Authors: Robert Whiting
‘Well, if you gotta have a gun,’ Zappetti finally said, ‘then I gotta get out. That’s just asking for trouble.’
MacFarland professed displeasure at this defection but relented on condition that Zappetti get him the firearm. So Zappetti contacted an Army friend, who came up with a .38 caliber revolver, a holster and several bullets. He threw away the bullets as a precautionary measure and delivered the gun and holster, as requested, to one of MacFarland’s young paramours, an eighteen-year-old
Korean high-school dropout named ‘M’ who was given to wearing black rhinestone-studded Latin clothes and big pompadours – fashion inspired by a mambo craze that had swept Japan. ‘M’ had been brought into the caper after Zappetti’s withdrawal along with two more accomplices from Tokyo’s foreign underworld, one of them a friend of the son of the vice manager of the Imperial, who would provide MacFarland with a personal introduction to the diamond concessionaire.
On D-Day, January 15, 1956, at 10.20 a.m., Imperial Hotel arcade jeweler Shichiro Masubuchi carried a briefcase filled with a number of expensive diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies to MacFarland’s room. Within a half-hour, bruised and bloody, he found himself bound and dumped into the hotel bathtub, the gems on the way out the door and in the possession of the robbers.
A rational criminal would have probably taken the back way out, especially if he was 6′4″ tall with a red duckbill haircut, in a land of small people who all had black hair, and more especially if it was a face that was recognizable to millions of Japanese television watchers.
But MacFarland had his own demented modus operandi. After leaving the hotel room with ‘M’ he took the elevator to the main lobby, where he agreeably stopped to sign autographs. Then he stood in line for a taxi in front of the hotel and met his cohorts at a Ginza coffee shop, where he handed over the gun and twelve of the sixteen diamonds in his possession to another accomplice with orders to hide them. Keeping the remaining four, he headed for the Latin Quarter, the deluxe nightclub in Akasaka in Southwest Tokyo co-owned by Lewin, where, he later testified, he sold them to the club’s manager, the ex-CIA operative Shattuck, who then left for Manila.
By this time, an Imperial Hotel maid had discovered the jeweler where he had been jettisoned in the bathtub and the police had launched a citywide manhunt for the perpetrators. At 6.30 that evening, a detachment of plainclothesmen had arrived at the Latin
Quarter, its chief detective holding an evening newspaper just off the presses with a photograph of MacFarland on its front page.
Because of the huge size difference between MacFarland and the detectives, none of whom stood over 5′5″ or weighed more than 130 pounds, a plan of attack had been devised at police headquarters. It called for a team of seven plainclothesmen to bring him in using physical force if necessary. Each officer had been assigned to grab a body part – one for each leg, one for each arm, one man to grab the torso, another for the neck, and a detective to snap the handcuffs on.
To everyone’s amazement, however, when the police approached, MacFarland meekly extended his hands and let himself be cuffed without protest.
A quick search revealed there were no diamonds on his person.
The story of MacFarland’s arrest was headline news in all the Japanese dailies the following morning; featured prominently was a photo of the stern-faced chief detective, leading his man, handcuffed hands covered by a raincoat, up the steps of the MPD.
It didn’t take long for the demented truth to dribble out once Masubuchi had fingered young ‘M’, who was arrested in short order along with the others and Zappetti, who, according to ‘The Mambo Kid’, as the press had nicknamed ‘M’ for his Latinesque style of dress, had supplied the gun and planned the whole thing. Police could not remember such an odd assortment of foreigners, or so many, for that matter, in a Tokyo jail at one time.
Tokyo was transfixed by the bizarre melodrama, and by week’s end the odious influence of aliens in the Japanese midst was
the
major theme in the media. Featured prominently in the same week were accounts of two taxicab robberies committed by Americans and the story of three US airmen who had gone ‘duck hunting’ at a sacred swan preserve north of Tokyo, shooting rifles from a helicopter hovering overhead. However, what happened next was more memorable and not just for the theater it provided but for the peculiar lessons it offered about the Japanese criminal justice system and the Americans caught in it.
