The Bookie At the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal Is Ready to Talk

I
t 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.

Editor’s picks

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.

Related Content

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.”

“Ippei was financing my Vegas lifestyle at the highest possible level,” Bowyer says.

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.

House of Cards

Last October — almost exactly a year after the raid, on a night when the Dodgers are playing the Mets in the playoffs — Bowyer is giving a tour of the home where he lives with his wife, Nicole. It sits nestled inside a gated community in San Juan Capistrano, an enclave of Orange County dominated by flaxen hills and the latest in athleisure. With a Mediterranean-style roof of curved terra-cotta tiles, private movie theater, sauna, cold plunge, and landscaped backyard, it is an impressive spread that embodies a strand of aspiration unique to Southern California: the personal residence that could be mistaken for an upscale rehab center. This is what the property has become for Bowyer, a purgatory where he spends his days reflecting on the life he lived and girding himself for what’s to come. Two months earlier, in August, he pleaded guilty to three felony counts — running an illegal bookmaking operation, filing a false tax return, and money laundering — and is awaiting sentencing on charges that carry a maximum of 18 years in prison.

“Do you want to see the one room,” he asks, “that the feds couldn’t find in the raid?”

Bowyer makes his way to his garage. Now 50, he is an affable guy who always seems to have just finished a punishing workout, and who emits a steely calm that can charm and unnerve in the span of a few seconds. He stops at what seems to be a banal metal shelving unit, save for the fact that it is secured to the wall by a discreet padlocked chain. Unlocking it, he slides the shelf to the side to reveal a narrow doorway.

“This is my man cave,” Bowyer says with a grin, squeezing into a wood-paneled nook.

Inside, the walls are marked with mementos from his former life. World Series tickets. A baseball signed by the late Pete Rose. “I’m sorry I bet on baseball,” it reads. There is a signed photo of Bowyer golfing with Travis Kelce. It was taken in July 2022 at the Edgewood Tahoe Resort, during an annual tournament where high rollers at the property’s casino are rewarded for their questionable impulses by being paired on the course with celebrities. Bowyer was a mainstay for years, golfing with Charles Barkley, former Saints quarterback Derek Carr, and Broncos coach Sean Payton. “None of them were clients,” he says. “But those events were golden marketing opportunities for finding new players.”

The most prominent object is a framed Ohtani Angels jersey, autographed by the ballplayer to Bowyer’s four-year-old son. “To Kingston,” it reads inside the crimson 1. Then, inside the adjacent 7, in a florid swirl familiar to millions of baseball fans: “Shohei Ohtani.”

Bowyer, who has never met or spoken to Ohtani, explains that he acquired the jersey through Mizuhara, when the interpreter was “maybe $20 million” in the hole and regularly sending wires of $500,000 to Bowyer from Ohtani’s bank account. “Still, wasn’t easy to get him to do it for me,” Bowyer says.

If the jersey once represented a high point in Bowyer’s shadowy rise, he has come to view it in a more sobering light: as something he could potentially sell. He has already offloaded his Bentley, his $450,000 Rolls-Royce Cullinan SUV, hundreds of bottles of rare-vintage wine, and has taken a job selling artificial turf on commission to make ends meet. Still, in addition to having a wife and five kids he takes evident pride in supporting, Bowyer owes the government $1.6 million, along with another $7.5 million in back taxes.

“That’s a million dollars, minimum,” he says of the jersey. It is not an outlandish estimation given that Ohtani’s “50/50 ball” — the one he sailed over the fence to become the first player in history to hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases in a single season — fetched more than $4 million at auction.

“That’s more valuable than this, but this is special: a signed jersey to the bookie’s son,” Bowyer says. “That’s my backup plan for if I need to feed my family.”

Booking It

To understand how Bowyer arrived at this peculiar inflection point, you must travel back in time to a youth that unfolded not far from where he now lives. Bowyer describes himself as having grown up being guided by an industrious work ethic and a talent for cutting corners, a kid entranced by the material excess endemic to the region but out of his reach. As a paperboy, he devised a cunning system to juice his sales numbers; at an early job pumping gas, he grilled the men pulling up in Porsches about how they made their money; and in addition to the poker games he ran, he bet on sports with friends, quickly coming to understand that he could mitigate his own losses by acting as the bookie.

