Tokyo Underworld (31 page)

It was truly amazing to contemplate. The brother of the chief executive of the United States had effectively handed over stock and real estate to a company with ties to Japanese organized crime, thereby helping it expand its web of influence, and had accepted a large payment for his efforts. The Japanese mob, whose forces had once been marshaled to protect the US president, had now very nearly made it to the doorstep of the White House.

It was not unrealistic to suspect that Nick Zappetti, given who he was, would get caught up in the web of deception that characterized the era of the
keizai yakuza
. What was unexpected was the way it all happened.

It all started one evening in 1989 when Franco and Roberto, from Rome, walked into his restaurant, completely out of the blue. They were short, stocky men in their forties wearing expensive leather jackets, fashionable three-day beards, and strong-smelling cologne. They introduced themselves and said they had a proposal.

‘We hear you’re the man to talk to around here,’ Franco had
said in heavily accented English. ‘We got some biscuits we want to unload,
paisan
.’

Franco produced a gold piece that weighed about 50 grams and handed it to Nick. They had a whole shipment of them, he said, which they would be willing to sell below the going market price of $12.95 a gram – $11 perhaps. Maybe $10. Or best offer. Since Nicola was a
big man
around town, said Franco, perhaps he could arrange for a suitable buyer.

Nick knew that at the prices they were talking about, the gold was obviously stolen, but his curiosity had also been aroused and he arranged for another meeting at his restaurant early the next morning before opening hours.

Franco and Roberto showed up at the appointed time carrying a large Boston bag and Nick ushered them into his tiny office. Franco unzipped the bag to reveal a small safe filled with gold coins, each encased in transparent plastic wrapping. Franco pulled out a fistful and handed them to Nick.

‘Check ’em out,’ he said.

Nick pulled the plastic off of one of the coins and ran a thumbnail across it to satisfy himself that it was genuine.

Then, in a demonstration of God knows what, Franco and Roberto counted out all the coins for him.

‘It should have tipped me off,’ Nick was to lament later.

Tokyo, with all its wealth, certainly attracted its share of foreign con artists. In his time, Nicola had played host to many of them: a fake French socialite trading on nonexistent connections with European royalty who bilked the Hotel Okura out of 10 million yen, which she claimed had been stolen from the room where she had been staying for two months, without paying her bill. A retired Air Force captain who opened the ‘How to Diet and Quit Smoking Clinic’ in Roppongi, appearing in TV ads in a white suit and smock warning of the dangers of tobacco, while chainsmoking up a blue storm in a back room office, behind locked doors. A civilian butcher at Grant Heights military housing
complex who was selling meat on the side on the black market and making up phony ID cards. The American English school principal whose school was a front for recruiting illegal labor from Southeast Asia. The bogus CIA agent compiling reports for a Japanese government intelligence agency. An executive of a fictitious Hollywood entertainment firm bilking starry-eyed investors out of their money. A Nigerian posing as an American jazz musician living off wealthy female Japanese music buffs. A Texan selling counterfeit
Japanese
government bonds. All of them had wandered through Nicola’s at one time or another.

Nick was fully aware of the risks in dealing with strangers – especially those who appeared suddenly to propose what amounted to a criminal transaction – but he rationalized his way around it. Franco and Roberto were fellow paisans. They were from the old country, and unless he misread his guess, they were also Mafiosi. If he could not trust them, then who could he trust? Besides, hadn’t they said that
he
was the man to talk to in Tokyo? Hadn’t they referred to him as a ‘big man’? He hadn’t heard that in a while. And it felt good. Also, he was just recovering from a heart attack, which had laid him up for several weeks. He needed to get back in the swing of things.

Thus it was that Nick took five random samples of the gold and grabbed a cab for Okachimachi to look up an old gem dealer he knew. Okachimachi was a teeming commercial area of narrow streets and tiny shops situated in Eastern Tokyo beneath the elevated rails of the Yamanote Line, which passed through the area. It was the city’s diamond center and the heart of Tokyo’s underground jewel business.

There one could buy just about any kind of precious gem – diamond necklaces, emerald pendants, jade brooches – and all at handsome discounts, thanks to their illegal origins. A diamond-encrusted wristwatch normally priced at $2 million in a luxury Ginza department store, for example, could be had in Okachimachi for as little as $200,000 – if it had been stolen.

