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Takeshi Ebisawa of Japan, Leader Within the Yakuza Transnational Organized Crime Syndicate, Allegedly Trafficked Nuclear Materials, Including Uranium and Weapons-Grade PlutoniumDamian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; Matthew G. Olsen, the Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s National Security Division; and Anne Milgram, the Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”), announced the issuance today of a Superseding Indictment charging TAKESHI EBISAWA with conspiring with a network of associates to traffic nuclear materials from Burma to other countries. In the course of this conspiracy, EBISAWA and his confederates showed samples of nuclear...

The Yamaguchi-gumi is one of the most feared crime syndicates in Japan and yet its name may become a relic of the past in 2020 if recent reports are to be believed. In terms of size, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi is already on the wane. The syndicate boasted nearly 40,000 members at its peak, but membership has steadily declined over the years. As the group was celebrating its centennial in August 2015, a faction named the Yamaken-gumi broke away from the syndicate, taking thousands of members with them to form the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi claimed they were leaving the...

Godfather and grandfather--the dwindling, graying yakuza THE ASAHI SHIMBUN April 5, 2017 at 17:15 JST Yakuza members are fast becoming a fellowship of grandads with about 40 percent of the approximately 20,100 registered on the wrong side of 50, according to police statistics. "I have a chronic illness and my true feeling is wanting to retire and take it easy if there was someone I could pass (the gang) down to," grumbled a 70-year-old leader of a gang affiliated with the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest yakuza organization. This particular old-timer has found himself unable to quit gang life because he was...

Around the start of this year, the weekly magazines — Shukan Taishu, Asahi Geino and Shukan Jitsuwa in particular — were brimming with articles feting the centennial anniversary of the Yamaguchi-gumi, which had gone from being a small group of tough guys on the Kobe waterfront in 1915 to Japan’s largest designated criminal syndicate, with an estimated 23,000 members. Nine months later, the gang is back in the news, this time with stories about its big breakup. On Aug. 27, a total of 13 gang affiliates, based in Kobe, Awaji Island and other cities in Hyogo Prefecture, as well as...

The exploits of the blind swordsman Ichi, the wandering "masseuse" and former Yakuza in a quest for redemption. Haunted by his pasted...hunted in the present....hesitant of his future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1HgAuU1TZs

Japan’s biggest yakuza organised crime group has published a magazine for its members that includes a poetry page and senior gangsters’ fishing diaries, reports said Wednesday. The eight-page publication has been distributed among the Yamaguchi-gumi, a sprawling syndicate believed to have about 27,700 members, in a bid to strengthen unity in the group, the daily Sankei Shimbun reported.

TOKYO, A Tokyo prosthetics maker said about 5 percent of his business comes from former members of yakuza -- the Japanese mafia -- seeking artificial pinkies. Shintaro Hayashi, who runs the Aiwa Gishi prosthetics company, said he started to see a spike in the demand for prosthetic pinkies about a decade ago and he discovered it was a result of the yakuza requiring members to sever portions of their fingers to atone for serious offenses against the organization, ABC News reported Friday. The finger-chopping ritual is known as "yubitsume." Hayashi said former members of the yakuza come to him for...

Federal authorities Thursday designated the notorious Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 as a “transnational criminal organization,” giving federal authorities more tools to fight the street gang that has its roots in Los Angeles. Under the designation, federal officials said they can now seize assets of gang members found within the United States jurisdiction. The designation is the first for a U.S. street gang. Among the organizations similarly designated are Japan’s Yakuza and Mexico’s Zetas, whose leader, Heriberto Lazcano, was killed by Mexican Marines on Sunday. An armed gang later stole his body from a funeral parlor. ... MS-13 began among El Salvadoran...

Kiyoshi Takayama, considered to be the second most important man in the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza group, was awarded a Y1.5 billion ($19 million) bail and could be freed ahead of his trial. Takayama, 64, is charged with extortion, being accused of taking some Y40 million from a construction company in 2005 and 2006. Currently he is in the hospital due to poor health according to press reports. The Yamaguchi-gumi is Japan’s biggest yakuza group. The yakuza engages in activities like gambling, prostitution and drugs, while conducting business through front companies. The yakuza gangs have long been tolerated by the Japanese authorities,...

How the Yakuza went nuclear What really went wrong at the Fukushima plant? One undercover reporter risked his life to find out By Jake Adelstein 11:30AM GMT 21 Feb 2012 /snip Tepco has long been a scandal-ridden company, caught time and time again covering up data on safety lapses at their power plants, or doctoring film footage which showed fissures in pipes. How was the company able to get away with such long-standing behaviour? According to an explosive book recently published in Japan, they owe it to what the author, Tomohiko Suzuki, calls “Japan’s nuclear mafia… A conglomeration of corrupt...

