Tokyo Underworld (16 page)

In the year after the underworld’s Olympic hiatus, the National Tax Office estimated that the total annual income from mob activities was more than the annual Tokyo metropolitan government budget of roughly 2 trillion yen (1.5–2 percent of the GNP) – only one-fifth of which was from legitimate enterprises. But no one was exactly sure just how much that was. ‘The tax bureau asks us to provide a figure,’ said one police representative, ‘and we do. But we’re really only guessing. The reality might be much higher.’ Indeed, some organized crime experts in Japan believed the total yakuza take to be about
seven
times higher. (For the sake of comparison, it is generally estimated that the Mafia accounts for some 2.5 percent of the US GNP.)

The final figure, whatever it was, added up to tremendous economic clout.

In this atmosphere of wealth and duplicity, the American Zappetti was right at home. By all accounts the richest foreigner in all of Tokyo, having long since supplanted Attorney Blakemore (when one included unreported income), he had opened his new restaurant in October 1964, and soon after he purchased a palatial new three-story, four-bedroom, Western-style concrete house in the same high-rent neighborhood. It came complete with sunken
fireplace, grand piano, swimming pool, maid, and butler and encompassed over 10,000 square feet, not counting the driveway, which itself could accommodate up to twenty automobiles. In a city as starved for elbow room as Tokyo, that was saying something. It took seven complete lounge sets and a small fortune in expensive paintings and art objects to furnish all the other individual rooms. In short order, he also acquired a second smaller house in Roppongi as a ‘backup’, a summer house in the historic templed suburban town of Kamakura, a seaside vacation home in nearby Zaimoku, a beachfront residence in Honolulu, a state-of-the-art yacht, and a fleet of cars that he replenished every year with the newest model Cadillac, imported at twice its Stateside list price because of import taxes and shipping charges. Not even the US ambassador lived as well as he did.

Zappetti had gained his riches, he didn’t mind boasting, through a combination of business skills and criminal cunning. An example of the latter came when officials from the Tokyo metropolitan government approached him about buying the land on which his first restaurant was situated in order to widen the street. They had offered to fully compensate him for all business losses he would suffer in the process of changing locations, so in the spirit of a born hustler, he hired nightclub hostesses from the area to come in and occupy all empty tables during the slack daytime hours to create the impression that his restaurant was always full. They sat there for several days in a row, doing their nails, waiting for the inspector from the highway commission to make his appearance. When he finally materialized, he was so impressed, he recommended a reimbursement of 97 million yen – more than twice what Zappetti had originally paid for the land and the building.

It may have been unethical and illegal, but, Zappetti argued, it was no worse than some of the other things that were going on around him – like the delegation of Tokyo snack bar operators who had come demanding he raise his prices. They complained that what Nicola’s was charging for a small pizza was about half of what
they were getting for something they called ‘pizza toast’, which consisted of a slice of bread topped with tomato and locally made processed cheese, cooked in an oven – and was hurting their business (causing ‘confusion’ was the term they had used, one that would be heard in the years to come whenever the Japanese government was asked to further open its markets). They wanted him to adopt their standard of ten times cost for something that was essentially a grilled cheese sandwich, which, of course, amounted to price fixing, collusion, and possibly attempted extortion. But he refused. He had his contacts on the military bases who provided him his supplies from North America so cheaply (if illegally) that he could afford to charge reasonable prices.

Buying on the black market was, for him, more of a necessity than a luxury because the prices of imported products on the open market were prohibitively high. A can of tomato sauce bought in Japan cost five times what it did in the United States. So did a cut of pork and a kilo of cheese. He had tried, on occasion, to import those items directly from abroad, in bulk, but there had always been some esoteric rule or law blocking him from getting the required permission. Once, for example, he had actually been told by a government official that the sauce tomatoes he wanted to import were not allowed in Japan because they had been grown in the sunshine, in violation of government regulations that permitted only hothouse tomatoes in that category of import. The economy was clearly rigged to protect those few domestic producers who had the market locked up from foreign competition that might otherwise come in and blow them away, because of the inferior quality of the homegrown product – the Japanese had only been making cheese since the nineteenth century and could not yet meet standards set by the Europeans. The needs of the consumer – the hard-working salaryman, the cash-strapped housewife – who had to pay through the nose, did not seem to matter. The consumer, after all, unlike the producer, was not a heavy political contributor.

