Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  After leaving the Yomiuri, Adelstein kept investigating, until finally he honed in on Goto’s liver. For yakuza, the liver is a crucial body part, a target of self-abuse on a par with the pinkie finger. Many gangsters inject methamphetamines, and dirty needles can spread hepatitis C, which is also a risk of the big tattoos. In addition, there’s a lot of drinking and smoking. In the yakuza community, a sick liver is a badge of honor, something that a proud samurai like Goto brags about in his memoirs. (“I drank enough to destroy three livers.”) But it also means that yakuza often need transplants, and a criminal source told Adelstein that Goto had received a new liver in the United States, where his extensive record would make him ineligible for a visa. After months of investigation, Adelstein discovered that Goto and three other yakuza had been patients at the UCLA Medical Center, one of the nation’s premier transplant facilities. Goto had been granted a visa because of a deal with the FBI—he had agreed to rat out other yakuza.

  Adelstein broke the story in May of 2008, first in the Washington Post and then with details that he gave to reporters at the Los Angeles Times. Jim Stern, a retired head of the FBI’s Asian criminal-enterprise unit, confirmed the deal, although he described it as a failure. He told the LA Times, “I don’t think Goto gave the bureau anything of significance.” (Stern was not involved in the deal.) According to Adelstein’s Japanese police sources, the UCLA Medical Center received donations in excess of $1 million from yakuza. An investigation at UCLA found no wrongdoing, and the medical center reported only $200,000 in donations, although it acknowledged other signs of giri—Goto gave his doctor a case of wine, a watch, and $10,000. The year that he received his liver, 186 Americans in the Los Angeles area died while waiting for a transplant. Long before the articles appeared, Goto’s men had contacted Adelstein. He says that they threatened to kill him, while another gang leader offered him half a million dollars to drop the story. After that, Adelstein was placed under Tokyo police protection, and the FBI monitored his wife and children, who had moved to the United States.

  In 2008, the Yamaguchi-gumi officially expelled Goto. He undertook the training necessary to be certified as a Buddhist priest, a step that’s not uncommon for ex-yakuza who fear retribution from former colleagues. It’s bad karma to kill a priest, even if he’s a former crime boss who reportedly still commands many loyal followers. And Goto is the type of Buddhist priest who uses his autobiography to issue oblique threats. “Just because I’ve retired from the business doesn’t mean I have the time to track down this American novelist,” he says in With All Due Respect. “If I did meet him, it would be a serious matter. He’d have to write, ‘Goto is after me’ instead of ‘Goto may come after me.’ ”

  In 2010, Adelstein hired a lawyer named Toshiro Igari to sue Goto’s publisher and force the retraction of this threat. Igari was involved in many anti-yakuza cases, including investigations into fixing sumo matches and professional baseball games. In August of 2011, the lawyer went on vacation to the Philippines, where he was found dead in a room with a cup of sleeping pills, a set of box cutters, a glass of wine, and a shallow cut on his wrist. The Philippine police report was inconclusive, although most Japanese newspapers reported the death as a suicide. In Japan, Goto’s book has sold more than two hundred thousand copies, and, since the spring of 2011, all royalties have been dedicated to tsunami relief.

  During the spring, I visited Adelstein in Tokyo, and the first thing he told me was that a week earlier he had been given a diagnosis of liver cancer. He had also nearly completed training to become a Zen Buddhist priest. Adelstein figured that if Goto could do it for protection, he could, too. He considered himself a Buddhist, and he liked the concept of karma, although he had told the priest who was training him that he didn’t believe in reincarnation. “He said you don’t have to believe,” Adelstein said. “In Buddhism, it’s not about faith; it’s about doing.”

