Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Was Stealing From a Celebrity... UNTIL // The Ippei Mizuhara Scandal

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime personal interpreter and close friend of Major League Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani, was at the center of a massive sports gambling and theft scandal.

I can't believe this guy robbed the most famous baseball player in the world. So this all starts with this dude, Epi. And Epi is around 36 during this time, living in Newport Beach, California. And Epi has an interesting job. He works for the superstar professional baseball player, Otani. And Otani plays in the United States, but he was born in Japan. So his English isn't that good. So he needs an interpreter everywhere he goes, and Epi works as his interpreter.

Now, as a pro baseball player, Otani is getting paid very well, while E-Pai is making around $87,000 a year, working as his interpreter. He also helps Otani with other stuff, like he's his assistant as well, and they've been working together for years. Anyway, my point is, he's making a fine salary. But in 2021, something happens that's going to change his life forever. One day, he's in San Diego at some kind of poker game, and he meets a guy who runs an illegal sports betting operation, which runs through various websites. And so Epie, who claims to have had a longstanding gambling addiction, decides to try these sites out. So he gets on them and he starts making bets. And over time, like all gamblers, his losses outweigh his wins and soon he's about $40,000

in debt. So now he needs a way to pay that off. And that is when he comes up with a total. terrible idea. Why not just steal from his boss, Otani? You know, his friend, you know, the guy his whole career is built on. Because here's the thing, Epi already has access to Otani's bank account. Why? Because back in 2018, when Otani first came to the U.S., he barely understood any English, and Epi was there with him to help him get his life set up. So he was there when Otani needed to open a checking account. In fact, EPI was the one who interpreted O'Tani's login details to the bank worker helping him open the account. So, using Otani's logins, EPI gets into his checking account, and he changes the email address and phone number to his own.

So now any updates or transaction alerts will come to him instead of Otani. Once he has control of the account, he takes out the $40,000 he needs and he uses it to pay off his gambling debts. and easy. And that's the scary part. It was actually too easy, and E-Pai notices how easy it was. And so now that his debt is gone, he could just stop sports betting and move on with his life. I mean, Otani is making so much money that he probably wouldn't even notice the 40 grand is missing. But quitting sports betting is not what he's going to do. That's just not the way gambling addictions work. He believes that he can still win big. So he keeps on betting, and he bets a lot. In fact, he averages nearly 25 bets every single day. And sometimes he'll actually win big. But he doesn't

like use any of the winnings to sneak money back into Otani's account or anything like that. No, no. Rather, he takes most of his winnings and he bets them all over again, and then he loses all over. again, and he gets into debt all over again, and he goes right back to Otani's bank account, and he steals more money. And over time, eventually, he starts withdrawing even bigger amounts from the account. Now, large enough transfers from a bank require additional verification, you know, for security reasons. And so E Pi starts impersonating Otani, like he calls the bank and he pretends to be Otani to convince the employees to approve his transfers. And so, And so about two years pass, and it's now 2023, and E-Pai's crazy scheme is still going on.

And somehow, I guess, no one notices or even suspects that he's doing this. Meanwhile, Otani is a free agent. So he decides to leave his team, the Los Angeles Angels, and go sign with a different team, the L.A. Dodgers. And so now he has a 10-year, $700 million contract, making him one of the highest paid athletes in the world. And because Otani's salary increases, E-Pai's does too, to around $500,000 a year. But even with all this extra income coming in, E-Pai doesn't stop sports betting and he doesn't stop stealing from Otani. And so he keeps this going. He does it over and over and over again.

And so it's now 2024. And he's stolen around 17 million. from Otani's account. So, how is Eipai taking this much money without anyone from Otani's team noticing? Well, it's partly because of Otani's language barrier. Like I said, he speaks limited English, and he depends on Ipae a lot. Even when Otani needs to speak with his own agent, Epi has to get involved and translate for him. So it's easy for him to just take whatever he wants from Otani.

Meanwhile, his gambling addiction keeps getting worse, and his bets have gotten bigger and bigger. And at this point, he's bet so much that he's won about $142 million, but he's lost about $183 million. So he's sitting on a $40 million deficit. Damn. And if that isn't bad enough,

with all this money moving through his account, he's supposed to report it to the IRS. But he can't report stolen money on his taxes because that would expose all this thefties, been doing. So he starts lying on his taxes. So now he's stealing millions, gambling millions, and hiding money from the IRS. And no one seems to notice he's doing it. Until. Until this guy re-enters the story. His name's Matt. And Matt is the guy who E. Pye met at the poker game a few years before. He's the guy in charge of the illegal sports betting sites that E.Pie uses. So on his end,

Matt's sites have been getting wire transfers from a bank account with the name Otani on it, because that's how E.Pai pays through wire transfer through Otani's account. And Matt knows Epie, and he knows that he works for Otani and that he's a huge gambler. So he definitely knows that E. Pi is the one sending in all this money. Regardless, Matt's sleazy-ass starts going around and bragging to people that he has a connection to the real Otani. The real Otani is a client of his, which he's not. Now, unfortunately for him, by sheer coincidence, around the same time, the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS

have been investigating illegal sports gambling schemes, and they've been looking into his websites and building a case against him for a while. And eventually, boom, they bust into his home and they raid the place, and they get access to his financial records and wire transfers and spreadsheets and stuff, and when they comb through all that stuff, they find Otani's name on millions of dollars worth of wire transfers.

And professional athletes are definitely not supposed to be betting on their own sport like that at all, much less through illegal websites. So they look into all this. And reporters, reporters are also all over this story, because, you know, it's connected to a famous baseball player. And eventually, it is revealed that it was actually E. Pi who's been making all the bets, not Otani. And this forces Eipi to come out and defend himself.

So before this story has even broken publicly, Eipai decides to sit down for an interview with a reporter and clear his name. And he admits that he had been gambling, but he lies and tells the reporter that Othani knew that he had been gambling and that he had agreed to help him pay off his gambling debts. And then, Otani hears about this, and his lawyers have to go and put out a statement, basically calling E. Pai a liar and a thief. And once this news breaks,

bam, the Dodgers fire E. Pie as an interpreter. Because he was actually officially employed by the Dodgers. Also, bam, he gets arrested. Well, he actually doesn't get arrested. Rather, he turns himself into the feds. And I don't have a lot of it. a mugshot, but here is a picture of him. And so ultimately, he takes a plea deal and he gets sentenced to four years, nine months in prison.