“In one way or another,” he says, speaking in several exclusive conversations conducted as he awaits sentencing, “I was always gambling.”

A critical juncture arrived when Bowyer was 19 and expecting the birth of his first child, a daughter, with his high school girlfriend, Monica, whom he would eventually marry. Working as a busboy at Chevys, a chain Mexican restaurant, he caught the attention of a regular named Micky Dhillon who ran a commodities firm. He offered Bowyer a job in the mail room. Intrigued by a world that felt a whole lot like gambling, Bowyer studied for his brokerage license. Before turning 25, he says, he earned upward of $300,000 a year as a broker and discovered that he had stumbled into a Shangri-La for someone interested in bookmaking.

“It was a room of finance bros,” recalls Bowyer. “Some were doing hookers, some were doing cocaine, some were gambling, some were doing all of the above. These guys were into blowing their money, buying Ferraris, and so I looked at it all like: Why don’t I just take it?” Bowyer’s co-workers became clients of his bookmaking operation, the line between his licit and illicit earnings becoming so porous as to feel nonexistent. (Dhillon did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Basically, he was a drug dealer doing his own cocaine,” says a friend of Bowyer’s of his gambling.

While building his book and establishing himself in commodities — and becoming a father to two more daughters with Monica — Bowyer was also immersing himself in the culture of Las Vegas. He’d first visited on his 21st birthday, winning $28,000 playing blackjack at the New York New York casino and getting his initial taste of the voodoo Vegas deploys to ensure that money returns to the house: a comped suite. Within a few years, he was traveling to Vegas a few times a month, spending six hours a day at the blackjack table and generally losing far more often than he won. “I was a total degenerate, no skill,” he says. But he enjoyed the comped rooms, dinners, shows, and the thrill of having his own “host,” as the casino employees charged with luring and retaining big spenders are known.

Bowyer quit commodities and became a full-time bookmaker by the time he turned 30, converting a network of friends and associates into “agents” who got commissions on players they referred to Bowyer. Bookmaking and gambling became one and the same: a closed loop of dopamine reinforcement that allowed Bowyer to sustain a vice rather than being undone by it, with his Vegas trips doubling as marketing opportunities to cozy up to potential clients. Michael Greenberg, Bowyer’s childhood friend who was with him at the first meeting with Mizuhara, was close with Bowyer throughout this evolution. “Basically,” Greenberg says, “he was a drug dealer doing his own cocaine.”

This period was not without dramatic pitfalls. Bowyer and Monica divorced in 2003. He got into an often-tempestuous relationship with a “cabana girl” at the Mirage with whom he had a fourth daughter. If bookmaking was in theory the keel that kept the ship upright, in practice Bowyer often treated it as another gamble, priding himself on taking bets that his competition wouldn’t touch. To pay his customers, he sometimes borrowed from friends. In 2011, he filed for bankruptcy. And, later, he faced a moment that would prove to be an omen of what his future held.

“I got raided,” he says.

It was March 25, 2014. Bowyer was returning to California from a jag in Vegas. His oldest daughter, Lauren, who was then 18, was at home. When Bowyer called her, he could tell from her voice that something was wrong. Then a neighbor called to let him know that his home was swarming with men in tactical vests and long guns who turned out to be from the Department of Homeland Security. “I felt that deadbeat-dad feeling,” Bowyer says.

The government seized a small amount of cash, $14,511, much of it found in a curious form: plastic-wrapped bricks bundled in currency bands reading “$10,000.” “But when we opened them, it was just one-dollar bills with $100s on top,” says Mark Speidel, the lead Homeland Security Investigations agent. “Bowyer told us he’d bring it out as a kind of flex, saying it was around $100,000, to prove he could pay off gambling debts or whatever. That told me a lot about the kind of guy we were dealing with.” Though Bowyer agreed to cooperate with Speidel, who was pursuing a larger case into offshore gambling in Costa Rica, the investigation fizzled and no charges were filed against Bowyer.

Bowyer, for his part, was unfazed by the affair. “I thought that was my get-out-of-jail card,” he says. “I viewed it like: You’re not worth our time.”

Within an hour of the agents departing, he was again taking bets.

