Kenyatta Johnson associate gets prison for using ties to Philly Council president to profit from sales of city-owned land

A childhood friend of Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson was sentenced to a year in federal prison Monday for trading on that connection to skirt regulations, defraud taxpayers, and profit from buying and reselling city-owned properties in rapidly gentrifying Point Breeze.

Felton Hayman, 54, of Wilmington, pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges earlier this year, admitting that he had sought Johnson’s aid to purchase vacant lots at cut-rate prices, then immediately make deals to resell them for nearly four times what he had paid.

In doing so, Hayman acknowledged, he had ignored contingencies on his sales agreement that required him to build affordable housing on the parcels or hold them for at least five years.

“I did something dumb,” he told U.S. District Judge Mark A. Kearney during his sentencing hearing Monday. “Just dumb. I made a mistake.”

But Kearney scoffed at Hayman’s suggestion that probation alone was sufficient punishment for his crimes. In addition to the prison term, the judge ordered Hayman to pay nearly $260,000 in fines, restitution, and criminal forfeiture.

“I don’t believe fraudsmen should just get a laugh and a giggle — ‘pay it back and then go on your way,’” Kearney said. “Fraudsmen who take advantage of relationships with the City of Philadelphia have to pay with jail time. Anything else is a slap on the wrist.”

Still, the judge credited Hayman’s remarkable turnaround after a prison stint earlier in his life, noting that — aside from this recent crime — he had transformed himself into a successful businessman, a model citizen, and “in many, many ways an ideal of what we hope for in rehabilitation.”

Specifically, Hayman was sentenced Monday for transactions involving three properties in which he made a profit of more than $140,000 in 2018.

While prosecutors had also flagged earlier transactions involving three other Point Breeze parcels — which Hayman sold for more than $1 million more than he had paid — they fell outside the statute of limitations and were not linked to specific charges against him.

And though Johnson, a three-term Democrat from Point Breeze, played a role in facilitating the sale of all of those properties to Hayman, federal authorities have consistently said that they considered him to be a victim of — not an accomplice in — Hayman’s scheme.

Johnson was mentioned only once during Monday’s proceedings and was otherwise referred to only as “a Council member” by lawyers on both sides of the case. He declined to comment on Hayman’s sentencing afterward.

Still, Hayman’s admissions are not the first time Johnson’s land-use decisions have drawn scrutiny for how they have benefitted his friends and political allies.

The Inquirer documented several of those transactions — including some of the land deals involving Hayman — in a 2016 investigation.

» READ MORE: Developers bought low and sold high with the help of Philadelphia City Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson

Johnson and his wife, Dawn Chavous, were later indicted — but ultimately acquitted — in an unrelated 2022 case alleging, in part, that they accepted payoffs from a pair of nonprofit executives looking for Johnson’s help in holding on to properties they had bought from the city.

In both that case and Hayman’s, Johnson relied on a custom known as councilmanic prerogative, the tradition by which members of Council hold final approval on nearly all land-use decisions in their districts.

Johnson has defended prerogative power as a practice that helps give residents a voice in neighborhood development through their elected representatives. But critics of the tradition, which is not codified in city law, maintain that allowing one legislator unchecked sway over land use makes the system vulnerable to unethical behavior.

» READ MORE: Councilmanic prerogative in Philadelphia: What you need to know

In Hayman’s case, his long history with Johnson raised concern even before federal authorities got involved.

Hayman and Johnson grew up together in Point Breeze but ultimately took different paths. Johnson went into politics — first working as an aide to state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, then winning office himself as a state representative before his 2011 election to Council.

Hayman, meanwhile, found himself in prison for 15 years after he pleaded guilty in 1991 to a third-degree murder charge. Police said Hayman, then a gang member, had helped concoct a plan to kill a rival drug dealer. However, some of Hayman’s co-conspirators shot and killed a different man in a West Oak Lane tavern.

After release from prison, Hayman worked as a driver and legal assistant to a Philadelphia lawyer before going into the construction business.

When, in 2018, Hayman expressed interest in redeveloping three city-owned vacant lots in the now booming neighborhood where he and Johnson were raised, the Council member was willing to help.

Hayman said he intended to build “three-story homes for affordable housing” on the lots on Bucknell and Titan Streets. Johnson introduced a Council resolution necessary for the sale to proceed.

But even before the $101,000 sale was finalized, Hayman was flouting deed restrictions holding him to his promise to redevelop the lots. He had listed all three for sale for $150,000 a piece and managed to sell two of the parcels within a matter of weeks for a combined $230,000.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia Councilman Kenyatta Johnson helped friend make $165,000 flipping city-owned lots

“Hayman used his connections to [Johnson] to circumvent established procedures for bidding on vacant city lots, and then lied to the Council member and others about his intentions,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Dubnoff wrote in court filings in the run-up to Monday’s proceedings.

But in court, Hayman’s lawyers portrayed him as a man who had done the nearly impossible — emerged from a prison sentence for murder and went on to build a successful real estate business that has allowed him to give back to his community since.

He now owns and manages 79 rental properties, they said. And in addition to mentoring area youths in the construction business, he has focused on hiring employees struggling with addiction, homelessness, or post-prison transitions to give them the same second-chances he has enjoyed in life.

A sentence of probation, said defense lawyer Steven Carroll, would send “a message to the community that you can come from a troubled past and you can come from incarceration and you can overcome that.”

Kearney ultimately disagreed. But the 12-month sentence he imposed fell slightly short of the 15-to-21-month punishment recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.

“There’s no doubt that Mr. Hayman has come out from a very tough sentence and in many, many ways been an ideal of what we hope for in rehabilitation,” the judge said, before sending Hayman on his way. “That’s what makes this so hard.”