When news broke that Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had been accused of stealing $4.5 million from the baseball superstar to pay down gambling debts with a California bookie, it was already one of the more consequential sports stories of the year, rapidly overshadowing March Madness and the NBA playoff push. The wire transfers had come to light because the FBI was investigating a man named Matthew Bowyer for running an illicit bookmaking scheme (online gambling isn’t yet legal in California). ESPN and the Los Angeles Times were alerted that Ohtani’s name had surfaced in the investigation; two $500,000 payments had been wired directly from Ohtani’s bank account to Bowyer.
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