The Yakuza and the Nuclear Mafia: Nationalization Looms for TEPCO Jake Adelstein 2,500 Views Dec 30, 2011 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources. The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the...

Yakuza involved in Fukushima clean-up: reporter Crime Dec. 16, 2011 - 10:45AM JST TOKYO — A Japanese journalist who worked at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant this summer claimed Thursday that Japan’s yakuza crime syndicates were involved in supplying clean-up crews. “Roughly 10% of plant workers there were brought in through the mediation of the yakuza,” said Tomohiko Suzuki, 45, who has written a book based on his experience at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. “The yakuza are very much involved in this industry but they are not involved as people working on site,” Suzuki told reporters. “They are in charge...

Even Japan’s infamous mafia groups are helping out with the relief efforts and showing a strain of civic duty. Jake Adelstein reports on why the police don’t want you to know about it. Plus, more coverage of Japan’s crisis.The worst of times sometimes brings out the best in people, even in Japan’s “losers” a.k.a. the Japanese mafia, the yakuza. Hours after the first shock waves hit, two of the largest crime groups went into action, opening their offices to those stranded in Tokyo, and shipping food, water, and blankets to the devastated areas in two-ton trucks and whatever vehicles they...

Mobsters in Japan hit the books to beat new laws ELIZABETH JACKSON: They're members of the biggest, meanest organised crime group in Japan. But these tattooed gangsters are being sent back to school by their godfathers. Under new laws, mob bosses can be sued for the misdeeds of their underlings. So the leaders of the feared Yamaguchi-gumi have begun testing their mobsters' knowledge of the laws.

In Japan, even mobsters bite the recession bullet AFP - Monday, April 20 TOKYO (AFP) - - They made their money with sex, drugs and gambling but then invested much of it in high finance. Now Japan's yakuza have their back to the wall as the economic crisis takes aim. Just like the legitimate businesses they have muscled into, Japan's mafia are being squeezed by the steepest economic downturn in decades, and as profits have plunged, management has been thinning out the ranks. One of the victims of the downturn is Taro Hiramatsu, a heavily tattooed retired gangster in his...

LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles hospital provided liver transplants to four Japanese gang figures, including one of Japan's most powerful gang bosses, over a period when several hundred area patients died while awaiting transplants, according to a published report. The surgeries were performed at UCLA Medical Center by world-renowned liver surgeon Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, executive chairman of UCLA's surgery department, the Los Angeles Times reported in a story posted on its Web site Thursday night. The Times cited a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The surgeries were performed between 2000 and 2004,...

Excerpt - A 60-year-old gangster was sentenced to death Monday for fatally shooting Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito during his election campaign in April last year. Tetsuya Shiroo shot Ito, 61, twice with a pistol on the evening of April 17 near the mayor's election campaign office in front of JR Nagasaki station, according to prosecutors' closing argument at the Nagasaki District Court. Ito died six and a half hours later in hospital. The crime ''was extremely outrageous and heinous,'' Presiding Judge Yoshimichi Matsuo said. ''It infringed people's right to vote and destabilized democracy from its roots.'' ~ snip ~

Yakuza arrested for murder of Nagasaki mayor said 4th term would be 'unbearable' NAGASAKI -- The yakuza under arrest for gunning down former Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito during his election campaign committed the crime to prevent the mayor from being re-elected to a fourth term, local police allege. "It'd be unbearable to see the former mayor re-elected to a fourth term," Tetsuya Shiroo, 59, was quoted as telling investigators. Shiroo harbored a grudge against Ito after the introduction of an anti-gang public works policy, and a dispute with the municipal government over a demand for compensation after a car accident...

The mayor of the Japanese city of Nagasaki was shot to death in a brazen attack Tuesday by an organized crime chief apparently enraged that the city refused to compensate him after his car was damaged at a public works construction site, news agencies reported. The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are strictly banned and only four politicians are known to have been killed since World War II. Mayor Iccho Ito, 61, was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station Tuesday evening, Nagasaki police official Rumi Tsujimoto said. One of the bullets...

There was a scare today at a U.S. military base outside Tokyo when two small explosions occurred shortly after 11 p.m. there. While no one was injured, investigators are looking at the possibility that it was an attempted terrorist attack. Intelligence reports in Japan and Pakistan suggest al Qaeda has established a small but powerful presence in Japan, which leads some wondering whether or not today's events are the first attempt at an attack by al Qaeda in Japan. Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News they have had several reports that Pakistani militant organizations working with al Qaeda had established...