☢️ #45 The Plutonium-Smuggling Yazuka Kingpin (An Update)

Developments in the strangest story of 2024...

Jan 12, 2025

Portrait of a man begging to be arrested. Image: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

Japanese Yakuza Leader Pleads Guilty to Nuclear Materials Trafficking, Narcotics, and Weapons Charges

That’s the headline of a January 8, 2025 press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Here’s the drill: Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, pleaded guilty in Manhattan, New York, to conspiring with a network of associates to traffic nuclear materials, including uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, from Burma to other countries, as well as to international narcotics trafficking and weapons charges.

The details are fascinating plus terrifying.

But, in an update to our coverage of this case that appeared in our very first edition, we’re going to reveal the hidden truth behind this whole farrago.

But first, some news: from our next edition, we’re going to rebranding to make it clear that this is the home of True Crime Japan, in all its bizarre and outré dimensions.

Don’t worry—you’ll still see that familiar ⛩️ in your inbox so you always know it’s us.

Drugs, Guns & Rockets

In April 2022, U.S. prosecutors announced the arrest of a 58 year old Japanese citizen Takeshi Ebisawa, plus two Thai nationals and a Thai-American, on charges of drug and weapon smuggling.

The indictment was a doozy. The Drug Enforcement Administration had planted an informant in a group that was conspiring to traffic 500 kilograms each of methamphetamine and heroin for sale on the streets of New York. Part of the proceeds would be used to buy U.S.-made heavy weaponry — surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), 10,000 rifles, and thousands of rockets, which would then be funneled to rebel groups in Myanmar.

This, on the face of it, is a law enforcement coup — dismantling an international narcotics network that also dealt in military-grade ordnance.

So, who was Ebisawa, the alleged mastermind behind this operation, embodying a level of international villainy not normally associated with the image of the modern Japanese citizen?

The Department of Justice began their press release “U.S. Attorney Announces Arrests Of A Yakuza Leader And Affiliates for International Trafficking of Narcotics and Weapons, Including Surface-To-Air Missiles.”

Within, we got the following: “Ebisawa, a leader within the Japanese transnational organized crime syndicate known as the Yakuza—a network of highly organized crime families with affiliates in Asia, Europe, and the Americas—is involved in various criminal activities, including weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, fraud, and money laundering.”

Searing stuff, that — and one might leap to the conclusion of missing little fingers and complex regimes of honor and obedience.

Yet anyone familiar with both the Western and Japanese media landscapes could see something was off when the Tokyo press reported the story.

One of Japan’s leading daily newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, struck a very skeptical tone on Ebisawa’s apparent gang ties; their page 11 story described Ebisawa as a “yakuza” (with prominent quote marks). They also could not confirm the kanji characters of Ebisawa’s name, instead leaving it in phonetic script — a clear sign they could not verify the man’s identity.1

Perhaps this was just sloppy fact-checking. But the biggest giveaway that Ebisawa was not, in fact, a high-ranking Yakuza figure was the absence of any reference to a specific criminal syndicate.

Why? In Japan the traditional semi-official status of organized crime families means that membership is a matter of pride rather than secrecy, to the extent that the National Police Agency keeps an up-to-date database of members of Yakuza groups — and Ebisawa doesn’t appear on it (Link: Japanese).

A true paid-up member of the Yakuza caught smuggling plutonium would have been front-page news — but the story barely registered in Japan, even while going viral in the English-speaking world.

In fact, according to Yahoo! Japan, Ebisawa is actually a two-bit crook from a commuter suburb in out-of-the-way Tochigi Prefecture who until he disappeared off to Myanmar on vacation lived in a $400/month house, drove a 20-year old car and hung around cheap restaurants mooching coffee off acquaintances (Link: Japanese).

This sense that Ebisawa may not be who the Department of Justice said he was was heightened by another curious detail from the indictment: one of the counts he faced was money laundering—a common fallback charge in international crime cases.

Brace yourself for the amount in question.

$100,000.

For a purported international arms smuggler, this is humiliating. Your Adnan Khashoggis or Viktor Bouts wouldn’t (or won’t, in Bout’s case) get out of their four-posters for deals below nine figures, as a point of professional pride. By comparison, Ebisawa’s alleged operation starts to seem almost quaint.

How does one even broker a deal involving tons of narcotics and military-grade weapons and contrive to walk away with such a pittance?

A purported Yakuza with no gang ties, grandiose plans for drugs and weapons, but very little sign of the oceans of money that would such an operation would spin off.

So far, so weird.

