In the clubhouse after the Los Angeles Dodgers won their season opener in Seoul last month, longtime Shohei Ohtani interpreter Ippei Mizuhara made a stunning admission to the team: He was addicted to gambling and Ohtani had paid his debts to a bookmaker.
Ohtani, who is not fluent in English, listened but was unable to fully understand what Mizuhara said. However, he knew enough to be wary and he wanted answers.
A few hours later, around midnight, Ohtani finally got 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 brought his boss up to speed: he had racked up huge debts with the bookie and stole the baseball star’s money to pay them off.
However, by coming clean, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to protect himself from the law, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. He asked his employer to follow up on the story he had just told to Ohtani’s teammates, his advisers and an ESPN reporter who had investigated $4.5 million in wire transfers from Ohtani’s account. Ohtani to an illegal bookmaker in California.
Ohtani refused and called his agent, Nez Balelo, into the conference room. Balelo then brought in several other people to handle the crisis: a lawyer in Los Angeles; Matthew Hiltzik, crisis communications manager in New York; and a new performer that Ohtani’s inner circle could trust. Mizuhara’s wife also joined the meeting.
Shortly afterward, Ohtani’s advisors released a statement to reporters, alleging that Ohtani had been the victim of multimillion-dollar theft. Soon, headlines linking Ohtani to illegal gambling spread around the world.
It was a story that would set off a dizzying three weeks, spanning from South Korea to Los Angeles, from baseball stadiums to hotels to airports to meetings with lawyers and federal agents. At times it seemed baseball’s biggest star was in danger of being tainted by a gambling scandal, echoing painful episodes from the sport’s past. It culminated Thursday when prosecutors charged Mizuhara with bank fraud and filed a criminal complaint alleging a lavish embezzlement in which he stole $16 million from Ohtani, who they said was the victim in the case.
The formal charge and complaint were announced a day after The New York Times reported that Mizuhara and his lawyer, Michael Freedman, a former prosecutor who specializes in white-collar criminal defense, were negotiating a plea deal. On Friday, Mizuhara turned himself in to Los Angeles law enforcement and appeared in court for the first time, wearing street clothes and shackles. He did not enter a plea and was released on $25,000 bail. The conditions of his release require him to submit to a drug test and undergo treatment for his gambling addiction.
Freedman released a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “continues to cooperate with the legal process and hopes he can reach an agreement with the government to resolve this matter as quickly as possible so he can meet his responsibilities.” He added that Mizuhara apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and was “looking forward to getting treatment for his play.”
The trip to Seoul felt like a triumphant moment for Major League Baseball. Ohtani’s emergence as a transcendent star in the United States, whose on-field exploits evoked comparisons to Babe Ruth, had given the league new cultural relevance around the world. And now Ohtani and his new team, who signed him to a 10-year, $700 million contract in December, were in Asia to open a new season with two games against the San Diego Padres. The excitement couldn’t have been greater.
But once the news of Mizuhara broke, Major League Baseball realized it had a problem on its hands. She announced that she 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 unusually made public the news that they, too, had opened an investigation. The saga of major league career leader Pete Rose, who was kicked out of baseball in the 1980s for betting on the sport, was on everyone’s minds.
After the hotel meeting, the Dodgers quickly fired Mizuhara. He was soon on a plane to Los Angeles, where Homeland Security agents greeted him at the airport. He refused to submit to an interview, but he gave officers access to a goldmine of information that would prove crucial to their investigation: He signed a form authorizing a search of his cell phone.
Ohtani also returned to Los Angeles under a cloud. Upon arrival, he also gave investigators access to his electronic devices.
Working with a Japanese linguist, investigators reviewed about 9,700 pages of text messages exchanged between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or any of the bookmakers Mizuhara had dealt with.
For two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles — one of the days he was struck. his first home run as a Dodgerhours after an interview with agents — and described his relationship with Mizuhara, whom he first met in 2013 while playing professional baseball in Japan.