He had also tried parallel importing – a system whereby one could claim shipments as unaccompanied baggage upon arrival in Japan. To get around the high cost of foreign whiskey – a fifth of imported Scotch cost a small fortune – he and a partner had imported 800 cases of liquor through the process, flying back and forth and signing the declaration sheets each time. It was considerably cheaper than going to the liquor store. But then someone in the Japanese government complained and the North American supplier was ordered by Schenley, the company that controlled most of the liquor sold in the United States, not to sell in bulk to unauthorized agents anymore – meaning people like Zappetti and his partner – and that was the end of that. Thus did he return to the black market.

In time, he tried to produce his own materials, with varying degrees of success. He leased a huge plot of farmland in Hokkaido, that big, open, northernmost island, and started a dairy farm in order to make his own cheese, confident he could do a better job than any domestic producer. He purchased a herd of pedigreed cows and struck a deal with six local farmers to tend his farm while he was in Tokyo, the idea being they would clear the land, feed and milk the cows, and then make the cheese, which he would use in Nicola’s pizza.

Zappetti had constructed an authentic American-style ranch house with five bedrooms and a new state-of-the-art barn and purchased an array of modern equipment, which included five ten-ton Komatsu bulldozers, a tractor, a pickup, a jeep, a snowmobile and assorted other trucks. He even sent his farmers to bulldozer school.

Nobody had bothered to tell him that there was clay under the topsoil, which meant that it would be impossible to grow anything for the cows to eat, and that consequently Zappetti would have to
buy
all his feed. Or that sinkholes would appear as the hired hands began clearing the land – one of them swallowing up an entire bulldozer. And when his crew of farmers finally got around to
making the cheese, it was all but inedible, which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Zappetti’s cows were beginning to keel over and die. A veterinarian from the local Farmers Association identified the malady by pointing to the word ‘neglect’ in his Sanseido Japanese-English dictionary, hinting that the local farmers spent more time in the master’s whiskey cabinet than they did tending to his livestock.

In the end, Zappetti was forced to shut down that operation. But a sausage factory he put up outside the city in the town of Atsugi proved less disastrous, and with the economy in overdrive, he continued to prosper. To keep up with demand, he added 3,500 square feet at his main restaurant, then 3,500 more, then put in a parking lot and a mini-sausage factory on the roof of the building in violation of a city ordinance. He hired new chefs, expanded his staff, opened more branches around the city, and built a frozen pizza plant in Yokota, with a fleet of four-ton trucks to deliver the wares.

Money was coming in faster than he could think of ways to dispose of it. He spent as much of every evening as he possibly could in the fleshpots of Akasaka and Roppongi. He boasted that he never went to sleep without a beautiful girl in his arms, sometimes two. The nightclub bartenders grew so accustomed to the concupiscent
gaijin
tycoon and his conquests that they would automatically point out the newest hostesses whenever he walked through the door.

‘They called me the King of Roppongi,’ he would boast years later. ‘And that’s what I was. I was the richest American in the country. I always had a knockout doll on my arm. And when I walked down the street, everyone turned to look.’

Being the Mafia Boss of Tokyo provided Zappetti with other moneymaking opportunities of the type not normally discussed at meetings of the American Chamber of Commerce of Japan.
Indeed, from the time Lee Mortimer’s article came out, he found himself besieged by a bizarre stream of requests and business proposals. There were Americans who came in looking to peddle fake military ID cards, black market dollars, counterfeit yen bonds, stolen fur coats and even smuggled rice – for which, incidentally, there was a strong market in Japan, given the strict price controls imposed by the LDP, which depended heavily on the rice-growing industry to stay in power. There were nightclub hostesses with ‘international’ business secrets to sell – commodities futures prices, projected interest rate shifts, and other such data, pregnant Japanese women seeking to find departed foreign lovers, and sailors off ships parked in Yokohama Harbor with goods from the Golden Triangle for sale. There was even a retired mafia hitman who wanted to introduce cocaine to the Japanese public. Some proposals he took. Others he turned down because of the trouble or the potential danger involved. Still others he passed on to more qualified ‘business associates’, like that of a high-ranking Latin American flyweight boxer, in Japan for an important match, who had offered Zappetti a million yen if he could arrange to ‘eliminate’ his wife’s lover – an unranked middleweight from South America who was also on the fight card. Zappetti took the latter to a certain smoke-filled Korean barbecue in the Ginza, and within two days, the middleweight was on a plane out of the country. It wasn’t exactly what the flyweight had in mind, but he wasn’t in a position to complain – especially since his wife had already taken up with someone else.

