Tokyo Underworld (29 page)

‘Americans had the wrong idea about Japan,’ Nick took to saying when it was all over. ‘The Japanese weren’t just vicious competitors in trade with the United States. They were even worse with each other.’

The new economic might of Japan also gave birth to what became known as
keizai yakuza
(financial gangsters), bubble-era mobsters who distinguished themselves more in the area of white collar crimes. Among other things, they profiteered from insider trading on the ever rising Tokyo Stock Exchange, as they learned to translate brawn, connections, and cash into important investment tips. They also set up specialized finance companies called
jusen
to borrow money from the banks for the purchase and development of real estate. In the heated competition for business that marked the bubble era, bankers even began to approach them, offering cheap loans, while brokerages urged them to buy securities. As long as they had land, which was soaring in value, for collateral, the banks and brokerages would give them anything they wanted.

The men from the local chapter of the Sumiyoshi, the gang that had seized control of the Roppongi-Akasaka area in the wake of the Tosei-kai’s decline and became regular customers at Nicola’s, were exemplars of the new breed of racketeer. They arrived to dine at Nicola’s in a convoy of black stretch Mercedes with opaque tinted windows, sporting double-breasted Italian suits and designer sunglasses and carrying cellular phones. Seated in groups of twenty to thirty, they would order pizza, filet mignon, and the best imported Chianti on the menu. Then, lighting up post-dinner cigars, they would lean back to discuss stock options, futures, and their overseas investments. This crime-on-the-half-shell modus
operandi also described the men from the newly opened branch of the Inagawa-kai in Roppongi as well as a local branch of the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, which also held periodic dinner parties at Nicola’s.

All of them were tanned, from periodic visits to Hawaii, and remarkably healthy looking. It was quite a change from the days of pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked, noisy goons dressed in loud checked jackets and baggy pink pants with wads of 10,000-yen notes protruding from their shirt pockets. If the model had once been Marlon Brando in the 1955 movie
Guys and Dolls
, it was now more like Michael Douglas in
Wall Street
. There was even a marked absence of clipped pinkies, because a missing fingertip, it was now widely recognized, adversely affected one’s golf swing. To avoid the slice – in both instances – therefore, everyone was on his best behavior.

One high-ranking captain named Tani could have passed for a Harvard graduate. He was fluent in French, English and Chinese. He was an expert calligrapher who ink-brushed his own name cards (which carried the title of ‘corporate vice president’) and was as knowledgeable about classical music as he was about rock and roll – his favorites being Claude Debussy and Mick Jagger.

A tall, well-groomed man in his early forties, his hobbies included astronomy (a large telescope stood on the balcony of his $20,000-a-month red-brick Roppongi apartment) and collecting cars (a Karman Ghia, a Benz and a black stretch Cadillac were among his possessions). His specialty, the
sokaiya
business of corporate extortion, was seeking out companies that were breaking the law – either by evading taxes, excessively padding expense accounts, or making illegal stock transactions and under-the-table donations to politicians – and then shaking them down. He would trade his silence for large blocks of shares, which he would later sell. To this end, he assiduously studied commercial law and subscribed to all the major dailies and economic journals (which offered quite a contrast to the yakuza of old, whose reading
material had usually consisted of comic books and the horse racing news). He hired himself out to the corporations he had just extorted – as an ‘honorary board member’ – and advised them how to protect themselves from future extortion by other yakuza like himself. The longer he stayed, of course, the more evidence he collected of his new partners’ misdeeds that could be used for further extortion purposes.

‘It’s the nature of human beings to be corrupt,’ he told Nick, explaining his philosophy of life. ‘If the companies didn’t have anything to hide, people like me wouldn’t be in business. The special weakness of the Japanese businessman is that he will do anything to help the company, even if it means breaking the law and risking going to prison. They do it out of loyalty. Or out of fear of being shunted aside. That’s a weakness you can take advantage of. The American businessman breaks the law to line his own pockets and is thus harder to catch. That’s a fundamental difference.’