What Happens in Vegas

A new casino opened its doors in Las Vegas in June 2021, three months before Bowyer met Mizuhara. At a cost of $4.3 billion, Resorts World was the first ground-up construction of a gaming emporium on the Strip in more than a decade, rising on a lot formerly occupied by the notorious Stardust. It was there, in the 1970s, that the bookie and mob associate Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal created the first sportsbook to be run out of a Vegas casino during a freewheeling era of graft, skimming, and violence immortalized in Martin Scor­sese’s Casino. Resorts World, however, positioned itself squarely within a different paradigm. A futuristic monolith of coppery glass housing a buffet of global business interests, it rose not as an homage to Sin City but to Vegas’ reorientation around an even more powerful American god: corporate synergy.

Past the flamboyant neon and acres of chintz, all casinos on the Strip stand engaged in a shadow war to seduce so-called whales, the tiny sliver of high rollers critical to a casino’s gaming revenues. As a newcomer, Resorts World was at a disadvantage. According to a complaint that would eventually be filed by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the casino solved this problem in a manner that harkened back to the days of the Stardust: by wooing bookies onto its casino floor, where their illegal earnings were converted into clean money in the form of chips. Most prominent among them was Bowyer, who was courted to Resorts World by an independent host. He walked through the doors in February 2022 with $1 million — the first of what would become more than 80 visits to the casino over the next two years.

Bowyer’s relationship with Vegas had evolved in ways that mirrored the city’s shifting identity. He was a married man once again, to Nicole, a pixieish blond whom Bowyer refers to as “my queen.” With Nicole, he had a fifth child, his son Kingston, which transformed his trips to Resorts World into family affairs. Twice a month the casino sent its red-striped private jet for Bowyer, his family, and their nanny; an hour later, they were on the tarmac in Vegas, met by red Rolls Royce Phantoms that ushered them into the casino’s “palace,” a private 7,000-square-foot villa with four bedrooms, a pool, and an on-call butler service. Joining them was an entourage of friends, brought not merely for camaraderie but to allow Bowyer to circumvent his own betting limits. Supplying trusted compatriots with funds earned from his bookmaking business, Bowyer would have them wire it to the casino under their names and then follow his lead at the baccarat table.

“When I put down $30,000, they’d bet $10,000,” Bowyer says. “If we lost, we still had a great time. If we won, we’d figure out a split.”

It was a costly existence to maintain. But his bookmaking operation had never been so flush, thanks to his newest player, Mizuhara. Following the poker game in San Diego, Mizuhara had started betting primarily on soccer with a modest credit line of $8,000, which he burned through quickly. “Nicest guy in the world,” Bowyer says, “but a truly terrible gambler.” When Mizuhara volunteered to pay his losses, Bowyer instead offered a “bump” — an increase in credit that allowed Mizuhara to keep playing.

By November 2021, Mizuhara had run up a debt of $40,000, which he promptly paid, passing an integrity test of sorts for Bowyer to understand what kind of client he was dealing with. Following more bumps, Mizuhara owed $300,000 by February 2022. He sent the funds to Bowyer’s friend Greenberg, who served as a middleman for the transfer — and who alerted Bowyer to something peculiar about the wires coming in. They came from an account bearing a globally recognizable name: Shohei Ohtani.

“The minute I saw that wire,” Bowyer says, “was when I knew I was fucked.” Indeed, Greenberg quickly bowed out of the arrangement. (“Whatever the fuck that was about,” Greenberg says, “I didn’t want to be part of it.”) But Bowyer convinced himself there must be some kind of explanation. “That’s the greed, the degenerate gambler in me,” he says. “You have the voice in your head that knows something is wrong, but you have another voice that tells a different story.”

The story Bowyer initially told himself was that Mizuhara and Ohtani were likely betting together under one account. This theory started to unravel in March 2022, when Mizuhara gave Bowyer tickets to an Angels spring-training game. Bowyer sat in the first row behind home plate. At one point, when Ohtani was on deck, Bowyer noticed a flurry of bets coming in on Mizuhara’s account. “Shohei is literally 15 feet from me swinging a bat,” Bowyer says. “So, obviously he had nothing to do with those bets.” (Mizuhara and his lawyer did not reply to requests for comment.)

