The Case of Shohei’s Translator

Michael Freedman became a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers at exactly the wrong time—the year after a hobbled Kirk Gibson hit a shocking walkoff home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, which the underdog Dodgers would win in five games. “I just missed that,” he says. “And then it was decades before they made it back to the World Series.”

In fact, it was nearly three decades, 2017, and then the Dodgers lost to a Houston Astros team later accused of cheating. “Another intersection of baseball with federal criminal law,” Freedman jokes.

His most recent such intersection is repping Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator of Shohei Ohtani, accused of stealing from the Dodgers superstar to fuel a gambling addiction.

In a way, this case, too, came to Freedman at the wrong time. “I was in the middle of a RICO public corruption trial for the former deputy mayor of the city of LA, Ray Chan. … I was deep into that. From January until the end of March, it was all I thought about. … It was a two-week trial with a very rigorous judge, every day starting at 8 a.m. Which means you’re in the court at 7:00, and you’re out of the house at 4 a.m.”

Working on his closing argument, he was thinking that when it was over he’d like to take in a Dodgers game. “That’s always my idea of a day off: find a day game and go sit in the sun,” he says.

And then the call came about repping Mizuhara.

He’s not sure how Mizuhara found him. “When someone’s looking for a federal criminal defense lawyer, oftentimes it’s hard for them to even realize what it is that they need,” he says. “When I started out, most of my referrals were really, really direct. A friend of mine would say, ‘Hey, I told this guy to call you.’ … It’s more common these days that people find me.”

He has nothing but good things to say about his practice area. “Federal prosecutors are generally very good lawyers,” he says. “It’s like in baseball—you want to see two good teams play, right? You want to see professionals at a high level. And there were good lawyers all around in this case.”

The Mizuhara case he describes in straightforward terms. “Most observers of the federal criminal system would say that we resolved the case pretty quickly,” he says. “From the initial appearance in early April, the plea was filed shortly thereafter. Then we had the initial arraignment, which is really just a procedural step. The change of plea was in early June. So basically two months. … We were trying to negotiate the best resolution for him as early as possible.”

What was different, of course, was the press coverage. Freedman was able to work the case for a few weeks before The New York Times broke the story. Then all bets—so to speak—were off. Early reports were full of speculation. Did Ohtani have a secret gambling problem? Was the translator taking a fall for him? Nope.

Freedman was the calm center of this media storm. “If you get led astray by what’s going on with the media, or even the other participants in the case, you lose sight of the facts and the client,” he says. “The press is very different than the practice—that’s one of the challenges. … Obviously, there was a lot of press interest, and there could have been press conferences. Different lawyers might have handled this differently. But I feel very confident in my approach. I explain it to the client, get their buy-in, and feel like we’re doing what’s best for them.”

The Japanese media, he adds, was particularly obsessed with the story. “You show up to a courthouse that you’ve been to hundreds of times and there are suddenly 100 reporters waiting for you. That’s very surreal. … And then it’s equally amusing on the other side of it: to go back to the same courthouse the next week on a low-profile case. It’s like, ‘Where are all my friends from the global media?’”

In the end, Mizuhara pled guilty to two counts: bank fraud and tax fraud. He was sentenced in late January.

“Even though it’s a significant low point in someone’s life to be approaching federal sentencing—and I never take that lightly—it’s one of the real privileges of my job,” Freedman says. “By law, the court has to consider the background and characteristics of the defendant. So this is where you can really tell the client’s full life story: who they are, how this mistake occurred, what they plan to do with the rest of their life, and what’s an appropriate punishment holistically. That’s the real name of the game in terms of this work—in a case that resolves by plea agreement.”

As a kid, in what he calls the Eric Karros-Mike Piazza era, Freedman estimates he went to about 20 Dodgers games a year. “I still remember being in the car and hearing on the radio that Eddie Murray was traded,” he says. “I was devastated.”

In recent years, between work and raising two kids, it’s a rarer event; and the kids, now 10 and 6, never seemed into it—until 2024. “The older one just got obsessed,” Freedman says, “so we’ve probably been to five or six games.” That included the NLDS game when they knocked off the San Diego Padres, and the NLCS game when they advanced to the World Series. Between him and his kids, he adds, “It’s hard to say who was more excited. But yeah, everyone was very excited.”

And no doubt he’s been hearing from friends and neighbors about the case of Shohei’s translator? “People haven’t stopped talking about it, that’s for sure,” Freedman says.

Talking His Way In

“When I was in high school, I was really into photography, and we had to come up with our own project on an LA photography exhibition. Somehow I contacted the Dodgers and talked my way into coming to the stadium on an off day. It was empty, and they toured me all around. I got to shoot color photos, then got them printed professionally. I’ve had those in my office pretty much my whole career.” —Michael Freedman