Venetian Las Vegas to Pay $7.2 Million Fine Over Ties to Black Book Bookmaker Matthew Bowyer

The Venetian Las Vegas will pay a $7.2 million fine after Nevada gaming regulators found the resort ignored years of warning signs involving illegal bookmaker Matthew Bowyer, the man at the center of the scandal that took down Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter. The Nevada Gaming Commission is scheduled to vote on the settlement July 23.

The Venetian is now the fifth Las Vegas Strip property penalized over dealings with Bowyer or similar money-laundering violations in roughly a year, joining Resorts World Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts. Combined, those five fines total more than $39 million.

Decades of Play Despite Warnings

Bowyer was a Venetian customer from 1999 until March 2024, when the property banned him after learning he was operating an illegal sportsbook. Regulators say that as far back as 2019, a Venetian vice president of player development flagged concerns about Bowyer’s source of funds when he sought to return after a hiatus, but the casino’s own compliance team cleared him anyway.

Court filings show Bowyer claimed income of $500,000 to $1 million as the owner of a synthetic turf grass company. Despite that modest profile, the Venetian accepted a $1 million cashier’s check from him and let him wager tens of millions of dollars. Between 2019 and 2021, Bowyer made 30 trips to the property, put up $22.3 million and lost $3.6 million.

A Scandal With National Reach

Bowyer’s illegal bookmaking operation ran for at least five years and served more than 700 bettors before it collapsed in October 2023, including Ippei Mizuhara, the Dodgers interpreter now serving a prison sentence for stealing from Ohtani to cover his own gambling debts. Bowyer pleaded guilty in August 2024 to operating an unlawful gambling business, money laundering and filing a false tax return, and he has since been placed in Nevada’s Black Book, barring him permanently from the state’s casinos.

The Venetian’s compliance failures were not new. The property, sold by Las Vegas Sands Corp. to Apollo Global Management in February 2022, previously forfeited $47.4 million to the federal government in 2013 for failing to file required suspicious activity reports, drawing an additional $2 million fine at the time.