Boxing promoter Greg Cohen is headed to federal prison for wire fraud.
Cohen was sentenced last week in the The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to six months in prison, three years supervised release and 150 hours of community service on one count of defrauding an individual by means of false pretenses, a federal offense.
Cohen accepted $200,000 for a stock investment that he never made in 2016. A spokesperson with the Department of Justice confirmed that the matter is unrelated to boxing. Cohen had 60 days to surrender for his term of imprisonment.
Cohen, who promotes middleweight Rob Brant and heavyweight Jarrell Miller, pleaded guilty to the charge, in accordance with a plea agreement with the government, and agreed to repay the $200,000.
In court documents obtained by Boxing Junkie, Cohen “induced a victim to invest in a purported stock transaction,” in the amount of $200,000, and which was to be “facilitated by a particular investment manager and had a guaranteed return, when in truth and fact there was no stock transaction, the particular investment manager was not at all involved and the return was not guaranteed.”
The victim claimed he asked Cohen to refund the investment, plus interest, within approximately 90 days but Cohen continually delayed repayment. In November 2017, the victim reached out to the the investment manager purportedly involved in the transaction only to discover that the manager had no knowledge of the kind of stock the victim described. Cohen’s bank records corroborated this, as they showed no evidence of a wire transfer to the manager in the amount of $200,000.
Cohen was arrested on Jan. 10, 2019 but released on bail.
He was able to modify his bail terms to travel to Japan this past July to accompany Brant for a middleweight fight against Ryota Murata.