  He seemed neither surprised nor upset about the cancer diagnosis. The disease had been discovered in the early stages, and doctors at a clinic in Tokyo were treating it with injections of ethanol. They had told Adelstein that the cancer might be connected to diet, or to years of drinking and smoking, or even to Marfan syndrome. Regardless, his tranquility probably had less to do with Zen than it did with operating in a milieu where everybody knows something about liver problems. One afternoon, we stopped by the neighborhood police station, where Adelstein mentioned the diagnosis to a detective friend. “Wow, you’re just like a yakuza!” the cop said. “Are you actually covered with tattoos?” When we met with one of Adelstein’s criminal contacts, he talked about how his gang boss had originally hoped to get a UCLA liver, but after Adelstein’s exposé he had been forced to settle for an Australian organ instead. (He eventually went through two Aussie livers, and then died.) Periodically, Adelstein’s driver gave updates on a mutual acquaintance whose liver hadn’t responded to ethanol and was currently being zapped with radio-wave treatment. The driver himself had a lucky liver—his hepatitis C had been successfully treated with interferon.

  The driver’s name was Teruo Mochizuki, and he had a long criminal history. As a teenager, he had been a delinquent, until finally his frustrated parents passed him off to a local yakuza. Mochizuki joined the Inagawa-kai, and he also became addicted to methamphetamines. He had gone to prison four times on drug-related charges. Now in his fifties, he said he had been clean for more than two decades. He was powerfully built, with broad shoulders, no neck, and a bullet-shaped head. Like other yakuza I met, he had expressive eyes, although even the manga brows remained still when I asked about his left hand. He said quietly, “There was some trouble and I had to lose the finger.” He had done it in front of the boss at the gang’s office. A doctor stopped the bleeding, but Mochizuki had declined treatment of the nerve endings. “To repair the finger would be to take back the apology,” he explained. He said that the yakuza tradition is connected to the way that samurai warriors ritually sliced their own stomachs in ancient times. He also remarked that Japanese law grants disability status to a nine-fingered person, but Mochizuki refused to apply, out of respect for his digital apology.

  He had known Adelstein for more than fifteen years. When I asked how they had first met, he told the story casually, as if these were the details of an everyday personal encounter. In 1993, an associate of Mochizuki’s was blackmailing the criminal owner of a pet store, so the owner murdered the yakuza and, according to rumor, carved up the body and fed it to his dogs. Adelstein, who was single at the time, covered the story and interviewed the dead yakuza’s meth-head girlfriend; almost immediately they began sleeping together. One day, Mochizuki went to the girlfriend’s home to pay his condolences, and Adelstein answered the door, postcoital.

  I had lots of possible questions but decided to go with the most obvious: “What was your first impression of Jake-san?”

  “My first impression was, ‘What an idiot!’ ” Mochizuki said. “You can look all over Japan and you won’t find a reporter willing to do these things. I was surprised that he was fearless. He was just so strange.”

  Over the years, Adelstein and Mochizuki became friends. In 2007, Mochizuki was expelled from the Inagawa-kai, after an internal conflict that he didn’t want to talk about. The following year, Adelstein offered Mochizuki a job as his bodyguard and driver. “I didn’t want to do it,” Mochizuki told me. “Goto is one of the most influential guys in Japan, and nobody would want a job like that. But I felt I had no other choice.” He explained that Tokyo job prospects are poor for an uneducated middle-aged man with nine fingers and tattoos that show beneath a dress shirt. He now earns about $3,500 a month for driving Adelstein around Tokyo in a black Mercedes S600, which is a common yakuza car model. Adelstein had bought it cheap from another gang contact.

  Mochizuki carried no weapons. He said that he tried to anticipate problems, and he monitored underworld contacts for news of Goto. He told me that Adelstein behaved differently from typical Japanese journalists, who are carefu
l not to cross certain lines. “He has no regard for those taboos or restrictions,” Mochizuki said. “If he were Japanese, he wouldn’t be around right now.” Mochizuki explained that some yakuza dislike Adelstein’s stories, but he is widely recognized as a man of his word. “He has a heart,” Mochizuki said. “People appreciate him for that. It’s not common for somebody who is not Japanese to have this feeling of obligation.”

