The nearly five-year sentence handed down to Ippei Mizuhara, Shohei Ohtani‘s former interpreter, for bank fraud and filing a tax return last Thursday has another episode after the runner who accepted the bets from him, Mathew Bowyer, pointed out that there are many professional athletes who bet on sports.
Bowyer pleaded guilty to accepting illegal sports bets, money laundering and also filing a false tax return, and is now awaiting sentencing on April 4. In an interview with the New York Post, he confessed to feeling sorry for being part of the scandal that involved Shohei Ohtani, who will receive $17 million of the $18.1 million that Mizuhara will have to pay in restitution.
After pleading guilty last year, Ippei Mizuhara, who acted as the English-language liaison between Ohtani and his teammates during his first season with the Dodgers, was sentenced to four years and nine months in federal court in Santa Ana, California.
Mathew Bowyer has his data on gambling athletes
Mathew Bowyer has a history of accepting bets from various athletes, according to the Department of Justice and, in his chat with The Post, he acknowledged that one of his clients was the late Pete Rose, and noted that about half of current athletes bet, although it is very rare for them to do so in their sports.
“I know some of them still gamble on sports… If 50 per cent play, I think 10 per cent of them are compulsive gamblers,” Bowyer said.
Although these are not precise figures and only correspond to an estimate according to his experience, Bowyer believes that at most 3% of professional athletes take the risk of betting on their sports, while he touched on the example of Terry Rozier, point guard for the Miami Heat of the NBA, who is under federal investigation.
“I was very surprised because he is disgustingly rich and normally the people who usually do these things do not have contracts of 90 million dollars,” Bowyer said of Rozier.
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