Last month, in the clubhouse after the Los Angeles Dodgers won their season opener in Seoul, Shohei Ohtani's longtime interpreter Ippei Mizuhara made a surprising confession about the team. He was a gambling addict, and Otani was paying off his debts to bookmakers.
Otani, who is not fluent in English, listened but could not fully understand Mizuhara's words. But he knew enough to have doubts, and he wanted answers.
A few hours later, around midnight, Otani finally had the opportunity to take Mizuhara to a conference room in the basement of the Fairmont Ambassador Hotel in Seoul.
Now that the two of them were alone, Mizuhara confronted her boss. He owed a large amount of money to a bookmaker, and in order to pay it off, he stole the baseball star's money.
However, according to two people familiar with the conversation, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to protect himself from the law when confessing. He asked patrons to listen to the story he just told Ohtani's teammates, advisors, and an ESPN reporter who inquired about a $4.5 million wire transfer from Ohtani's account to an illegal bookmaker in California. is.
Ohtani refused and called his agent, Nez Valero, into the conference room. Valero then had several others called in for crisis management. Matthew Hiltzik, director of emergency management in New York; And a new interpreter that Otani's inner circle can trust. Mizuhara's wife also attended the meeting.
Shortly after, Ohtani's advisers issued a statement to reporters claiming that Ohtani was the victim of multi-million dollar theft. Soon, headlines linking Ohtani to illegal gambling spread around the world.
It was the beginning of a whirlwind three weeks, traveling from South Korea to Los Angeles, baseball stadiums, hotels, airports, and meeting with lawyers and federal officials. At times, it appeared that baseball's biggest star was in danger of being tainted by a gambling scandal, reflecting the game's painful past. The situation culminated Thursday when prosecutors released a criminal complaint charging Mizuhara with bank fraud and alleging extravagant embezzlement that he stole $16 million from Ohtani. Otani asserted that he was the victim of the incident.
The formal indictment and complaint were announced a day after The New York Times reported that Mizuhara and Michael Friedman, a former white-collar criminal defense attorney, were negotiating a plea deal. On Friday, Mizuhara surrendered to law enforcement in Los Angeles and made his first court appearance wearing his street clothes and shackles. He entered no plea and was released on $25,000 bail. Conditions of his release include passing a drug test and receiving treatment for gambling addiction.
Friedman issued a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “continues to cooperate with the legal process and hopes to reach an agreement with the government to resolve this case as soon as possible to ensure accountability.” Ta. He added that Mizuhara apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and was “eager to seek treatment for gambling.”
The trip to Seoul looked like a triumphant moment for Major League Baseball. Ohtani emerged as a transcendent star in the United States, his on-field accomplishments drawing comparisons to Babe Ruth and giving the league new cultural relevance around the world. And now, his new team, which signed Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract in December, was in Asia to open the new season with two games against the San Diego Padres. I couldn't be more excited.
However, once the Suwon news broke, Major League Baseball realized they were in trouble. It announced that it is investigating the matter. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Division and the Department of Homeland Security's Los Angeles field office also announced the opening of an investigation. The story of Pete Rose, Major League Baseball's all-time hitting leader, was on everyone's mind in the 1980s when he was banned from baseball for gambling.
After the meeting at the hotel, the Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara. He was soon on a flight back to Los Angeles, where Homeland Security officials met him at the airport. Although he refused to be questioned, he gave investigators access to a treasure trove of information vital to the investigation. He signed a form consenting to having his phone searched.
Otani also returned to Los Angeles under cloud cover. When he arrived, he also gave his investigators access to his electronic devices.
Investigators worked with Japanese linguists to review approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or the bookmakers with which Mizuhara had done business.
Over two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles, and several hours after his meeting with investigators, he hit his first home run as a Dodger on one of the days he met Mizuhara, who he first met in 2013. He talked about his relationship with people. While he was playing professional baseball in Japan.
