Yakuza Doodle Dandies
Asian Vampire Bats in the American Belfry
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
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From Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition:
doo-dle (v.t.) – to make a fool of; to fool.
dandy (n.) – a man who pays too much attention to appearance; a fop.
March 4, 2005
Billionaire accused of insider trading
Las Vegas Review-Journal
Billionaire Japanese developer Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, once listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man, was arrested Thursday on allegations of insider trading and falsifying financial statements at his company.
Tsutsumi, 70, owns a major stake in Kokudo Corp., which controls Seibu Railway and its subsidiaries. He also owns Prince Hotels, Inc, the Seibu Lions professional baseball team and Seibu Construction Ltd.
He was arrested on suspicion of violating the securities and exchange law, the Tokyo District Prosecutors’ Office said.
Prosecutors took Tsutsumi to a Tokyo detention center for questioning.
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March 25, 2005
Goldman Sachs offers to buy
Seibu Railway group for $8.5 billion
Yahoo biz
US investment bank Goldman Sachs has offered to buy the scandal-hit Seibu Railway group for about 900 billion yen ($8.5 billion dollars), a newspaper said.
Goldman Sachs has proposed purchasing Seibu Railway shares held by the group’s core company Kokudo and taking over Kokudo’s debt obligations, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said, citing anonymous Seibu officials….
The group has been hit by a financial scandal.
Former Seibu railroad and hotel empire chief Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, once dubbed the world’s richest man, has been charged with falsifying financial statements to conceal his family control over the listed Seibu Railway.
He has also been indicted for insider trading after orchestrating the sale of shares in the now delisted railway firm before the concealment came to light.
The group’s reform panel was set to compile the final version of its reform plan centering around Kokudo’s absorption into Seibu Railway and a 200-billion-yen capital increase, the economic daily said.
The offer by Goldman Sachs would serve as an alternative to this plan, it said….
For more on Goldman Sachs, GO TO > > > Apollo Advisors; The Blackstone Group; Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Investigating Investcorp; Yakuza Doodle Dandies
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March 8, 2005
Princeville Resort Sold for $161M
By Rick Daysog, Star-Bulletin
The Princeville Resort on Kauai is being sold for more than $161 million, according to a published report.
The Nikkei English News said the sale of the 9,000-acre resort to Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds and a partnership headed by developer Jeff Stone will likely close this month.
Stone told the Star-Bulletin in July, when the deal was first announced, that the buyers plan to make substantial improvements to the resort….
Stone said in July that the buyers expect to retain the resort’s 600 employees as part of the sales agreement….
The sellers include Japan’s fourth-largest brewer, Suntory Ltd., which owns a 51 percent stake in the property; Mitsui & Co., which owns 24.5 percent; and Japanese developer Nippon Shinpan Co., which also owns 24.5 percent.
Suntory, which will receive about $80.8 million from the deal, plans to sell some of its noncore businesses and invest about $1.9 billion over the next three years to buy other beverage companies, Nikkei reported.
Mitusi and Nippon Shinpan acquired the resort in 1990 from developer Chris Skase’s Quintex Australia Ltd.
Suntory later purchased a 51 percent stake in the resort from Nippon Shinpan….
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For more on Princeville’s insurance broker, Marsh & McLennan, GO TO > > >
For more on Hawaii Prince Hotels President/CEO, George Ariyoshi, GO TO > > >
Woo vs. Harmon: Witness George Ariyoshi
And, for more on these flocking financial vultures, GO TO > > > Apollo Advisors; The Blackstone Group; Buzzards Of Paradise; Claims By Harmon; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Paradise Paved; Predators in Paradise; The Grand (and dirty) Ko Olina; RICO in Paradise; The Weinberg Foundation; Yakuza Doodle Dandies
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From Deep Black Lies:
HIROHITO’S GOLD
Explosive Japanese WWII Secrets Revealed
By David Guyatt
The history of the war in the Pacific is lettered with tales of Japanese cruelty against British and American servicemen, amongst others.
Not only did Imperial Japanese forces treat Allied POW’s as slaves to build their railway in Burma, but also used them in horrific medical experiments at Mukden, Manchuria, the headquarters of the secretive Unit 731 – Japan’s chemical and biological warfare weapons facility.
Yet, even while all this was taking place, another more furtive Japanese force was engaged in work so secret that it has remained concealed, until now.
Operating under the command of a Royal prince of the Imperial household, a highly secret unit was tasked with the methodical plunder of Southeast Asia. The project was called “Golden Lily” – named after a poem written by Emperor Hirohito.
The unit plundered such profoundly large quantities of loot from China and Southeast Asia that, following the end of the war, the west determined to keep its activities secret. A mixture of fear, greed, and impending cold war and a vast complex of international corruption sat behind this decision.
Cynically forgotten were the horrific deaths of Allied POW’s who were forced to build complex tunnel systems and other underground depositories and then buried alive with the loot. One reason, perhaps, why history will record this as one of the most explosive stories of World War Two ever to be told.
American author, Sterling Seagrave, has previously received international acclaim for his penetrating investigative books: “The Soong Dynasty,” and “The Marcos Dynasty.” Now, in his latest work, “The Yamato Dynasty”, Seagrave unveils some of the most enduring secrets of the war in the Pacific….
As Sterling and Peggy Seagrave make clear, the ruling family of Japan has always been governed by others more powerful than themselves. The emperor and imperial family are figureheads used to conceal from the public the real power brokers who lurk behind the “black curtain.” These are the family owned and managed businesses or Zaibatsu that include such trans-national corporations as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo amongst others.
The authors say this corporate power has grown stronger, not weaker, and that the “postwar financial cliques share power with nobody. Not with the emperor, who is only a magic wand, and not with elected politicians, who are only hand-puppets. Financial cliques are the most powerful forces in modern Japan.” Moreover, Japan’s post-war business structure is unlike any other modern industrial society for the simple reason that organised crime are openly factored into it.
Hence the zaibatsu include not only “financiers, bankers and heads of corporations, but underworld bosses” – the so-called Yakuza crime clans.
The financial elite maintain their positions of power by paying bribes. In the same way that Japanese society is rigidly structured in certain key way, it should come as no surprise that political bribery and large scale corruption are also disciplined art-forms.
Political bribes are paid in “Bullets” with each shot amounting to 100 million Yen, equivalent to US$800,000. This enables the most powerful families to govern from a position of invisibility – a feature that had dominated the thoughts of Japan’s ruling elite throughout recent history….
A significant proportion of the current financial power of the zaibatsu and, indeed, that of the imperial family, has its origin in WWII.
For instance, Seagrave reveals that “Most zaibatsu had participated in the looting of conquered countries and helped in running the wartime drug trade on the mainland. An estimated $3 billion was made in the heroin trade alone…”
After the war, the vast wealth that had been accumulated from the heroin trade and from plundering China and other Southeast Asian nations magically disappeared. The result was that Allied military Supremo, General Douglas MacArthur accepted the position that Japan was ordered to pay in war reparations to a meagre $1 billion. From this, Allied Prisoners of War were paid trivial amounts in recompense for the inhumanities inflicted upon them during their internment. British POW’s were paid a miserable £48 each, for example….
The sheer quantity and value of plunder gathered by the Golden Lily was mind numbing. The whole of Asia under Japanese control had been combed for treasure. Most of it was shipped to Prince Chichibu’s headquarters in the Philippines….
After the war had finished, Japanese led groups began to recover large amounts of treasure hidden in the Philippines. They were not alone. Seagrave reveals that American OSS (forerunner of the CIA) agents watched as Japanese troops buried treasure at Luzon in the Philippines and began a clandestine recovery operation between 1945 and 1948.
This was headed by a Filipino-American OSS – and later CIA – officer, Severino Garcia Santa Romana. Romana, in turn, worked under the watchful eye of the late and now infamous CIA operative, General Edward Lansdale – who was embroiled in Operation Mongoose and the abortive CIA invasion of Cuba during the Kennedy administration.
There was no intention on the part of the OSS/CIA to return any of the plunder to the rightful owners. Instead, Santa Romana set up numerous front companies to launder the gold bullion secretly recovered.
In all OSS/CIA gold bullion was secretly deposited in a total of 176 bank accounts located in 42 countries.
Nor was this a rogue operation conducted by a knowing few. The authors reveal that General William Donovan, head of the OSS, knew of the Lansdale-Romana recoveries, as did General Douglas MacArthur, and former US President Herbert Hoover. Knowledge also extended to cold war warrior and later head of the CIA, Allen Dulles. Seagrave also believes it likely that President Truman was in the charmed circle of those who were informed.
The twice-looted gold became “the basis of the CIA’s ‘off the books’ operational funds during the immediate postwar years, to create a worldwide anti-communist network.”
To ensure loyalty to the cause, the CIA distributed Gold Bullion Certificates to influential and well-known people throughout the world. The authors hold documents showing that “one of the big gold bullion accounts set up by Santa Romana was in the name of General Douglas MacArthur.”
Other documents indicate that gold bullion worth $100 million was placed in an account in the name of Herbert Hoover, former President of the United States.
Meanwhile, Allied veterans of the war in the Pacific continue to fight for meaningful compensation for the barbarous treatment they experienced. The $1 billion reparations paid by Japan, once it had been divided among the many millions entitled to compensation, amounted to a pittance.
As late as November 1998, a Tokyo court rejected an appeal from 20,000 British, Australian, New Zealand and American former internees who had asked for compensation of $22,000 each.
In contrast to this miserly sum paid to Allied POW’s, leading Japanese zaibatsu submitted their own claims for compensation after the war, arguing that the damage inflicted on their armaments factories by Allied air raids required restitution.
These claims totaled $5 billion and many were paid….
