JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Seventeen months ago, Matt Bowyer found himself at the center of a storm. It involves the most famous baseball player in the world, Shohei Ohtani; his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara; more than $300 million in sports wagers and allegations of theft. Bowyer, an illegal bookmaker, couldn't talk about any of it at the time. He was facing criminal charges.
But today in federal court in southern California, Bowyer was sentenced to just over a year in prison, a result that gave him an odd bit of freedom. It allowed Bowyer to speak in depth about the scandal for the first time. From California, Keith O'Brien has this story.
KEITH O'BRIEN: Few players are more electrifying than Shohei Ohtani.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Here's the 2-1. It's a drive. It's a bullet. Was there any doubt? Shohei Ohtani arrives in October with a three-run home run.
O'BRIEN: There was a time not that long ago when Matt Bowyer lived for moments like this one. As an illegal bookmaker in Southern California, Bowyer had about 1,000 people betting with him, dozens of agents working for him and millions of dollars moving every week.
MATT BOWYER: That's why people bet with me. They were getting paid. They know, if they won, they're getting paid.
O'BRIEN: But last fall, when Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series, Bowyer's house was quiet. Football season was quiet, too. Bowyer, a man who once watched every game, wasn't watching sports at all because he had been caught up in the biggest sports gambling controversy in decades.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: We begin at 3 with a scandal that's rocking the sports world.
O'BRIEN: In an interview at his home earlier this year, Bowyer retraced his steps, recounting how he ended up here. It began, he said, in the early 1990s, when he was just 16 years old. He was running a poker ring and a bookmaking operation out of his mother's house. One of his friends was soon into him for $300, and Bowyer was in trouble for the first time.
M BOWYER: So his mom called my mom, and we had an intervention at my house. I'll never forget it. I came home, and there was four moms in my living room.
O'BRIEN: The poker ring ended that day. The bookmaking did not. It continued into Bowyer's adult years, worrying his wife, Nicole, especially after the birth of their son in 2021.
NICOLE BOWYER: In my mind, I did not want my son to grow up with a dad that did something not legal for a living.
O'BRIEN: But by then, Bowyer's operation had grown. The money supported a lavish lifestyle, and his clients were sometimes famous. Several, he said, were professional athletes.
M BOWYER: I'd speculate that 10 of them were baseball players.
O'BRIEN: Bowyer was getting close to them. And one night in September 2021, he said he and one of his agents, a man named Mike, got invited to a poker game involving players and coaches for the Los Angeles Angels. It was Shohei Ohtani's team at the time, and Bowyer said that Ohtani's interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, joined the poker game, too.
M BOWYER: And we all went in there and ordered pizzas, and we were playing poker. And Ippei was on his phone betting on a sports app, and I don't know which one. And it might have been a legal one, illegal. I don't even know. And Mike saw that and said, hey, you know, Matt does that, if you needed a spot to play.
O'BRIEN: It was standard procedure for Bowyer. He was just recruiting a new player. But Mizuhara was not a standard client. According to court records, Mizuhara's statements and Bowyer's memory, Mizuhara immediately began betting with Bowyer and losing a lot.
M BOWYER: There had to be zero handicapping on what he was picking, and the parlays were just long shots. I mean, you might as well just took 10 grand and lit it on fire.
O'BRIEN: The losses mounted millions of dollars. And when it was time to start paying up, the wire transfers came in from the bank account of Shohei Ohtani.
M BOWYER: The minute I saw a wire transfer with the name of Shohei Ohtani was the moment I said, holy [expletive]. This is good and bad.
O'BRIEN: Federal investigators later determined that Ohtani had nothing to do with the gambling. Mizuhara was stealing from his friend, they said, even impersonating Ohtani in phone calls to the bank.
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UNIDENTIFIED BANK TELLER: Who am I speaking with?
IPPEI MIZUHARA: (Impersonating Shohei Ohtani) Shohei Ohtani.
UNIDENTIFIED BANK TELLER: Thank you. How may I help you?
MIZUHARA: (Impersonating Shohei Ohtani) I tried to make a wire transfer a couple of days ago.
O'BRIEN: But Bowyer didn't know any of that. He just knew that he had tapped into a seemingly bottomless account. Ohtani was about to leave the Angels and sign a $700 million deal with the Dodgers. Bowyer admitted to boasting about his ties to the player in conversations with other gamblers, and Bowyer was talking at a dangerous time. Unbeknownst to him, the feds were already closing in.
CHRIS SEYMOUR: It was just out of left field, I guess, would be the category I would put it.
O'BRIEN: Chris Seymour was a special agent in criminal investigations at the Internal Revenue Service in the summer of 2023 when he first learned about Bowyer's bookmaking. At the time, he had no knowledge of Ippei Mizuhara.
SEYMOUR: It was not where we were going. It was not where we're looking. And all of a sudden, you got this line drive, and you're like, wow, we got to - I guess we got to follow that one.
O'BRIEN: In October 2023, Seymour and other federal agents raided Bowyer's Southern California home in San Juan Capistrano. Seymour left that day with a mountain of evidence against Bowyer. And while that was frightening for Matt and Nicole, it was nothing compared to what happened next. When news broke that Mizuhara was one of Bowyer's clients, reporters descended on the house. Nicole said it got to the point where she could barely walk outside.
N BOWYER: They come with cameras. They come right in your face. They hide behind cars. I'm trying to put my son in the car, and they're just right in your face, trying to film everything you're doing, asking if Shohei Ohtani was betting or if we knew anything. It was a lot. It was a lot to take in.
O'BRIEN: Now that it's over - with Ohtani cleared of wrongdoing, Mizuhara sentenced to almost five years in prison and Bowyer receiving his own sentence today - Nicole Bowyer considers it all a blessing. Her husband isn't a bookmaker anymore. He's a dad, playing with his son on the floor of the house where he once ran his bookmaking operation.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Let's wrestle together.
M BOWYER: OK. Get over here.
O'BRIEN: He's also trying something new. In recent months, Matt Bowyer has written a book, and he has started telling his story in public for the first time.
M BOWYER: I think we should give these guys a nice...
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O'BRIEN: One day last February, he spoke about his mistakes at an ethics and accounting class at the University of Southern California. And afterwards, many students came down to the stage to talk to him.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I'm sorry, man. But, like...
M BOWYER: Oh, don't be sorry.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I'm a huge Dodgers fan.
M BOWYER: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: And I remember seeing your name on, like, the articles. And...
O'BRIEN: They had questions about gambling, about Mizuhara and about Ohtani. But mostly, they just wanted to say that they had met the bookie at the center of it all.
For NPR News, I'm Keith O'Brien in Los Angeles.
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