Inside the secret parking lot meeting where Shohei Ohtanis name first surfaced in gambling scandal

ESPN’s upcoming “30 for 30” podcast revisits the moment investigators and reporters first discovered an apparent financial connection between Shohei Ohtani and the illegal bookmaking operation that later helped expose Ippei Mizuhara’s massive theft.In a preview for “The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani,” ESPN investigative reporter Tisha Thompson recounts meeting a nervous source in a parking lot in the middle of the night after learning that a paper trail connected Ohtani’s bank account to bookmaker Mathew Bowyer.The source handed Thompson a phone containing documents sent through an encrypted application.Each image would disappear after 30 seconds, leaving her only enough time to take handwritten notes.The first document showed a $500,000 transfer dated Sept.

14, 2023.A second showed another $500,000 payment on Oct.

2.Both included the same banking information.California's top news, sports and entertainment delivered to your inbox every day.

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Never miss a story “Later, after I drive away, I will stare at the jumble of letters and numbers I scribbled into my notebook, and I’ll realize it’s routing information,” Thompson says in the series.“I just saw wire transfers from a bank account at Bank of America, and there’s a name attached to the account: Shohei Ohtani.”The two payments, totaling $1 million, provided the first direct financial link between Ohtani’s account and Bowyer’s operation.

At that stage, however, Thompson did not know who had authorized the transfers or why they had been made.The story changed almost immediately.Another source contacted Thompson with the name of Ohtani’s longtime interpreter, Mizuhara, who initially claimed that he had accumulated the gambling debts and Ohtani had agreed to pay them.Mizuhara withdrew that account the following day, beginning a dramati...