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March 25, 2005
Goldman Sachs offers to buy
Seibu Railway group for $8.5 billion
Yahoo biz
US investment bank Goldman Sachs has offered to buy the scandal-hit Seibu Railway group for about 900 billion yen ($8.5 billion dollars), a newspaper said.
Goldman Sachs has proposed purchasing Seibu Railway shares held by the group’s core company Kokudo and taking over Kokudo’s debt obligations, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said, citing anonymous Seibu officials….
The group has been hit by a financial scandal.
Former Seibu railroad and hotel empire chief Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, once dubbed the world’s richest man, has been charged with falsifying financial statements to conceal his family control over the listed Seibu Railway.
He has also been indicted for insider trading after orchestrating the sale of shares in the now delisted railway firm before the concealment came to light.
The group’s reform panel was set to compile the final version of its reform plan centering around Kokudo’s absorption into Seibu Railway and a 200-billion-yen capital increase, the economic daily said.
The offer by Goldman Sachs would serve as an alternative to this plan, it said….
For more on Goldman Sachs, GO TO > > > A Connecticut Yankee in King Kamehameha’s Court; Ace Up the Sleeve; AIG: The Un-American Insurance Group; Allied World Assurance; Apollo Advisors; The Blackstone Group; The Carlyle Group; Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Investigating Investcorp; Marsh & McLennan: The Marsh Birds; Paradise Paved; The Strange Saga of BCCI
See also: Seibu Group; Tsutsumi Yoshiaki
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From tripod.com:
Yakuza Stretch Tentacles Overseas
Like most growth-oriented enterprises, the yakuza have not confined their illegal — and legal — business activities to Japan. In the late 1960’s the Japanese mob took advantage of the sharp rise in Japanese tourism and began organizing “sex tours” to various countries in Southeast Asia.
The yakuza also began to recruit — or, more probably, to coerce — women from the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and other Southeast Asia countries to work as “hostesses” in mob-controlled brothels in Japan. The overseas push proved similarly lucrative for drug trading — primarily of Korean, Taiwanese and other sources of methamphetamine (known as “speed” on U.S. streets).
Gunrunning also evolved into a profitable activity since the sale of guns is controlled so strictly in Japan that the black market price for handguns can be as much as $5,000 to $7,000.
Gangsters typically have bought the guns abroad, mostly from criminal elements in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and the United States, and sold for exorbitant prices on the black market back home. . . .
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American law enforcement officials maintain that until 1974 yakuza activities in the U.S. were relatively limited, both in nature and scope. Not surprisingly, given its geographic proximity and brisk tourist trade, Hawaii initially attracted Japanese gangsters. Their focus there was on fleecing their own countrymen on yakuza-organized tours that included patronizing yakuza-run bars, restaurants, brothels and other entertainment.
As the yakuza’s economic power has grown, however, they have focused greater attention on picking other fruits from the U.S. market. In this regard, mobsters found that, partly due to its heavy tourist traffic, the fiftieth state was a prime market for selling Asian-made methamphetamine (usually at a cut-rate price compared to U.S.-made speed) and/or trading these drugs for handguns. . . .
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From its Hawaiian beachhead the Japanese mob has moved on to the mainland, stopping first in southern California but continuing its reach up the coast to such cities as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. As the yakuza have cultivated ties with other organized crime groups operating in the United States, American law enforcement officials have observed the Japanese mob in gambling centers, such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City, as well as in Newark, New Jersey, New York City and Boston. . . .
While the primary focus of the yakuza’s dealings with other organized crime groups still appears to be the trafficking in drugs and handguns, U.S. officials, aware of the Japanese mob’s expanded activity in the “above-ground” business world in Japan, have become increasingly worried about the extent to which the yakuza have been able to commingle their illicit profits with legitimate Japanese investment in the United States.
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Yakuza in Business and Politics.
The yakuza has always been involved in politics and business right from the start. The groups are always hungry for more power and money, wherever they can find it….
In 1987, Noboru Takeshita was elected prime minister in Japan. There were always suspicions of gangster ties in the election. When questioned on the accusations in 1992, Takeshita denied knowing at the time that the yakuza were involved….
The Liberal Democratic Party kingmaker was made to resign from politics in October 1992 when he admitted to receiving Y500m ($4 mil) from a delivery firm, Sagawa Kyubin. The owner of the firm, Hiroyasu Watanabe, paid the kingmaker for trying to help save his business….
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There is another yakuza incident that hits closer to home. West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based real estate firm, bought two American companies with help from none other than Prescott Bush, Jr. – President Bush’s elder brother….
West Tsusho is an arm of a company run by the Inagawa-kai’s leader, Ishii Susumu. . . . Tsusho purchased Quantum Access, a Houston-based software firm, and Asset Management International Financing & Settlement, a New York City-based company. . . .
With the anti-yakuza countermeasure act in place, the future for the yakuza seems bleak, at least in Japan.
The North American expansion could do very well, as they channel nearly $10 billion into legitimate investments not only in the US, but in Europe as well.
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From U.S. News and World Report, 4/13/98, by David Kaplan:
Yakuza, Inc.
U.S. investors are spending billions of dollars to snap up huge portfolios of bad loans from Japanese banks. What the local banks aren’t telling their new customers is that behind much of their economic woes stand Japan’s wily crime syndicates.
In the late 1980s, the yakuza became major players in the nation’s wildly speculative real-estate market. Japanese crime experts now believe that as much as 40 percent of the banking industry’s bad loans are tied to organized crime, representing a whopping $235 billion . . .
The gangs have played such havoc with efforts to clean up the banking mess that one former top Tokyo cop calls his nation’s economic crisis a “yakuza recession.” . . .
At the front lines of this crisis, suddenly, are American investors, among them a Who’s Who of equity funds, investment banks, and real estate trusts.
Over the next few years, U.S. financial companies hope to spend more than $20 billion on the bad-loan portfolios, according to real-estate specialists at Ernst & Young.
Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and others are betting that their experience in liquidating property will pay off big in Japan. The firms are paying as little as 10 cents on the dollar for Japanese properties that range from downtown high-rises to abandoned golf-course developments.
But the risks for U.S. investors are substantial. Yakuza experts warn that Western capital has never before collided with Japanese organized crime in such a major way….
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Risky business. . . . Investors may be unprepared for what awaits them. “You’ve got inexperienced guys from New York coming here who don’t know what they’re getting into,” says an investment banker with years of experience in Tokyo….
In November, a mysterious fire struck the home of a top executive at the Japan subsidiary of Cargill Inc., the U.S. argibusiness giant.
Cargill was among the first foreign firms to buy portfolios of bad loans. When the fire occurred, Cargill executives were suspicious of foul play.
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The majority of bad loans in Japan are tied to real estate.
Japanese authorities are also considering whether to allow securitization of bad loans, a tool the U.S. used effectively in cleaning up the savings and loan industry.
But the sale of securities based on yakuza-tied debt could make for unusual bedfellows.
Conceivably, pension-fund holders in Sarasota or Sacramento could end up earning interest on mafia-run brothels in Osaka….
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U.S. News obtained a … portfolio of 108 properties offered to Western investors by Mitsui Trust & Banking Co., one of Japan’s largest banks. Thirteen of the properties … are held by Azabu Building, a company that might not mean much to Americans but is quite familiar to Japanese police.
In early March, Azabu’s president, Kitaro Watanabe, received two years in prison for hiding some $18 million in assets from creditors. Azabu properties, moreover, are protected by groups tied to Tokyo’s largest crime syndicate, according to police….
The issue is sensitive enough that not one banker interviewed for this story — American or Japanese — would talk on the record. It’s easy to understand why. “These guys are a nightmare to deal with,” said a Tokyo banker responsible for collecting bad loans….
In 1993, Tomosaburo Koyama, a vice president of now bankrupt Hanwa Bank … was gunned down outside his home. Koyama headed a section of the bank that collected problem loans, and police believe the murder is tied to a dispute with a local yakuza gang.
A similar slaying occurred a year later, when the manager of a top branch of Sumitomo Bank was found shot through the head in his apartment building. Since 1991, assailants have committed dozens of violent acts against Japanese companies, including assaults, arson, and 21 shooting attacks on the homes of corporate executives. . .
It is not well understood in the West that key portions of Japan’s financial industry— debt collection, bankruptcy management, consumer finance — are heavily influenced by the yakuza.
What pushed the gangs so deeply into the financial world was Japan’s Bubble Economy, the huge speculative boom that sent real-estate and stock prices soaring in the late 1980s. In terms of sheer market capitalization, the Tokyo Stock Exchange became the world’s largest; the Osaka stock market bumped London’s Bourse to fourth place.
The value of real estate in Tokyo, on paper, was said to exceed that of the entire United States.
These overinflated assets became the collateral for a seemingly endless amount of credit extended to virtually any business in Japan –and the yakuza cashed in big. . . .
To Japanese who watched the gangs, it soon became clear that all this money was transforming the underworld. This new breed of criminal was dubbed the keizai yakuza, the economic gangster, and became the stuff of legend from Ginza nightclubs to Manhattan art auctions. . .
Dirty Money
The Bubble popped in 1990, plunging Japanese property and stock markets to lows from which they have yet to recover fully. Last January, the Ministry of Finance offered what analysts say is the first accurate accounting of the size of the bad loans left from the Bubble’s collapse — nearly $600 billion, an amount larger than America’s S&L debacle, in an economy less that half the size.
Cleaning up the S&Ls, moreover, seems easy compared with what the Japanese face. The S&Ls were looted largely by white-collar crooks, not by violent crime syndicates. Much of the money lent to the gangs has simply disappeared, hidden away in mob investments, spent on fast living, or lost with deflating stock and property values….
Faced with gangsters, ultra-nationalists, and unresponsive police, U.S. investors may find it hard to resist making handsome payoffs to the mob.
