Prosecutors Say Ippei Mizuhara Stole $16 Million From Shohei Ohtani. Here’s What We Know.
On Thursday, authorities released a document detailing their investigation into Ohtani’s former translator. The findings shed new light on the gambling scandal that has engulfed MLB.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors formally charged Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime translator of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, with bank fraud stemming from what is described as the theft of more than $16 million from Ohtani’s bank account to support Mizuhara’s gambling addiction. It represents the latest turn in a scandal that has engulfed baseball’s biggest star in recent weeks and offers substantial new information in a saga that has seen dramatic revelations and even more dramatic reversals.
The 37-page complaint details a yearslong pattern of theft for nearly quadruple the amount Mizuhara had previously confessed to stealing. The money was allegedly used to pay off bookmaker Mathew Bowyer, with the first payments occurring in 2021. The complaint appears to support Ohtani’s claims, made during a press conference last month, that he was unaware of the payments and did not place any bets himself; online sports gambling is illegal in California, where Ohtani and Mizuhara live. Initially, Mizuhara had claimed that Ohtani had made the payments himself on Mizuhara’s behalf.
To call Mizuhara, who was fired by the Dodgers after initial reports of the payments emerged, merely a translator doesn’t paint the full picture. Since Ohtani moved to the United States in December 2017, he and Mizuhara were rarely seen apart. In addition to performing translating duties, Mizuhara was a jack-of-all-trades personal assistant, working as Ohtani’s porter, training partner, business manager, and chauffeur; they were widely described not just as employer and employee, but as best friends. Ohtani is famously ascetic and reclusive. For years, Mizuhara functioned as something like his buffer for all things not immediately related to a baseball diamond.
It adds a complex emotional element to the fraud charge: If Ohtani’s account of what happened and the charges in the federal complaint are accurate, this represents not just a massive swindle, but also something akin to personal betrayal. The complaint suggests that Mizuhara was all too aware of this fact, stating that he texted Bowyer in the days after the first reports of the payments emerged, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”
What We Know
Prosecutors say that Mizuhara began making wagers with Bowyer in September 2021 and placed approximately 19,000 bets between December 2021 and January 2024. The total amount of money involved is staggering: The complaint says that records of Mizuhara’s wagers “reflect total winning bets of $142,256,769.74, and total losing bets of $182,935,206.68.” This means that, in all, Mizuhara is alleged to have lost more than $40 million.
The numbers suggest that Mizuhara was making wagers at a dizzying rate. Prosecutors say that he placed an average of almost 25 bets daily for an average of $320,000 per day. Winnings were deposited in Mizuhara’s personal bank account, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara paid “at least” $15 million to Bowyer via wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account. Additionally, investigators found that Mizuhara had used Ohtani’s account to pay for things other than gambling, including more than $325,000 on eBay and the shopping platform Whatnot, which the complaint says was spent on more than 1,000 collectible baseball cards that prosecutors say Mizuhara intended to resell. The bank fraud charges against Mizuhara carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison and/or a maximum fine of $1 million.
Ohtani’s Involvement—or Lack Thereof
The complaint details how Mizuhara went to extreme lengths to pose as Ohtani and then hide the proceedings from him. Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara entered Ohtani’s bank account online and changed the settings to link the account with Mizuhara’s phone number and an anonymous email account connected to Mizuhara. On multiple occasions, Mizuhara was recorded making calls to Ohtani’s bank, falsely claiming to be the player in order to authorize wire transfers, prosecutors say, including one call during which he fraudulently claimed the funds were for a car loan. Per the complaint, Mizuhara bypassed Ohtani’s security questions during another call by relaying the player’s “biographical information.”
All of this seems to address some of the biggest questions surrounding the scandal to this point: Was Ohtani, who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, aware of the gambling debts? And if so, what was his involvement?
In an interview with investigators, Ohtani said the same thing that he did in his March 27 press conference: that he first learned of the alleged theft last month, when, following an address by Mizuhara to Dodgers players in English, Mizuhara met privately with Ohtani. During their conversation, the complaint says, the translator “disclosed to Victim A”—Ohtani—“for the first time that MIZUHARA had substantial debts from illegal gambling, and that MIZUHARA had been paying his bookmaker with funds” from Ohtani’s bank account.
