

It couldn't be learned what investments Walter financed with insurers' money in the deals under examination by the government, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. Tapping loans from his insurers had been a calling card of the 66-year-old billionaire's conglomerate for years.

The government hasn't charged Walter or his businesses with any crimes or found them liable for any civil penalties. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan declined to comment.

"We have always acted in good faith, and insinuations that we have in any way attempted to circumvent our obligations is simply false," said a spokesman for TWG Global, Walter's conglomerate.

Regulators allow lending to so-called affiliate entities-those with ties to the insurer's owner-as long as the loans are disclosed and don't exceed certain limits. In Walter's case, questions from federal authorities spurred an internal review at the insurers that found about $20 billion worth of such deals weren't disclosed to regulators in Delaware, where Walter's two primary insurers are based.

Walter is now racing to sell or unwind many of those undisclosed loans to head off ratings downgrades that would scare off policy buyers, the Journal reported. By late last week, he needed billions of dollars.

Josh Kushner, an investor and the brother of President Trump's son-in-law, and retired Disney CEO Bob Iger came to the rescue. They had been fishing around for an NBA team and made an out-of-the-blue offer for the Lakers last week that valued the team at $12.5 billion. Walter quickly agreed. Other sales, including his stake in Chelsea, are on the table.

Walter's big squeeze reflects the risks in an opaque corner of Wall Street where some of the financial world's titans make large and poorly understood bets. Walter helped pioneer a lucrative and now common trade: Capital from insurance companies, which invest policyholders' money, is used for direct loans to businesses. Around $1 trillion of insurer money is now invested in such private credit.

The federal investigations and Walter's surprise exit from the Lakers franchise have reverberated through Wall Street and professional sports-concentric circles of money and power that share a coterie of billionaire investors with one foot in each.

Play ball

Walter has said he was raised "poor and happy" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and studied accounting at Creighton University and law at Northwestern University. After graduation, he worked at a Chicago bank and then started his own investment firm.

In the closing days of 1999, Walter co-founded Guggenheim Partners, which grew to include asset management, investment banking and insurance services.

Guggenheim acquired insurance companies weakened in the 2008-2009 financial crisis and shifted their plain-vanilla bond portfolios into higher-yielding debt. The investment firm started Guggenheim Life and Annuity, now called Clear Spring, and helped some of its executives buy Security Benefit, Delaware Life and EquiTrust.

In 2012, Walter bought the Dodgers with Todd Boehly, a business partner at Guggenheim; baseball executive Stan Kasten; Hollywood producer Peter Guber; Bobby Patton, a Walter family friend; and Johnson, the former NBA star and Lakers great. The $2.15 billion record price raised questions among other bidders about the financing.

Walter's group had tapped the Guggenheim-tied insurers, and another owned by Patton but initially operated by Guggenheim, to help pay for the Dodgers purchase. Unsuccessful bidders, including hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen, raised objections to the practice. Insurance regulators in several states investigated deals but found no insurance-law violations, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In 2014, two policyholders at Security Benefit sued Guggenheim and other related insurance companies in federal court, alleging that Walter and his associates treated the insurance companies like a cash machine to buy the Dodgers. Guggenheim denied the allegations. After a day, the complaint was withdrawn.

Walter and his wife bought a nature reserve in Florida and ski-town real estate in Colorado. He and Patton acquired a New Mexico ranch and thousands of acres of farmland in Canada.

Walter drew on loans from insurers to invest in startups, including plant-based food-maker Beyond Meat and online used-car dealer Carvana, according to insurance filings and people familiar with the matter.

At Guggenheim, Walter's outside investments raised questions for compliance personnel responsible for reviewing potential conflicts of interest across Guggenheim units, clients and employees. Boehly left the firm in 2015 and later took control of Security Benefit.

Malibu mansion

In 2016, a Guggenheim compliance lawyer noticed that some of Walter's personal investments appeared to be financed through ABS Capital, which was founded by two former Guggenheim executives. The compliance lawyer found a maze of corporate entities, known as LLCs, that appeared to be vehicles for Walter. Those corporate entities had been represented within Guggenheim as belonging to people who were friendly with or in business with Walter, the Journal reported.

That year, ABS set up LLCs to buy two Los Angeles homes in the city's pricey Pacific Palisades. One of the houses was to be temporarily used by an executive at Guggenheim, who had a personal relationship with Walter. The following spring, ABS and Walter bought an $85 million home on Malibu's Carbon Beach from Geffen, a Guggenheim client. In a bitter postscript, the mansion burned to rubble in last year's Southern California wildfires.

