In the clubhouse after the Los Angeles Dodgers won their season opener in Seoul last month, Shohei Ohtani’s longtime performer Ippei Mizuhara made a surprising admission about the team: He was addicted to the game. and Ohtani had paid his debts to a betting house.

Ohtani, who is not fluent in English, heard but did not fully understand what Mizuhara said. However, he knew enough to be suspicious and wanted answers.

A couple of hours later, around midnight, Ohtani finally had the opportunity to take Mizuhara to a conference room in the basement of the Fairmont Ambassador Hotel in Seoul.

With just the two of them there, Mizuhara opened up to his boss: he had racked up huge debts with the betting house and had been stealing the baseball star’s money to pay them off.

But in coming clean, Mizuhara made a last-ditch effort to protect himself from the law, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. He asked his boss to accept the story he had just told to Ohtani’s teammates, his advisors and an ESPN reporter who had made inquiries about $4.5 million in wire transfers from Ohtani’s account to an illegal betting house. in California.

Ohtani refused and called his agent, Nez Balelo, into the conference room. Balelo then had several other people called in to manage the crisis: a lawyer in Los Angeles; Matthew Hiltzik, crisis communications executive in New York; and a new performer Ohtani’s inner circle could trust. Mizuhara’s wife also joined the meeting.

Shortly afterward, Ohtani’s advisors issued a statement to reporters, alleging that Ohtani was the victim of a multimillion-dollar robbery. Soon, headlines connecting Ohtani to illegal gambling spread around the world.

It was a story that would trigger three dizzying weeks, going from South Korea to Los Angeles, from stadiums to hotels and airports, to meetings with lawyers and federal agents. At times, it seemed like baseball’s biggest star was in danger of being tainted by a betting scandal, echoing painful episodes from the sport’s past. It culminated Thursday when prosecutors charged Mizuhara with bank fraud and filed a criminal complaint alleging lavish embezzlement in which he stole $16 million from Ohtani, whom they firmly claimed was the victim in the case.

The formal charge and complaint were announced a day after The New York Times reported that Mizuhara and his attorney, Michael Freedman, a former white-collar criminal defense prosecutor, were negotiating a plea deal. On Friday, Mizuhara surrendered to authorities in Los Angeles and made an initial court appearance, dressed in street clothes and shackled. She did not enter a plea and was released on $25,000 bail. The conditions of her release require her to submit to drug testing and seek treatment for her gambling addiction.

Freedman issued a statement Friday saying Mizuhara “continues to cooperate with the legal process and is hopeful that he can reach an agreement with the government to resolve this case as quickly as possible so that he can be held accountable.” He added that Mizuhara apologized to Ohtani and the Dodgers and was “eager to seek treatment for his gambling.”

The trip to Seoul seemed like a triumphant moment for Major League Baseball. Ohtani’s emergence as a transcendent star in the United States, whose on-field exploits evoked comparisons to Babe Ruth, had given the league new cultural relevance around the world. And now Ohtani and his new team, which signed him to a 10-year, $700 million contract in December, were in Asia to open a new season with two games against the San Diego Padres. The emotion could not have been greater.

But once the Mizuhara news broke, Major League Baseball realized it had a problem on its hands. He announced that he was investigating the matter. And the Los Angeles field offices of the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security unusually made public the news that they, too, had opened an investigation. The saga of Pete Rose, the major league hits leader, who was banned from playing baseball in the 1980s for betting on the sport, was on everyone’s minds.

After the hotel meeting, the Dodgers quickly fired Mizuhara. He soon boarded a plane back to Los Angeles, where homeland security agents met him at the airport. He refused to submit to an interview, but gave agents access to a gold mine of information that would prove crucial to their investigation: he signed a form giving his consent to search his cell phone.

Ohtani also flew back to Los Angeles under a cloud. When he arrived, he also gave investigators access to his electronic devices.

Working with a Japanese linguist, investigators pored over about 9,700 pages of text messages between the two men and found no mention of sports betting or any of the bookmakers Mizuhara had been dealing with.

Over two days this month, Ohtani met with investigators in Los Angeles (one of the days he hit his first home run as a Dodger, hours after an interview with agents) and described his relationship with Mizuhara, whom he met for the first time. in 2013. while playing professional baseball in Japan.

