Mathew Bowyer, bookie for baseball star Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, vows to turn his life around

As he prepared to begin serving a federal prison sentence for booking sports bets illegally, Mathew Bowyer pledged never to engage again in unlawful activity.

A 50-year-old Southern California resident, Bowyer said that he is focused on post-prison goals, including serving as a motivational speaker, cautioning others about the downside of illegal gambling.

In a telephone interview last month, Bowyer said he is becoming a “better version” of himself, vowing he will never do anything illegal “for the rest of my life.”

That personal pledge includes turning away from illegal bookmaking, a livelihood that, though unlawful, provided his family with a lavish lifestyle. This went on for years, bolstered by a large client base, including major bettors who, in some cases, lost millions at a time. According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bowyer’s unlicensed gambling business was in operation “for at least five years until October 2023 and at times had more than 700 bettors.”

One of those multimillion-dollar bettors was Ippei Mizuhara, the Japanese interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani.

Last year, Bowyer pleaded guilty to running an illegal gambling business, money laundering and filing a false tax return, the Associated Press reported. He also was ordered to pay the IRS more than $1.6 million in restitution. According to his lawyer, the IRS payment has been made. He also faces two years of supervised release.

The guilty plea resulted from his operation of what the government said was “an unlicensed and illegal bookmaking business that focused on sports betting and violated a California law that prohibits bookmaking.”

After the plea, Bowyer was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison, beginning on October 10, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California. That low-security prison is near the Pacific Ocean, about 3 1/2 hours north of Bowyer’s home in San Juan Capistrano.

Mizuhara also was imprisoned in connection with Bowyer’s sports-betting operation. This summer, the 40-year-old interpreter began serving a sentence of four years and nine months at a low-security federal prison in Pennsylvania. Mizuhara was convicted of bank and tax fraud after stealing almost $17 million from Ohtani, the AP reported. Major League Baseball has cleared Ohtani of wrongdoing, indicating he was a victim of fraud.

The collapse of Bowyer’s sport-betting operation ended his previous high-roller lifestyle. A self-described degenerate gambler and now a convicted felon, Bowyer said he has been banned from every casino in the United States. The most prominent of these are on the Las Vegas Strip, where casino hosts once pampered Bowyer, expecting him to gamble, and potentially lose, large sums.

Nevada authorities took note of his visits to Las Vegas. As ESPN reported, state gaming regulators last spring issued a $10.5 million fine against Resorts World Las Vegas on the Strip over allegations of illegal gambling, many of which centered on Bowyer.

“The Nevada Gaming Control Board alleged that Resorts World allowed Bowyer to play 80 separate days over about 15 months, while repeatedly failing to verify his source of funding,” ESPN reported. “Bowyer lost over $6.6 million during that time, while the casino extended gifts, discounts and flights on its private jet, according to the complaint.”

In his 2025 first-person book Recalibrate, Bowyer said he placed, during decades of fast living and high-stakes wagering, more than $1 billion in bets globally, some at casino gaming tables, some with bookmakers.

“It didn’t matter whether it was sports or table games, I loved to gamble,” he wrote in Recalibrate.

Before heading off to prison, he told The Mob Museum that those days are over. “I’m just a better version of myself,” he said.

Recently, as the Mizuhara scandal exploded, Bowyer was thrust onto newspaper front pages when it became evident he was booking millions of dollars in bets illegally for Ohtani’s interpreter.

Over the decades, including currently, stories have popped up about people in the sports world being caught betting, not only damaging their own reputations but threatening to undermine the integrity of the games.

Even so, the Mizuhara episode especially raised eyebrows, considering the staggering amounts he was betting. The Mizuhara story also captured the public’s attention because of Ohtani’s status as a generational talent and global ambassador for Major League Baseball.

Currently, Ohtani is a pitcher and designated hitter for the defending World Series-champion Dodgers, having relocated across town from his previous team, the Los Angeles Angels, at the end of the 2023 season. As a key component of the Dodgers’ championship run in 2024, Ohtani won his third MVP award, becoming the first player ever to hit 50 home runs while stealing 50 bases in a single season. As the 2025 season concluded, Ohtani was among the National League leaders in home runs and runs batted in.

To this day, Bowyer’s home office includes an Angels framed Ohtani jersey hanging on the wall. As a big-time bookmaker, Bowyer fraternized with athletes, celebrities and other major gamblers who valued the personal relationship and discrete betting action that underground bookmakers can provide, allowing huge wagers on credit and without tax implications.

A former commodities trader with polished people skills, Bowyer met Mizuhara while playing Texas hold ’em poker at a Southern California hotel after a baseball game between the Angels and San Diego Padres. Not only were players involved in the private poker game, he said, but also coaches and “random friends of the team.”

“Ippei happen to be there, and that’s when we started the relationship,” Bowyer said. The interpreter was betting with the use of an online app and then struck up a conversation with Bowyer.  “It just parlayed into a relationship from there,” Bowyer said.

That relationship took both down an unlawful gambling path together. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mizuhara placed at least 19,000 bets with Bowyer’s illegal gambling business from September 2021 to January 2024 “through one of the betting websites Bowyer used for it.”

“During this period, Mizuhara had total winning bets of at least $142,256,769 and total losing bets of at least $182,935,206, leaving Mizuhara owing approximately $40,678,436,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

The government said Bowyer on a regular basis would increase Mizuhara’s betting limits.

“From February 2022 to January 2024, Bowyer directed Mizuhara to make payments of at least $16.25 million to Bowyer-controlled bank accounts, all of which were proceeds of Bowyer’s illegal gambling business,” the statement said.

Ultimately, Mizuhara admitted to stealing nearly $17 million from Ohtani “to pay off gambling debts and failing to pay tax on his gambling income,” according to the government.

Regarding speculation that Ohtani might have been a bettor himself, possibly using Mizuhara for cover, Bowyer said he never spoke with them about it but added that Ohtani has not been known to be a gambler “at all on any level.”

“The fact that he’s never been known to gamble on anything with anyone kind of tells me that he doesn’t gamble,” Bowyer said.

However, some of Bowyer’s clients were athletes, creating the kind of bond that leads to suspicion that games could be fixed. Bowyer said he wasn’t aware of any player betting on his own team’s games or rigging any of them. He added that the integrity of the game is important to him. “We want to watch a game and know that there’s nothing going on,” Bowyer said.

One priority now for Bowyer is figuring out how to generate income after being released from prison. In addition to wanting to write books and become a motivational speaker, he is meeting with filmmakers on different projects. Bowyer also is active on social media sites such as Instagram and has a website, mathewbowyer.com, with information about his personal experiences.

Over the telephone, he said his goal is to provide “the best life” for his family, including his wife, Nicole, and five children.

Bowyer said his wife has “been through hell and back,” including being handcuffed during investigations into her husband’s gambling activities and facing state scrutiny as a Las Vegas casino host, also related to her husband’s endeavors.

“I want to continue to give her a good lifestyle for being loyal and being a hard-working woman,” Bowyer said.

Getting set financially again won’t require doing anything illegal, he said.

“That being said, it’s going to be a dog fight because it’s not only that I paid $1.7 million already in restitution, but we’re looking at over almost $10 million in taxes and all kinds of things I have to overcome, so it’s a lot of money,” he said.

Going forward, Bowyer is remaining positive.

“I’m trying to be strong-minded and show my kids and everybody that when you have adversity and you make poor choices, you’ve got to be accountable and you have to learn to look yourself in the mirror and appreciate who you are and what you’ve done and make better decisions,” he said. “It’s not what you do in life. It’s what you do after you make these mistakes that matters most.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.