Then, for almost two years, with Ebisawa and his accomplices stuck in pre-trial detention, the story went cold…

Those black objects are not the remnants of your family barbeque. Image: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

☢️Weapons-Grade Plutonium

Wednesday, February 21, 2024. Prosecutors in New York suddenly release a jaw-dropping supplementary indictment against Ebisawa, now 60, further accusing him of attempting to sell plutonium to Iran.

Details on the indictment counts against Takeshi Ebigawa

Now that’s what Bertie Wooster would call “a bit of a facer”.

Let’s go to the paperwork:

Beginning in early 2020, Ebisawa informed UC-1 and a DEA confidential source (CS-1) that Ebisawa had access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wanted to sell.
Later that year, Ebisawa sent UC-1 a series of photographs depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, as well as pages of what Ebisawa represented to be lab analyses indicating the presence of thorium and uranium in the depicted substances.
In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, UC-1 agreed, as part of the DEA’s investigation, to help Ebisawa broker the sale of his nuclear materials to UC-1’s associate, who was posing as an Iranian general (the General), for use in a nuclear weapons program.
Ebisawa then offered to supply the General with “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” than uranium for this purpose. Ebisawa further proposed, together with two other co-conspirators (CC-2 and CC-3), to UC-1 that CC-1 sell uranium to the General, through Ebisawa, to fund CC-1’s weapons purchase.
Thereafter, on a Feb. 4, 2022, videoconference, CC-2 told UC-1 that CC-1 had available more than 2,000 kilograms of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 — referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as “yellowcake” — and that CC-1 could produce as much as five tons of nuclear materials in Burma.
CC-2 also advised that CC-1 had provided samples of the uranium and thorium, which CC-2 was prepared to show to UC-1’s purported buyers. CC-2 noted that the samples should be packed “to contain . . . the radiation.”
Approximately one week later, Ebisawa, CC-2, and CC-3 participated in a series of meetings with UC-1 and CS-1 in Southeast Asia, to discuss their ongoing weapons, narcotics, and nuclear materials transactions.
During one of these meetings, CC-2 asked UC-1 to meet in CC-2’s hotel room. Inside the room, CC-2 showed UC-1 two plastic containers each holding a powdery yellow substance (nuclear samples), which CC-2 described as “yellowcake.” CC-2 advised that one container held a sample of uranium in the compound U3O8, and the other container held Thorium-232.

And back to The Kyote:

Astonishingly, Ebisawa had actually managed to get his hands on actual nuclear materials.

Despite no gang ties, no money, and no friends.

And what we suspect happened is this: a small-time grifter scraped together enough cash to visit a low-cost destination like Myanmar, chasing the adventure his uneventful life had always lacked.

Probably he spent his time in tourist bars, bullshitting a fictional Yakuza background cobbled together from popular media. And, as luck would have it — or not, perhaps, he attracted a crew of actual ne’er-do-wells with heavy contacts, but who lacked the intelligence—or the instincts—to see through him.

Given access to genuine drugs, weapons and plutonium, Ebisawa must’ve thought he’d finally caught his big break — and reacted just as you’d expect someone so far out of his depth: immediately attracting the closest undercover U.S. Agent, telling them everything, posing for incriminating snaps, then finally — as the indictment narrates — taking the pornographically stupid decision to agree to travel to New York to finalize a deal to smuggle plutonium to America’s enemies.

By any standards, Ebisawa might be the most successful larper of all time.

And, naturally, the publicity-hungry Department of Justice seized the moment, billing Ebisawa as a Yakuza kingpin to drum up headlines (one can’t help but wonder if that’s the story Ebisawa himself went with—for the ego boost.)

Guilty

Thus we return to the present, and the news that, after three years in custody, and a year after the supplementary plutonium indictment, Ebisawa has entered a guilty plea.

He’s now facing, wait for it,

Maximum 30 years on the nuclear charges
Maximum life for the guns and rockets
Maximum 20 years for money laundering

Well, it’s not that bad — these are maximum possible sentences after all…

But on the drugs charges, I’m afraid, it’s a mandatory minimum 20 years in prison.

He’s 61 years old.

Whoops.

We think he took a plea with some kind of repatriation arrangement that will allow him to serve his sentence back in Japan.

Either way, he’s probably going to do long, dark time till he expires.

(Finally, if not exactly a “grace note”, it’s somehow reassuring the hapless Ebisawa is still alive to plead guilty — he’s lucky the Mossad were otherwise engaged while he was doing his thing; the Israelis tend to deal with people who aid the Iranian nuclear program by leaving them at the curb in garbage sacks.)

The Kyote