In mid-August, a federal judge in Atlanta sentenced David Bradford, Drive Planning LLC’s chief operating officer, to four years and three months in federal prison, closing the case against the company’s second-ranking executive in a Ponzi scheme that federal prosecutors say pulled money from more than 2,000 investors. Bradford, 53, of Peachtree Corners, Georgia, must also serve three years of supervised release and repay $4,297,878.16 in restitution to victims, a figure dwarfed by the $233,777,763.82 ordered against founder Todd Burkhalter, who separately received 20 years for orchestrating the scheme. The distance between those two restitution numbers says almost as much about how a federal fraud case gets built, count by count, as it does about who actually ran the company.
What David Bradford Pleaded Guilty To
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia, Bradford previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in what prosecutors call the CORE Fund scheme, one of two investment vehicles Drive Planning used to solicit investor money between September 2020 and June 2024. The larger of the two vehicles, the Real Estate Acceleration Loan program, is the one at the center of Burkhalter’s case and the one prosecutors say accounts for most of the roughly $380 million taken from victims. The CORE Fund was smaller and marketed separately: Drive Planning told prospective investors it offered “100% Passive Income from Tax Liens,” guaranteed returns of 10% every six months, and claimed that contributions were pooled, government-protected, and fully collateralized. Prosecutors say the company stopped putting money into the CORE Fund after roughly December 2022 while continuing to collect from new investors, and that the fund ultimately took in at least $4.1 million from people who sought to invest in it.
Past his title, his guilty plea, and the fund his case is tied to, the public record on Bradford is thin. The Justice Department’s release does not describe specific emails, meetings, sales pitches, or internal decisions attributed to him personally. It identifies his role as Drive Planning’s chief operating officer, names the count he admitted to, and states the fund it involved. For a case built around one of the largest Ponzi schemes in Georgia history, the written record of what its second-highest executive actually did, as opposed to what title he held, is notably sparse.
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How a $4.3 Million Restitution Order Gets Calculated
Federal restitution generally tracks the scope of the offense a defendant is convicted of, not the total size of the criminal enterprise around him. Burkhalter was sentenced for orchestrating the entire scheme, both the CORE Fund and the larger REAL program together, and his restitution order of $233,777,763.82 corresponds to losses across all of it, in line with prosecutors’ estimate that more than 2,000 investors lost close to $380 million in total. Bradford’s plea was narrower: a single conspiracy count tied specifically to the CORE Fund rather than the company’s full operation. His restitution figure, $4,297,878.16, lands close to the CORE Fund’s own reported investor losses. The fund took in at least $4.1 million, leaving roughly $200,000 unaccounted for in the public record, possibly interest or additional CORE-related claims. The Justice Department’s release does not itemize the arithmetic behind the exact number. What it does show is the pattern: a subordinate charged with one piece of a fraud, rather than the whole of it, ends up owing on that piece, not on the parent company’s total losses.
A Third Executive, A Different Charge
Bradford was not the only Drive Planning executive sentenced that week. Julie Edwards, 59, of Cumming, Georgia, served as the company’s chief administrative officer and pleaded guilty to a different kind of offense altogether: laundering proceeds of the Ponzi scheme rather than conspiring to carry it out. U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson sentenced Edwards to two years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered her to repay $630,000 in restitution, a fraction even of Bradford’s number. Three Drive Planning executives, three distinct federal charges, and three restitution figures that shrink in step with their roles: the founder who ran the whole operation, the operations chief tied to one fund within it, and the administrator convicted of laundering money rather than raising it. None of the three owes anywhere near the $380 million prosecutors say investors lost overall, because none of the three, on paper, was convicted of the whole scheme. Only Burkhalter was.
Why a Receiver, Not the Restitution Order, Decides What Retirees Recoup
For the investors who put savings and retirement funds into Drive Planning, a restitution order is only as good as a defendant’s remaining assets. Prosecutors say Burkhalter spent investor money on a yacht, a Cabo San Lucas condo, luxury vehicles, private jet charters, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in clothing and jewelry, spending that does not come back once whatever remains gets seized and sold. The channel that actually determines what victims recover runs through a parallel civil case, not the restitution line in a criminal judgment. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Drive Planning and Burkhalter in August 2024, obtained a preliminary injunction and asset freeze, and had a receiver, Kenneth D. Murena, appointed over the company. The SEC’s litigation release states the agency is also seeking disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, civil penalties, and an officer-and-director bar against Burkhalter. The Justice Department describes Murena’s job as attempting to recover funds and sell company assets to repay Drive Planning’s victims, a process entirely separate from, and likely to matter more to defrauded retirees than, the restitution figures attached to Bradford’s, Edwards’s, or even Burkhalter’s sentences. The SEC also runs a standing distributions-to-harmed-investors process for cases where the agency itself collects disgorged money, though here it is the court-appointed receivership doing the work of trying to get money back to Drive Planning’s roughly 2,000 investors.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
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Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