“On the big discounted properties, you may have to cooperate with organizations like mine,” advises godfather [Ryuma] Suzuki (who runs the Sumiyoshi-kai, a $1 billion crime syndicate with 7,000 employees). “Things can get a little rough out there.”
Privately, some U.S. investment bankers admit they may have to grease the wheels in order to clear their new properties.” The profit potential is big enough, says one, that there’s money to be made even after Suzuki’s commission of 40 percent….
But such decisions will have repercussions on both sides of the Pacific, say yakuza watchers.
If the gangs are paid off, it means a large infusion of American cash into the Japanese underworld — not a welcome thought for the United States, where yakuza practices have ranged from drug smuggling to extortion and money laundering.
Nor does it help the small band of Japanese reformers like Nakabo, who are struggling to change their system.
A more immediate threat, perhaps, is that posed to the investors themselves. As Japan’s banking industry found, the gangs do not easily go away. Until now, the yakuza have largely American business alone, but that may now change.
“In the short term, you’re getting an opportunity to make a profit,” says former FBI man Godfrey. “But you’re exposing yourself to paying off organized crime, and that could spill over to the rest of your business.”
As the Japanese like to say . . .
“Dealing with the yakuza is like feeding a tiger. If you try to stop, the tiger will eat you.”
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January 4, 1998
Yakuza may have faked Itami suicide
by George Alexander, Sun Tzu’s Newswire
STN – Bangkok – According to one Asia expert, Japanese organized crime groups may have faked the death of internationally acclaimed motion picture director Juzo Itami. The award winning movie maker had been severely scarred from a vicious slashing attack by Yakuza in 1992, delivered as a warning.
According to police reports in Japan, Itami died last month from injuries caused by a fall from the eighth floor of the building where his office was located.
Rex Osgood, an international policy consultant and specialist in Asian affairs said from Bangkok that he has watched the Yakuza crime syndicates for more than 30 years, and he says that Itami’s death may not be just another suicide.
Osgood said Japanese police should not rule out murder because: “The Yakuza had plenty of motives to silence Itami and set an example.”
Osgood recalled that in the 1970s and 1980s the Yakuza perfected the faking of suicides and accidental deaths for purposes of insurance fraud, enforcement, revenge, and intimidation of enemies….
Killing of oneself for reasons of honor and disgrace are common in Japan and police are prone to quickly dispose of unexplained deaths as suicides, according to Osgood.
Osgood added, “Bribery and corruption of Japan’s police by Yakuza are not unheard of. The Japanese police are very good, but they are not going to be anxious to dig very far on this one.”
People in Japan are finding it hard to believe that Itami would take his own life simply because a magazine threatened to expose an alleged love affair.
If they know, or suspect anything, Japan’s National Police and the news media have been close-mouthed about a possible Yakuza hit on the popular movie director.
Itami made a habit of portraying Yakuza in a negative light in his movies. The Yakuza tend to think of themselves as modern samurai with a Robin Hood streak of concern for the weak and poor….
After release of his 1992 movie ‘Minbo no onna’ Itami was attacked by Yakuza and hospitalized with a slashed face. Five gangsters went to jail for the assault. The movie was released in the U.S. under the title “The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion”.
Itami’s movies are popular outside of Japan and have sent a warning message about Japan’s criminal class to the rest of the world.
Yakuza gangs are often indistinguishable from Japan’s secretive ultranationalist societies and from 1895-1945 the societies and gangs were linked to war crimes including opium distribution in China, procurement of comfort women sex slaves and operation of brothels.
Following World War II, General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation government reached an accommodation with Yakuza, ultranationalists and militarists, including war criminals. Both sides benefitted from the arrangement and the Yakuza collected information, controlled labor unions and opposed Japan’s communists, but also had a free hand in blackmarkets and vice.
Modern Yakuza are involved in sex industries, liquor distribution, labor control, construction, transportation, gambling, and worldwide smuggling of anything that is contraband. Japanese news sources assert that Yakuza are involved in Japan’s current financial woes, including the outright collapse of Yamaichi Securities.
The Yakuza syndicates have formed working arrangements with organized crime rings from Sicily, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia, Jamaica, Columbia and the United States.
They deal in any and all contraband — women, computer chips, drugs, children and guns, and even weapons sought by terrorists such as the Aum Shinri-kyo cult.
According to Osgood; it is “the failure to control their criminal class that has brought Japan into a cooperative effort with Canada and Columbia under the aegis of the United Nations.”
Osgood said that: “This could eventually lead to worldwide gun control, with registration of firearms, ammunition and their owners enforced by virtue of U.N. membership. But, Yakuza trafficking in dangerous drugs, and women and children for prostitution and pedophilia, will continue unabated long after the dreams of global gun prohibitionists come true.”
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From The Laundrymen . . .
The Yakuza, Japan’s equivalent of the Italian Mafia, is said to consist of at least 165,000 members and to have an annual turnover approaching $70 billion.
A centuries-old traditional alliance made up of thousands of warrior clans, whose members identify themselves with multicolored tattoos, one of its more effective tactics has been company extortion. The Yakuza approach publicly held corporations and threaten that unless the company comes up with protection money, they’ll disrupt the shareholders’ next annual general meeting….
They are also into dealing drugs, and seem to have cornered the “ice” market in Hawaii — ice being crystal methamphetamine, a staple of drug users in the islands…
At least fifty major properties in Hawaii are said to be owned by Japanese criminals. The FBI scored a big win there in 1992 when they lured Mitsuo Yoshimura out of Tokyo and into a Honolulu resort hotel. He thought he was there to finalize a $5 million “ice” deal.
Arrested on U.S. soil, the 43-year-old boss of the Kyokushin-kai faction became the first, and to date only, Yakuza leader to be convicted in the United States. . . .
But according to a former Yakuza member who testified before a Senate investigations panel, Hawaii is not their only area of interest in America.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of Yakuza money has been poured into hotels and golf courses around the country.
Many of the private Japanese gambling clubs that dot midtown Manhattan are also believed to be backed by Yakuza groups. . .
When they first went international, they relied almost entirely on banks to launder their money.
At the beginning of the 1970s, however, the Yakuza discovered stockbroking.
With the help of Malaysian Chinese gangs, they opened brokerages in Malaysia and Singapore.
As their business grew, they moved quickly into Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
It is alleged they’ve now opened shop in the United States. . . .
Cash is funneled in one end, and shares in legitimate companies that pay legitimate dividends come out the other….
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Now, here’s a whole flock of Yakuza Doodle Dandies and a few of their nests.
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Apollo Advisors – Financial investment managers. 13th largest campaign contributor to Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate, and a client of lobbying firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.
Another of Akin, Gump’s clients is Miller & Chavalier, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm which, together with PricewaterhouseCoopers, drafted the multi-million dollar IRS settlement agreement for Hawaii’s Kamehameha Schools.
Apollo Advisors has another connection with Kamehameha Schools: Along with National Housing Corp (which was involved in an alleged kick-back scheme with ousted Bishop Estate trustees Henry Peters and Richard Wong), Apollo has financial interests in several estate owned properties involving two alleged Yakuza-connected companies: Azabu Building Company and Mitsui Trust.
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From Hoovers On-Line: Apollo Advisors earned its reputation as a vulture investor by specializing in distressed assets (junk bonds, troubled companies, real estate).
Leon Black, the former Drexel Burnham Lambert mergers and acquisitions chief, and a dozen other Drexel refugees founded the group, which invested in former Drexel clients after that firm’s collapse — notably the $3 billion dollar junk bond portfolio of failed California insurer Executive Life.
Apollo has invested billions from four funds and has launched a fifth fund aimed at raising some $4 billion.
Apollo is linked with the Artemis group of investment holdings controlled by French billionaire François Pinault; the relationship dates back to the downfall of Executive Life.
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From Hoovers Online: NRT is Not a Realty Trust anymore.
The #1 residential real estate company in the US began life in 1996 as National Realty Trust, established by real estate franchisor HFS (now Cendant) to own the nearly 400 real estate offices that came with the purchase of Coldwell Banker.
Cendant and a subsidiary of Apollo Advisors restructured the trust into NRT to snap up successful independent realtors in hot metropolitan markets and rebrand them under Cendant’s franchise names (Century 21, Coldwell Banker, and ERA).
The realtor has more than 700 offices in about 25 markets. After a planned IPO was aborted due to a tumbling market, NRT remains controlled by Cendant and Apollo Advisors. . . .
For more, GO TO > > > Apollo
Asset Management International Financing & Settlement – A New York City-based company purchased by West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based company allegedly connected with the Yakuza.
This deal was brokered by none other than Prescott Bush, Jr., older brother of former President George H.W. Bush….
For more on Prescott Bush, Jr., GO TO > > > Hail to the Chief
Azabu Building Company – Azabu Building purchased a number of major hotel properties in Hawaii during the 1980’s “big bubble” years, with Mitsui Trust providing much of the financing. Several of the properties were on land leased from Bishop Estate.
When the bubble burst, Azabu and Mitsui were forced to liquidate many of their properties at huge losses— some of which were purchased by entities in which Apollo Advisors, Goldman Sachs, National Housing Corporation, Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate, and Trinity Investment Trust were connected.
From U.S. News & World Report, 04/13/98, by David Kaplan:
Yakuza, Inc.
American investors are spending billions of dollars to snap up portfolios of bad loans from Japanese banks. That could put them on a collision course with notorious Japanese crime syndicates called “yakuza”. . . .
The wiser U.S. firms … are hiring high-powered investigators and law firms in Tokyo to go through the portfolios loan by loan …“they all have the same questions … who are we dealing with? Who’s in the building?”