A Homeland Security Investigations special agent fluent in Japanese “reviewed approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between Victim A and MIZUHARA between 2020 and 2024” that contained no mention of Bowyer or his associates and no mention of “odds, wagering, or any other reference which might indicate Victim A’s knowledge of MIZUHARA’s gambling with” Bowyer. Additionally, while investigators found gambling records for Mizuhara with MGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel, none of the companies had records under Ohtani’s name, and Ohtani’s browser history “did not contain any evidence that Victim A had ever accessed the gambling websites used by” Bowyer. In all, this supports Ohtani’s account that he had no knowledge of Mizuhara’s illegal gambling or debts and that he has not been active in gambling, illegal or otherwise, himself.
Apart from allaying the concerns around Ohtani’s potential involvement in the scheme, the complaint clears up another potential headache for Major League Baseball. Prosecutors say that they have found no evidence that Mizuhara placed any bets on baseball, nipping what had the potential to become a colossal scandal for the sport in the bud.
Among the complaint’s most shocking revelations is that prosecutors say Bowyer nearly revealed the alleged theft directly to Ohtani. In November 2023, Bowyer allegedly texted Mizuhara, “Hey Ippie, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.”
This suggests that Bowyer may have been physically pursuing Ohtani, who was living in Newport Beach. Whether or not Bowyer believed that Ohtani was aware of the wire transfers, the revelation that Bowyer might have been monitoring him is creepy at best and outright threatening at worst. “You’re putting me in a position where this is going to get out of control,” Bowyer texted Mizuhara in January 2024, according to the complaint. “If I don’t hear from you by the end of the day today it’s gonna [sic] be out of my hands.”
Textual Evidence
It does not seem as though Mizuhara was concerned about the Stringer Bell Rule. The complaint says that investigators obtained Mizuhara’s phone, which “contained hundreds of pages of text messages with a phone number” that is “associated with BOOKMAKER 1”—a.k.a. Bowyer, who is separately under investigation for his “illegal gambling business.”
In September 2021, just as Mizuhara allegedly began placing wagers with Bowyer, prosecutors say he texted the bookie, “I’ve just been messing around with soccer, there’s games on 24/7 lol. I took UCLA but they lost outright!!!” He seemed to be unfamiliar with many of the mechanics of placing bets, messaging a second bookmaker the next month to say that he’d never done a wire transfer before.
As the months went on, the complaint says, Mizuhara repeatedly remarked on his own poor results. He wrote in January 2022, “Fuck I lost it all lol … can you ask [BOOKMAKER 1] if he can bump me 50k? That will be my last one for a while if I lose it.” In November 2022, he wrote, “I’m terrible at this sport betting thing huh? Lol … Any chance u can bump me again?? As you know, you don’t have to worry about me not paying!!” “I got my ass kicked again lol,” he allegedly told Bowyer in June 2023 before asking for more credit.
Other messages point to Mizuhara’s grim awareness that things were spiraling out of control. On one occasion, the complaint shows Mizuhara texted Bowyer to ask if he could reduce his account’s available credit from $300,000 to $100,000. “I’ll get too reckless with 300,” the complaint quotes him writing. In December 2022, the complaint says he texted Bowyer, “Can u bump me last 200? I swear on my mom this will be the last ask before I pay it off once I get back to the states. Sorry for keep on asking….” Six months later, the complaint reads, he wrote, “I have a problem lol.”
Mizuhara allegedly texted Bowyer in November 2023, “I’m gonna be honest, I ended up losing a lot of money on crypto the last couple years and I took a huge hit obviously with the sports too…. Just wanted to ask, is there any way we can settle on an amount? I’ve lost way too much on the site already … of course I know it’s my fault.”
On March 20, as news of the payments was just breaking, the prosecutors say that Mizuhara wrote to Bowyer via an encrypted message in Signal, “Have you seen the reports?”
“Yes, but that’s all bullshit,” Bowyer responded. “Obviously you didn’t steal from him. I understand it’s a cover job I totally get it.”
The complaint says that Mizuhara wrote back, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”