Another rising star was a man named Tomonao Miyashiro of the Kobayashi wing of the Sumiyoshi-kai. He was a slender, intense, articulate young man who had an MBA from a state college in California (along with an arrest record there that included charges of conspiracy, extortion, and assault with a deadly weapon – pleaded down to misdemeanors in exchange for Miyashiro’s departure from America’s shores). He had started Japan’s first skateboard company before moving on to bigger things. His title was technically
hishokan
, or ‘secretary’, to Kusuo Kobayashi, titular boss of the 300-member Kobayashi faction, but he wielded considerable influence, and some even viewed him as the de facto leader of the gang.

Miyashiro eschewed the practice of wearing tattoos, as well as finger shortening, and preached the need for modern-day yakuza to keep up with new developments in the world by reading the papers and watching CNN. He even appeared in numerous media interviews, including the US TV programs
Moneyline
and
60
Minutes
, where he was seen sporting a Mephistophelian goatee, expensive gold jewelry and suits out of
GQ
. He boasted of his friendships with Hollywood figures like Diana Ross and Frank Sinatra.

Miyashiro’s boss, the man whose underlings had once tried, years ago, to shake down Nicola’s restaurant and had fought the Tosei-kai in hand-to-hand combat for control of Roppongi, had gone on to bigger things. In his sixties, wearing three-piece suits and designer sunglasses on a string, Kobayashi was a prime candidate for nationwide leadership of the massive 8,000-member Sumiyoshi crime syndicate and was nurturing ties to the highest levels of government. One of Yoshio Kodama’s ex-disciples, Kobayashi had helped elect Yasuhiro Nakasone prime minister in 1982 by throwing the support of a several-thousand-member rightist organization he controlled behind the LDP politician. (A 1985 police investigation uncovered over 100 instances of extortion by the Roppongi office of the Kobayashi-kai alone.)

To Nick, the New Wave yakuza that appeared before him was all a bit perplexing.

‘What the hell is the point of being a yakuza’, he asked one well-tailored mobster, ‘if you act like everyone else? You guys use electronic calculators instead of swords. You talk about derivatives. Your name cards say corporate vice president instead of captain or elder brother. You’re trying too hard to be respectable.’

The mobster gave Nick a strange look and said, ‘What about you?’

Then he asked for the wine list.

The old breed of mobster, slowly dying out, still existed in the form of an aging Sumiyoshi underboss who ran an office a few doors from Roppongi Nicola’s. He was none other than Katsushi Murata, better known as the man who killed Rikidozan.

Murata had served seven years inside the high grim walls of Fuchu Correctional Facility for his infamous act, and in between
return visits, made possible by other convictions for gambling and arms possession, he had risen high in the ranks of the Sumiyoshi. By the mid-1980s, at age fifty, he had ascended to the post of director in the Kobayashi gang and been awarded his own personal
kumi
, or sub-gang, of fifteen men – an honor not lightly bestowed and one which meant that Murata now had men providing him with a share of their earnings as
jonokin
, or tribute.

Murata, a familiar sight in his frizzy punch perm, was one of the most highly regarded yakuza in the city. There had been numerous media accounts of his exploits, especially the encounter with Rikidozan and its aftermath. After leaving the New Latin Quarter that blood-spilled evening, Murata had gone with his boss, Kusuo Kobayashi, and three other gang members to Riki Apartments in Akasaka – to apologize and negotiate some sort of monetary settlement, as was often the case in such instances, before turning himself into the police. Ordered by Kobayashi to wait in the downstairs parking lot and avoid violence at all costs while the matter was being discussed in Rikidozan’s penthouse apartment, Murata found himself confronted by an angry band of Tosei-kai soldiers loyal to the famous wrestler and, rather than disobey his boss’s order, he stoically allowed himself to be slashed several times in the face and chest with a butcher knife. It was only when his companions were attacked that Murata finally swung into action – making a foot-long gash in the abdomen of one opponent with the weapon he had used only hours earlier in the Latin Quarter men’s room – before police arrived to impose order.