It was not often that Westerners saw the inside of a Japanese jail, and those who did were not anxious to return. Although the basic premise of criminal law under the new postwar constitution of Japan was the same as in US constitutional law, that a man was innocent until he was proven guilty, the reality was different. As Raymond Bushell, the American lawyer who defended MacFarland, put it, ‘We mean it and they don’t. They still have their old prewar thinking that if the police arrest you, then you are guilty until proven innocent. Otherwise why would they arrest you in the first place?’
Whereas in the United States prosecutors had to file formal charges immediately on an arrested suspect, the police in Japan were allowed to hold a man for up to twenty-three days before a formal indictment had to be issued. Moreover, whereas prisoners in America were allowed twenty-four-hour access to their lawyers, jailhouse guests in Japan were limited to a maximum of no more than one hour per day. Japanese law enforcement authorities believed that if they pushed hard enough during interrogation in the time allotted, the prisoner was bound to crack and admit his guilt. They reasoned from this fundamental truth that exercising a little unfriendly persuasion in the pursuit of justice was permissible. And if certain methods they were forced to employ to accomplish this were technically illegal, well, then, so be it. Thus were prisoners kept in bare, isolated concrete cells and forced to sit cross-legged on the floor in silence all their waking hours. And thus did they often return from the interrogation room bruised and bleeding. It was one big reason why the Japanese criminal justice system boasted a 99 percent conviction rate and would continue to do so for the rest of the century – much to the dismay of Amnesty International.
It didn’t take long for MacFarland to crack. He was taken to Kosuge Detention Center, a musty gray structure in northeastern Tokyo, where he was strip-searched and thrown into a tiny
windowless cell (about six by nine feet), empty except for a rotting futon, a rusted sink, a foul-smelling Western-style toilet and a bare sixty-watt bulb that remained on twenty-four hours a day. He was forbidden to lie down (or even stand up) except between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m..
During his first two weeks in incarceration, during which he was interrogated intensively, MacFarland attempted suicide three times. The first attempt took place in his detention center cell when he smashed his jailhouse rice bowl and used the shards to slash his wrists. Upon being treated at the prison infirmary, he ripped a cleaning bucket apart, barehanded, and, with a jagged edge of metal, cut his wrists again, also carving a long angry gash on his face from his temple to his chin in the process. Then, surviving that attempt, but now flat on his back in his cell and securely handcuffed, he began a fast to the death. Soon, he was being fed intravenously.
Finally, MacFarland confessed. His confession, however, was quickly followed by the announcement that he was paralyzed from the waist down and needed medical and psychiatric treatment, which he said he was not getting in jail. This may or may not have been an attempt to use Article 39 of the Criminal Code, which stipulated that penalties ‘may be reduced for an act done by a weak-minded person’.
‘I’m going crazy,’ he told International News Service correspondent Leonard Saffir from a room at the International Catholic Hospital, where he had been moved under police guard. ‘I’m going bats. I can put a burning cigarette on my leg and not feel it. But nobody knows what’s wrong.’
For his first court appearance, he was carried before the judge on a stretcher by eight policemen and two prison attendants. Covered by a sheet, his left wrist bound with a bandage and another bandage covering the long scar running from his temple to his chin, he looked, to Japanese reporters covering the case, ‘just like an Egyptian mummy’.
The judge, unmoved, sentenced him to eight years. Shortly thereafter his paralysis would disappear.
Zappetti proved a harder case to crack. Arrested in his office at the Hotel New York on a Friday afternoon, he was hauled off to the Marunouchi jail in the city center without even being allowed to put on his coat. So he huddled in his cell, over that weekend, awaiting interrogation, in sweater and slacks, minus his belt to preclude any MacFarland-like suicide attempts, under a moth-bitten blanket, turning blue from the cold.
On the following Monday his interrogation began. Every morning at precisely 9.00, he was taken to a drab, gray room with high windows, a table and two chairs, to begin eight hours of intensive questioning and pressure to confess.
