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LOS ANGELES (CN) — An attorney for former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig said the government’s charges that he willfully lied during a 2022 interview regarding bets he placed with an unlicensed bookmaker in Southern California were based on nothing but assumptions and speculation.
Keri Axel told the jury during her closing argument Wednesday that Puig had neither lied or tried to obstruct the investigation into Wayne Nix’s illegal sports betting business when he sat down for a voluntary interview with investigators from the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security on Jan. 27, 2022.
Rather, she said, the federal agents speculated that he would remember the details of his interactions with Nix in 2019 more than two years later when they confronted him with details of sports bets he placed through a middleman with Nix’s organization. Axel said investigators assumed he was lying when he just needed more time to accurately recollect the details of his uncontested gambling habits.
“Assumptions and speculation are not evidence, and you shouldn’t rely on it,” Axel told the jurors in downtown LA.
Puig, 35, is on trial on charges he lied to federal agents when he purportedly told them during the video-conference interview that he hadn’t discussed sports betting with Donny Kadokawa, a private baseball coach who Puig had befriended in early 2019. Kadokawa testified for the government that he had been Puig’s middlemen and placed bets for him with Nix’s organization for a few month in 2019.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in LA also accuse Puig of lying when, during the same interview, he purportedly told them that he had lost $200,000 betting on an “unknown” website in 2019 and that an “unknown” person told him to purchase $200,000 in cashier’s checks made out to another client of Nix’s to settle his outstanding debt.
Axel argued, not only did Puig tell the investigators that he had placed bets through Kadokawa on basketball games in May 2019 — once he remembered during the same interview — he also offered to look for additional information. However, according to the attorney, the investigators had already decided he was lying and they weren’t interested.
In addition, she said, there’s no evidence in the investigators’ notes from the interview — which wasn’t recorded at the request of one Puig’s attorneys at the time — that he falsely told them he lost the $200,000 betting with an “unknown” person on an “unknown” website.
“Nothing in the notes say ‘unknown,’” Axel argued. “I don’t where they get this.”
The former Major League Baseball slugger, who played for the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Guardians in 2019, was interviewed as part of the investigation Nix’s illegal gambling business, which was used by a number of high-profile athletes.
Nix, a former minor league baseball pitcher, was arrested in 2020 and started cooperating with the investigation soon after. He provided the government with names of his clients, which led them to Puig in late 2021.
Placing bets with bookmakers that aren’t state-licensed isn’t a federal crime, and Puig wasn’t a target of the IRS and Homeland Security investigation, which the investigators testified, was more concerned with any potential organized crime involvement in Nix’s business, money laundering and the integrity of professional sports.
“All he had to do was tell the truth,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Juan Rodriguez told the jury in the prosecution’s closing argument earlier Wednesday. “Instead he chose to lie and to obstruct.”
Testimony during the 11-day trial revealed that Puig lost more than $1.5 million betting with Nix in just five months. Nix eventually cut him off because Puig was consistently unwilling or slow to pay his debts.
Nix’s organization allowed their clients to bet on credit with the understanding they’d settle up once a week in cash. However, Kadokawa testified that while Puig was harassing him daily to place more bets with Nix, the bookmaker was demanding constantly that Puig pay his ever increasing debts.
“He may have been a good baseball player, but he was not a good bettor,” Rodriguez said. “He kept losing.”
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