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Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani will get better $325,000 price of baseball playing cards that his former interpreter and good friend Ippei Mizuhara fraudulently bought, per The Athletic’s Sam Blum.
Based on Blum, the federal government will transfer for an order “to replicate Ohtani’s superior curiosity within the property” when Mizuhara is sentenced on Jan. 24.
Mizuhara bought the playing cards on-line from January to March of 2024 with the intent to re-sell them. The playing cards featured Ohtani’s picture together with Yogi Berra and Juan Soto.
Final week, Ohtani requested a listening to from the U.S. District Court docket for the Central District of California to get better the fraudulently bought playing cards that had been seized from Mizuhara. Prosecutors say that the listening to, which was scheduled for Dec. 20, is not needed.
“Ohtani holds a legitimate pre-existing curiosity in Forfeitable Property as title to the Forfeitable Property was vested in Ohtani on the time of the fee of the acts which give rise to the forfeiture,” the federal government wrote in its submitting, per Blum.
In June, Mizuhara pleaded responsible to financial institution and tax fraud after stealing almost $17 million from Ohtani’s accounts to repay sports activities betting money owed. After being fired from the Dodgers in March, he was indicted by the federal authorities in April.
Together with the stolen playing cards and stolen cash from Ohtani’s accounts, Mizuhara pocketed a $60,000 examine that Ohtani gave him to make use of for dental work and as an alternative used Ohtani’s debit card to pay for the process, in accordance with a plea agreement in Could. Per Blum, Mizuhara may very well be required to pay restitution to Ohtani.
Amid distractions off the sphere concerning Mizuhara, Ohtani received his third MVP award and led the Dodgers to the World Sequence, the place they defeated the New York Yankees because the two-way star received his first championship.
