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 surprising admission to the team: He was addicted to gambling, and Ohtani had paid off his debts to a bookmaker.
Ohtani, who is not fluent in English, listened but was unable to fully understand what Mizuhara said. He knew enough to be suspicious, however, and he wanted answers.
A few hours later, around midnight, Ohtani finally got the chance to pull Mizuhara into a conference room in the basement of the Fairmont Ambassador Hotel in Seoul.
With the two of them there, Mizuhara got even with his boss: He had racked up huge gambling debts and was stealing the baseball star’s money to pay them off.
As he came clean, however, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to protect himself from the law, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private matter. He asked his patron to follow up on the story he had just told Ohtani’s teammates, his advisers and an ESPN reporter who had investigated 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 asked several others to reach out as they managed the crisis: an attorney in Los Angeles; Matthew Hiltzik, crisis communications officer in New York. and a new interpreter whom Ohtani’s inner circle could trust. Mizuhara’s wife also attended the meeting.
Shortly thereafter, Ohtani’s advisors issued a statement to reporters, claiming that Ohtani was the victim of a multi-million dollar theft. Soon headlines linking Ohtani to illegal gambling spread around the world.
It was a story that would spark a whirlwind quarter, moving from South Korea to Los Angeles, from parks to hotels to airports, to meetings with lawyers and federal agents. At times, it looked like baseball’s biggest star was in danger of being tainted by a gambling scandal, echoing painful episodes from the sport’s past. It came to a head 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, whom they categorically said was the victim.
The formal charge and complaint were announced a day after The New York Times reported that Mizuhara and his lawyer, Michael Friedman, 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 made an initial court appearance, wearing street clothes and shackles. He pleaded no contest and was released on $25,000 bail. Conditions of his release require him to submit to a drug test and seek treatment for a gambling addiction.
Friedman issued a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “continues 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 so that he can take responsibility.” He added that Mizuhara has apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and “is willing to seek treatment for his gambling.”
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 drew comparisons to Babe Ruth, had given the league new cultural relevance around the world. And now Ohtani and his new team, which 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 could not have been greater.
But once Mizuhara’s news broke, Major League Baseball realized it had a problem on its hands. He announced that he was investigating the matter. And the local Los Angeles offices of the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security uncharacteristically went public with the news that they, too, had launched an investigation. The saga of Pete Rose, the major league career hits leader who was banned from baseball in the 1980s for betting on the sport, was on everyone’s mind.
After the hotel meeting, the Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara. Soon he was on the plane back to Los Angeles, where Homeland Security agents met him at the airport. He declined to be interviewed, but gave agents access to a gold mine of information that would prove critical to their investigation: He signed a form giving consent to search his cell phone.
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 examined about 9,700 pages of text messages between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or any of the betting companies Mizuhara was involved with.
Over two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles — one of the days he made his first game as a Dodger, hours after an interview with agents — and described his relationship with Mizuhara, who 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 employed him separately as a “de facto manager and assistant,” according to the complaint. Mizuhara drove his boss to and from the field and handled some “professional and personal matters” outside of baseball.
In 2018, both men visited a bank in Arizona, where the Angels were in spring training, and opened an account where Ohtani’s wages could be deposited. For the next three years, Ohtani never logged into his online account once, according to prosecutors, and the money piled up.
Ohtani has plenty of other bills, of course — he makes more money from endorsements and business deals than from his lucrative baseball salary. But it was this account, solely for Ohtani’s baseball winnings, that Mizuhara planned to take control of and then, as he fell deeper into a gambling addiction, steal for years, according to prosecutors.
Mizuhara changed the account settings so that notifications and transaction confirmations go to him, not Ohtani. Relying on phone recordings obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara also impersonated Ohtani to win the bank’s approval for certain large transactions. And every time 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 bill, Mizuhara told them Ohtani preferred to remain private.
From November 2021 to 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 in recent years. Modern Ruth. A baseball monk. Japan’s most famous citizen. Authorities identified him simply as “Victim A” in the criminal complaint released Thursday.
The complaint revealed text messages between Mizuhara and the bookie, which is also the subject of a federal investigation, as Mizuhara racked up losses and was repeatedly given increases in his credit limit — “hits,” in gambler parlance.
A text from Mizuhara in 2022 reads: “I’m terrible at this sports betting huh? Lol… Any chance you can hit 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 bookie was aware of Mizuhara’s connection to Ohtani. Last November, the bookie had trouble reaching Mizuhara and threatened to expose him to Ohtani, saying he knew where to find the baseball star.
In text included in the complaint, the bet read: “Hey Yippei, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you don’t answer my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach watching [Victim A] walk his dog. I will just go talk to him and ask how can I get in touch with you since you are not answering? Please call me immediately.”
As Mizuhara fell into debt, prosecutors say, he used $325,000 of Ohtani’s money early this year to buy baseball cards over the Internet and send them to the Dodgers club under an alias. 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 believed he had planned to resell them.
Because this is a baseball story, the criminal complaint was filled with numbers:
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19,000 bets.
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Total Bets Won $142,256,769.74.
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Total Lost Bets $182,935,206.58.
Crucially, 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 narratives, two people familiar with the matter said, and worried that Ohtani could somehow become embroiled in a potential gambling scandal. tarnish the entire sport.
Those concerns were dispelled a week later when Ohtani offered a detailed account to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying Mizuhara robbed him and pledging to cooperate with any investigations. Baseball officials were skeptical, the people said, that Ohtani would make up such a story knowing that both the feds and the league would be investigating. When the authorities charged Mizuhara and laid out the charges against him, any lingering suspicions disappeared.
As for the Dodgers, they are leading their division early in a season that many fans will declare a failure if it doesn’t end with a championship. Ohtani’s bat is heating up. Inside the clubhouse, players say Ohtani, without Mizuhara as a setup man, has made more of an effort to get to know his teammates.
“You know, the last couple of days, I think Sohei has been even more connected with his teammates,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after Ohtani addressed the issue to the media in Los Angeles two weeks ago . “And I think there’s only upside to that.”
Ana Facio-Krajcer contributed to the report.