By then, however, Mizuhara had revealed himself to be a personal whale whose feral gambling habit mirrored — and now heavily subsidized — Bowyer’s own. Mizuhara placed nearly 25 bets a day, some as high as $160,000. As Bowyer continued to increase Mizuhara’s credit line, the interpreter’s debt quickly ballooned into the millions, paid down via installments in the form of six-figure wires bearing Ohtani’s name.

From the start, Mizuhara had been insistent on wiring the funds to a Bank of America account, which presented Bowyer with a dilemma. He had years earlier been “debanked” from Bank of America, along with Wells Fargo and Chase, meaning he’d been banned from having an account with them. “Probably,” he says, “because they could smell I wasn’t above board.” After Greenberg opted out of the arrangement, Bowyer needed someone else to act as middleman for the transfers. He found a willing participant in Ryan Boyajian, a close friend who had served as Bowyer’s best man in his wedding to Nicole and who is known to viewers of The Real Housewives of Orange County as the musclebound, perpetually tanned fiancé of cast member Jennifer Pedranti.

Boyajian and Pedranti became fixtures on the Resorts World trips, with Boyajian receiving the wires from Ohtani’s account via Mizuhara and then forwarding the funds directly to the casino in preparation for their gambling sprees. (Neither Boyajian nor Pedranti would comment.)

“For me? It was the perfect sequence to move the money,” says Bowyer. “Basically, Ippei was financing my Vegas lifestyle at the highest possible level.”

None of this should have been possible in modern-day Las Vegas. Since 1985, following an addition made to the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, state-licensed casinos were reclassified as financial institutions, making them beholden to the same strident anti-money-laundering (AML) laws as the banking industry. To ensure that money gambled is legally obtained, anyone wishing to bet more than $10,000 must be vetted by a casino’s compliance team, with gaming venues required to verify a prospective heavy bettor’s source of funds (SOF). Further, per the amended law, if a casino “knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect” that any amount over $5,000 originated from nefarious gains, they must file a suspicious-activity report (SAR). When Bowyer first arrived at Resorts World with $1 million, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s complaint, the casino’s compliance officers were unable to confirm his SOF and categorized him as “medium risk.” Yet he was still permitted onto the floor. (Resorts World did not respond to requests for comment.)

“The minute I saw that wire [from Ohtani’s account] was when I knew I was fucked,” says Bowyer.

By July 19, 2022, when the casino’s internal AML committee conducted its first thorough evaluation of Bowyer, he had already become a regular — and highly profitable — presence at Resorts World, losing more than $500,000 the previous month. Among the notes from the committee’s meeting is a seemingly damning remark from the “Director of Cage” — the employee responsible for overseeing all revenue that moves through the heavily guarded area where cash is exchanged for chips — who in regard to Bowyer “stated that patron is a known ‘bookie.’”

Despite this, no SAR was filed by Resorts World. Bowyer continued to be welcomed as a guest, one whom those in the casino’s C-suite seemed eager to protect. In a subsequent meeting of the AML committee, according to legal filings, a Resorts World executive “requested that the word ‘bookie’ be stricken from the … agenda as that was one person’s opinion.” The casino also awarded Bowyer with some ethically dubious perks. Following his first visit, he arranged for Nicole to become licensed as an independent casino host, so she started earning a commission directly from Resorts World for their personal trips, in effect ensuring that a portion of Bowyer’s losses went back into his own coffers. (Nicole earned shy of $700,000 in this role over less than two years.)

Mizuhara was hardly so fortunate during this period. His text messages to Bowyer, released in the federal government’s criminal complaint, offer a time-stamped window into how insidiously gambling can erode a person’s grasp of reality:

Jan. 15, 2022, to Michael Greenberg: Fuck I lost it all lol…can you ask [Matt] if he can bump me 50K? That will be my last one for a while if I lose it.

March 6, 2022, to Bowyer: Anyway you can bump me a little bit? I will wire you my losses on Wednesday if that is ok. I need to wait a week before I send another big wire.

Nov. 4, 2022: I’m terrible at this sports betting thing huh? Lol…Any chance you can bump me again?? As you know, you don’t need to worry about me not paying!!

These continued every few days for the better part of the next year, one Bowyer would look back on as a personal and professional zenith. In February 2023, he flew to the Atlantis casino in the Bahamas, placing his largest ever single bet on the Kansas City Chiefs triumphing over the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. He won $4.6 million; Mizuhara’s debt to Bowyer, meanwhile, was fast approaching $20 million.

