In the clubhouse after the Los Angeles Dodgers won their season-opening win in Seoul last month, Shohei Ohtani’s longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, made a surprising confession to the team: He’s a who was addicted to gambling, and Ohtani had paid off his debt to a bookie.
Ohtani, who was not fluent in English, listened but did not fully understand what Mizuhara said. However, he knew enough to become suspicious and he wanted answers.
A few hours later, around midnight, Ohtani finally had the chance to drag Mizuhara into a conference room in the basement of the Fairmont Ambassador hotel in Seoul.
With just the two of them there, Mizuhara leveled with his boss: He had racked up huge debts to the bookie and had stolen money from the baseball star to pay it off.
However, in the interest of transparency, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to protect herself from the law, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. He asked his protégé to recount the story he had just told Ohtani’s teammates, his advisor and an ESPN reporter who had been investigating $4.5 million in transfers from Ohtani’s account went to an illegal bookmaker in California.
Ohtani refused and called his representative, Nez Balelo, into the conference room. Balelo then asked several other people to call in as they resolved the crisis: a lawyer in Los Angeles; Matthew Hiltzik, director of crisis communications in New York; and a new interpreter that Ohtani’s relatives can trust. Mizuhara’s wife also attended the meeting.
Soon after, Ohtani’s advisers issued a statement to reporters, accusing Ohtani of being the victim of a multimillion-dollar theft. Soon news linking Ohtani to illegal gambling activities spread around the world.
It’s an opening story to three dizzying weeks, traveling from South Korea to Los Angeles, from baseball fields to hotels to airports, to meetings with lawyers and federal agents. At times, it seemed like baseball’s biggest star was in danger of being tainted by a gambling scandal that recalled painful periods in the sport’s past. It culminated Thursday when prosecutors accused Mizuhara of bank fraud and filed a criminal complaint alleging a lavish embezzlement in which he stole $16 million from Ohtani, whom they asserted was definitely the victim in the case.
The charges and formal complaint were announced a day after the New York Times reported that Mizuhara and his lawyer, Michael Freedman, a former prosecutor specializing in defending white-collar criminals, is negotiating a plea deal. On Friday, Mizuhara surrendered to law enforcement in Los Angeles and made his first appearance in court, wearing street clothes and shackled. He did not enter a plea and was released on $25,000 bail. Conditions of his release require him to undergo drug testing and seek treatment for gambling addiction.
Freedman released a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “is continuing to cooperate with the legal process and hopes that he can reach an agreement with the government to resolve this case as quickly as possible to He can take responsibility.” He added that Mizuhara has apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and “looks forward to seeking treatment for his gambling addiction.”
The trip to Seoul seemed like one Major League Baseball’s winning moment. Ohtani’s emergence as a transcendent star in the United States, one whose on-court achievements have been compared to Babe Ruth, has given the league fresh cultural relevance around the world. And now Ohtani and his new team have signed him 10-year contract worth 700 million USD in December, they traveled to Asia to open the new season with two games against the San Diego Padres. The excitement couldn’t be higher.
But when the news about Mizuhara broke, Major League Baseball realized they had a problem. It announced that it was investigating the matter. And the Los Angeles field offices of the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security were unusually public with the news that they had also opened an investigation. The story of Pete Rose, the career major league shortstop who was banned from baseball in the 1980s for betting on the sport, is on everyone’s mind.
After the meeting at the hotel, the Dodgers promptly fired Mizuhara. He quickly boarded a plane back to Los Angeles, where homeland security agents met him at the airport. He refused to participate in an interview, but he did give agents access to a goldmine of information that would prove crucial to their investigation: He signed a form consented to a search of his cell phone.
Ohtani also flew back to Los Angeles under a cloud. Upon arrival, he also gave investigators access to his electronic devices.
Working with a Japanese linguist, investigators studied approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or any bookmaker Mizuhara ever dealt with. pandemic.
Over two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles – on one of the days of his attack. his first home run as a Dodgerhours after his interview with agents — and described his relationship with Mizuhara, whom he first met in 2013 while playing professional baseball in Japan.