Murata was a gangster with an old-fashioned sense of honor in more ways than one. Whenever the anniversary of Rikidozan’s death came around, he never failed to pay his respects. On those occasions when he was incarcerated, he had the prison Buddhist priest come to his cell to light an offering of incense and say a prayer for the repose of Riki’s soul. When he was out among the general populace, Murata would visit Riki’s grave in the Ikegami Honmonji Cemetery in Eastern Tokyo, to bow and pray before the
life-size bronze bust of the wrestler. He would always go on the day before the anniversary or the day after, so as to avoid meeting Riki’s family members.

But Murata was suffering from the old gangster disease of diabetes, for which he had to inject himself with insulin every day. Worn and flabby, he was sliding into the sedentary life of a middle-aged man. He lived comfortably in a tenth-floor 400,000-yen-a-month luxury apartment in the upscale residential area of Minami-Azabu with his young wife – the attractive twenty-seven-year-old madam of a high-class Roppongi hostess club – and a menagerie of pets, which included four Siamese cats, two mynah birds, four monkeys, four dogs, a parrot, a raccoon and a tank of tropical fish. Neighbors would see him taking afternoon strolls in a nearby park, occasionally with a monkey perched on his shoulder. To casual observers, he looked more like a retired salaryman than one of the city’s most feared gangsters, and he remained distinctly out of place among the new
keizai yakuza
.

The question of traditional values aside, the fact remained that the yakuza never had it so good as during that era, when the United States of America became a new money-laundering and investment haven for them. Zappetti flew back and forth between Tokyo and Hawaii all the time; he spent most of each winter at his house on Oahu with his wife, and the number of yakuza flying with him had increased dramatically during the eighties. It seemed that half the seats in the first-class section of the Japan Air Lines Friday evening flight from Narita to Honolulu were occupied by mob bosses and underbosses. In fact, there were so many gangsters on the flight that some people had taken to calling it the ‘Yakuza Express’. The price of real estate consequently soared in Hawaii and on the West Coast as gangster types bought up US property, and there was so much mob money being laundered in the United States each year via land deals and dummy corporations that by the end of the decade the total annual revenue involved exceeded that of all organized drug trafficking in America. In response, the FBI
started conducting investigations into yakuza cash laundering in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Las Vegas. The yakuza had certainly come a long, long way from the days of peddling money orders on the Ginza black market.

A common method of money washing was one in which funds were lent to an ‘investment company’, which used the cash to buy a golf club or a resort in the United States. The club or resort collected fees from new members, and the ‘clean money’ was funneled back to the original investors. Eventually, the investment company sold the property – sometimes at a loss. An informant with ties to the yakuza told a Senate subcommittee in August 1992 that the Japanese firm which had bought (and since sold) the famed Pebble Beach Golf Course in California had borrowed funds from a bank with links to the yakuza, and noted several other properties in Hawaii bought with money generated illegally by the
doryokudan
.

One of the more closely watched players in this high-stakes game was a character named Ken Mizuno, who owned a golf club, a real estate company, a Las Vegas restaurant and a posh Indian Wells resort. Mizuno became something of a legend at the Las Vegas Mirage Hilton for his outlandishly lavish spending. He would regularly charter a DC-9 to fly in with a group of guests on gambling tours. Over a two-year span in the late eighties, he dropped $66 million at the gaming tables.

US and Japanese law enforcement officials, it was reported, were convinced the cash was not his to spend and that Mizuno was a yakuza front man, or a ‘
paipu
’ (pipe) in the parlance, who was losing intentionally at Vegas casinos with Japanese mob connections in order to wash illicitly obtained funds. In fact, in a report issued in 1992 by a US Senate subcommittee probing Asian crime, Mizuno would be identified as an ‘associate’ of the Yakuza. West Coast investigators said he was of Korean ancestry and had special links to the
Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai
(East Asia Friendship Enterprises Association), a yakuza gang of ethnic Koreans active in Southern California that was a branch of the Tosei-kai (also operating under
the name
Toa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai
, and active in Shinjuku, Seoul, and Honolulu). Japanese journalists and authorities, on the other hand, saw greater significance in his relationship with Kusuo Kobayashi, the Sumiyoshi strongman – Mizuno being a noted guest at the huge wedding of Kobayashi’s son in 1988.