  Adelstein has published a book about his adventures on the police beat, Tokyo Vice, and is working on two more. A few years ago, he researched human trafficking for the U.S. State Department, and now he serves as a board member for the Polaris Project Japan, a nonprofit that combats the sex trade. Periodically, he does investigations for companies. The American lawyer who researches organized crime told me that when he first met Adelstein his image was off-putting. But he had become deeply impressed by his work. “He’s a craftsman,” he said. “He takes pride in doing the kind of research he does correctly.” He continued, “It’s this odd thing where you have this white guy who is as close to that part of Japanese society as a person can get.”

  Adelstein follows his strict rules of reciprocity and protection of sources, but otherwise he is willing to do nearly anything to get a story. He said that once, after his marriage had fallen apart, a lonely female cop offered access to a file on Goto if he slept with her, so he did. In the red-light district, he relies on foreign strippers for information, and on a few occasions when they’ve run into visa problems he has introduced them to gay salarymen who need wives in order to rise at their conservative Japanese companies. Adelstein says he never breaks the law—he simply puts these people in touch and tells them that they are free to fall in love and get married, and then they are also free to apply for spousal visas and show up at corporate events together. But he acknowledges that a journalist in America would be appalled. “I’ve slept with sources,” he told me. “I’ve done hard negotiations that are probably tantamount to blackmail. I’ve ransacked rubbish bins for information. I’m willing to get information from organized crime or antisocial forces if the information is good.”

  By now, he’s played the stereotypical role of the crime reporter for so long that he can’t shake the lifestyle. Whenever I went out with him, we always seemed to end up having drinks with some beautiful, bright woman. For five years, he has rented a house in a quiet neighborhood, but it was as if he had just moved in: at night, he dragged a futon out of a closet and slept on the floor of his office. For breakfast he microwaved instant meals from a convenience store and served them on paper plates. In the kitchen, I counted five bottles of whiskey, four bottles of vodka, and three spoons. There was no table; he ate takeout meals on the couch. He marked his hand with a pen every time he lit a clove cigarette, supposedly to cut back, although once I watched him accumulate six marks while we were en route to a cancer treatment. On that particular day, the doctor decided to postpone the injection of ethanol, but I wasn’t sure that Adelstein’s body noticed the difference. We went straight from the appointment to dinner at a shabu-shabu restaurant, where he ordered two bottles of sake and finished them while waiting for an elegant Japanese-American woman to join us. After that, he had five more drinks at three different bars, and he was still going strong at two in the morning.

  In the farmland of southern Boone County, atop the last line of hills that overlook the Missouri River, stands a six-sided pagoda. The structure has three tiers marked by upturned eaves. “It was my impression of what a Japanese house should be,” Eddie Adelstein told me, when I visited. He said that he didn’t know much about Japan, having traveled there only once to see his son, but he had always liked the idea of an Asian house. He had a friend in Kansas who specialized in designing six-sided buildings, so they combined their interests. Since 2005, the pagoda has been home to Sunao Adelstein and her two children. Eddie and his wife, Willa, live in another building on the property.

  The neighbors are mostly farmers and people who moved to the countryside for the quiet, but they’ve picked up certain ideas about the yakuza and Tadamasa Goto. “When it started, somebody from the FBI came by and talked to everybody,” Heidi Branaugh, a nurse who lives on a small farm nearby, told me. “It was just odd. The first night I was here, after the sheriff came by, there was a helicopter overhead.” Branaugh keeps a donkey, forty chickens, ten goats, and a dog named Bessie. She said that for a year Bessie barked at the car that the sheriff’s department parked near the pagoda every evening. “They’d sit right up there on the drive, watching. Once they chased some guys who were looking for mushrooms.” Another neighbor named Robert asked me for an update on Goto’s threat. “It’s safe now, isn’t it?” he said. Beni Adelstein, Jake and Sunao’s eleven-year-old daughter, wanted to make sure that I understood that yakuza are different from Missouri criminals. “It’s not like they rob trains like Jesse James,” she said.