According to the complaint, the Los Angeles Angels hired Mizuhara as an interpreter when Ohtani joined the team in 2018, but Ohtani also hired Mizuhara as his “de facto manager and assistant.” Mr. Mizuhara drove his boss to and from the ballpark and managed his “work and personal matters” outside of baseball.
In 2018, the pair visited a bank in Arizona, where the Angels were holding spring training, and opened an account where Ohtani's salary could be deposited. Over the next three years, prosecutors say, Ohtani never logged into his online account, and the money accumulated.
Of course, Ohtani has many other accounts. He makes more money from sponsorships and business deals than from his lucrative baseball salary. However, according to prosecutors, Mizuhara took control of the account solely for Otani's baseball income, and after falling deeper into a gambling addiction, he plotted theft over the years.
Mizuhara changed his account settings so that transaction alerts and confirmations went to him instead of Otani. Based on phone recordings obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara impersonated Otani in order to obtain bank approval for certain large transactions. And every time Ohtani's other advisors (including his agent, tax preparer, bookkeeper, and financial advisor, all of whom were interviewed for the federal investigation) inquired about the account, Mizuhara said that Ohtani had made the account private. I told him that I wanted to.
E. Martin Estrada, a U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said Mizuhara stole $16 million from accounts between November 2021 and January of this year to feed his “voracious appetite for illegal sports betting.” That's what it means.
A lot has been said about Ohtani over the past few years. modern ruth. Baseball monk. Japan's most famous citizen. He was identified simply as “Victim A” in a criminal complaint released by authorities Thursday.
The complaint alleges that texts between Mizuhara and the bookmaker, which is also the subject of a federal investigation, as Mizuhara racked up losses and received repeated credit limit increases, known in gambler parlance as “bumps.” The message has become clear.
The email from Suwon in 2022 reads as follows: LOL… Is there a chance we will bump into each other again?? You know, you don’t have to worry about me not paying. ”
There is no evidence that Otani knew about the bet, but the bookmaker was aware of Mizuhara's relationship with Otani. Last November, the bookmaker was unable to contact Mizuhara and threatened to expose Otani, saying he knew the baseball star's whereabouts.
In text included in the complaint, the bookmaker writes: I don't know why you won't return my calls.I'm here in Newport Beach and you know [Victim A] While walking his dog. I'm going to go and talk to him and ask him how I can contact him since he hasn't responded. Please call me back immediately. ”
As Mizuhara racked up even more debt, prosecutors said he used $325,000 of Ohtani's money to buy baseball cards online earlier this year and had them shipped to the Dodgers clubhouse under a false name. Announced. When investigators searched Mizuwon's car, they found cards of Juan Soto, Yogi Berra, Ohtani and others in several briefcases. Prosecutors said they believe he planned to resell it.
This was a baseball story, and the criminal complaint was packed with numbers like:
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19,000 bets.
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Total prize money is $142,256,769.74.
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Losing bets totaling $182,935,206.58.
Importantly for Ohtani and for Major League Baseball, prosecutors said, Mizuhara's bet was not on baseball.
When news of the incident broke in South Korea, Major League Baseball was alarmed by the change in the narrative and feared that Ohtani would somehow become embroiled in a gambling scandal that could taint the entire sport, officials said. Two people spoke.
Those concerns were put to rest a week later when Ohtani gave a detailed briefing to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying Mizuhara had stolen from him and pledging to cooperate with any investigation. Baseball officials said they suspected Ohtani would make up such a story knowing that both federal authorities and the league would investigate. When the authorities indicted Mr. Mizuhara and detailed the charges, all remaining suspicions were cleared.
As for the Dodgers, they are leading the division at an early point in the season when many fans would have declared them a failure if they didn't end with a championship. Ohtani's bat is getting hotter. Inside the clubhouse, players said Ohtani made more of an effort to get to know his teammates without Mizuhara as a buffer.
“You know, I think Shohei has become more aggressive with his teammates the last few days,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after Ohtani spoke about the incident to reporters in Los Angeles two weeks ago. He told the group. “And I think there's only good sides to that.”
Ana Fazio-Kreiser Contributed to the report.