This has been beaten to death, but no evidence exists to prove Ohtani was not involved. I read the entire indictment. I think just about the entire thing was about Ippie moving money. But that could have just as easily been done with Ohtani’s approval as without his approval. What remains is:
1-It is less than likely that Ippie has Ohtani’s credentials, but definitely possible.
2-It is unlikely that Ohtani simply didn’t bother opening his statements for 26 months.
3-It is extremely unlikely that a bookie gives a translator $100k line of credit.
4-It is almost impossible that someone making $200-300k a year is getting a $1M line of credit.
5-The $1M line of credit being contingent of making a $500K payment every Monday would never be done if the bookie was relying only on Ippie’s weekly take-home pay of $4,000. Ippie is 99% short.
6-The bookie was nice enough to acknowledge that it was a “cover job”. So, a cover for what?
7-What of the missing $24,000,000? The indictment mentioned $40M of losses, and $16M of implied theft. So does someone owe someone $24M? And if that is Ippie’s $24M debt, does that mean the bookie allowed Ippie to run up, quite literally, a 100 years of take-home debt?
I’m not saying that there couldn’t be other issues, like old-fashioned embezzlement, with gambling as a cover. But there is about a 0% chance that the current story is true.