Nick’s acquaintance was an aging Taiwanese nicknamed ‘Crazy Wong’, who ran a jewelry store not much bigger than a large closet, a few meters from Okachimachi Station, but one whose window display alone could ransom the Queen Mary. Wong was well known throughout the Tokyo underworld as the man to talk to if you had quality merchandise to sell. Nick had had a passing acquaintanceship with him for thirty years. Wong had even bowled on a team Nicola’s had sponsored in the Tokyo Bowling League during a brief boom that sport enjoyed back in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Japan. In fact, it was Nick who had dubbed him ‘Crazy’ because of all the bizarre things Wong did: he bowled sidearm, he chased his beer with whiskey, and he carried around a briefcase that was always filled with expensive gems – which, in Nick’s opinion, was Wong’s craziest habit of all. Wong was only 5′2″ and lucky if he weighed 100 pounds soaking wet. He never carried a weapon, didn’t know karate, and to Nick’s mind was just begging to be robbed. In the States, they’d have cut off his arm to get the bag. Yet, in Japan, in all those years, he had never had anything stolen. Nick could only chalk it up to cultural differences or dumb luck. Or perhaps having the right kind of friends.

Wong inspected the gold coin samples Nick presented and verified them as legitimate. He offered to buy all the merchandise the Italians had, which amounted to twenty kilos (forty-four pounds) of gold coins at $9.00 a gram and pay Nick a commission of $2.00 per coin for brokering the deal.

With the price agreed to by Franco and Roberto, Nick engaged the services of a young down-on-his-luck American named Zack, who frequented his restaurant and who, for a spell, served as a late-night manager-cum-watchman. Zack arranged for everyone to meet and conclude the transaction at his tiny apartment in residential Azabu.

When the brothers arrived at the appointed midday hour carrying their Boston bag, they subjected everyone to a rude body search for hidden weapons. ‘I not thief,’ Wong had cried
indignantly. ‘I businessman. I gentleman.’ Then they opened their portable safe and deposited five bags of gold coins, each weighing four kilos, on the living room floor. Crazy Wong produced the $200,000 he had procured and started to undo the wrappings to inspect the rest of the gold, but the brother immediately stopped him.

‘No touch,’ said Franco, wagging a finger angrily. ‘You don’t do that.’

Wong protested, naturally, and Zappetti stepped in to mediate.

‘It’s okay,’ he said to the jeweler, flashing a reassuring, knowing wink. ‘They’re
paisan
.’

Wong calmed down, but then Franco called a sudden halt to the proceedings.

‘I can’t give you the key to the safe here,’ he said. ‘How do I know somebody’s not waiting outside to split my head open once I take the money?’

This called for more discussion and, finally, a new, somewhat more elaborate course of action was concocted in which Crazy Wong, Zack and Franco would stay in Zack’s apartment and jointly guard the safe while Nick and Roberto would go to the Royal Park Hotel, on the other side of the city, where the brothers were staying. There, in the hotel coffee shop, a public and therefore secure location, Nick would hand over the cash to Roberto, who would then telephone Franco and signal the okay to come down and give Nick the key to the safe. When Nick had possession of said key, Nick would call and inform Crazy Wong and Zack, who would proceed to carry the safe to Wong’s Okachimachi office. Nick would then taxi over to unlock it.

It took several hours to carry out this complicated plan of action, and by the time Nick’s taxi had finally made its way through the rush hour traffic to Wong’s jewelry shop it had grown dark and Wong was waiting impatiently – alone.

Producing the final link in the labyrinthine scheme, Nick was given his broker’s commission of $40,000 and unceremoniously
shown the door. Zack had already signed a receipt for the commission on their behalf before leaving, said Wong, so the deal was concluded and now he would like to open his safe in private, if that wasn’t too much to ask. Nick said no, it wasn’t, and returned to his restaurant, where he ensconced himself at a back table and treated himself to a cold self-congratulatory draft beer, in defiance of doctor’s orders. Only briefly did he wonder what had possessed Zack to sign for the money before Nick had even received it.

Then, the next morning, came the angry phone call.