The Los Angeles Angels hired Mizuhara as Ohtani’s translator when Ohtani joined the team in 2018. But Ohtani also separately employed him as a “de facto manager and assistant,” according to the complaint. Mizuhara drove his boss to and from the ballpark and handled some “business and personal matters” outside of baseball.
In 2018, the two went to a bank in Arizona, where the Angels were holding spring training, and opened an account where Ohtani’s paychecks could be deposited. Over the next three years, Ohtani never logged into the online account, prosecutors say, and the money piled up.
Ohtani, of course, has plenty of other accounts – he makes more money from endorsements and trade deals than he does from his lucrative baseball salary. But it was this account, intended solely for Ohtani’s baseball earnings, that Mizuhara planned to take control of and then, as he fell deeper and deeper into a gambling addiction, plundering for years, according to prosecutors.
Mizuhara changed the account settings so that transaction alerts and confirmations went to him, not Ohtani. Relying on phone records obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara also posed as Ohtani to obtain bank approval for certain large transactions. And every time one of Ohtani’s other advisers — his agent, his tax preparer, his accountant or his financial advisor, all of whom have been questioned as part of the federal investigation — inquired about the account , Mizuhara told them that Ohtani preferred to keep the account private.
Between November 2021 and January of this year, Mizuhara stole $16 million from the account to feed his “voracious appetite for illegal sports betting,” according to E. Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.
Ohtani has been called many things over the past few years. The Ruth of modern times. A baseball monk. Japan’s most famous citizen. In the criminal complaint released Thursday by authorities, he was identified simply as “Victim A.”
The complaint revealed text messages between Mizuhara and the bookmaker, which is also under federal investigation, as Mizuhara racked up losses and was repeatedly granted increases to his credit limit – “bumps”, in gamer parlance.
A text from Mizuhara in 2022 reads: “I’m bad at this sports betting thing, huh? Lol… Is there any chance you could bang me again?? As you know, you don’t have to worry that I won’t pay.
Although there is no evidence that Ohtani knew about the bets, the bookmaker was aware of the connection between Mizuhara and Ohtani. Last November, the bookmaker had difficulty reaching Mizuhara and threatened to report him to Ohtani, claiming he knew where to find the baseball star.
In a text included in the complaint, the bookmaker wrote: “Hey Ippei, it’s 2 p.m. Friday. I don’t know why you aren’t answering my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see (victim A) walking her dog. I’ll just talk to him and ask him how I can contact you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.
As Mizuhara fell deeper into debt, prosecutors say, he used $325,000 of Ohtani’s money earlier this year to buy baseball cards online and had them shipped to the Dodgers’ clubhouse under a pseudonym. Officers found the cards – 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.
Being a baseball story, the criminal complaint was full of numbers:
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19,000 bets.
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$142,256,769.74 in total winning bets.
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$182,935,206.58 in total losing bets.
Importantly, for Ohtani and for 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 evolving narratives, two people familiar with the matter said, and worried that Ohtani might somehow become entangled in a gambling scandal that would have the potential to tarnish the entire sport.
Those concerns were dissipated a week later when Ohtani offered a detailed account to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying Mizuhara had stolen from him and pledging to cooperate with any investigation. Baseball officials were doubtful, sources said, that Ohtani would make up such a story knowing that both federal authorities and the league would investigate. When authorities charged Mizuhara and detailed the allegations against him, any remaining suspicions were dispelled.
As for the Dodgers, they are leading their division at the start of a season that many fans will declare a failure if it does not end in a championship. Ohtani’s bat heats up. Inside the clubhouse, players say Ohtani, without Mizuhara as a buffer, has made more of an effort to get to know his teammates.
“You know, over the last few days, I think Shohei has been even more engaged with his teammates,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after Ohtani addressed the subject with the news media in Los Angeles. Angeles two weeks ago. “And I think there are only benefits to that.”
Ana Facio Krajcer reports contributed.