One portfolio of 49 loans examined … found that 40 percent of the borrowers had ties to organized crime. Fully 25 percent of them had criminal records ranging from disrupting auctions to assault, extortion, and rape.
U.S. News obtained a similar portfolio of 108 properties offered to Western investors by Mitsui Trust & Banking Co., one of Japan’s largest banks.
Thirteen of the properties — including condos, undeveloped land, and parking lots in Tokyo — are held by Azabu Building, a company that might not mean much to Americans but is quite familiar to Japanese police. In early March, Azabu’s president, Kitaro Watanabe, received two years in prison for hiding some $18 million in assets from creditors.
Azabu properties, moreover, are protected by groups tied to Tokyo’s largest crime syndicate, according to police. One investigator who ventured onto one of Watanabe’s properties was held hostage for an hour by its “tenants,” until the gang’s boss telephoned the hapless fellow, according to the man’s associates. “Next time you come out here, come with the proper introductions!” shouted the godfather.
“Go home, wash your face, and come visit us again.”…
Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi – The bank that says “YES” … to the Yakuza.
March 14, 2001
19 Japanese Banks Placed on Credit Watch
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
After the close of today’s trading in Asia, Fitch IBCA placed 19 Japanese banks of “Rating Watch Negative” because of concern about their asset quality….
Among the banks are Japan’s largest, including Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Fuji Bank, Sumitomo Bank and Sanwa Bank….
Much of Japan’s bad loan problem is related to the decreased value of land offered as collateral during the bubble economy of the 1980s.
Although billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been funneled to help resolve the bad loans racked up by banks, problem loans still total a staggering 64 trillion yen ($331 billion)…
The newest big fear on Wall Street is that Japan’s economic problems will cut into demand in that country for U.S. goods and services – leading to a further drop in American stock prices. . . .
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From Organized Crime Registry: Who Got Yakuza Into Our Banking System? —
Business Week carried a feature story in its Jan 29, 1996 edition with the headline, “The Yakuza and the Banks” . . . The main focus of the parliamentary debate begun recently is whether tax money should be used to bail out the special housing loan companies, “jusen,” whose management collapsed under the weight of trillions of yen in bad loans. . . .
The seven failed jusen companies have a combined total of claims amounting to 13.2 trillion yen, at least half of which was lent to the yakuza (organized crime)-related companies at the peak of the economic bubble. . .
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Rueter’s News Service, 02/16/98:
Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Toyko-Mitsubishi (BTM) Linked to Bribery Scandal
Two of Japan’s leading banks, Sumitomo and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, were implicated on Monday in a widening bribery scandal involving officials at Japan’s powerful Ministry of Finance (MoF). . .
Tokyo prosecutors on Monday issued a fresh arrest warrant against tow MoF inspectors . . . on suspicion of receiving bribes from Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, as well as Sanwa Bank, in exchange for confidential information. . . . Many of them were encroached by Kanto-based yakuza, incurring massive losses in failed stock and land speculation. . .
The article by Insider said: “MOF at the end of 1984, through the underground connections of former officials, requested the then leader of Yamaguchi Gumi, the late Takenaka Masahisa, to come to Tokyo and help kick out Kanto-based yakuza from Sogo banks.” . . .
At the time, Yamaguchi Gumi was in the midst of an internal breakup, and Takenaka needed money. He immediately complied with the request and went to Tokyo to start talks with the Kanto-based yakuza. But immediately after, he was killed by an unknown assassin.
However, taking advantage of this situation, Yamaguchi Gumi not only expanded its business territory but also started interacting openly with the bank’s top management with the consent of the Ministry. . . .
Cargill, Inc. – From Corporate Predators: Clean Food or Irradiated Dirty Food? (12/8/97):
The irradiation industry is betting that consumers will settle for the latter.
Earlier this month, in response to a petition filed by Isomedix, a New Jersey radiation firm, the Food and Drug administration (FDA) authorized the use of irradiation— a process by which food is exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation— for meat products including beef, lamb and pork. Irradiation is already permitted in the United States for poultry. Irradiation kills significant numbers of micro-organisms, such as e. coli. . . .
Companies like Isomedix are hoping to ride the wave of justified public concern over outbreaks of e. coli and other food contaminants to overcome consumer resistance to the controversial irradiation process. Public opinion polls show three quarters of the population oppose irradiation and would refuse to eat irradiated food.
There are sound reasons underlying consumer resistance to irradiation.
First, although the FDA has approved the use of irradiation, there are serious uncertainties surrounding the safety of irradiated foods. “No long-term studies on the safety of eating irradiated beef have been conducted, and the effects on humans are unknown,” notes Michael Colby, executive director of Food & Water, Inc., a Vermont-based food safety organization that is the leading opponent of food irradiation.
Second, irradiation kills “good” as well as “bad” bacteria. That means if beef becomes contaminated after irradiation, dangerous bacteria will be free to multiply without competition from harmless bacteria.
Third, irradiation fails to deal with the real food safety problem: unhealthy conditions on animal farms and in slaughterhouses and packing-houses.
In the last two decades, the meat and poultry industries have become tremendously concentrated, with each sector dominated by a handful of giants like ConAgra, Cargill, Perdue and Tyson. These companies buy animals raised on “factory farms,” where the animals are confined to small spaces in which bacteria can easily spread.
The animals are transported to increasingly mechanized slaughterhouses and processing plants, where feces routinely spill or spray on meat, and chicken carcasses are dipped in cold water tanks contaminated with fecal material. Animals pass by workers on the corporate assembly lines at staggering speeds— often too fast for the workers to maintain proper sanitation standards, or even to identify contaminants on meat or poultry.
Genuinely insuring a safe food supply requires addressing these conditions so that animals are raised, slaughtered and processed in sanitary conditions.
There are other reasons to reject irradiation. At existing irradiation facilities (which overwhelmingly sterilize products like medical equipment rather than food), there is already a disturbing record of worker overexposure to nuclear radiation and of improper disposal of radioactive waste….
The solution to the problem of dirty and contaminated meat and poultry is to clean up the beef, pork and poultry farms and the factories in which animals are slaughtered and processed— not to expose the food to nuclear radiation. That’s the message consumers must send to the beef, pork and poultry companies, supermarkets, restaurant chains and other big food distributors. . . .
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U.S. News and World Report, 4/13/98, by David Kaplan: Yakuza, Inc. . . . U.S. investors are spending billions of dollars to snap up huge portfolios of bad loans from Japanese banks. What the local banks aren’t telling their new customers is that behind much of their economic woes stand Japan’s wily crime syndicates.
In the late 1980s, the yakuza became major players in the nation’s wildly speculative real-estate market. Japanese crime experts now believe that as much as 40 percent of the banking industry’s bad loans are tied to organized crime, representing a whopping $235 billion . . .
At the front lines of this crisis, suddenly, are American investors, among them a Who’s Who of equity funds, investment banks, and real estate trusts. . . .
But the risks for U.S. investors are substantial. Yakuza experts warn that Western capital has never before collided with Japanese organized crime in such a major way. . .
Risky business.
Investors may be unprepared for what awaits them. “You’ve got inexperienced guys from New York coming here who don’t know what they’re getting into,” says an investment banker with years of experience in Tokyo. . . .
In November, a mysterious fire struck the home of a top executive at the Japan subsidiary of Cargill Inc., the U.S. argibusiness giant.
Cargill was among the first foreign firms to buy portfolios of bad loans. When the fire occurred, Cargill executives were suspicious of foul play….
For more, GO TO > > > The Biotech Birds
Castle & Cooke – From The Honolulu Advertiser, 5/8/86: Mililani Golf Course sold to Japanese firm . . .
Oceanic Properties, Inc. yesterday announced sale of the Mililani Golf Course to a Japanese company …
The new owner, Sports Shinko Co. Ltd, plans “to beautify and improve the course …”
The seller, Oceanic Properties is the real estate subsidiary of Castle & Cooke, Inc. . . .
Sports Shinko Co was organized in 1959 by its president, Toshio Kinoshita, and opened its first golf course in 1962. It currently manages 26 golf courses in Japan . . .
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From: The Buying of the President (1996 ed): . . .
Phil Gramm has also been criticized for mixing government business and campaign politics by using his Senate office staff to work on campaigns. . . . At least two different aides to Senator Gramm have written memos about how Gramm’s wife, Wendy…should be used for his reelection bid. . . .
That is particularly interesting in light of the powerful position she held in Washington as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As the nation’s leading regulator of futures contracts for all agricultural commodities, Wendy Gramm was under tight ethical constraints as to the degree and nature of her personal daily interaction with agribusiness interests. In other words, the chairwoman of the powerful federal regulatory agency overseeing agriculture commodities futures trading would be helping her U.S. senator husband raise campaign funds from the corporations and individuals she regulated. . . .
The CFTC oversees federal regulation of the nation’s fourteen commodities and futures exchanges. At those exchanges, contracts to buy and sell a seemingly endless variety of commodities are traded: oil and gas, soybeans, cattle, pork belies, corn, precious metals, cocoa, lumber, cranberries, and sugar, to name but a few. The regulatory duties of the CFTC are aimed largely at ensuring fairness and stability at the nation’s commodities exchanges.
One week after Bill Clinton won the presidential election it became clear that Wendy Gramm would be leaving the politically appointed CFTC post. On November 16, 1992, nine energy companies wrote to the commission seeking to exempt energy derivative contracts, a business valued at $5 TRILLION a year, from federal regulation. . . .
In response to the energy companies’ request, Wendy Gramm set in motion the process that led to those energy derivative contracts, and other exotic financial transactions, being exempted from regulation. . . . A Center for Public Integrity investigation shows that of the nine companies that requested the exemption, seven had donated to Phil Gramm campaigns through PACs, company officers, or employees. . . .
