The Junkies took some time to discuss the biggest story in baseball happening off the field, that being the Dodgers firing Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter after Ohtani says he had $4.5 million ‘stolen,’ and the guys agreed that something doesn’t add up with the story as told so far.
And it starts with a backstory that he swore on his daughter’s life.
“This isn’t what I think happened, this is I know what happened – I met Mathew Bowyer in passing like four years ago in Vegas. I knew he was a bookie and lived in Orange County, and he's absolutely out of his mind, personality wise,” Lang began. “About three months ago, my best friend, who I go to L.A. and play golf with all the time and stay at his house, calls me and asks if I know a bookie named Mathew Bowyer, and I said yeah. He goes, ‘I just played golf with him and the Feds are after him, and I asked him who was your biggest client, and he told me it was Ohtani.' I said get out of here and he goes nope, and I asked how much, and he told me, ‘I'm not gonna give you the number, but I will tell you the number is between $7 and $25 million, and it's only soccer and that's it.”
Apparently, the Feds raided Bowyer and confiscated $11 million in cryptocurrency and all his money, and he and his family – a wife and five boys – had. But, the biggest seizure, according to Lang, was Bowyer’s phone.
“The Feds come in and take everything, and they get his phone and they go through his phone and here's all this stuff in Japanese, through the interpreter. So they ask, and Bowyer tells the story that it’s Shohei Ohtani,” Lang says. “He’s into me for X, that’s what that is, and the Feds are like whoa, biggest face in baseball right now, what are we gonna do? So, they go Ohtani’s people, and they concoct the story that says this guy didn't speak any English and never talked to a bookie; his interpreter stole the money and did this – but I know for a fact it’s 100 percent Ohtani and the interpreter is the fall guy for all of this. My boy has no reason to make up and consider the story.”
Apparently, there’s no way to connect Ohtani and Bowyer because Ohtani doesn’t speak English, so you can’t prove it was him – only the interpreter as the middleman.
“Trust me, when this interpreter goes back to Japan, he's gonna be very well taken care of. He's a fall guy, and when he goes back over there, you're never gonna hear another word about this guy,” Lang said. “Now will Ohtani stop gambling? Well, when you're down the amount of money that he's down betting soccer, you're a degenerate, so I don’t know. I don't know how deep they're gonna go and I don’t think people deep down in places you don't talk about parties are believing it was just the interpreter – this guy is a meek, almost submissive little guy – so he gets the Lee Harvey Oswald patsy treatment. Ohtani is the face of baseball and this story is massive, and they needed a fall guy.”
Translation: MLB will say they fired the interpreter and there were no bets on baseball, so Ohtani will go unscathed professionally.
Take a listen to the whole story above, which includes Lang explaining how bookies still work in some places (and the dangers of working with them), and why he doesn’t think gambling had anything to do with Ohtani’s contract taking a lot of deferred money.