June 23, 2023: I’m the worst lol…can’t catch a break…Can I get one last bump? I swear this is gonna be the last until I get the balance down significantly …

A day later: I have a problem lol … Can I get one last bump?

Reflecting on his business as he awaits sentencing, Bowyer vacillates between two modes of thought. There is pride in the well-oiled machine he created, in operating less as a traditional bookmaker than as a one-man casino, building a juggernaut that provided his family with so much of what his own youth lacked: the sprawling house, the decadent trips, the private-school educations. But there is also clear shame in the understanding that it was all fueled by preying upon what for many, himself included, is an addiction.

“I got on a guy who’s going off his rails and losing every dollar he has and stealing it,” Bowyer says of Mizuhara. “Of course I didn’t know he was stealing it then, but I could have done some homework and said, ‘Hey, you OK? Is this your money? I see the wires are from Shohei — is this his money?’ I never did any of that. I chose to look at the money coming in and be selfish.”

Indeed, in responding to that last text from Mizuhara requesting yet another bump, Bowyer didn’t even bother to conceal the arrangement he was hoping would extend in perpetuity: “Done ✔️👊 I have the same problem 😂. To be honest with you Ippie [sic], as long as you guarantee the 500 every Monday I’ll give you as much as you want because I know you’re good for it.”

Chasing Losses

That September, Resorts World fired its president, Scott Sibella, a Vegas native and veteran of the Strip. The casino’s parent company, the Malaysian-based Genting Group, stated only that he had “violated company policy.” But Sibella’s forced exit was widely understood to be connected to a federal investigation that, in part, concerned his ­previous tenure running the MGM Grand, where Sibella was found to have allowed a prominent bookie named Wayne Nix to gamble more than $4 million in illicit money. (A year later, Sibella pleaded guilty for failing to file an SAR, and MGM paid $7.45 million in penalties.)

Though Bowyer had also gambled extensively at the MGM Grand, and was now betting far higher sums at Resorts World, he never considered that he could also be a person of interest in the same federal probe.

“Didn’t cross my mind for a second,” says Bowyer, who continued to enjoy his status as one of Resorts World’s prized whales. On Oct. 1, 2023, he boarded the casino’s private jet for a flight from Vegas to Dallas, where he and other high rollers were put up in a suite for a Cowboys game. By then Bowyer had dropped all pretense of presenting himself as anything but a bookie. “I got very sloppy and very cocky,” he says, explaining that he personally described himself as “Shohei Ohtani’s bookie” during visits to the casino. “I wanted people to think that, to talk about it. I thought — idiotically — that it was a great marketing ploy.”

What Bowyer didn’t know is that a man named R.J. Cipriani, a Vegas fixture and self-styled vigilante who moonlights as a whistle­blower, had been talking to federal investigators for months about how Resorts World was allowing Bowyer to gamble at the casino. Four days after the Cowboys game, on Oct. 5, Bowyer was back home in Orange County when he was greeted in his driveway by dozens of federal agents.

“I knew it was all over,” Bowyer says. “It wasn’t like the first raid. One, my business had gotten too big in terms of the volume, the money. Two, it became clear that the government wasn’t fucking around this time. They were chasing something even bigger than me.”

So began a fraught period. As Bowyer came to understand the federal government’s ultimate agenda — building a case that would punish Resorts World in a manner that deterred others in Vegas from profiting off criminals — he struck a deal. Bowyer would plead guilty to running a book, laundering money, and filing a false tax return, cooperating with their investigation so long as his associates — Greenberg, Boyajian, the network of nearly 50 agents who brought him players — were granted immunity. “I basically told them I’d drive the bus and crash it right into the fucking casino for you,” Bowyer says. In interviews with the same IRS agent, Chris Seymour, who would write the criminal complaint against Mizuhara, Bowyer outlined how his money was moved through Resorts World — and how he believed executives knew his money was made illegally, noting the casino would stop play to allow him to take illicit bets. (Seymour declined to comment on the case.)