The Los Angeles Angels hired Mizuhara as Ohtani’s translator when Ohtani joined the team in 2018. But Ohtani also hired him separately as a “de facto manager and assistant,” according to the complaint. Mizuhara drove his boss to and from the ballpark and handled certain “business and personal matters” outside of baseball.

In 2018, both men visited a bank in Arizona, where the Angels held spring training, and opened an account into which Ohtani’s paychecks could be deposited. Over the next three years, Ohtani never logged into the online account, prosecutors say, and the money piled up.

Ohtani has plenty of other accounts, of course: He makes more money from endorsements and business deals than he does from his lucrative baseball salary. But it was this account, solely for Ohtani’s baseball earnings, that Mizuhara would plan to take control of and then, as he fell deeper into a gambling addiction, he would steal for years, according to prosecutors.

Mizuhara changed the account settings so that transaction alerts and confirmations went to him, not Ohtani. Based on telephone recordings obtained from the bank, prosecutors said Mizuhara had also impersonated Ohtani to obtain bank approval for certain major transactions. And whenever one of Ohtani’s other advisers — his agent, tax preparer, accountant or financial advisor, all of whom were interviewed for the federal investigation — asked about the account, Mizuhara told them that Ohtani preferred the account remain private. .

Between November 2021 and January of this year, Mizuhara stole $16 million from the account to feed his “voracious appetite for illegal sports betting,” according to E. Martin Estrada, a US attorney in Los Angeles.

Ohtani has been called many things in recent years. The current Ruth. A baseball monk. The most famous citizen of Japan. In the criminal complaint that authorities released Thursday he was identified simply as “Victim A.”

The complaint revealed text messages between Mizuhara and the sportsbook, which is also the subject of a federal investigation, as Mizuhara racked up losses and repeatedly received increases to his credit limit — “hits,” in gambler parlance.

A text from Mizuhara from 2022 reads: “I’m terrible at this sports betting thing, huh? Hahaha… Is there any chance you can crash into me again? As you know, you don’t have to worry about him not paying.”

While there is no evidence that Ohtani knew about the bets, the bookmaker knew of Mizuhara’s connection to Ohtani. Last November, the bookie was having trouble contacting Mizuhara and threatened to expose him to Ohtani, saying he knew where to find the baseball star.

In a text included in the complaint, the bookmaker wrote: “Hello Ippei, it is 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you don’t return my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see (Victim A) walking her dog. I’m going to go up and talk to him and ask him how I can contact you since he’s not responding. Please call me immediately.”

As Mizuhara fell deeper into debt, prosecutors say, he used $325,000 of Ohtani’s money earlier this year to buy baseball cards online and sent them to the Dodgers clubhouse under a pseudonym. Agents found the cards (of Juan Soto, Yogi Berra and Ohtani, among others) in several briefcases when they searched Mizuhara’s car. Prosecutors said they believed he had planned to resell them.

Being a baseball story, the criminal complaint was full of numbers:

• 19,000 bets.

• $142,256,769.74 in total winning bets.

• $182,935,206.58 in total in losing bets.

Crucially, for Ohtani and for Major League Baseball, prosecutors said none of Mizuhara’s bets had been on baseball.

When news of the story broke in South Korea, Major League Baseball was alarmed by the changing narratives, two people familiar with the matter said, and worried that Ohtani could somehow become embroiled in a baseball scandal. bets that had the potential to taint the entire sport.

Those concerns were allayed a week later when Ohtani offered a detailed account to reporters at Dodger Stadium, saying he was robbed by Mizuhara and promising to cooperate with any investigation. Baseball officials had doubts, the people said, that Ohtani would make up such a story knowing that both federal authorities and the league would investigate it. When authorities charged Mizuhara and detailed the allegations against him, all remaining suspicions were dispelled.

As for the Dodgers, they are leading their division at the start of a season that many fans will declare a failure if it doesn’t end with a championship. Ohtani’s bat is heating up. Inside the clubhouse, players say Ohtani, without Mizuhara as a buffer, has made more of an effort to get to know his teammates.

“You know, over the last few days, I think Shohei has been interacting with his teammates even more,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters after Ohtani addressed the matter to the media in Los Angeles. Angeles two weeks ago. “And I think that only has advantages.”

Ana Facio Krajcer contributed reports.