The key did not fit, Crazy Wong yelled into the phone. He had had to call a locksmith to pry the door of the safe open. Inside, he had said, were five real pieces of gold and 395 counterfeit ones. He had called the brothers at the Royal Park, but they had already checked out. It appeared, Wong said, that he had just been cheated out of $200,000 and he wanted to know what Nick was going to do about it.

Nick could not have been more embarrassed. He, the King of Roppongi, and one of the city’s great bullshit artists, had been duped. And for the life of him, he could not figure out how it had happened. Nick immediately offered to return the commission, but Crazy Wong was by no means satisfied. He demanded Nick also take responsibility for the $160,000 he had lost. When Nick refused, Crazy Wong announced he was going to sue Nick for
selling counterfeit merchandise
.

Jesus Christ, Nick wondered. How in the hell could Wong sue him over counterfeit merchandise when the goods involved had been smuggled into the country in the first place? Then he made an interesting discovery. On the receipt Wong had in his possession – the receipt for Nick’s broker’s fee which Zack had signed on Nick’s behalf – was a handwritten notation in Chinese ideographs that the amount received, the $40,000, was
not
a commission but a
down payment
for ‘twenty kilos of gold worth $200,000’.

That was how in the hell Crazy Wong could sue.

Nick contacted Zack, who insisted that the only writing on the
receipt when he signed it at Crazy Wong’s request had been the word ‘Receipt’, the date and the broker’s fee figure of $40,000. That business about down payment must have been added later, he said, but unfortunately he had neglected to get a copy of the original. Then Zack abruptly left the country, leaving Nick to face the litigatory wrath of Wong all by himself, who was now calling Nick’s employees at their homes in an effort to find out about Nick’s worth.

To get out of his jam with Crazy Wong, Nick decided to approach someone from one of the gangs that now frequented his restaurant. He felt he had a right, at least, to ask for a favor because, for one thing, they were constantly borrowing his in-house cellular phone, calling all over Japan, discussing their business deals. As a result, he had an enormous monthly phone bill, which he diplomatically paid without comment.

The prime candidate for the favor Nick wanted to request was a man who introduced himself as the new boss of Akasaka. A robust-looking man in his forties – about 5′9″, 190 pounds – who abstained from alcohol because of chronic diabetes and who could be seen jogging around the streets of Roppongi in a training suit buying his daily copy of the
Asian Wall Street Journal
at the Crossing bookstore, he was always very cordial. More than once he had told Nick, ‘If you have any problems, let us know.’

Well, now Nick had a problem and he decided to let the guy know. The next time the boss came in, Nick sat down at his table, presented him with a drink on the house, and popped the question.

‘Can you do something for me?’ he said. ‘I need a “hammer”, if you know what I mean.’

‘A hammer?’ the man asked looking up from the pizza menu.

‘Yeah. A guy’s beating me out of some money and I would like him to meet with some personal misfortune. You know, maybe he could have an accident. Somebody could ransack his office. Maybe
he could be mugged on the way home. It doesn’t matter as long as he gets the message to stop fucking with me.’

‘Who’s the guy?’ he man asked.

Nick told him and the man replied that he would do some checking and get back to him.

Several days later he reappeared with an answer that left Nick slackjawed.

‘Sorry,’ the boss said, ‘but, we can’t help you. Your guy is under our protection. There’s nothing we can do.’

Then he sat down to order his dinner.

Nick already knew he’d been set up. Now he’d begun to wonder how far the sting extended.

In Japan, it was just one layer over another.

Nicola Koizumi entered the last decade of the twentieth century – and the final years of his life – a sick and embittered old man. He had been hit with a sudden succession of debilitating ailments – heart trouble, diabetes and failing vision among them – which, Japanese doctors liked to remind him, were a natural outcome of the debauched existence he had led for so long.

Worse yet, at an age when most of his contemporaries were relaxing and enjoying the fruits of their lifelong labors, he remained enmeshed in endless litigation. His lengthy appellate court battle with Nihon Kotsu, which had been interrupted by a heart attack that nearly killed him, had become so complicated that his own lawyers had filed lawsuits against him. His Hokkaido land case, which had gone against him after eight tortuous years of legal wrangling, was bogged down in appeals, along with the
taishokukin
case, and Crazy Wong was starting up the court machinery for his own attack on Zappetti’s dwindled fortune. It all left him brimming with hatred for the Japanese and their system of justice.