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LOS ANGELES (CN) — An immigration officer testified on Tuesday that former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig confirmed under oath that he wasn’t involved in illegal gambling during his naturalization interview on Aug. 14, 2019.
The date is significant because federal prosecutors claim that Puig at that time was laying hundreds of bets with a Southern California bookmaker who ran an illegal sports gambling operation popular with high-profile athletes.
Jose Lopez testified on the sixth day of Puig’s jury trial on charges he lied to Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security investigators when they questioned him in January 2022 about his dealings with Wayne Nix, the illegal bookie, and about $200,000 in cashier checks that he used in 2019 to settle part of a debt with Nix.
Puig, 35, had initially agreed to plead guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal agent and pay a $55,000 fine. However, when it came time to enter a plea before Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles, he changed his mind and chose to fight the charges.
He’s now on trial for obstruction of justice as well as lying to the investigators.
Lopez told the jury that the Cuba-born slugger sat down with him for his naturalization interview in Miami and that he confirmed under oath that the answers he had provided on his application to become a U.S. citizen, including his denial of illegal gambling, were correct.
“He was nice — a little nervous, but pleasant,” Lopez testified.
Puig passed the civics test as well as the English reading and writing test without any problems, according to Lopez, though the question he was asked to read out loud was just “what do we have to pay to the agreement?” and the written answer he gave was “we pay taxes.”
Federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in LA, however, claim that in August 2019, Nix had provided Puig with an account at Costa Rico-based gambling website his illegal business used for its clients to place bets on sports games per the limits that Nix set.
During the three months in 2019 that Puig used the account, prosecutors say, he placed about 900 bets on tennis, football and basketball games.
He’s not accused of betting on baseball games.
Nix gave Puig his own account after he had settled more than $200,000 in losses he had accumulated on bets with Nix earlier that year through a private baseball coach, Donny Kadokawa. The Hawaii-based coach testified last week that he had been haunted by Nix over Puig’s unpaid losses.
Nix, a former minor league baseball player, pleaded guilty in 2022 to running a sports betting business in California — where sports gambling is illegal — that was used by high-profile athletes as well as coaches, broadcasters and analysts. He’s yet to be sentenced.
During the IRS and Homeland Security’s investigation of Nix and his cronies, they discovered that Puig had been one of his clients. Federal agents interviewed Puig in 2022, when he was playing in South Korea, but he denied that he had anything to do with Nix.
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