Cumulatively, Gramm’s campaigns had received $157,250 from the people who were asking his wife to exempt energy derivatives and the other transactions from regulation. …
During Wendy Gramm’s tenure with the commodities commission, Phil Gramm accepted $38,500 in commodity honoraria, according to his actual disclosure records. . . At the same time she was heading the commodities commission, he was on the Senate Banking committee. That means that Phil Gramm, too, had regulatory jurisdiction and oversight regarding commodities.
On July 24, 1990, Phil Gramm voted to kill an amendment that would have lowered the sugar price support from eighteen cents a pound to sixteen cents a pound. That was a potential conflict of interest because Gramm’s disclosure show that at the time the couple owned between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in a sugar company named Castle and Cooke.
See also: Sports Shinko
Central Pacific Bank – one of Hawaii’s largest commercial banks, formerly majority-owned by Japan’s giant Sumitomo Bank. The major financial asset of Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI).
See also: Sumitomo Bank
Chris Hemmeter – From Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 11/1/99, by Richard Borreca:
Hawaii Land: The Source of Power, the Pot of Gold at Rainbow’s End
At the time of statehood, ownership was concentrated, with fewer than 100 owners holding half of all the land. – Hawaii’s dream and nightmare dovetailed into one: develop the land, make every parcel as valuable as possible.
“Ten years from now I envision Honolulu to be largely concrete and steel, with some coconut trees sprinkled throughout,” boasted Lowell Dillingham, developer of the Ala Moana Center, in 1961. . . .
While commercial real estate was valuable, it was the tourism boom that echoed through the new high-rise canyons of Waikiki. Jumbo hotels– built to match the lumbering jumbo jets which began coming regularly in 1970.
Between 1968 and 1971, 17,140 hotel rooms were created in Waikiki . . .
The Kalakaua Avenue view of Diamond Head was first blocked by the 1970 Holiday Inn, with its 650 rooms rising 25 stories high. Today, the hotel is called the Hawaiian Waikiki Beach Hotel.
But perhaps the building boom’s crescendo sounded in 1974, when young developer Chris Hemmeter blew up the Biltmore Hotel to build the first super-block, the Hemmeter Center and the adjacent King’s Alley.
The hotel was the Hyatt Regency . . .
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Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 10/9/99, by Peter Wagner: Grand Developer Down But Not Out – He blew into town, built an empire and lost it in New Orleans. Somewhere along the way, Chris Bagwell Hemmeter became an icon among Hawaii developers and set a new standard for lavish “fantasy” resorts.
His legacy in Hawaii, a mixed bag of opulence and elegance, includes the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, Hyatt Regency Waikoloa, Hyatt Regency Maui, Westin Maui, Westin Kauai, King’s Alley in Waikiki and Hemmeter Corporation Center in downtown Honolulu.
Hemmeter was 22 and just out of Cornell University when he arrived in Hawaii in 1962 to become assistant manager at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.(which sits on land leased from Bishop Estate). … He parlayed a $10,000 loan from his parents first into retail stores, then restaurants, before turning his energy to resort developments.
Hemmeter’s high-flying fortunes began to plunge in 1995 with two Chapter 11 bankruptcies and a Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy filed in 1997, brought on by the failure of Mississippi gambling boats and an $800 million casino in New Orleans.
The personal bankruptcy, a liquidation now being closed in Los Angeles, showed $847,000 in assets and $87 million in debts.
“We bet the whole company on our project in New Orleans, based on the advice and counsel of the investment community and everybody else involved, and it didn’t work out,” he said Thursday from his Los Angeles home. “I guess that’s what risk-takers do.”
But Hemmeter, who turns 60 Monday, is hard to keep down. He and his son, Mark Hemmeter, are developing a $225 million hotel, lodge and casino in Black Hawk, Colo. “Jackpot Springs” is due to open in two years. . . .
See also: Azabu Building Co; Mitsui Trust & Banking Company
Coconut Island – Better known to millions of TV viewers as “Gilligan’s Island”.
From sheep to science – Coconut Island
by Nathalie Parkvall, editor, HPU Student Newspaper
Before 1930, Bishop Estate-owned Coconut Island, or Moku O Lo ‘e, was a 12-acre island used as a base for local shepherds and fishermen. Little did anyone know that the island would gain national notoriety by being featured in the opening credits of the popular ‘60s TV show Gilligan’s Island, and few could foresee the many changes that would make the island a rather special place today.
Over the decades, the Kaneohe Bay-located island was transformed many times. It was as a location for a tuna-packing factory, it became a rich man’s private paradise with a bowling alley and a small zoo, and today it is the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology’s research center (HIMB) owned by University of Hawai‘i. . . .
Coconut Island, named after its many coconut palm trees, has a long history of many different owners. In the 1930s, Christian Holmes, owner of Hawaiian Tuna Packers (now Coral Tuna) bought the island from Bishop Estate to use as a tuna-packing factory. As he wasn’t satisfied with the size of the island, he decided to enlarge it to 28 acres, more than double its original size, using material taken from a sandbar in Kaneohe Bay.
Holmes had a vision of creating a private paradise, so while working on increasing the size of the island he also enhanced it by building a saltwater swimming pool and fishponds (which later became useful for HIMB) and adding numerous exotic plants and trees. He also built a bowling alley, brought a shooting gallery from an amusement park in San Francisco, and built bars at several spots on the island. He also made a bar with a movie theater out of a 4-masted schooner, Seth Parker, which he couldn’t sail anymore since it leaked. This boat was later featured in the movie Wake of the Red Witch starring John Wayne.
Holmes wasn’t satisfied with his paradise until it also housed a small zoo, including such animals as donkeys, monkeys, a giraffe, and a baby elephant, which were later donated to the Honolulu Zoo when Holmes died in 1944. After his death, the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station (now Kaneohe Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i) used the island as a rest and recuperation post for its officers until five wealthy oil men purchased the island in 1947.
Eventually one of the men, Edwin Pauley, became the sole owner and utilized the island as a summer residence for his family, entertaining many famous people, including Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Red Skelton, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
In 1951, Pauley invited scientists from UH-Manoa to establish a marine lab on a part of the island. He leased the land “rent-free” to help establish the Hawai‘i Marine Lab, which moved into the barracks previously built by the Marine Corps. In 1961, a fire destroyed the marine lab, but with help of a $300,000 donation from Pauley, a new lab was built, which became the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in 1965.
After Pauley’s death in 1981, the estate was put up for sale. After 17 months with no buyer, a proposal was made for the state to buy the island. However, the negotiations took several years and before the state made up its mind, Katsuhiro Kawaguchi, a Japanese real estate developer, made an offer of $8.5 million for the private part of the island and bought it in 1987.
In 1992, Kawaguchi was deported due to criminal activities and forced to sell the property. The Pauley family bought the island back for $2 million and donated it to UH. In addition, the Pauley Foundation and Trustees granted $7.6 million to the university for constructing a new marine lab to be named the Pauley-Pagen Laboratory. The new laboratory opened in 1998 with 17,000 square-foot-building, housing laboratories, classrooms, and a library.
The new laboratory specializes in two tropical marine biology areas——biodiversity and biotechnology. With the expanded marine research facilities, the future looks bright for HIMB and Coconut Island.
© 2001, Kalamalama, the HPU Student Newspaper. All rights reserved.
See also: Katsuhiro Kawaguchi
For more, GO TO > > > Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Vampires on Gilligan’s Island
Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank – From nando.com, 7/5/97: Tokyo banks gripped by reign of terror –
Kuniju Miyazaki, former chairman of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank had had enough. After the two days of grueling questioning by investigators, who were looking into his bank’s payment of billions of yen to a corporate blackmailer, he felt physically and psychologically wrecked.
A further interrogation was scheduled last Sunday afternoon. But early that morning he wrote an apologetic letter to his sleeping wife and another letter to his fellow directors, and hanged himself from a bookcase in his bedroom.
The 67-year-old bank executive is the latest victim in a widening scandal surrounding illegal payments made by DKB, Nomura Securities and other Japanese firms to Ryuichi Koike, a self-confessed racketeer. . . .
Daiwa Bank – From a Press Release by the US Atty, Southern Dist of NY, 11/2/95:
CRIMINAL INDICTMENT OF DAIWA BANK
It was announced today that a 24-count indictment has been filed in Manhattan federal court against THE DAIWA BANK, LTD. (“DAIWA”).
DAIWA is charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, obstructing an examination of a financial institution, falsification of bank records, and misprision of felonies by failing to disclose federal crimes.
The charges arise out of the unauthorized sale of securities from DAIWA’s custody account, including the sale of more than $375 million in customer securities, by Toshihide Iguchi, a former Executive VP at the New York Branch, which were used to cover trading losses incurred by Iguchi….
According to the Indictment, DAIWA learned in mid-July 1995 that Iguchi had lost more than $1.1 billion through unauthorized trading in US govt securities, and the sale of securities belonging to DAIWA’s customers to conceal those losses….
If convicted on the criminal charges filed today, DAIWA faces maximum fines under the federal Sentencing Guidelines exceeding $1 billion….
DAIWA is a Japanese bank headquartered in Osaka, Japan. DAIWA is one of Japan’s largest commercial banks and maintains branches around the world, including offices in NY and 10 other states in the US.
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The Detroit News, 10/26/96: Daiwa Bank Executive Sentenced for Cover-up of Unauthorized Bond Trades – The former general manager of Daiwa Bank’s New York branch was sentenced Friday to two months in jail and fined $100,000 for hiding $1.1 billion in losses from unauthorized bond trades.
Masahiro Tsuda was one of two Daiwa employees charged in the attempt to conceal 12 years worth of government bond trading losses from federal regulators before the Japanese bank revealed the coverup last summer.
