72off, this is just embarrassing.

They interviewed everybody, including Balelo, Ohtani's bookkeeper, accountant, financial advisor, all of whom said that they weren't able to provide oversight because Ippei told them that particular account was off-limits. They looked at every single text message between Ippei and Bowyer as well as Ohtani and Ippei, they looked into other forensic evidence, including access records for all bank accounts involved as well as the website where the bets took place. There's literally evidence of Ippei changing contact information on the account to his own to ensure Ohtani doesn't get alerts, there's evidence of the bank freezing access because Ippei initially wasn't able to prove that he's Ohtani and there are literally recordings of Ippei pretending to be Ohtani in order to unfreeze the account.

Then there are all kinds of texts between Bowyer and Ippei where Ippei is begging for credit limit increases, then texts where Bowyer is pressuring Ippei to pay back, even suggesting that he might approach Ohtani directly as a way to threaten Ippei. Then Ippei messaging back and asking if they can settle, since he literally can't pay back the full amount due to his circumstances. Ippei's gambling winnings were also routed to his own account, rather than Ohtani's.

Ippei has accounts with MGM, DraftKings and FanDuel; Ohtani has none. There are records of Ippei taking money out of Ohtani's account for his personal purchases outside of gambling.

None of this fits your conspiratorial nonsense and all of this fits a rather simple theory that Ohtani was a victim of massive fraud. Investigators looking into this literally thought the case was so clear (these kinds of things can take a lot longer, but not when every single thing points in the exact same direction) that they had a press conference making it extremely clear that Ohtani was the victim and isn't at all implicated in any wrongdoing.

Here's the full indictment in case anyone else still wants to understand what happened:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documen...indictment.pdf

I mean, his financial accountants were shitty too. They couldn't ever communicate with him besides through his interpreter, who relayed to them that they weren't allowed to view those accounts.

Feels like at some point you spend $300 and have a Japanese interpreter yourself talk with your client who has signed 100s of millions in contracts and a decent bit of his cash flow is probably tied up in these "unknown" accounts.

I have a little more sympathy for Ohtani, he's not a professional accountant and he placed his trust in his oldest/best friend involved here, the person who seemingly had helped him out so much (for a living) for years. Yea, he was naive, and careless here, but it's not like he lost 16 mil buying into bad investments. For all we know, the interpreter told him the money was still in accounts. Yes, naive, but to one of the people closest to him and not from greed or putting trust into a stranger. For so many people in this world, if a husband or wife truly wanted to steal money and were smart about it, it could be GG for them. This isn't really much different. He's a victim of a crime it seems.

Top notch money managers should've sniffed this out. How much cash flow does Ohtani likely have. Sub 100 mil, right? Perhaps significantly less than 100 mil. And 16 mil is in accounts they can't see and nobody really double checked that?

seems legit

New conspiracy by me is Doyers were just implanting the seed that Shohei is tied to gambling. They take advantage of his next 5 cheap years of his contract then set him up again to get fully nuked by mlb for gambling. Then they don't have to pay the full rest of the contract.

Not to cape too hard for candy bar, but looks like he was right.

If there was a whiff of Ohtani lying to the feds about this, you can bet your ass they would’ve dug in and gone for the big celeb scalp. Make him swear to it in grand jury like Bonds and look for anything to pick apart.

Question for people who don’t believe Ohtani didn’t gamble - what do you think about that low level Jags employee who stole tens of millions to waste on DFS? You think someone else in the org must be in on that one too? Why is it so much easier to steal a **** ton from a business as an opposed to a single person?

No, we're spiking the ball at your stupidity. For example.

How is this looking for you? Why was I able to correctly infer what was going on between Ohtani's camp and ESPN, while you jumped to absurd conclusions?

Let's be clear here though - he might be a massive moron compared to actually smart people who can, you know, deduce things and figure things out, but given your contributions to this thread, I'm definitely taking Ohtani over you in just about anything that's related to mental capacity.

Also, I'm not sure if you understand what's going on at all. Ohtani had every reason to believe that professionals were taking care of his finances. I'm not sure what not caring about his finances enough to check how much money he has has to do with being a moron.

Ohtani's wealthy, but he's not so wealthy that you'd expect people employed by him to mange his finances top-notch. As far as high net-worth individuals are concerned, he's a pretty small fish, though I guess association with him has some perks.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documen...indictment.pdf

None of this seems like gross negligence, but more like standard operating procedure. In a way, Ohtani being such a weird unicorn in many ways (literally as a player, then giving up like 200M to come to the states early, the whole deferral thing and also foregoing leverage by offering multiple teams the same discount, instead of trying to get teams to bid) likely made Balelo not question anything about Ohtani.