Through it all, Zappetti steadfastly denied all the charges. The police sergeant conducting Zappetti’s interrogation, a man named Nagata, who was thin to the point of malnourishment, stopped short of striking his foreign captive, but throughout the course of the day he repeatedly slammed the table, yelled at the top of his voice, and blew cigarette smoke in his prisoner’s face. Zappetti, who did not smoke, would sit there insouciantly, inhaling the blue haze, as if he enjoyed it, repeating an insult in Japanese that a gangster in the adjoining cell had taught him during a furtive late-night conversation.
Zappetti was playing for time. If the prosecutor’s office could not come up with formal indictments within the allotted twenty-three days, they had to release him. And, as it turned out, it was his word against that of the ‘Mambo Kid’ because MacFarland, who willingly fingered everyone else, had, for some reason, refused to implicate him.
Finally one day Nagata tried another ploy. If Zappetti could demonstrate that he had money, the sergeant said, the police might be inclined to believe his claims of innocence. If he didn’t need any funds, Nagata reasoned, there would be no point in his being involved in a robbery in the first place, now would there?
When Zappetti was arrested he had but 100 yen in his pocket and no bank account – only a shoebox full of illegal military scrip and Japanese yen squirreled away. There was no possibility of getting any help from his wife, who wanted nothing more to do with him. But there were his parents, to whom Zappetti had been sending money regularly since his military days.
‘I got plenty of money in America,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to steal. When I need money I get it from there. There’s no problem.’
‘Prove it,’ said his interlocutor.
He had the police send a telegram to his father in New York. ‘Wire $500,’ it read simply. ‘I’ve been arrested.’
The $500, which was more than a police sergeant’s annual salary, reached American Express in downtown Tokyo in two days and his captors took him there to pick it up. They handcuffed him and chained his legs and then, pulling him by a rope tied around his waist, paraded him down the street, along the Imperial Palace moat, to the American Express office, amid the midday traffic of Army jeeps and ramshackle taxis belching noxious fumes. His mobility was further hampered by the fact he had lost some thirty pounds from his jail diet and his beltless slacks were so big on him he had to hold them up by hand. The police could have driven him to the Amex office in a van, which they normally did when transporting prisoners, and they could have also gotten him some fresh clothes, especially since his sweater was sporting several new holes. But the police were purposely trying to shame him in front of the midday crowd of pedestrians, who had doubtless never seen an American in shackles and chains before, not to mention one who looked like a street bum and couldn’t keep his pants up. Japan was a country that put a premium on face, and public humiliation was regarded as a particularly effective method of making a suspect admit to guilt.
At American Express, the police refused to remove the handcuffs. Zappetti had to raise both of his manacled hands to collect his $500 and sign the receipt, while somehow keeping his
pants from falling down. He was then paraded back to jail the same way he had come and the money taken from him for safekeeping.
Sergeant Nagata stared hard at him in the interrogation room and said, ‘All right. So you got $500. But can you do it again?’
So Zappetti sent another telegram. And they all went through the same routine once more. When the money arrived, he was shackled and roped and again marched through the midday downtown crowds in his rotting, foul-smelling clothes. It was only after he had received a third cash wire, accumulating a total of $1500, that Nagata conceded enough was enough and that maybe they were not going to get anywhere by going down that road. That was good because the clerk at the Amex counter had told the American prisoner on his last visit that he would have to take his business elsewhere; he was embarrassing everyone with his distasteful presence.
On the twenty-third day of his imprisonment a deal was offered by the prosecutor. If Zappetti would admit to procuring the gun, the robbery charges would be dropped. He would be released on bail, he would be fined $800 and sentenced to eight months in prison, which would be suspended for three years. And he would not be deported, which was a major, major concession on their part. But he
had
to admit to something, he was told by his Japanese lawyer. It was a matter of face because they had already arrested him.
Thus did Zappetti agree and secure his release.
MacFarland’s young accomplices received suspended sentences, but the Latin Quarter manager Shattuck was brought back from Manila to stand trial. He also refused to confess, adamantly denying he had ever taken the missing diamonds, but was tried and convicted purely on MacFarland’s say-so. Shattuck claimed that MacFarland had framed him, that MacFarland had hidden the jewels somewhere but had implicated Shattuck because of a personal dispute the two had had over an unpaid debt. However, the judge chose to believe MacFarland.