Tsuda, 55, pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to defraud government regulators. He admitted helping the bank hide losses run up by Toshihide Iguchi….
Iguchi pleaded guilty nearly a year ago to charges that include misapplication of bank funds, money laundering, and conspiracy….
Daiwa Bank pleaded guilty on Feb 2 to conspiracy charges, paid a $340 million fine and closed down its US operations.
The fine was the largest ever against a financial institution in this country on criminal charges….
Fuji Bank – From Compromised – Clinton, Bush and the CIA: . . . Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, Arkansas has set in place permanent money-laundering industry concealed as their everyday municipal bond business. They do not care where funds come from, in fact, dirtier is better. . .
Regardless of the method used by the money launderer, the common denominator is finding a bank or financial institution along with people in a position of power who are willing to break the law and not ask questions. Money laundering, by definition, involves commingling clean and dirty funds and making both indistinguishable. Arkansas offered this environment under the umbrella of its cooperative bond business.
An example of this is the deposit of $50 million offshore by the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority (ADFA) with Fuji Bank, Ltd., in the Cayman Islands on Dec 29, 1988. This was a very strange transaction, indeed, for an organization chartered and founded on lending money for investment and development within Arkansas, not for moving large sums of funds offshore.
Fuji Bank’s name reappears as the bank that purchased the industrial development loan of POM, Inc., the parking meter company in Russellville, Arkansas, owned and operated by the Ward family . . .
By purchasing the loan from First American Bank of Memphis, Tenn., Fuji effectively retired the loan, and the Ward family presumably continued making their payments directly to Fuji. This was curious behavior on behalf of POM, since they were giving up a long-term, fixed-rate, low-interest loan issued by ADFA, which had a guarantor, the bank in Memphis, to back it up.
Curious behavior, indeed, to forfeit a loan that has a co-signor, since this action would normally reduce a company’s line of credit. Unless, of course, the objective was to move the loan offshore, where repayment ledgers are nearly impossible to attain.
Webb Hubbell, Hillary Clinton’s law partner, was POM’s corporate attorney at the time.
ADFA, being a state authority, is not legally required to publicly divulge its records. And, therefore, the millions of dollars that flow through the Arkansas agency’s coffers can be shrouded in secrecy . . .
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From Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 3/14/01: 19 Japanese Banks Placed on Credit Watch – Fitch IBCA’s Negative Rating Outlook Sends Worldwide Stock Markets Reeling and Pushes the Yen to a 20-Month Low Against the Dollar…
After the close of today’s trading in Asia, Fitch IBCA placed 19 Japanese banks of “Rating Watch Negative” because of concern about their asset quality. . . .
Among the banks are Japan’s largest, including Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Fuji Bank, Sumitomo Bank and Sanwa Bank. . . .
Much of Japan’s bad loan problem is related to the decreased value of land offered as collateral during the bubble economy of the 1980s.
Although billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been funneled to help resolve the bad loans racked up by banks, problem loans still total a staggering 64 trillion yen ($331 billion)…
The newest big fear on Wall Street is that Japan’s economic problems will cut into demand in that country for U.S. goods and services – leading to a further drop in American stock prices….
Gene and Nora Lum – A couple from Hawaii who were deeply involved in the Democratic fund-raising scandals.
From PBS Frontline: . . .
Interview with Donna Wong
Donna Wong is a Kailua, Hawaii, neighborhood board member who happened to be on an organized hike with Gene Lum when a group of horsemen stole nearby rancher Leonard Wong’s cattle and slaughtered his prize bull.
Wong and others also filed a 1989 Federal Elections Commission complaint alleging illegal foreign contributions to local politicians.
Five years later, FEC investigators found more than 100 violations of federal campaign law….
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Q: What are the purposes of neighborhood boards here on the island?
Wong: To look at land issues, development, how things are changing, what is needed in the community, what is going on, what is good and what is bad.
Q: So it tends to look at things such as zoning restrictions …
Wong: Absolutely, yes. . . .
Q: Did the sort of cases you were considering remain constant? Or did they vary?
Wong: Well … not very many big issues came up in our small town of Kailua, except when a golf course was proposed in a very pristine valley . . . We learned that a foreign Japanese entity was looking at purchasing over 1,000 acres and putting in two golf courses. And that was a shock: Where’d the golf course come from? Why a golf course in Kailua, and just basically what is going on? . . .
Q: It’s not land that was earmarked for golf course development?
Wong: No, it was agricultural land. And until there was a change in the law in 1986, golf courses had to go through a permitting system. And then the laws was changed and golf courses were automatically permitted on agricultural land, and then we came smack up against that, like what do we do now?
Q: Why was the law changed?
Wong: Well, what we’ve come to learn now is to smooth the way for this Royal Hawaiian Country Club golf course in Kailua.
Q: So the Royal Hawaiian interests were locally powerful and prominent Hawaiians who were well enough connected to get the law changed?
Wong: Well … some lived in Hawaii, some acted as consultants, some acted as attorneys for the foreign investment money.
Q: What was at stake?
Wong: What was at stake is there happened to be farmers on this land … 150 acres for each golf course, and there were two that were being proposed . . . So what happens to these farmers?
Q: And what had the new landowner and the developers proposed be done with these farmers?
Wong: Well, there was a conditional use permit that said the farmers had first right of refusal for relocation. And the neighborhood board and others worked real hard to get that in so that there would be a safety net for the farmers.
Q: So that at least if they’re going to be moved, and their land is going to be made into a golf course, they would have someplace else to live and presumably, to farm.
Wong: Right. . . . and so we felt assured that they were sort of taken of … until someone came up to me personally and said, “Donna, we got an eviction notice. Don’t we have any rights?” And so I proceeded to tell them, what about the conditional use permit? Well, neither the landowner nor the state had told them about this permit or about any of their rights. They just went in with this eviction notice and said, “You’ve got to get out of here.”
Q: And were they evicted?
Wong: Thankfully, the community stepped in and raised the issue, and they would have been evicted if lawsuits had not been filed to stay off an eviction. Eventually, after four or five years they were evicted.
Q: So you all were able at least to hold up the eviction, and therefore hold up the development of this golf course for a few years. Is it at this point that Gene and Nora Lum enter the deal as fixers for the people who have tens of millions of dollars at stake in the project?
Wong: They enter at the beginning. . . . There is an Old Government Road that runs through the valley, and Gene was brought in at this time. This is one of my first contacts with him, on a hike that was put together by the director of the state Dept of Land and Natural Resources. It was exchanging this Old Government Road for this insufficient trail, but he was trying to convince everyone that this was a good deal.
Q: And he represents himself how, as being a representative of this development company?
Wong: Oh, he did, yes.. . .
Q: Do you think the Lums were instrumental at all in the political maneuvering that was necessary to changing the law?
Wong: Sure. It was surprising to see Gene representing the developer at the hike, as an attorney, and then to see him show up at the city council working for the city council chair of the planning committee. . . .
Q: Where did the Lums fit into the “grease” game?
Wong: They came right at the beginning of the Japanese money boom. And so that just started a whole snowball of money and all that the money bought, whether it was permits or anything else like that. . . .
Q: . . . What happened to the farmers?
Wong: They were evicted, and it wasn’t an easy eviction.
Q: How so?
Wong: They were, well, sort of put on notice that any minute now they’re going to come in and they’re just going to bulldoze down their homes. They sort of had a 24-hour watch to start up a phone tree to call and say, okay, they’re coming. And then one day they just did.
You would have though it was a war zone. There were marshals, there were sheriffs, there were police. Helicopters. You know, there were elderly people, working class people, kids. It was terrible. They just went in and packed up all their belongings in moving trucks, held everybody else at bay, and then went in and just bulldozed their houses.
Q: Were they armed?
Wong: Oh yeah, lots of guns.
Q: So you have this small armed posse coming in to forcefully remove people from the places they’ve lived and made their living.
Wong: Yeah, for no reason. And it’s a foreign entity that’s been aided by our local Hawaiian attorneys, consultants, politicians. These are dispensable people. These are small people. They could go.
Q: So you have these middle men, these enablers, these fixers … people such as the Lums, who helped to grease the way, both politically and otherwise. Are they ever held accountable?
Wong: We tried. We tried going after the mayor, we tried the governor, we tried the DNLR … and we were ignored. The powers to be to get this golf course through were just way too much for just small people.
Q: And at the end of the day it came down to money.
Wong: Yeah. There was a lot of money to be made. . . .
Q: Is this when the Wong’s bull was butchered?
Wong: That was before the eviction, but the Lums were definitely involved. . . . Gene was on the hike that day. I was hiking right behind him . . . Shots were fired, pantiolos were riding on this little trail. I said, “What are these guys doing on this trail? We’re hiking.” “Oh, they’re here to protect you from the cattle.”
Q: I assume it’s not the usual thing one runs into on a nature hike.
Wong: No, not at all. And to hear gun shots, no. But afterwards, we learned that’s when they were stealing the Wongs’ cattle and shot the bull.
Q: Were there any environmental issue at stake?
Wong: Oh, there’s a lot of environmental issues at stake. This watershed, 11.5 miles, is the main water source for Kawainui Marsh, which is the largest freshwater marsh in this state. The golf course came in and they were allowed to channelize the streams … so it cut down on this water source to this significant marsh. Bulldozing, of course, caused a lot of runoff, which eventually ends up in this marsh, as do the pesticides and the herbicides and the fertilizers and all the chemicals that are used on a golf course.
Q: And you have no state environmental protection agency?
Wong: Well, we do. We have those departments, and we have very good environmental and land use laws, but just not one ever enforces them…
Q: And how did the people who built this golf course fare?
Wong: Well, I don’t know how they fared individually, but the golf course went bankrupt. . . .
