Page 2 of 3

EATING PUMPKIN

With a curly mop of red hair and a Grinch-like smile, friends and supporters have come to see Johnson as a quirky philanthropist.

In 2006, when Washington County was raising funds for the Children's Justice Center, a place where minors can heal from abuse and tell their stories, Jeremy Johnson came to the county's aid. According to documents obtained through an open-records request by City Weekly, Johnson, both individually and through I Works, donated $91,500 toward the construction of the center.

Washington County Sheriff Corey Pulsipher considers Johnson a friend and knows him through his help with the Sheriff's Search & Rescue Team, an almost completely volunteer contingent that searches for missing and injured hikers and others in the county's wilderness. "If he had the ability, he would always help me out," Pulsipher says.

In a February 2015 interview with City Weekly, Johnson said he didn't think such civic generosity should raise any eyebrows. "I've been doing stuff for the Search & Rescue guys forever, because those guys are awesome," Johnson says.

Few of Johnson's friends understood how he had earned his millions or how his allegedly corrupt empire has spread its digital tentacles to pull in hundreds of thousands of victims. According to charges in the FTC case, Johnson's enterprise is alleged to have netted him $50 million in profits. In order to hide his assets, Johnson's minions, as of 2012, were said to have set up at least 180 companies spread across a portfolio of stocks, bank accounts, a 5,000-acre ranch in Idaho, muscle cars, planes, choppers, a 2,200-square-foot mansion in St. George and a string of businesses clustered in Washington County but spread out as far as Belize and the Philippines.

Johnson has long maintained that the "negative option marketing" clause with which the FTC took issue was well advertised in the subscription services that I Works sold, and that people had every opportunity to understand the ongoing charges they would receive.

While his public persona was that of a do-gooder, Johnson began collecting business associates over the years who saw another side of him. Chad Elie was one of Johnson's partners in the world of online-poker-payment processing between 2009 and 2011 who has since served time for bank fraud and money laundering. At the time Elie knew Johnson, he says Johnson bragged openly about "owning" former Attorney General Shurtleff (campaign documents have shown Johnson and his friends and family donated well over $100,000 to Shurtleff).

Elie recalls walking into the lounge of a Las Vegas casino once to find a friend of Johnson's sitting on top of a pool table, his legs spread open while another man smacked the cue ball into his groin—an indignity the man was willing to suffer in order to get a loan from Johnson. Elie saw another friend of Johnson's eat the raw innards of a pumpkin in order to be approved for a friendly loan.

"And he was allergic to pumpkin," Elie says.

To the people and causes he respected, Jeremy Johnson was, without a doubt, generous to a fault. But, on June 29, 2006, just a few months before he donated to the county-operated Children's Justice Center, a man named Wayne Ogden became unconvinced of Jeremy Johnson's heart of gold. He claims he was detained, assaulted and threatened with violence by members of Jeremy Johnson's entourage.