That doesn't seem too entertaining. If you want to construct a vaguely plausible-sounding conspiracy theory that's also somewhat entertaining, you might want to start with Ohtani's wife - what if she was jealous of Ippei's (or even Ippei's wife's) relationship with Ohtani? Both Ippei and his wife have known Ohtani for a long time (who knows what they might have done together) and Mamika's first public appearance as Ohtani's wife was almost immediately followed by Ippei's gambling scandal. One might think, without Ippei around, Ohtani has no one to truly depend on except Mamika and might be a bit vulnerable to manipulation. So if you look at this situation from an evil sociopathic/narcissistic/borderline personality type of perspective, she's the clear winner here.

that I was spot on. you suck at reading more than you suck at writing. congrats

for sure. ultimately that's on him too tho. leaving yourself so vulnerable (assuming the current reports are true) requires a level of negligence that's absurd

This is an example of how people like yourself stay not just uninformed, but generally incapable of learning things in general. Or colloquially speaking, you exemplify how dumbasses behave. You were clearly wrong, but you tell yourself you were spot on. No wonder you're literally unable to follow a simple argument.

In this case, I posted a tweet by Pitching Ninja saying that he has a hard time not believing Ohtani given that he's cooperating with the authorities and accusing Ippei in the context of an investigation, when that would invite nothing but trouble if he wasn't 100% truthful.

In response to this, you posted an article by ESPN saying that they weren't able to get Ohtani's camp to confirm which authorities they talked to. Then I pointed out that the article has no actual information - there are all kinds of reasons why Ohtani's camp might not want to prioritize talking to ESPN and virtually no parties answered ESPN on anything, which made the article essentially content-free. Then you accused me of incessant wishcasting (well you have no idea these things work so I didn't think you'd understand either). The implication here was that Ohtani's camp wasn't committed to this matter being investigated by the authorities because they were not confident that Ohtani's accusation would withstand scrutiny.

But as it turns out, Ohtani's camp did turn over everything (even including Ohtani's phone), voluntarily gave interviews (not just Ohtani but multiple professionals within his camp), voila, the authorities literally are completely convinced of Ohtani's version of what happened. In other words, I was 100% right about everything here, you were completely wrong to question Pitching Ninja's argument.

Again, it's okay to be wrong - but to behave this way when you're shown to be wrong, well that's why you sound the way you do. This might seem harsh, but I want you to feel bad, because that'd be good for you.

yeah i get all my news from something called "pitching ninja"


all ppl said from the beginning was ohtani was placing bets and/or he's a complete ****ing moran, lets see how this plays out, and ... turns out the ladder might be the deal here? lol trying to take a victory lap on this, you muppet

Nope, the whole Ohtani is a moron thing is something you guys pivoted to, after the whole conspiracy angle was starting to fall apart, I assume because people like you perceive the other side as being pro-Ohtani (I don't really care either way, I only care about what is true) so simply attacking Ohtani in some other way, in your primitive brain, makes you feel you're evening the score.

At the beginning there were two reasonable scenarios - 1) Ohtani paid Ippei's debt willingly and 2) Ippei stole from or defrauded Ohtani and yet people like you jumped to by far the least likely scenario 3) Ohtani was the one actually betting and Ippei is the fall guy. Even people sympathetic to Ohtani believed 1) was more likely than 2) in part because Ohtani's camp looks better in that case.

I wrote out my reasoning because I literally didn't see anyone at the time (talking about social media and reddit more generally, I think this thread was sadly exclusively discussing the least likely scenario, yes it's true, 2p2 is often dumber than reddit these days) argue for 2) vs 1) but I felt the available evidence was already fairly overwhelmingly in favor of 2). I didn't even address 3) or the Ohtani gambled scenario because it was obviously extremely unlikely even with the information that was out there - I only addressed that after I realized that many of you were so far behind that you didn't even understand the nuances around 1) vs 2) and were just talking about 3).

Again, the point isn't that I was right and you were wrong (though that is also the case here). The point is:

Where did you go wrong? What were you thinking? If a similar situation was to strike again, would you make all of the same errors because you didn't learn anything here? If your reasoning skills are at this level, how do you know they aren't consistently letting you down in real life as well?