Q: And what happened to the people who were moved off their land?
Wong: They had to go picket in front of the governor’s house to get their belongings out of storage … and then they just scattered. Some have gone to the Philippines, some have moved to other islands, and they just haven’t done well. And they had a very close community. It was a rural community in an urban setting.
Q: It just ceased to exist?
Wong: It was bulldozed out of existence.
Q: And the Lums?
Wong: Oh, thy went on to what they consider was greener pastures when they went to the Big Island with another golf course. . . .
Q: I get the impression that the favored procedure was to channel money from foreign investors through people like the Lums, who would pass it on to local politicians and facilitate whatever needed to be done.
Wong: Absolutely…
Q: It was money from the foreign nationals going to whom?
Wong: It went to the mayor, to the governor, to senators, representatives….
Q: That Gene and Nora Lum would come to develop a relationship and ultimately a political union, with the head of the Democratic party, and move to Washington, and run in those circles and meet the President of the United States and attend his inaugural and so on. Does that come as a surprise?
Wong: No, it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Nora sought opportunities, and she knew opportunities when she saw them…
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From freerepublic:
Lum Pleads Guilty to Tax Fraud
Tulsa, Okla (AP) 8/13/98 – Democratic fund-raiser Gene K.H. Lum changed his plea in a tax fraud case to guilty Thursday as part of an agreement that seeks his cooperation in other investigations.
Lum, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to making illegal donations to Democratic campaigns, admitted he filed tax returns that claimed more than $7.1 million in false deductions for him and his wife.
Lum, 59, faces up to six years in prison and $500,000 in fines at a Nov 23 sentencing. . . .
Under the pleas agreement, the government agreed not to seek indictments against his wife, Nora, or their corporations. . . .
The Lums, who operated a Tulsa-based gas pipeline company at the time of the violations, pleaded guilty last year to a charge of felony conspiracy for laundering $50,000 in illegal donations to 1994 congressional campaigns.
Their daughter, Trisha C. Lum, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation in a separate campaign finance incident.
Gene and Norn Lum each received 10 months in prison and $30,000 fines in that case.
The tax charges stemmed from information uncovered by independent counsel Daniel S. Pearson during his investigation of Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. Pearson closed his inquiry when Brown was killed in an airplane crash. He transferred his findings about other people to the Justice Dept for continued investigation and prosecution….
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Comments in the freerepublic forum: . . . Of some interest to me was the fact that the golf course Michael Brown (son of Ron Brown) was given a membership to (and which Bill Clinton often uses …) in suburban Virginia was owned by the Bishop Estate of Hawaii. . . . Bishop put close to 100 million into a company called McKenzie Methane Gas a few years before Dynamic. Bishop also bought into a Red Chip bank with Mochtar Riady’s brother in law. Bishop hired as its Washington law firm Verner Liipfert whose lobbyist is ex Gov. John Waihee. Waihee appointed 4 of the 5 Bishop Trustees. Waihee attends Clinton coffees. Waihee appointed Sen. Akaka. Verner Liipfert has another big name partner ex Sen. George Mitchell. Mitchell’s son in law was president of Lum’s company Dynamic Energy. Bishop owns 11% of Goldman Sachs. Sec of Treasury Robert Rubin’s blind trust managed by Bishop, etc, etc. (abwehr, 8/13/98)
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From PBS Frontline: Interview with Charles Chidiac – Charles Chidiac is a financier-developer who knew the Lums in Hawaii. He was also involved in Asian Pacific Advisory Council-Vote, a Los Angeles Democratic fund-raising group once headed by Nora Lum. He has a checkered past. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the BNL financial scandal.
Q: Give me an example of corruption in Hawaii in the 1980s.
Chidiac: Well, if you want to do business in Hawaii, you go and you apply for a zoning. You get a call from an attorney. And he says, “I want to see you.” “About what?” “Oh, I want to talk about your application.” . . .
“But I already have an attorney.” “It’s necessary to see you anyway.” So he comes over and he says, “Listen, you applied. This attorney of yours is no good. If you don’t hire me, you’ll never get your zoning. . . .”
So, that’s how they do it. It’s called in Hawaii, “law firming,” instead of laundering. “Law firming” is laundering money through law firms.
Q: In other words, bribery?
Chidiac: Pure, pure bribery, under the cover of being legal work.
Q: Describe Nora Lum.
Chidiac: Well, she is a Japanese woman … And she’s very smart. … Her husband is an attorney. … She knew all the tricks of raising money …
Q: You had a very close relationship with them for awhile.
Chidiac: . . . I had everything ready and this thing was dragging on and on and on. And I didn’t realize that the state of Hawaii, to extort half a million or a million dollars from a developer, would go to the extent of destroying a project that would create 3,000 to 4,000 jobs for the poorest part in the islands, where you have 30% unemployment. The sugar cane industry is collapsing, and they just didn’t care…. We were planning to build three hotels …
Q: Big money?
Chidiac: The project was going to cost somewhere around $800 million.
Q: Did Nora and Gene have access to Governor John Waihee?
Chidiac: All the time, any time. Any time. . . .
Q: What was her stock in trade?
Chidiac: Power pimping … and greed. She pays for power; she buys power.
Q: Did she ever have big success in Hawaii?
Chidiac: I think I was her biggest success. . . . She introduced me to late Commerce Secretary Ron H. Brown in Honolulu. … and she only boasted about her power …
Q: Did she have many businesses?
Chidiac: She had no business. She was just acting as a power peddler. And raised money for different councilmen and politicians. . . .
Q: What motivated them?
Chidiac: They told me that … their only interest was to make money.
Q: How did the Lums and Ron Brown meet?
Chidiac: I think she met him through John Waihee because … as the governor, he met Bill Clinton. . . .
Q: Was she talking to big wigs on the phone all the time?
Chidiac: Yeah, — We had calls from Hillary Clinton. . . . I heard her talking to Ron Brown. …
Q: Does it surprise you that a woman who owns a souvenir shop and her part-time lawyer-husband can go in and out of the White House 13 times and accompany the president to Jakarta . . . Does it surprise you that their daughter ends up working for Ron Brown? That Gene almost gets on Amtrak’s Board of Directors? That Nora can come and go with Bruce Lindsey, who helps them do an oil deal in Oklahoma?…
Chidiac: Well, I mean, if the President is corrupt, everything’s possible….
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The Honolulu Advertiser, 7/7/82, by James Dooley:
Yakuza Ties Cited at Olomana
A Japanese national who quietly purchased the Olomana golf course last year for $2.1 million in cash has been identified by Japanese law-enforcement officials as an associate of the yakuza — Japanese organized crime….
The subject of the allegation, Ken Mizuno, chairman of the board of Mizuno Kohgyo Co, Ltd, of Japan and a Hawaii subsidiary, Mizuno Kohgyo Hawaii Inc.
The Hawaii firm last year purchased all the stock in Olomana Golf Links, Inc from reals estate developer Herbert Horita.
Mizuno also has an interest in a tour company here and has opened a gourmet Japanese restaurant in the Tropicana Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas.
The identification of Mizuno as a yakuza is contained in a report on Mizuno’s finances and background compiled by the Clark County sheriff’s office in Las Vegas….
County Asst Sheriff Jere Vanek told commissioners last week that the police recommended denial of a license to Misuno on grounds that he is an associate of the yakuza. Vanek said it was believed that the organization was trying to gain a foothold in Las Vegas….
Vanek said Mizuno had used yakuza members to collect golf club membership fees in his $100 million golfing empire in Japan….
Vanek said Mizuno had “an amicable relationship” with Morihiro Okita, the boss of the Towa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai yakuza group….
In an interview last month with The Advertiser, Mizuno’s nephew Yukichi Mizuno, who operates Olomana Golf Links, said his uncle has no business ties with the yakuza….
Two investigators from Las Vegas visited Hawaii and Japan early this year as part of an investigation into Ken Mizuno’s background begun after he applied for his liquor license in Las Vegas….
The investigators were advised by Japanese law-enforcement agencies that Mizuno, also known as Ken Arai, is an associate of Okita.
The Towa Yuai Jigyo Kumiai, headquartered in Tokyo, is dominated by Japan-born gangsters of Korean ancestry, and in recent years has gained business footholds in Korea, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, according to federal and local law-enforcement sources and according to the results of an Advertiser investigation….
The Clark County sheriff’s office has recommended denial of the liquor license for four reasons, the primary one being Ken Mizuno’s alleged yakuza association.
Other reasons, contained in confidential report to with The Advertiser gained access, include:
>> . . . Mizuno’s involvement in six companies, some of them of “questionable background” . . . In 1981 alone, according to the report, Mizuno and his companies suffered losses totaling a staggering $31 million— yet during the same period Mizuno brought $3.1 million in cash, traveler’s checks and bank transfers into the United States….
Ken Mizuno’s principal port of entry into this country has been Honolulu … and he brought suitcases literally filled with cash through customs here. Mizuno properly declared all the cash….
The Las Vegas report stated a concern that Mizuno might be “laundering” money— that is, importing illicitly generated cash and investing it in legitimate U.S. business enterprises.
>> . . . Ken Mizuno allegedly falsified a personal history questionnaire in Las Vegas when he stated that he had never been arrested. In fact, he was arrested in 1976 in Tokyo on a gambling charge, although it later was dropped.
Ken Mizuno incorporated Mizuno Kohgyo Hawaii Inc last July 23, capitalizing the firm at $100,000 . . . He is listed as treasurer and chairman of the board. . . . All stock in the company is owned by Mizuno Kohgyo Co. Ltd of Japan.
On the same day that the local company was incorporated, the company purchased all stock in Olomana Golf Links, Inc. from Horita…
The state owns the land on which the golf course was built and it is under lease to Olomana Golf Links.
