CRAZY WONG AND THE GOLD SCAM
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.
8. Black Rider
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.
‘In any other country in the world I would have won hands down,’ he would rage darkly. ‘Ghana. Timbuktu. No problem. But here? Never.’
If he had not had his stroke, he mused, things might have turned out differently. In the Nihon Kotsu appeal, the legal team of four lawyers he had assembled over the course of that case had adopted a new approach, arguing that his flagship restaurant, including the building in which it was housed and the land on which it stood, should all be returned because their combined value had multiplied over the years to an amount far, far in excess of their worth at the time of the takeover. The increase was so great, their brief stated, that it was now impossible to claim that seizure of the property constituted fair repayment of the original loan.
After four years of plodding through appellate court, it seemed to Nick, at least, the judge might actually be buying that argument – if the sympathetic looks he was getting from the berobed figure on the bench were any indication. It was a view, it might be noted, that was not wholeheartedly shared by his counsel. But then Nicola went into a hospital in central Tokyo for minor surgery to correct a bad back that was hampering his golf game and suffered a bizarre heart attack, which served to hopelessly confuse his situation.
It had come on a warm night in June 1986. He had been lying down in his expensive second-story hospital suite, thinking about the operation scheduled for the following morning, when suddenly he began to perspire and tremble; he felt a terrible pain in his chest and was overcome by a wave of nausea. He got up and went into the bathroom where he was racked by alternating bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. When he finally came out, pale and shaken, he looked out the window and what he saw caused him to rub his eyes in disbelief. There, bathed in the moonlight, he later told friends, was a rider on a black horse coming through the front gate of the hospital grounds, heading up the driveway toward the main entrance. The rider was wearing armor, like the knights of old, and his face visor was down. He was holding a sword in one hand and a deck of black cards in the other, which he began flinging in Nick’s direction, one by one. Clearly visible in the dim light was the English word ‘Death’ scrawled in yellow ink on each card.
‘So this is death,’ Nick muttered to himself, wondering at the same time what a medieval English knight was doing in a twentieth-century Tokyo apparition.
‘Wel
l, I’m not ready to die just yet,’ he said aloud.
The rider kept coming.
‘Fuck you, death!’ he yelled out the window. ‘Go to hell.’
He stood there cursing. Then suddenly the figure vanished.
Nick got back into bed and pressed the call button.
Soon the room was filled with doctors, more nurses and equipment. A grim-looking Japanese heart specialist examined him and informed him he had had not one but two myocardial infarctions, which had caused 75 percent of his heart muscles to stop. He was immediately moved to the intensive care unit, where he was dosed with glycerine pills and told to keep as quiet as humanly possible.
Nick thought he was probably going to die. So, it appeared, did everyone else. His wife, his son Vince, who came the next day, the entire medical team – they all had that look on their faces. The chief of his legal team had even showed up to see him. He sat by the edge of Nick’s bed and said, ‘I can get you a settlement of 5 oku – 500 million yen right now.’
Nick stared at him dully. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness.
‘Plus legal fees,’ the lawyer added.
Nick grunted.
‘All right,’ he managed to say weakly.
The figure the chief lawyer had cited – at the time the equivalent of roughly $4 million – was but a fraction of the total value of the property. But Nick had been thinking about something else. In his twilight zone haze, it occurred to him that it might be possible to use the Nihon Kotsu offer in court as evidence against the defendants. If they were willing to give up that kind of money – insufficient as it may have seemed to him – to settle the case, then, he asked himself, wasn’t that an indication in itself that the defendants believed deep down in their hearts of hearts that they were wrong and owed something to the plaintiff?
Tokyo Underworld Page 24