On the Reds forum there's no doubt this is a massive coverup. Only remaining debate is whether Ohtani should get consecutive life sentences or the needle.

if he had a shred of honour he'd commit seppuku already


prob too dumb to figure it out tho ... sad!

Wanted to address this earlier, but didn't because the Ohtani situation was not yet resolved.

The conspiracy theory that MJ's retirement was some sort of a secret punishment is virtually impossible - MJ was formally investigated and was found to have gambled, but on NBA games. If he bet on NBA games and David Stern knew, it's extremely likely that many others would have also known and there's just no plausible way at this point for those people to conspire, nor are there any plausible motives. They'd be assuming huge personal risks to benefit a superstar - why?

What is somewhat more plausible is that while MJ did not bet on NBA games, there was an ongoing investigation into his gambling activities at that point in time and as a player, MJ was likely required to cooperate with the investigation. This might have led to revealing information that's somewhat damaging to MJ's public image. MJ might have thought retirement was a reasonable way to avoid having to comply with this.

There was a contemporary report:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-c21a3c2e6b9a/

The investigation was wrapped up immediately after MJ's retirement and they never ended up interviewing MJ. Which strongly suggests that they were trying to interview MJ, but weren't able to and this was the last thing that they were waiting on before concluding. But when MJ retired, they realized they no longer could force him to cooperate, which means they had no reason not to conclude the investigation, since everything else was ready. One possible conspiracy angle is that some NBA insiders (perhaps even Stern) might have known where the investigation was leading and let MJ know that the investigation would end with no wrongdoing on the part of MJ if it was to conclude then. But that's not much of a conspiracy since it's fundamentally contingent on MJ being innocent and the insider involved believing MJ is innocent.

Yet another related possibility is MJ was just sick and tired of being investigated. I can definitely understand that indignation from his perspective - he's the one making the game of basketball popular and the owners rich and how dare they investigate his private life when he's literally done nothing wrong. So it might have been his F-U to the league and the owners.

Sad, but not surprising.

One funny thing (and this pattern is everywhere) is that it's usually the dumbest people that jump to "If that's true, Ohtani must be the dumbest person for that to happen" when it's their own lack of intelligence that's making it difficult to imagine plausible reasons as to why and how certain things might happen. Most people (even very smart people) are vulnerable to all kinds of breaches and do all kinds of dumb things all the time that could lead to significant negative consequences in retrospect.

Above is from The Athletic article:

https://theathletic.com/5409424/2024...izuhara-victim

There first page of this is people (including me) saying lol gamblor etc. No one was honestly hedging that he was just a big dope.

Making a bunch of jokes and pointing out weird stuff about the story then saying - OR he’s the dumbest person ever - isn’t actually allowing for the possibility he was scammed and it’s disingenuous to point to that and say - well I had an open mind the whole time.

I’ll admit, my first reaction was that he had to be gambling and panicked with some weird coverup, but changed my mind after a week or so. Just take the L.

This is especially true when trust is built between two humans over several years.

What the failed conspiracy theorist are all pivoting to now is victim blaming. It's standard for people w/ high degrees of narcissism to do. They generally can't admit when they are wrong, because well, they are awesome and always correct. And secondly, they turn their victim / target, into the problem, because again, it can't be them.

does ohtani know how to read, or is this like a charlie kelly/forrest gump type situation?

Mizuhara sent encrypted messages to an illegal bookmaker after The Los Angeles Times and ESPN articles came out. Mizuhara asked the bookmaker, "Have you seen the reports?" The bookmaker responded, "Yes, but that's all bullshit. Obviously you didn't steal from him. I understand it's a cover job I totally get it."

In the complaint, literally the next response after this is Mizuhara saying “Technically I did steal from him. It’s all over for me”

It's quite hilarious to imagine 72off's state of mind when he decided to quote this but literally skip the part where Ippei admits to stealing. Also it's likely that the bookie had an ulterior motive in sending this given that he was already under investigation and cooperating with the authorities at this point. After all, his lawyer admitted to trying to get the feds interested in investigating Ohtani. The whole Bowyer stalking Ohtani to threaten Ippei (and Ippei begging for credit, then trying to negotiate for settlement, etc) makes it rather clear that Bowyer also didn't think Ohtani was the one behind the bets.

So while it's unclear whether this was his own idea, his lawyer's or the feds, but the text from Bowyer is a clear bait to try to get Ippei to admit to something.