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Zappetti ever met who drank while he was asleep.
    Oddly enough, the Soviet Embassy, involved in a bitter cold war with the United States and its allies, quietly encouraged Lansco’s activities, offering tips and suggestions for possible business deals, in the belief that black marketeering would result in the overthrow of capitalism. As Leo put it to Zappetti somewhat absurdly late one drunken night, ‘Nick, I’m in this business because I want to get rich and destroy the capitalist economic system.’
    For a time, Lansco joined forces with a West Coast gangster named Huff, a big, mean-tempered man who ran the Evergreen general store on the eastern end of the Ginza, which was itself a front for black market goods – as a shopper discovered one day when strolled in and asked for some flour and Huff replied, ‘How many carloads do you need?’
    Huff became famous in the Ginza underground for the time he hijacked 3,000 baskets of imported bananas from the US military and sold them on the street. His connection to Lansco ended when he was shotgunned to death in a gangland killing, sometime later on a trip to Arizona. Rumor had it he was done in by California-based Asian mobsters, resentful of his success in the Far East.
    Eventually, more than one of the Lansco partners would see the inside of a Japanese jail, but that would come later – much, much later, and only after the GHQ had packed up and gone home.
OCCUPATION LEGACY
    The Occupation lasted six years, eight months and fourteen days, and the amount of theft, graft, illicit sales, fraudulent conversions and other funny business that took place during that time is impossible to calculate – although many have tried. A Japanese magazine once estimated that 10 percent of all supplies shipped from the United States during the Occupation wound up on the black markets. Another study guessed the amount of American currency brought in by streetwalkers alone from the occupiers to be a staggering total of $200 million yearly. Still other reports dealt with a secret billion-dollar slush fund created by the Japanese government from the black market sale of goods and materials
donated
by the United States. The fund, equivalent to nearly 10 percent of Japan’s 1950 GNP, was reportedly used to finance the production of basic industries. (In addition, the Japanese government also sold great stockpiles of gold, silver and copper bullion, pig and scrap iron, steel, aluminum and rubber, which they had concealed in early 1945 in anticipation of Japan’s defeat.) Yet, these figures are only educated guesses and no one knows for certain the exact extent of the ill-gotten lucre. Suffice it to say that as an exercise in the cross-cultural exchange of illegal goods and services, it was suitably impressive.
    Of course, the Americans liked to view their occupation of Japan as more than just one giant backstreet Walmart. They preferred to focus on the concrete social and political reforms that they had seen instituted, which were designed to give the common man a break: the redistribution of land, the fostering of labor unions, the establishment of equal rights for women, and the elimination of the tyrannical
ie
(family) system – that aspect of the legal code which gave the male head of the household control over marriage, divorce and adoption. (Japan’s prewar Civil Code had stated, ‘Women are to be regarded as incompetent,’ denying them a voice in matters of law, property, and suffrage.) Indeed, it was commonly agreed that SCAP was infinitely more generous to theJapanese than the wartime Imperial Army had ever been to its Asian subjects. SCAP’s behavior, most notably its decision not to indict the still-revered Sun God Emperor Hirohito for war crimes but to leave him on the throne downgraded to a figurehead, offered quite a contrast to the tales of wholesale rape and murder related by tearful Japanese refugees from Soviet-occupied Manchuria. (As the months and years passed, the