Ex-Dodger Yasiel Puig convicted of lying to feds in sports gambling probe

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig was convicted Friday on charges of lying to federal agents in 2022 during their investigation of an unlicensed bookmaker in Southern California who was used by high-profile athletes to bet on sports.

A federal jury took a day and a half to find the former All-Star guilty on one count of obstruction of justice and one count of making false statements to federal investigators. He faces up to 15 years in prison on the combined charges, but his actual sentence will likely be much less severe.

Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee set his sentencing date for May 26.

“He’s shocked and disappointed,” Puig’s attorney Keri Axel told reporters after the verdict was read.

Puig will seek to have the verdict overturned, Axel said, because the government failed to prove key elements of the charges, including whether Puig’s purported false statements were material to its investigation of an illegal bookmaker and his organization.

Gee denied the government’s request to remand him to custody, saying he wasn’t a flight risk or a danger to the community. He will have to notify the judge, however, if he intends to travel outside the U.S.

The jury in Los Angeles returned the verdict after hearing extensive evidence of Puig’s involvement with Wayne Nix’s illegal gambling syndicate over a five-month period in 2019 during which, a prosecution witness testified, he lost more than $1.5 million betting on tennis, basketball and football games.

Puig, 35, wasn’t accused of betting on Major League Baseball baseball games, and he hasn’t denied betting on sports. Rather, he has maintained that he didn’t knowingly lie during the 2022 video interview but that he had been confused and didn’t accurately remember the events from three years earlier.

The Cuba-born slugger, who was playing for the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians in 2019, wasn’t a target of the government’s investigation when agents with the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security, joined by prosecutors from U.S. attorney’s office in LA, questioned him about $200,000 in cashier checks he purportedly sent to one of Nix’s other clients to settle an outstanding debt with the bookie.

They also questioned him about his relationship with Donny Kadokawa, a private baseball coach the government said was a middleman used by Puig to place bets with Nix’s organization.

Nix is a former minor league pitcher who for about 20 years ran an illegal betting business in California — where sports betting is illegal — and had assembled a roster of clients that included high-profile athletes and others involved in professional sports. After he was arrested in 2020, he started cooperating with federal investigators and provided them with names of his clients.

Criminal investigators with the IRS and Homeland Security testified at trial that they sought to interview Puig as they went down the list of clients they had gotten from Nix to verify the information the bookie had given them.

They said Puig initially told them during the interview that he only knew Kadokawa from baseball even though Kadokawa told the jury he started placing bets for Puig with Nix’s organization in May 2019 and continued to do so for several months.

Puig later on during the interview only acknowledged that he had asked Kadokawa to place a bet for him on a game while Kadokawa was in Las Vegas, the investigators said.

Puig also told the investigators that the $200,000 in cashiers checks he purchased in 2019 were for a bet he lost on a website and that an unknown person had instructed him over the phone to send the checks to the person who turned out to be one of Nix’s clients.

Text messages introduced at trial, however, showed Kadokawa and another private baseball coach, Benny Bonilla, who was friends with Puig and Kadokawa, had instructed Puig to purchase the cashier checks and sent them to Nix’s clients at the behest of Nix.

Nix, the government claimed, eventually gave Puig his own account with a Costa Rico-based sports betting website that was used by Nix and his clients. But after Puig was continuously slow in settling his debts, Nix cut him off in September 2019 because, prosecutors said, he wasn’t worth the headache.

In 2022, Puig agreed to plead guilty to lying to federal agents and to pay a fine of at least $55,000. However, when it was time to enter the plea before Gee, who also presided over his trial, Puig changed his mind.

According to Puig’s attorneys, he had been rushed into making a plea deal when he was playing six days a week in the South Korean baseball league and the government indicated that he was about to be indicted and that it would seek an arrest warrant for him.

Gee, a Barack Obama appointee, rejected the prosecution’s request to use his admissions from the plea agreement against him at trial because he never formally pleaded guilty and, as such, the agreement wasn’t binding. The Ninth Circuit affirmed her ruling last year.

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