Former Dodger Yasiel Puig begins trial on charges he lied in gambling probe

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former LA Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig went on trial Tuesday to fight charges he lied to federal investigators looking into his involvement with an illegal Southern California sports betting ring.

Puig, 35, is accused of obstruction of justice and of making false statements when he was questioned in January 2022 about his participation in the sports betting operation of Wayne Nix, a former minor league baseball player who, prosecutors claim, Puig owed more than $900,000 at one point in 2019.

The former Major League Baseball slugger wasn’t even the target of the government’s investigation when he was questioned by investigators with the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security who were looking into the leaders and organizers of the illegal sports betting racket, Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Alexander told the jury in her opening statement.

“He was told he wasn’t a target and that the interview was strictly voluntary,” Alexander told the jury in downtown Los Angeles. “But instead of telling the truth, he walked a tightrope of lies.”

According to the prosecutor, Puig’s involvement with Nix’s illegal sports gambling operation began in 2019, after he befriended Donny Kadokawa and Benny Bonilla, two coaches he had met at a baseball camp.

Puig had Kadokawa place bets for him with Nix’s organization, and Bonilla collected cash payments to hand over to Nix’s people, Alexander said.

Eventually, Nix gave Puig his own login to the gambling site, and he ended up placing about 900 bets in just a few months until Nix cut him off because he wasn’t paying his debts and, according to the prosecutor, simply wasn’t worth the headache.

In 2022, Puig had 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 Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who’s now presiding over his trial, Puig changed his mind and refused to go through with it.

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 Court of Appeals affirmed her ruling last year.

Jose Nuño, one of Puig’s attorneys, told the jury in his opening statement that his client doesn’t dispute that he gambled on sports, but he never bet on Major League Baseball games.

However, according to the lawyer, the interview during which Puig was supposed to have lied was “a game of foreign language telephone” conducted through a Zoom-style web conference with all the participants in different locations.

Puig either wasn’t sure about or couldn’t remember the events that had taken place three years earlier in 2019, with the intervening fog of the pandemic lockdown, Nuño told the jury.

“Confusion doesn’t equal a crime,” he argued.

Puig played for the Dodgers from 2013 to 2018, and his purported involvement with Nix’s illegal betting business started in 2019, after he had been traded to the Cincinnati Reds. There are no allegations that he bet on games in which he participated.

Nix and some of the people who worked with him have struck plea deals with the Justice Department. Nix began operating his bookmaking racket more than 20 years ago, and through his contacts in the sports world, he developed a client list that included current and former professional athletes. He employed three former professional baseball players to assist with the business.

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