While Bowyer understood his organization was unraveling, his players did not yet know about the raid. Aware that he would need serious money for what was on the horizon — legal proceedings, supporting his family — he tried to recoup outstanding debts with his clients, none of whom owed Bowyer more than Mizuhara. His tab stood at just over $24 million. “It was all about to blow up, and just being honest, I was trying to extract as much as I could from him,” says Bowyer, who hounded the interpreter to pay up.

Mizuhara, however, had become increasingly evasive, going dark for weeks at a time. In November, six weeks after the raid, Bowyer got a text from a friend who had just seen Ohtani in Newport Beach walking his dog; Bowyer appropriated the sighting as his own as a means of pressuring Mizuhara to engage. “Hey Ippie [sic], it’s 2 o’clock on Friday,” Bowyer texted on Nov. 17. “I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see Shohei 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?” Mizuhara eventually wired a portion of his debt, but then disengaged from the conversation once more. Bowyer’s texts became increasingly more foreboding:

Dec. 14, 2023: I know ur busy but u Need to show some respect.

Jan. 6, 2024: You’re putting me in a position where this is going to get out of control. If I don’t hear from you by the end of the day it’s gonna be out of my hands.

Mizuhara agreed to meet in person to discuss the matter. Along with Greenberg, Bowyer’s friend who had also met Mizuhara at the poker game and received the $300,000 wire from Ohtani’s account, they gathered at a Starbucks in Fashion Island, an upscale shopping mall in Newport Beach near the condominium where both Mizuhara and Ohtani lived. It was Bowyer’s third time ever meeting Mizuhara in person — and would turn out to be the last.

“He wouldn’t say anything to us,” says Bowyer, who at one point stepped outside, hoping Mizuhara might be more forthcoming with Greenberg. “It was the most awkward conversation,” Greenberg recalls. “I tried to get the answer the whole world would want to know. I asked, ‘Does Ohtani know about this?’ And Ippei goes, ‘Well, kind of, sort of, not really.’ I told him, ‘I’m trying to get you out of this mess. I’ll tell Matt to lower the debt.’”

But Mizuhara remained monosyllabic, nearly mute. Later, in his own presentencing filing, he would offer a window into a shattered mindset familiar to many who develop a problem with gambling. “I became almost dead inside,” he wrote. “Although I had always told myself I would win it all back, as it became clear to me this was an impossibility, I think I just shut down. But that did not stop me from placing more bets.… I felt pressure to stay in the game.”

He did eventually send Bowyer one more wire — in total he’d transfer $1.25 million to Bowyer after the raid — but soon after their conversations turned to another urgent matter. Reporters had been reaching out to them about stories that would connect Ohtani’s name to what was still a private predicament — kerosene on what was already a fast-spreading conflagration. While Bowyer didn’t talk to the press, Mizuhara gave the interview to ESPN in which he told conflicting versions of what had happened. On March 20 — the day the news broke linking Ohtani’s account to Bowyer’s operation — he and Bowyer had what would be their last exchange, one the government would use as evidence in its complaint against Mizuhara.

Mizuhara: Have you seen the reports?

Bowyer: Yes, but that’s bullshit. Obviously you didn’t steal from him. I understand it’s a cover job I totally get it.

Mizuhara: Technically I did steal from him. It’s all over for me.

The Over/Under

One afternoon in mid-August, a year after he first pleaded guilty, Bowyer sits inside a modest recording studio in Orange County. In a life defined by shape-shifting hustles — busboy turned commodities broker, broker turned bookmaker — he is here in the hopes of jiggering another quixotic reinvention. The next two days will be spent recording the audiobook of his autobiography, Recalibrate, which he recently self-published.

Wearing a sleeveless, moisture-wicking workout shirt suctioned to his imposing frame, Bowyer comes across as poised, calm — almost eerily so. “Oh, that’s definitely a front,” he says, admitting that this facade, honed at blackjack and baccarat tables from Vegas to Monte Carlo, masks a biting panic. He is nearly broke since paying off the $1.6 million in restitution he owed the government. More pressingly, in just more than two weeks, Bowyer will be sentenced.

In February, the same judge who will determine Bowyer’s fate, John W. Holcomb, sentenced Mizuhara to nearly five years in prison for defrauding Ohtani of almost $17 million. At the time, Bowyer was confident that his punishment would be significantly less severe, possibly only house arrest, given his cooperation with the government’s case against Resorts World. But an investigation that once seemed destined to culminate in a historic punishment against the casino has so far failed to move with the same speed as the ancillary case that convicted Mizuhara and cleared Ohtani, whose Dodgers are favored by oddsmakers to win this year’s World Series.