  Sunao Adelstein told me that she was tired of thinking about Goto. In 2008, the FBI had advised the family to install an alarm system and buy some guns, because it wouldn’t be too hard for a hit man to track down the only pagoda along this stretch of the Missouri River. Since then, the authorities believed that the local risk had passed, although at the time of my visit Sunao had not returned to Japan for two years, because the Tokyo police were concerned about the threat in Goto’s With All Due Respect. Sunao used to work as a business reporter in Tokyo, but now she was studying accounting and trying to adjust to life in rural Missouri. She liked the pagoda, although she complained that there was almost no closet space, because the designer had been so obsessed with the Japanese exterior. Who would have imagined that a pagoda needs closets? “Very often I think, why am I living here?” she said. “I grew up in Saitama. It’s not a big city, but it’s a suburb of Tokyo. I never dealt with ticks, with bugs. I hate ticks!”

  Sunao is a slender, pretty woman, and she took me for a walk in the countryside with the children. She wore a short red skirt and black leggings; periodically she stopped to check for ticks. After years of living apart, she and Jake had finally decided to file for legal separation. They were still on good terms, but she spoke sadly about the marriage. In her opinion, her husband had changed after his research took him deep into the criminal underworld. “He was beaten by somebody, so he was wary. He was not goofy Jake anymore,” she said. “He would use words the yakuza way.” She continued, “It has to do with the facial expression, the way they speak. When he got angry he was like this. We argued once and he said, ‘Omae niwa kankeine! Kono Bakayaro!’ I thought, Oh, he knows bad Japanese now.”

  She said that at one time she had hoped he would find a different career, but now she realized that it would never happen. Some of Adelstein’s friends and family told me that he was addicted to the excitement, while others mentioned that he was too attached to the character that he had created. But beneath the chaotic personal life there was also something deeply moralistic about his outlook. He seemed to have more faith in giri than he did in any system of justice, and he could respect even a criminal as long as the man kept his word. “He expects people to be fair and honest,” his father told me.

  Eddie Adelstein said that his own experiences with crime had influenced his son. He worked as a pathologist at the VA hospital in Columbia, and had served as the county medical examiner for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, patients at the VA suddenly began dying at a high rate, and there were rumors about a nurse named Richard Williams. Finally, Dr. Adelstein commissioned an epidemiologist to perform a study. “After three days, he said, ‘You know, this guy is murdering people,’ ” Dr. Adelstein told me. “Most deaths were clustered between the hours of one and three in the morning, which was when that nurse was working. And he had taken care of eleven of the thirteen people who had died in the study.” The study found that it was ten times more likely that a patient would die during one of Williams’s shifts than under another nurse’s care.

  Some believed that the nurse might be killing patients by injecting c
odeine, but nobody knew for certain. When Adelstein approached hospital administrators, their first response was to hide the findings. “Everybody who took part in the cover-up was promoted, and everybody who tried to expose it was punished,” he said. Williams eventually left the hospital, but the director gave him a letter of recommendation that helped him find a job at a rural nursing home. During Williams’s first year at the nursing home, thirty-three patients died, whereas there had been only six deaths in the ten months before he started. Dr. Adelstein and others took the story to the FBI, Congress, and ABC News. The FBI investigated, but forensic results were incomplete, in part because labs were too busy with tests related to the O. J. Simpson trial. Williams was charged, but the case was dismissed when prosecutors could not determine the cause of death. At last report, he was living quietly in suburban St. Louis. He is suspected of murdering as many as forty-two people, many of them war veterans—more victims than are attributed to Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy, or Tadamasa Goto.

  All of that had happened while Jake was starting his career in Japan. “It made me extremely distrustful of everyone,” he told me. “The biggest lesson I took was that even when you’re in the right, when you’re doing something good, you won’t be rewarded.” And it occurred to me that the darkest element of Adelstein’s life wasn’t the image he projected of the tormented reporter, or even the crazy yakuza stories. Beneath all the exoticism, it was actually the normalcy of crime that was most disturbing. Whether you’re in Missouri or Tokyo, things aren’t always what they seem—the nurse might be a murderer, and the gangster might run a hedge fund.