The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most. Unlike so many of Orange County’s native sons, for example, Bowyer wasn’t raised with access to bottomless funds. But his adolescent poker winnings netted him enough to buy a pickup, which he tricked out with a thunderous subwoofer that ensured that his presence was felt even when he wasn’t seen.

Thirty years later, on Sept. 8, 2021, Bowyer was behind the wheel of a very different vehicle, his white Bentley GT Continental, driving to a very different poker game. Held in a hotel conference room in San Diego, it was hosted by some players and staff of the L.A. Angels, who were in town for two games against the Padres. For Bowyer, then a 46-year-old father of five who could be mistaken for a retired slugger — confident gait, hulking arms mosaicked in tribal tattoos — attending was a no-brainer. These were the back rooms where he cultivated new clients to expand what he referred to, cryptically, as “my business.”

During the poker game, Bowyer and one of his friends, a stocky guy named Michael Greenberg who had been a fixture at those long-ago high school poker games, began talking to a man seated at the card table. Japanese, slight in build, sporting a gray T-shirt, with inky hair cut into a modish bowl, neither Greenberg nor Bowyer yet knew the man’s name — Ippei Mizuhara. But both were aware that he was the interpreter and close friend of a player being heralded as the most extraordinary in baseball history: Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenomenon who was then in his third year with the Angels, and finishing up a transcendent season in which he would hit 46 home runs, strike out 156 batters, and be named the American League Most Valuable Player. This connection, however, was not the reason Bowyer was keen to talk to Mizuhara. Between hands at the poker table, the interpreter was obsessively placing bets on sports through his phone.

Bowyer sidled up for a brief conversation — one he’d later come to spend many sleepless nights replaying in his mind.

“What are you betting on?”

“Soccer,” replied the interpreter.

“I run my own site,” said Bowyer, speaking as he always did: polite tone, penetrating eye contact. “We do soccer — we do it all. And with me, you don’t need to use your credit card. I’ll give you credit.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Matt.”

“I’m Ippei.”

“Ippei, if you’re interested, hit me up.”

And that was that, an exchange of the sort that Bowyer had been finessing for the better part of two decades in constructing one of the largest and most audacious illegal bookmaking operations in the United States. He’d had versions of this talk on manicured golf courses, over $5,000 bottles of Macallan 30 scotch, while flying 41,000 feet above the Earth in private jets comped by casinos, and lounging poolside at his palatial Orange County home. He’d had the talk with celebrities, doctors, day traders, trial lawyers, trust-fund scions. Often nothing came of it. But sometimes it led to a new customer — or “player,” in his industry’s parlance — adding to a stable of nearly 1,000 bettors who placed millions in weekly wagers through Bowyer. He used the bulk of his earnings to fuel his own ferocious thirst for gambling and the attendant lifestyle, escaping often to villas at Las Vegas casinos for lavish sprees that earned him a reputation as one of the Strip’s more notorious whales — a high roller with an icy demeanor doted on by the top brass of numerous casinos.

In this case, however, the exchange with Mizuhara sent Bowyer down a different path. Shortly after the poker game, he set up Mizuhara with an account at AnyActionSports.com, the site Bowyer used for his operation, run through servers in Costa Rica. It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.

‘Victim A’

Two years later, in December 2023, Shohei Ohtani signed what was then the largest contract in professional sports history with the Los Angeles Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. The deal for “Shotime” dominated the sports media for months. But on March 20, 2024, news broke that threatened to derail the show just as it was beginning.

The revelation that millions of dollars had been transferred from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal bookmaker surfaced in dueling reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Both centering on his then-39-year-old interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, the dispatches were as confounding as they were explosive. In an interview with ESPN, Mizuhara initially presented himself as a problem gambler, declared that Ohtani was not involved in any betting, and explained the payments as Ohtani bailing out a friend, going so far as to describe the two of them sitting at Ohtani’s computer and wiring the money.

But the following morning, before ESPN went live, Mizuhara disavowed his earlier statements. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara; investigations were launched by MLB and the IRS; and five days later, Ohtani issued a statement denying any role in a scandal that echoed unsavory chapters of the sport’s past. “I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker,” Ohtani said. “I’m just beyond shocked.”

Given the whiplash of shifting narratives, the speculation that followed was inevitable. Flip on talk radio, or venture into a conspiratorial corner of the internet, and you were treated to bro-inflected theorizing as to what really happened, what Ohtani really knew. Equally intriguing was the timing. The scandal erupted at a moment when the longtime stigma surrounding sports betting had, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for wider legalization, given way to a previously unfathomable landscape where pro athletes had become spokespeople for entities like DraftKings and FanDuel; where ESPN operated its own multimillion-dollar sportsbook; and where Las Vegas, a town historically shunned by professional sports leagues, had just celebrated its reinvention as a sporting mecca by hosting the Super Bowl. But if such factors tempered the public’s instinct to rush to the harshest judgments, the ordeal also revealed how the corporatization of sports betting had done little to snuff out a secretive underworld estimated to be responsible for $64 billion in illicit wagers annually. (California is one of 11 states where sports betting remains illegal.)

Yet perhaps most remarkable was the speed at which the matter was seemingly resolved. Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the federal government issued a scathing criminal complaint against Mizuhara just three weeks later — on April 11 — that supported Ohtani’s narrative. The numbers were vertigo-inducing. Over roughly 24 months, Mizuhara had placed more than $300 million in bets, running up a debt of $40.6 million to an illegal bookmaking operation. To service it, the government alleged, Mizuhara himself became a criminal, taking control of one of Ohtani’s bank accounts and ­siphoning almost $17 million from the superstar. In June, Mizuhara pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud.

One person who was not shocked by any twist in this saga was a central character who, throughout, remained an enigma: Mathew Bowyer. Since meeting Mizuhara at that poker game in San Diego, he had received at least $16.25 million in wires directly from Ohtani’s account, had poured most of it into conspicuous escapades in Vegas, and had been braced for a reckoning since the previous October, when dozens of armed federal agents raided his home. While the raid inadvertently unearthed the Ohtani-Mizuhara ordeal, the mushrooming scandal obscured a more complex, far-reaching, and ongoing drama. The agents who descended upon Bowyer’s home were not interested in the private misfortunes of a baseball superstar, but rather in exposing something Bowyer understood more intimately than most: how Las Vegas casinos skirted laws — and reaped profits — by allowing major bookies to launder millions by gambling on the city’s supposedly cleaned-up Strip.

by David Amsden, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/Kyodo AP/Matthew Bowyer