Yasiel Puig lost over $1.5 million in bets with unlicensed bookie, IRS agent testifies

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former MLB slugger Yasiel Puig lost more than $1.5 million in sports bets he placed with an illegal bookmaker in Southern California over no more than five months in 2019, a criminal investigator with the Internal Revenue Service testified Wednesday.

IRS Special Agent Christen Seymour told a jury in Los Angeles federal court that he based his estimate on $500,000 in wire transfers from Puig’s checking account that went to shell companies affiliated with Wayne Nix’s illegal gambling business and the $980,000 Puig owed Nix by the end of September 2019 when Nix cut him off.

The estimate doesn’t include cash payments Puig made or received from Nix and two cashiers’ checks of $100,000 each that Puig purchased on June 25, 2019, to settle an outstanding debt with Nix, Seymour said.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have charged Puig with lying to federal investigators and obstruction of justice because in a January 2022 interview he told them that the $200,000 in cashiers’ checks was to pay for a bet he lost on an unknown website and he didn’t know the person was who had instructed him to buy the cashier checks and make them out to a person who turned out to another gambler Nix owed the money to.

“He said he lost some online bets and was told by an unknown person to make the checks out to” the other gambler’s name, Seymour testified under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Morse. “He made it clear he didn’t know who it was, and he was most certain it was by phone.”

However, text messages between Puig and two private baseball coaches — who were acting at the time as his middlemen with Nix’s organization — show that on the date he bought the cashier checks, one of them instructed him to make the checks out to Nix’s other client. In addition, investigators found a photo of the address label Puig had used to send the checks via UPS on the mobile phone of 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 played for the LA Dodgers between 2013 and 2018, and for the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians in 2019, when the government claims he got involved with Nix’s unlicensed gambling business. He hadn’t been a target of the investigation into Nix when he was interviewed in January 2022.

Nix, a former minor league baseball player, shortly thereafter in 2022 agreed to plead 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 yearslong IRS and Homeland Security investigation of Nix and his cronies, they discovered that Puig had been one of his clients.

In an April 2021 interview, Nix told investigators that dealing with Puig had been “disaster,” Seymour said. According to the prosecution, Nix cut ties with Puig because “he simply wasn’t worth the headache” given that he was continually unwilling to pay his losses and yet demanded additional credit to lay more bets.

Nix’s group let gamblers bet on credit with the understanding they would settle their debts, or collect their winnings, once a week, preferably in cash. Puig’s arrangement with Nix required him to pay up once he was $100,000 in the hole, and Nix would pay him when he had accumulated $100,000 in winnings.

Another Nix client whom Seymour said he interviewed during the investigation was former NBA Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen.

Seymour testified that Pippen, a golfing friend of Nix, had initially also been unwilling to be truthful about betting with the unlicensed bookie. However, according to Seymour, he eventually admitted that he had placed bets with Nix and didn’t end up getting charged.

Nix, according to the prosecution, wouldn’t let his clients bet on sports they themselves were engaged in. Puig purportedly placed bets on tennis, basketball and football games, but not on baseball games.

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