EL PASO, Texas — Timothy France Johnson, the 63-year-old brother of El Paso’s mayor, will spend 51 months in federal prison for an 11-year Ponzi scheme built on the promise of promoting NBA preseason games, the U.S. Department of Justice said in announcing his sentence on Friday.
The court also entered a money judgment of $3,148,094.48 against Johnson. A separate hearing to set restitution for the people he took money from is on the calendar for Nov. 19.
Prosecutors said Johnson raised more than $3 million over the years by telling investors their cash would pay for staging NBA exhibition games. None of it went to legitimate game business. He produced fake contracts and doctored financial statements, assured backers their money faced no risk, and used new deposits to pay off earlier investors and cover his own bills, a classic Ponzi structure.
The FBI’s El Paso Field Office investigated the case. Federal charges were filed against Johnson in April 2024, and in March of this year he admitted guilt on all seven of the wire fraud counts he faced. Three money-laundering-type counts tied to spending the stolen funds were also part of the case.
U.S. Attorney Simmons, whose office prosecuted the case, said the scheme ran for more than a decade to build a false image of success, and that some victims handed over hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bureau’s acting special agent in charge in El Paso, Aida Reyes, said the sentence brings the case to a close but cannot undo the harm to victims.
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