Tokyo Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

standing whatsoever. It was brought into being solely by printing up some official-looking but fake documents, a letterhead that displayed an imaginary address in a nonexistent Texas town, and a set of checkbooks. For sheer audacity, nothing else in the city could quite match it. Whenever Lansco needed a quick fix of capital, Zappetti would prepare a bearer’s check for a certain amount – $30,000 was usually the minimum required to ensure a respectable profit – sign it at the bottom with Harry S. Truman or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and sell it to someone in the underworld for 10 percent of its face value. The underworld buyer would in turn sell the check to someone else at a ‘discount’, explaining that it was stolen. The buyer usually didn’t care because he was planning to turn around and sell it to someone else – perhaps a Japanese entrepreneur, desperate for hard-to-get dollars. Whoever tried to cash the check at the end of the chain would realize it was worthless, but given all the go-betweens, it was almost impossible to trace the draft back to its original source.
    The primary traffickers of the Lansco checks were members of the two gangs vying for control of the Ginza, the Sumiyoshi-Ikka (Sumiyoshi Family), a prewar gambling group that had traditionally run the area, and the Tosei-kai (Eastern Voice Society), a vicious gang of young Korean street toughs that had sprung up on the ashes of Japan’s defeat. The Sumiyoshi and the Tosei-kai were at constant odds with each other over turf, which included the right to buy checks from the Americans, to ‘escort’ GIs on leave from Korea, where war had erupted in June 1950, and to run protection and franchise rackets among the myriad of nightclubs, cabarets, dance halls, amusement parlors and gambling dens springing up all over the Ginza.
    Gangsters from both sides would from time to time take sudden potshots at the large clock tower atop the seven-storied Hat-tori Building at the Ginza 4–chome crossing, just to show who was in charge. Both gangs, in fact, earned the sobriquet ‘
Ginza Keisatsu
’ (Ginza Police), because they were better armed than the men of the Metropolitan Police Department, who, after having been relieved of their weapons by the GHQ, often had to make do with wooden staves.
    For the most part, the foreigners and indigent mobsters on the Ginza lived in parallel worlds that did not intersect socially; the
gaijin
(‘outside people’, as Japanese referred to the Westerners in their midst) kept to the cozy, if gaudy military clubs, like the Rocker 4, on one corner of the Ginza 4–chome intersection, a new multifloored pleasure palace with 2,000 hostesses ferried to work from all around the rubble-strewn city by Army shuttle buses. The gangsters hung out in their own rickety bars – typically dark establishments with bare unpainted wooden floors, vinyl-covered bar stools and booths, and smelly ‘outdoor’ unisex toilets. The two sides only came together when business demands dictated – fake check sales, money laundering, or, as in one other memorable venture, gumball sales.
    Lansco had somehow come into the possession of a thousandpounds of stolen gumballs, which the company was unable to sell. Lansco representatives went to stores, kiosks and open-air stalls all over the Ginza, explaining that gumballs were the latest rage back in the States, but found there was absolutely no interest. The Japanese merchants they spoke with had never seen gumballs before and after one viewing said, quite candidly, that they did not care to see them again. There were all sorts of objections: The gumballs didn’t suit Japanese tastes, a refrain foreign businessmen would hear quite often over the next half-century in association with any number of products; they weren’t sweet enough, the artificial coloring didn’t look right, they stained the hands, and so on and so forth. That Lansco had no gumball machines with which to dispense the gumballs did