A whistleblower filed a report with the SEC alleging self-dealing and other breaches by Walter and Guggenheim. The report listed ABS deals and the houses among the examples.

By 2018, another Guggenheim employee filed a separate whistleblower complaint, alleging that three of the Walter-tied insurers were trading corporate bonds between one another-often at prices above what they might fetch on Wall Street, the Journal reported. The SEC reviewed the allegations, but never filed a complaint. In 2019, the SEC dropped its probe into Guggenheim and ABS.

Representatives for Walter and Guggenheim have previously told the Journal, most recently in 2020, that all insurance-company lending to affiliates was lawful and disclosed.

The current probe burst into public view after June filings by Delaware Life and Clear Spring revealed the companies had been subpoenaed by federal authorities.

Authorities have zeroed in on ABS Capital, as well as Amistad Financial, Bradford Allen and Hudson Trading, the Journal reported. Proceeds from the loans made by the insurers passed through entities purportedly controlled by each of these firms and went to other Walter-linked businesses.

Amistad, chaired by former McDonald's CEO Don Thompson, is connected to Walter's empire through its purchase of life-insurer EquiTrust from Magic Johnson Enterprises. Johnson's company had earlier acquired the insurer from Guggenheim and others.

Entities controlled by Amistad, including Amistad Merchant Funding, Amistad STF II and Amistad Debt Warehouse 1, were among the recipients of loans from Walter's insurers Delaware Life and Clear Spring, according to their recent filings.

Earlier this year, EquiTrust lent $500 million to 10 companies, with names including Harborcrest, Alder Ridge and Cedarpoint, the insurance filings show. Those companies were established by Federico Hermida, a principal at ABS, according to corporate filings.

Amistad executives didn't respond to requests for comment, and EquiTrust's chief lawyer said EquiTrust is aware of reports of a federal inquiry involving TWG and it is monitoring the situation closely.

Another firm that investigators are probing, Bradford Allen, is a commercial real-estate broker founded by Jeffrey Bernstein and Laurence Elbaum that has worked on a series of Walter deals, including the renewal of Guggenheim's lease on its Midtown Manhattan offices and the development of a headquarters in Indiana for the F1 racing team Walter backs. Bernstein formerly was on the board at EquiTrust.

Revelation

The recent government scrutiny of deals by Walter's insurance companies seemed to come by chance. It began with a whistleblower inside Guggenheim Investments, the firm's asset management arm, about possible accounting fraud in a Middle-East financing deal.

In April 2025, Walter's conglomerate, TWG Global, announced that Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi fund, would help it raise $10 billion in fresh equity. Based on the whistleblower's account, authorities began to explore whether Guggenheim Investments, partly owned by TWG, might have used misleading contracts to inflate its revenue and secure a better deal.

A spokesman for Guggenheim Investments said the firm received a whistleblower report in the spring of 2025 about the accounting of "certain advisory contracts" of Guggenheim Private Investments, an investment adviser. The firm shared the report with its independent auditor, which issued "unqualified audit opinions" giving the company's 2024 and 2025 financials a clean bill of health, he said.

Payments related to the contracts led federal investigators to ABS, Amistad, Bradford Allen and Hudson Trading, said people familiar with the matter. Authorities later discovered the connection between the four firms and entities that passed loans from the Walter-controlled insurers to his other investments, according to people familiar with the matter.

Walter's insurers have crafted plans to move a big chunk of affiliated loans off their balance sheets by the end of the year. The misclassification of such loans could spark lawsuits by policyholders, analysts said, or draw civil corrective orders from regulators. Delaware's insurance department hasn't commented. Ratings firms have said the companies could be downgraded if they don't meet their remediation plans.

The jewel of Walter's portfolio is widely seen as the Dodgers. Since Walter took over, the team has spent lavishly to acquire superstar talent such as Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, and the club has deferred some of the biggest contract payments deep into the future.

Midway through the Dodgers' World Series in 2024, the first of two back-to-back MLB championships, Walter suffered a stroke. He struggled for months to speak clearly, saying some words when he meant something else, according to people who interacted with him, the Journal reported. Some investors and employees question his decision-making. TWG has said Walter "has the business acumen and judgment required."

Walter's stroke has been discussed by his defense team in talks with federal prosecutors.