Former Major League Baseball outfielder Yasiel Puig has been found guilty in federal court in California on two counts of lying to federal investigator who were investigating a sports gambling ring.
Each count of making a false statement carries up to five years in prison, while the obstruction of justice charge carries up to a 10-year term of imprisonment. The jury in federal court in Los Angeles began deliberating on Wednesday and found him guilty Friday afternoon. He made false statements to federal investigators regarding a sports gambling ring taking bets in California that was based in Costa Rica.
The case stems from the federal investigations into illegal sports gambling operations run by former minor league baseball player Wayne Nix and others in California, where sports gambling is illegal at the state level.
The investigation into the illegal sports gambling rings run by Nix and others ensnared Ippei Mizuhara, a Japanese-American who worked for the Los Angeles Angels and Dodgers as a translator for superstar player Shohei Ohtani. According to a press release issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Nix, who played in the Oakland Athletics’ organization from 1995 to 2001, had been running an illegal gambling operations for nearly 20 years.
In November 2022, Puig was charged in federal court in Los Angeles with a single count of lying to federal agents from Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service. The Cuban-born outfielder reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, but then changed his mind and declined to plead guilty to the count of making a false statement.
After Puig declined to plead guilty, the government charged Puig with a second count of making false statements as well as obstruction of justice and quickly moved to declare Puig in breach of the plea agreement, which contained a waiver of Puig’s right to not have the factual basis of his plea agreement admitted as evidence at a subsequent trial.
The district court ruled that the facts of the plea agreement were not admissible because of a provision of the federal rules of evidence, and the government appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in Puig’s favor in May 2025. The case is U.S. v. Puig, No. 2:22-cr-00394, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California before Judge Dolly M. Gee.
Puig hasn’t played professionally in the United States since 2019, when he played 149 games for the Cleveland Indians and Cincinnati Reds. He spent the winter in Venezuela playing for the Navegantes del Magallanes of the Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional, where he hit .282/.340/.447 with three homers and 14 RBIs in 26 regular season games. He last appeared in the round robin playoff for the Navegantes on Jan. 16, going 0-for-3 in a 4-0 loss to the Bravos de Margarita. He had seven hits in 27 at-bats with six RBIs and two homers in nine playoff games with Magallanes before leaving to appear at his trial.
When the case against him was first filed in 2022, Puig played for the Kiwoom Heroes of South Korea’s KBO League. He’s since played winter ball for the Estrellas Orientales of LIDOM, the Tiburones de La Guaira and Navegantes del Magallanes in the Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional, played part of the summer of 2024 for Veracruz in the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol and returned to the Kiwoom Heroes for the summer of 2025 before his summer season was cut short by a knee injury in May.
During the 2023-24 winter ball season, Puig was rumored to have drawn significant interest from several Major League Baseball clubs, but ultimately never signed a contract and has not returned to MLB.
Photo: Outfielder Yasiel Puig #66 of the Kiwoom Heroes reacts in the top of the eighth inning during the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) League opening game between Kiwoom Heroes and Lotte Giants at Gocheok Skydome on April 02, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
