KVIG Informative

On June 13, 1960, the Nevada Gaming Commission created the state’s List of Excluded Persons — the “Black Book” — to keep organized crime figures out of licensed casinos. Sixty-six years later, on April 23, 2026, the commission added its 39th name: Mathew R. Bowyer, the Orange County bookmaker whose illegal sports betting operation fed the gambling debts behind the theft of nearly $17 million from Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani. The regulatory tool built to fight mob financing is still the state’s answer to a gambling economy organized crime never could have built on its own.

The Nevada Gaming Commission promulgated the exclusion list on June 13, 1960, under state gaming law authorizing regulators to bar people from licensed casinos when their presence threatens “the strict regulation of licensed gaming,” according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s own published description of the list’s statutory basis. The law allows exclusion based on criminal history or a “notorious or unsavory reputation,” and gives a listed person 30 to 60 days to request a hearing to show cause for removal.

Nine years after the Black Book began, Nevada faced a related problem the list alone could not fix: casino ownership itself. Requiring every individual investor in a casino to undergo full licensing discouraged legitimate banks and investors from putting money into Nevada gaming, leaving small groups of operators dependent on capital from hidden and often unsuitable sources, according to a Nevada State Bar historical account of the era’s gaming statutes.

Gov. Paul Laxalt, working with Nevada banker Parry Thomas, championed a legislative fix: the Corporate Gaming Act of 1969. Rather than requiring every shareholder of a casino-owning corporation to be individually licensed, the act created limited licensure for a corporation’s key executives, allowing outside shareholders to invest indirectly while regulators concentrated their scrutiny on the smaller group of officers who actually ran the operation, according to the same Nevada State Bar account.

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The change reshaped who could own a Nevada casino. William Harrah took his casino company public in 1971, listed it on the American Stock Exchange in 1972, and moved it to the New York Stock Exchange in 1973, becoming the first gaming company to trade there, according to the Nevada State Bar’s account of the period. Publicly traded capital, not cash from hidden partners, increasingly financed Nevada’s casino growth from that point forward.

The Black Book never went away. Regulators kept using it, and its subjects shifted over the decades from the mob figures it was built to bar toward cheats, athletes who bet on their own sports and illegal bookmakers, all evaluated under the same statutory standard the Gaming Commission adopted in 1960.

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The Nevada Gaming Commission voted unanimously on April 23, 2026, to add Bowyer as the 39th name on the list. Bowyer, 50, of San Juan Capistrano, California, pleaded guilty to operating an unlawful gambling business, money laundering and subscribing to a false tax return, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. His operation served more than 700 bettors across Los Angeles, Orange County and Las Vegas using Costa Rica-based websites and a call center, and he was sentenced to 12 months and a day in federal prison plus $1,613,280 in restitution, the same federal prosecutors reported. Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter and de facto manager for Ohtani, was a Bowyer client from September 2021 to January 2024 who placed roughly 19,000 bets and accumulated about $40.6 million in losses, prosecutors found; Bowyer directed Mizuhara to pay at least $16.25 million toward those debts. Mizuhara separately pleaded guilty to bank fraud for stealing nearly $17 million from Ohtani’s bank account to cover the losses and was sentenced Feb. 6, 2025, to 57 months in federal prison, according to the same U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The 1969 act cleared organized crime’s money out of Nevada casino ownership. It did nothing to stop a private bookmaker from running an unlicensed operation out of Costa Rican servers 65 years later, or from reaching one of the highest-paid athletes in the world through the man standing next to him. Nevada still has only one tool built for people like that. It just used it again.