According to the complaint, the Los Angeles Angels hired Mizuhara as Ohtani’s interpreter when Ohtani joined the team in 2018. But Ohtani also hired him separately as a “de facto assistant and manager.” Mizuhara drives his boss to and from the baseball field and manages a number of “business and personal matters” outside of baseball.
In 2018, both men visited a bank in Arizona where the Angels held spring training and opened an account into which Ohtani’s salary was deposited. According to prosecutors, over the next three years, Ohtani never logged into the online account and the money piled up.
Of course, Ohtani has many other accounts – he makes more money from endorsements and business deals than from his lucrative baseball salary. According to prosecutors, it was this account, intended solely for Ohtani’s baseball earnings, that Mizuhara would plan to control and then, as he became increasingly addicted to gambling, pilfer for several years.
Mizuhara changed his account settings so that notifications and transaction confirmations would go to him and not Ohtani. Based on phone recordings obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara also impersonated Ohtani to get bank approval for several large transactions. And whenever one of Ohtani’s other advisers — his agent, tax preparer, accountant or financial adviser, all of whom were interviewed for the federal investigation — asked about the account, Mizuhara told them that Ohtani wanted the account to remain private.
According to E. Martin Estrada, U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, between November 2021 and January of this year, Mizuhara stole $16 million from the account to satisfy his “sports betting craving.” .
Ohtani has been called many different names over the past few years. Modern Ruth. A baseball monk. Japan’s most famous citizen. In the criminal complaint authorities released Thursday, he was identified simply as “Victim A.”
The complaint reveals text messages between Mizuhara and the bookmaker, who is also the subject of a federal investigation, when Mizuhara was losing money and repeatedly had his credit limit increased — “bumping,” in a manner say the gamblers.
A text message from Mizuhara in 2022 read: “Am I bad at this sports betting game? Lol… Is there any chance you can bump into me again?? As you know, you don’t have to worry about me not paying.”
Although there is no evidence that Ohtani knew about the bet, the bookmaker knew about Mizuhara’s connection to Ohtani. Last November, the bookie had difficulty reaching Mizuhara and threatened to expose him to Ohtani, saying he knew where to find the baseball star.
In a text accompanying the complaint, the bookie wrote: “Hey Ippei, it is 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you didn’t answer my call. I’m in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] Take your dog for a walk. I will go up and talk to him and ask how can I contact you since you are not responding? Please call me back immediately.”
As Mizuhara fell deeper and deeper into debt, he used $325,000 of Ohtani’s money earlier this year to buy baseball cards online and deliver them to the Dodgers clubhouse under a pseudonym, prosecutors said. Agents found the cards — those of Juan Soto, Yogi Berra and Ohtani, among others — in several briefcases when they searched Mizuhara’s car. Prosecutors said they believe he planned to resell them.
Here’s a baseball story, the criminal complaint is full of numbers:
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19,000 bets.
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Total winnings are 142,256,769.74 USD.
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The total lost bet amount is 182,935,206.58 USD.
Importantly for Ohtani and Major League Baseball, prosecutors said none of Mizuhara’s bets were on baseball.
When news of the story broke in South Korea, Major League Baseball was alarmed by the changing stories, two people familiar with the matter said, and worried that Ohtani might somehow be caught up in a scandal. Gambling scandals have the potential to tarnish the entire sport.
Those worries evaporated a week later when Ohtani gave a detailed account to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying Mizuhara had stolen from him and pledging to cooperate with any investigation. It was said that baseball officials were skeptical that Ohtani would fabricate such a story knowing that both federal and league authorities would investigate it. When authorities charged Mizuhara and detailed the charges against him, any remaining doubts were cleared up.
As for the Dodgers, they are leading their division at the start of a season that many fans would declare a failure if it did not end in a championship. Ohtani’s bat is heating up. Inside the clubhouse, players said Ohtani, without Mizuhara as a buffer, made more of an effort to get to know his teammates.
“You know, over the last couple of days, I think Shohei has bonded even more with his teammates,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after Ohtani brought up the issue with the crowd. media in Los Angeles two weeks ago. “And I think there’s just a downside to that.”
Ana Facio-Krajcer Report contributions.
