Starting today, a Roanoke jury will weigh whether Ted James Johnson Jr. was a greed-driven schemer who deliberately swindled friends and grieving widows out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, or merely a sincere dreamer whose downfall resulted from bad luck and bad business decisions.

Prosecution and defense lawyers made their closing arguments Wednesday, capping a two-week trial in Roanoke's federal court. Federal prosecutors painted Johnson, a former commissioner of the revenue and clerk of circuit court for Giles County, as a fast-talking con man who would stop at nothing to keep money flowing into his phony investment firm.

"He didn't just rob Peter to pay Paul," said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Bybee. "He preyed on people that loved and trusted him."

Johnson's attorney, Tony Anderson, countered that the government's own key witness, Frank Graham Farrier Jr., who worked as Johnson's bookkeeper, insisted that he and his boss never intended to bilk their investors. Farrier has entered a guilty plea in the case.

"They worked hard," Anderson said. "They did not intend to defraud anybody."

Johnson faces more than three dozen federal fraud charges that the companies he and Farrier founded in the early 1990s, Mountain Investments and Dogwood Farms, were Ponzi schemes in which Johnson promised extraordinarily high returns from investments, but in fact used money taken from new investors to make the payments promised to the old investors. According to court evidence, what little money Johnson tried to use for securities trading he lost.

"Everything they tried failed," but they never disclosed that to investors, Bybee said.

In the early years of the operation, especially, people were able to get all their money back from Johnson, but as the decade-long run continued, Johnson and his partner found it harder to find enough new investors to keep up with payments. Investors testified that Johnson gave them checks that bounced, or put them off with one excuse after another.

In court Tuesday, Johnson described his main backup plan for how he intended to pay the money back, which involved selling more than 200 acres he controlled near the Pearisburg Wal-Mart. The property had been appraised for $2.1 million and Johnson said he believed it could sell for more if properly parceled.

Anderson called this Johnson's "bailout plan," noting that at the time it was standard to believe land appraisals would keep increasing in value.

In January 2001, the Virginia State Corporation Commission ordered Johnson to repay people who had given money to Mountain Investments. Instead, Johnson transferred their accounts to Dogwood Farms, his real estate company, giving them "deed of trust notes" that seemed to give them a stake in the Pearisburg property. Johnson collected the claims of about 80 people into a single $7.5 million deed of trust, but never recorded the deed.

Prosecutors argued that was proof he never intended to sell the land -- it was merely another ploy to lure in investors and take their money.

The entire operation collapsed in 2004 when Johnson filed for bankruptcy, listing debts to investors of more than $8 million. The land was sold for $1.3 million as the companies were liquidated. Only two investors recovered money from the sale.

At the bankruptcy hearings, he said his clients had given him loans, not investments. Prosecutors cited that as evidence he lied under oath.

Anderson argued that prosecutors had not shown intent to defraud, nor had they shown that Johnson gained any profit from the scheme. "There was never a profit under any circumstance." He accused prosecutors of "piling on" by pursuing so many charges.

"If anybody's piling on, it's Mr. Johnson," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennie Waering. "The picture shows, crystal clear, absolutely clear, that Ted Johnson Jr. is guilty of each and every count in the indictment."

Staff writer Mike Gangloff contributed to this report.