Being known as the Mafia Boss of Tokyo meant that Zappetti was usually surrounded by yakuza. In fact the Tosei-kai men dined at Nicola’s so often that other habitués cracked that the gang’s crest should be emblazoned on the front entrance next to the Nicola’s logo – which now consisted of a large painting of a bulbous-nosed chef holding a stack of pizzas. It is safe to say that no other American ever saw as much of the Tokyo mobster up close as Zappetti.

The Toei Film Studios was in the process of glamorizing yakuza in a long series of movies about the prewar and modern underworld. They starred heroic, taut-muscled figures elaborately tattooed and wearing colorful kimonos and carrying long swords (as later portrayed in the 1975 Sidney Pollack movie
Yakuza
).

However, what appeared at Nicola’s every night was something else entirely. These gangsters dressed like Lee Marvin in the 1963 hit movie
The Killers
– black suit, black hat, sunglasses, crew cut, .38 in a shoulder holster. They were all in notoriously bad health, with toneless bodies and wan complexions caused by a steady morning-to-night diet of cheap sake, unfiltered cigarettes and methamphetamines. Many of them suffered from diabetes and they talked incessantly of treatments for tooth cavities and hemorrhoids, afflictions for which medical care was denied in Japanese prison, where most of them wound up at one time or another. It was always easy to spot undercover policemen – members of the
sakurada-gumi
, or ‘cherry blossom gang’ as the plainclothesmen were derisively called in the underworld – when they were trying to pose as mobsters. They were invariably ruddy-cheeked and looked as though they could run the mile in four minutes. (What’s more, they always wanted to shake hands. Real gangsters just nodded and fixed you with a dark stare.)

Unhealthy though the modern-day yakuza may have been, there was nothing wrong with their level of courage. Approximately one-third of all Tokyo gang members were walking around with self-amputated left pinkies, having atoned, as per yakuza custom, for some egregious sin. Among them was boss Machii himself.In 1963, after one of his men had flagrantly shot an important adviser to an Osaka gang with which Machii had just forged a key alliance, the TSK boss chopped off the top joint of his own little finger as penitence, performing the ceremonious amputation with a silver fruit knife. He’d had to cut the bone in two at the joint, as well as slice the flesh to get his grisly morsel, which he had then stuck in a formaldehyde jar and hand-delivered
to the gang boss’s home. Zappetti didn’t know too many people back on Pleasant Avenue who were capable of doing that. Or taking fifty-three stitches without an anesthetic as one Shibuya gang boss had done after being slashed from ear to chin in a street fight. Or facing a man with a sword
unarmed
, as a Tosei-kai gangster named Kaneko, now minus a left hand, had done. That, according to the conventional wisdom, was the single bravest thing a yakuza could ever do. (‘You see that sword glint in the light,’ a retired yakuza had confessed, ‘and you realize how easily it can open you up. It’s the worst feeling in the world. If you get shot with a gun, it’s over. Maybe you die instantly. But a sword … you just keep bleeding.’)

More often than he would have liked, the
gaijin padrone
found himself involved in squabbles between the Western men who came to his restaurant and the gangsters who also patronized it. Although the soldiers of the Tosei-kai were Koreans who had suffered their share of discrimination at the hands of the Japanese and were thus not overly fond of the ‘pure-blooded yakuza’, they shared with them a strong distaste for the
Ameko
, as Americans in the city were derogatorily referred to in demotic Japanese – because of what they perceived to be the tendency of the Yanks to walk around town as if they owned it, even though the Occupation had been over for twenty-five years.