The Southern California bookmaker whose clients included Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter was sentenced Friday to a little more than a year in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution.
Mathew Bowyer, 50, of Orange County, pled guilty last August to charges of operating an illegal sports gambling operation, money laundering and signing a false tax return. Bowyer, who faced a maximum sentence of almost two decades in prison, received a 12-month and one-day sentence from U.S. District Court Judge John W. Holcomb.
One of Bowyer’s well-known customers was Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s ex-Japanese interpreter, who stole nearly $17 million from the two-way player to cover his sports gambling debts. Mizuhara began a 57-month sentence in June after pleading guilty to one count of bank fraud and one count of subscribing to a false tax return.
Bowyer’s case is part of an extensive federal probe into illegal sports gambling that led to last year’s arrest of Mizuhara, who acknowledged his severe gambling addiction. Prosecutors said Mizuhara placed at least 19,000 bets with Bowyer’s illegal gambling business from September 2021 to January 2024, with his winnings totaling more than $142 million and his losses totaling at least $182 million during the span.
“I was running an illegal gambling operation, laundering money through other people’s bank accounts,” Bowyer told the judge Friday, according to the Associated Press.
Bowyer’s attorney, Diane Bass, did not respond for comment when reached by The Athletic.
According to prosecutors, Bowyer ran an illegal gambling business for at least five years in Southern California and Las Vegas. He and “sub-agents” took wagers from more than 700 bettors, including Ohtani’s former interpreter. Although sports gambling is legal in Nevada, where Bowyer ran some of his operations, it is illegal in California. His unlawful business used several Costa Rica-based websites and a call center so agents and customers could place and track bets, prosecutors said. He sometimes paid his agents commission in casino chips.
In his plea agreement last year, Bowyer admitted to knowingly and willfully reporting a false taxable income to the IRS for the year 2022. He reported $607,897 in total income for that year, but the unreported funds were $4,030,938, all from the illegal sports-betting business, including $3.8 million in wire transfers.
(Photo: Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)