Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter has pleaded guilty to stealing millions from him to feed a sports gambling habit. The man who took Ippei Mizuhara’s bets entered a guilty plea to running an illegal bookmaking operation.
Major League Baseball has closed its investigation into the matter. And the Dodgers are delighted that Ohtani is putting up Hall of Fame numbers at the plate.
But the federal criminal probe that targeted Mizuhara and Mathew Bowyer, his Orange County-based bookmaker — and cleared Ohtani of any wrongdoing — is ongoing, even as MLB has been forced to deal with more forbidden gambling.
In Bowyer’s plea agreement, prosecutors allege that two current or former ballplayers placed bets with him. In the meantime, MLB banned another player for life and suspended four others after finding they bet on baseball, an offense that has been considered a mortal threat to the game since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
The league is likely to face more allegations of illicit betting by players, especially since the sport’s partnerships with legal gambling enterprises have sent conflicting signals about its disdain for wagering. MLB insiders and experts on sports ethics say the handling of the Mizuhura affair is a case study in how not to deal with such a challenge. They describe the episode as a public relations fiasco that at one point had tied Ohtani himself — falsely, prosecutors say — to payments made in the bookmaking underworld.
Both the Dodgers and MLB have remained mostly silent about their actions during the days before The Times broke the story about Ohtani’s name surfacing in the federal probe and the theft allegations against Mizuhara. In a statement to the paper earlier this month , league spokesman Glen Caplin said, “Just like in other cases, MLB immediately began its due diligence upon learning of allegations from the news media.” Caplin declined to provide any specifics.
After The Times began inquiring about the investigation in March, the Dodgers and MLB left it to Ohtani’s agent and a New York-based crisis public relations manager to deal with the newspaper’s questions and similar queries later by ESPN.
ESPN reported that an unnamed spokesman for Ohtani offered up Mizuhara for an interview — and the interpreter told ESPN that the ballplayer had paid Mizuhura’s gambling debts to an…