In the clubhouse after the Los Angeles Dodgers won their season opener in Seoul last month, Shohei Ohtani’s longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, made a stunning admission to the team: He was a gambling addict, and Ohtani paid the his debts to a bookmaker.
Ohtani, who is not fluent in English, listened but failed to fully understand what Mizuhara said. He knew enough to be suspicious, however, and he wanted answers.
Hours later, around midnight, Ohtani had a chance to pull Mizuhara into a conference room in the basement of the Fairmont Ambassador Hotel in Seoul.
With just the two of them there, Mizuhara gets even with his boss: He’s racked up massive bookmaker debts and steals the baseball star’s money to pay them off.
Still, coming clean, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to shield himself from the law, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. He asked his patron to go along with the story he told Ohtani’s colleagues, his advisers and a reporter for ESPN who asked about $4.5 million in wire transfers from Ohtani’s account to an illegal bookmaker in California .
Ohtani refused and called his agent, Nez Balelo, into the conference room. Balelo then called in several other people as they handled the crisis: a lawyer in Los Angeles; Matthew Hiltzik, a crisis communications executive in New York; and a new interpreter that Ohtani’s inner circle can trust. Mizuhara’s wife also joined the meeting.
Shortly thereafter, Ohtani’s advisors released a statement to reporters, claiming that Ohtani was the victim of a multimillion-dollar robbery. Before long, headlines connecting Ohtani to illegal gambling spread around the world.
It’s a story that begins a dizzying three weeks, moving from South Korea to Los Angeles, from ballparks to hotels to airports, to meetings with lawyers and federal agents. At times, it seems baseball’s biggest stars are in danger of being tainted by a gambling scandal, echoing painful episodes from the sport’s past. It ended on Thursday when prosecutors charged Mizuhara with bank fraud and released a criminal complaint alleging a lavish embezzlement in which he stole $16 million from Ohtani, who they firmly said was the victim in the case.
The formal charges and complaint were announced a day after The New York Times reported that Mizuhara and his attorney, Michael Freedman, a former prosecutor who specializes in white-collar criminal defense, were negotiating a plea deal. On Friday, Mizuhara surrendered to law enforcement in Los Angeles and appeared in court, wearing street clothes and shackles. He did not enter a plea, and was released on a $25,000 bond. Conditions of his release required him to submit to drug testing and seek treatment for a gambling addiction.
Freedman released a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “continues to cooperate with the legal process and he hopes he can reach an agreement with the government to resolve this case as soon as possible so he can take responsibility.” He added that Mizuhara has apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and is “eager to seek treatment for his gambling.”
The trip to Seoul seems like a breakthrough moment for Major League Baseball. Ohtani’s emergence as a transcendent star in the United States, one whose on-field exploits have drawn comparisons to Babe Ruth, has given the league fresh cultural relevance around the world. And now Ohtani and his new team, which signed him to a 10-year, $700 million contract in December, are in Asia to open the new season with two games against the San Diego Padres. The excitement couldn’t be higher.
But once the Mizuhara news broke, Major League Baseball realized it had a problem on its hands. 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 have not typically publicly announced the news that they, too, have opened an inquiry. The legend of Pete Rose, the major leagues career hits leader, who was banned from baseball in the 1980s for betting on sports, is on everyone’s mind.
After the hotel meeting, the Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara. Soon he was on a plane back to Los Angeles, where he was met by homeland security agents at the airport. He declined to submit to an interview, but he gave the agents access to a gold mine of information that would prove crucial to their investigation: He signed a form giving his consent to search his cellphone.
Ohtani also flew back to Los Angeles under a cloud. When he arrived, he also gave investigators access to his electronic devices.
Working with a Japanese linguist, investigators searched about 9,700 pages of text messages between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or any of the bookmakers who had spoken to Mizuhara.
For two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles — on one of the days he was hit 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 hired him separately as a “de facto manager and assistant,” according to the complaint. Mizuhara drove his boss to and from the ballpark and handled certain “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 where Ohtani’s salaries could be deposited. Over the next three years, Ohtani never logged into the account online, according to prosecutors, and the money piled up.
Ohtani has many other accounts, of course — he makes more money from endorsements and business deals than his lucrative baseball salary. But this account, solely for Ohtani’s baseball earnings, Mizuhara planned to control and then, as he fell deeper into gambling addiction, looted for years, according to prosecutors.
Mizuhara changed the account settings so that alerts and confirmations of transactions would go to him, not Ohtani. Based on phone recordings obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara also impersonated Ohtani to get the bank’s approval for several large transactions. And whenever one of Ohtani’s other advisers — his agent, tax preparer, bookkeeper or financial adviser, all of whom were interviewed for the federal investigation — asked about the account, Mizuhara told them more Ohtani wants the account to remain private.
Between November 2021 and January this year, Mizuhara stole $16 million from the account to feed his “voracious appetite for illegal sports betting,” according to E. Martin Estrada, the US attorney in Los Angeles.
Ohtani has been called a lot of things over the past few years. The modern-day Ruth. A baseball monk. Japan’s most famous citizen. In the criminal complaint released by authorities Thursday he was identified only as “Victim A.”
The complaint revealed text messages between Mizuhara and the bookmaker, which is also the subject of a federal investigation, as Mizuhara lost and was repeatedly given increases in his credit limit — “bumps,” in the speech of gamblers.
A text from Mizuhara in 2022 read: “I’m bad at this sports betting thing huh? Lol … Any chance you bump into me again?? As you know, you don’t have to worry that I won’t pay.”
While there is no evidence that Ohtani knew about the bet, the bookmaker was aware of Mizuhara’s connection to Ohtani. In November, the bookie had trouble reaching Mizuhara and threatened to expose him to Ohtani, claiming he knew where to find the baseball star.
In a text accompanying the complaint, the bookmaker wrote: “Hey Ippei, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you don’t answer my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I can see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’ll just go up and talk to him and ask how can I contact you since you’re not answering? Please call me right away.”
As Mizuhara fell deeper into debt, prosecutors said, he used $325,000 of Ohtani’s money earlier this year to buy baseball cards online and sent them to the Dodgers’ clubhouse under a pseudonym. Agents 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.
This is a baseball story, the criminal complaint is stuffed with numbers:
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19,000 bet.
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$142,256,769.74 total winning bets.
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$182,935,206.58 total lost 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 shifting narratives, two people familiar with the matter said, and worried that Ohtani could be embroiled in a gambling scandal that has the potential to ruin the entire sport.
Those concerns faded a week later when Ohtani offered a detailed account to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying Mizuhara had robbed him and promising to cooperate with any investigation. Baseball officials were skeptical, the people said, that Ohtani would make up such a story knowing that both federal authorities and the league would investigate it. When authorities charged Mizuhara and detailed the charges against him, any remaining suspicions were dispelled.
As for the Dodgers, they are atop their division early in a season that many fans will declare a failure if it doesn’t 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, the last few days, I think Shohei has been communicating more with his teammates,” Dave Roberts, the Dodgers’ manager, told reporters after Ohtani addressed the matter for news media in Los Angeles two weeks ago. “And I think there’s just the opposite of that.”
Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed reporting.
