A 41-year-old Dallas man is facing federal charges after prosecutors say he ran a yearslong scheme that bled more than $40 million out of banks and private lenders, using falsified financial records to secure loans and then diverting the money into unrelated ventures. Garrett Douglas Johnson was indicted on five counts of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud, and part of the alleged fallout is visible on the shoreline of Lake Texoma, where a marina he controlled fell into such disrepair that federal regulators shut it down.
According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, the indictment names several major regional, FDIC-insured lenders as targets of the scheme, including Texas Capital Bank, Happy State Bank, American National Bank & Trust and Gateway First Bank. Johnson kept primary residences in Dallas as well as Kingston and Edmond, Oklahoma, while managing corporate entities across both states, federal court documents show. As reported by Dallas News, Johnson represented himself as an owner, manager or partner of several companies when seeking financing, including Marina Del Rey, Blue Duck Energy, an oil and gas company, and American Select Partners, a Dallas-area insurance business.
A Trail of Falsified Loan Applications
Federal prosecutors detailed one of the earliest instances in August 2020, when Johnson secured a $1.5 million loan from Texas Capital Bank after falsely claiming he held more than $6.6 million in an escrowed trust account, per the Justice Department. Dallas News reports that Johnson also claimed millions of dollars were held in nonexistent trust accounts on other occasions and overstated revenue in loan applications, according to prosecutors. In 2022, he falsely stated that one of his companies had more than $9 million in accounts receivable while obtaining a $6.5 million revolving line of credit, prosecutors say.
The scheme also reached private lenders. Prosecutors allege Johnson convinced a private lender to wire $2.5 million by misrepresenting how the money would be used. Investigators say he used money from new loans to fund unrelated business ventures and to repay earlier debts, and at one point transferred more than $100,000 to a personal account to pay the IRS, according to federal prosecutors.
Marina Loan Diverted Into Oil and Gas
The largest single loan cited in the indictment came in December 2021, when Johnson obtained a $9.23 million loan from Happy State Bank that was intended for marina infrastructure improvements at Marina Del Rey on Lake Texoma. Federal authorities allege that instead of repairing the marina, Johnson diverted millions of dollars from that loan to acquire oil and gas interests…