Following the election of Donald Trump — a former casino magnate, or at least an aspirational one — the U.S. attorney of the Central District of California who had been spearheading the prosecution against Resorts World, Martin Estrada, was forced to resign. Since then, nearly every lawyer on the case has left the office. Sources close to the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say the prosecution team had completed a proffer deal with Resorts World just before the election and was awaiting a sign-off from upper management in the Department of Justice’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section. It never came; that office has since been cut nearly in half. The DOJ, meanwhile, has become increasingly retooled around Trump’s pursuit of immigrants and those deemed his enemies.

With no sign of momentum, Bowyer has withdrawn his cooperation deal: “There’s no way I can sit here for another two, three, four years. I would rather take it on the chin.” He shrugs. “Maybe I’ll be going to prison.”

Resorts World, and some associated with the casino, has not completely evaded consequence. Sibella, its terminated president, had his gaming license revoked last December. (“There are a lot of people in this business that know they could easily be in my position,” he says of the matter. “I’ll leave it at that.”) In March, the Nevada Gaming Control Board fined the casino $10.5 million. Touted as the second-highest fine ever levied by the board, many observers struggled to view it as anything but the gentlest of wrist slaps. Resorts World admitted to no wrongdoing. And the fine is notable for being less than the $11.6 million of Ohtani’s money that Bowyer and his associates lost at the casino; another prominent bookie ensnared in the government’s investigation, Damien LeForbes, lost $12.3 million in ill-gained money gambling at Resorts World during the same period. Put another way, the casino’s retribution to date is that it has been permitted to retain more than half of the money that, according to numerous legal filings, its executives should have understood was dirty.

“Any federal prosecutor, regardless of political affiliation, will tell you there is always one goal in an investigation: Go after the heads of the Hydra,” says Estrada, the former U.S. attorney, who declined to discuss the case specifically. “When you miss the top and just get the little guy, that’s not a success.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Bowyer.

“I think it’s bullshit,” he says in the studio, growing animated. “Yeah, I broke the law and should be held accountable. But these corporations who were making tons of money off of someone like me were able to write a small check. No prison time for anyone there, no real punishment? To me, it’s a way of saying to them: Just keep doing it.”

He shakes his head, returns to the task at present. Bowyer’s book, he hopes, will further assist in a rebranding mission that he’s been teasing out on social media since last fall. It began with videos that give the impression of Bowyer sitting down for a Joe Rogan-style podcast: Behind a microphone, his meaty biceps always prominent, Bowyer speaks in uplifting platitudes. In them, he plays a few nebulous, seemingly contradictory roles at once: successful businessman, repentant criminal, recovering gambling addict, Bentley aficionado — demographics he hopes will resonate in ways he can monetize. He’s been stacking content so his feed can be regularly updated while he’s in prison.

On Aug. 29, Judge Holcolmb sentences Bowyer to 12 months and one day and two years of supervised release. Bowyer was also ordered to attend counseling for gambling addiction and to surrender to authorities by Oct. 10. 

Still two weeks away from that reckoning, Bowyer is already looking past his prison term. He cites Jordan Belfort, the disgraced stockbroker who, following 22 months in prison, documented his fraudulent exploits in The Wolf of Wall Street and became a successful public speaker, as a role model. “I want to parlay my book into motivational speaking and a movie,” Bowyer says, imagining a life on the other side of prison where he is paid to riff on both the perils of gambling and the steely mindset required to amass a fortune. “I’ll be in front of NFL teams, MLB teams, college athletes, universities, financial advisers, any form of sales-motivated people.” He envisions a day when, maybe, he’ll steer those most deeply lost in gambling’s darkest corners toward a different path. “That would be so self-soothing, you know, to have somebody not destroy their life because of something I said,” he says. “I would love that.”

Altruism, however, is not his primary motivation. “I’m not gonna lie — I need to make money,” Bowyer says. “And I do believe that I’ll make more money than I’ve ever made in my lifetime.”

---

Contributor DAVID AMSDEN is based in Los Angeles and is the author of the novel Important Things That Don’t Matter.