Horita, one of the most active and successful real estate developers in the state, told The Advertiser . . . “I don’t know anything at all about him (Mizuno), he just wandered into town, somebody brought him in to see me, and he bought the golf course. I haven’t seen him since.”
Horita acknowledged that Mizuno paid cash….
As for Mizuno’s yakuza associations, Horita said: “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Mizuno is now the subject of intense scrutiny in Las Vegas by a variety of federal and local law-enforcement agencies, including the metropolitan police, the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the FBI. . . .
Ash Resnick, in charge of international operations for the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas … told The Advertiser earlier this year that Mizuno last year was a $300,000 “player” at the Aladdin’s gaming tables until he switched his play to the Tropicana….
See also: Ken Mizuno
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From a Frontline interview:
Anthony P. Locricchio is an attorney who represented Hawaiian farmers in a lawsuit against Japanese golf course developers. Locricchio and others also alleged in a 1989 Federal Elections Commission complaint that foreign nations made illegal contributions to local politicians. Five years later, FEC investigators found more than 100 violations of federal election campaign law….
Q: What was the money game here? . . .
Locricchio: The game was possible … because of the huge imbalance between the yen and the dollar. One of the most beautiful places on earth suddenly became a bargain place, and Hawaii, a very tiny place, vied with California and New York for … the largest investment of Japanese dollars … It was for sale, it was cheap, and you found willing collaborators. The takeover of Hawaii economically and the loss of the environmental protections and protections for our people only occurred because lawyers, accountants, and political beings, were ready, willing and able to help sell their birthright.
Q: For a buck.
Locricchio: No, they were very smart. It was for several bucks.
Q: Where would you see Japanese investment?
Locricchio: It started with the tourist industry, with hotels, resorts, golf courses, and then started to move into restaurants, office buildings, really through the entire fabric of the economy. And the usual economic rules were thrown overboard. For example, a hotel might sell to a Japanese interest for $30 million. Two months later, it would sell for $60 million. In four months, it would be $120 million. … You would have had to … rented out rooms at $500 a day and 100% occupancy to meet the debt service. . . . Hawaiians couldn’t afford to live in Hawaii. We had, during this period of time … a huge outflow of people at the bottom of the economic sector, especially native Hawaiians. . . .
Q: Where does golf course development fit in this? . . . Did Hawaii have any regulations in place governing land acquisition for golf development?
Locricchio: It should have been very difficult, because Hawaii is the only state in the country which has a constitutional protection for agricultural land. You were required, before you changed the use of agricultural land, to have a two-thirds vote to approve those kinds of changes by constitutional amendment. . . . For the Japanese, not only was the land a great bargain, but buying the politicians was a great bargain. They used to joke about how little money … it took to buy influence. They were able to change the law and to get the Constitution ignored. . . .The people who were involved in agricultural subsistence farming then became the targets, and the Japanese land owners were getting them thrown out and buying up the land, so they had no place to farm. In this very short period of time, within five years, you went from a predominantly agricultural-supported economy to literally a disappearance of agricultural land for local farmers.
Q: . . . So what your need to do along the way, you’re telling me, is first gain influence with the politicians. That turns out to be easy enough. Who else do you need?
Locricchio: You need to hit all the levels of politics. … getting the state law changed was not enough. You then had to go to the local mayor. And he told you to hire his attorney and to give contributions to his campaign. And again, that was fairly easy….
Q: And when push came to shove, how would it play out? How would people be literally removed from the land they’d be farming?
Locricchio: We had situations where the police were actually used to help threaten and terrorize the farmers on these lands. They would come in with false eviction notices, with a policeman in uniform, and these farmers were uneducated, didn’t know they were false evictions. …. The left because they were told, “You’d better get out, or we’ll carry you out.”
Q: You mean the police were privately employed for these purposes?
Locricchio: We have a unique situation here, where police are permitted to work on their off hours for private land owners and private businesses. They’re permitted to wear their uniforms, to carry their guns, and to have many of the police powers they have as public officers. … Or, it they didn’t use the police posse and used somebody else, you’d go to make a criminal complaint, and absolutely nothing would happen. Whether cattle were shot, cattle were stolen or you had eye witnesses, absolutely no police action would be taken….
Even though we lived here and experienced it, we got numbed by our Americanism. We kept thinking, “This will work out. We will be able to stop this.” Because Americans are ultimately optimistic . . . Even though we’re angry at our government, we still believe deep down the American democratic system will prevail. And that was our stupidity.
Q: One of the things you observed during this Japanese economic invasion of Hawaii was the willing participation of all levels of Hawaiian residents (as opposed to native Hawaiians.) This was presumable motivated by what?…
Locricchio: Money. Hawaiian professionals … had never seen anything like the Japanese invasion. Law firms overnight moved into marble-encrusted quarters because suddenly their Japanese clients were paying huge legal bills. Middle men who had operated in political arenas and gotten mediocre money for it suddenly saw opportunities to make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars….
Q: So Nora and Gene Lum present themselves to these money people as fixers. They can work one end of the political machine to the other and help get things done, help clear the way. Can you give us an example?
Locricchio: There are three key examples of when the Lums really used their fixer skills: One that affects a project outside of Hawaii, and two here in Hawaii… Mount Olomana is one of Hawaii’s scenic treasures. It’s Japanese-owned, and we believe … Nora Lum … was partially responsible for bringing the Japanese land buyer to this valley and buying 1,090 acres of land here in Hawaii for only $7 million. In Hawaii, that’s an incredible bargain… After they were able to buy the state legislative vote change, that land became worth $40-$50 million overnight… Finally, there is a golf course. It was delayed for several years while we fought against it…. They actually built a golf course on the side of a mountain. It is a ridiculous location for a golf course, but in Japan they were selling memberships at $250,000 per membership. That did not even give the owners of the membership a piece of the land. They just got a membership, and then they would have fees over and above that….
Q: Who were the people with the money who connected with the Lums?
Locricchio: That spectrum of people was everyone from legitimate Japanese established businesses and the largest corporations in Japan to the criminal yakuza, which is the Japanese Mafia . . .
Q: What is the interest of the yakuza in Hawaiian golf development?
Locricchio: The incredible amounts of money . . . there were reservations for thousands of memberships at $250,000 each, which was hundreds of millions of dollars before the golf course would even be built….
Q: What became of the Wongs and the other ranchers who were dislocated by the developers?
Locricchio: . . . The houses of the “bad” farmers, who refused to buckle under, were bulldozed. The Wongs’ children were shot at, the 93-year-old Filipino guy who had lived there for years and years had a SWAT team of 10 police officers pull him out of his house. He ended up in the emergency room and in the hospital for months and months. He had to have a tracheotomy, he was so petrified. 54 state and local police officers, sheriffs, helicopters, submachine guns with SWAT teams, moved little old ladies and elderly people and children, ripped them out of their houses with full governmental support … and the area was sealed off so the press couldn’t get in and take pictures. They had massive bulldozers….
My associate learned that two of the children were so panicked by what was going on … they had hidden under their house, and the mother, who was off the land, was not allowed to go back on and find her children. She went ballistic, because she knew they were going to bulldoze the house. She couldn’t get the police to go in and get the kids out of there. … Tom Levine, an attorney, went around the police lines, ran in to try to get the kids out of there. He was arrested. He was booked. He was tried for criminal trespass.
Q: Arrested by this hired police force?
Locricchio: By the police, who on their off hours worked for the golf course owners.
Q: Were the children there?
Locricchio: The children turned out to be under the house. Tom finally convinced the guys who were dragging him off for booking to please go in and look under the house. … sure enough, minutes before the house was bulldozed down, these frightened to death children were pulled out.
Q: What is there now?
Locricchio: It sits there, bulldozed today, and there was no need to do it. . . . And you’d see this opulent golf course now, which has lost lots and lots of money.
Q: Are Nora and Gene Lum typical or atypical . . . Are they low-level fixers who just got lucky?
Locricchio: I guess I have to say that their greed is exceptional . . .
Q: Should Ron Brown have known better than to tie in with these people, or did he see what he wanted to see?
Locricchio: . . . Putting on the shoes of the guy who’s got major funding responsibility is a very difficult situation. I think you become blinded by the need . . . And whoever takes his place … whether it’s Democrat or Republican, is going to find the same pressures, and need to find the Genes and Noras.
This is our electoral process. Our whole system is so stupid that we now have a population that expects its politicians to be corrupt because that’s the only way they can get elected. And something is very wrong.
Q: Where do people like the Lums fit into that?
Locricchio: They take advantage of history. They build a profession and a lifestyle based on this horrible deviation from democracy, and they make a living, and a very good living from it.
For more, GO TO > > > Paradise Paved
* * *
The Reagan Information Interchange , 10/17/97, by Mike Reagan:
Reno Blocks Couple from Testifying about Foreign Money to Clinton
I was going through one of my papers today and saw an article. It was the tiniest of articles. . . .
It says, “The Justice Department opposes giving convicted Democratic Fund Raisers Nora and Gene Lum immunity from further prosecution in exchange for their congressional testimony about a scheme to funnel foreign money to Democrats in 1992. The Dept said immunity would cause irreparable harm to its investigation.”
Well, I saw that and I thought I better go back because I’ve got a couple of stories I just haven’t had time to get to. Because, there is probably a very good reason these people are not able to get immunity. So, let me share with you a story by Bob Novak. . . .
What he said in his article … is:
“Two former high level Democratic Fund Raisers are ready to swear that the foreign leader … [to whom] Bill Clinton’s 1992 Campaign for President returned $50,000 was South Korea’s President Kim Young-sam.
“The alleged $50,000 payment is the most shocking of many eyebrow lifters in the offing that is proposing to sing like canaries to win immunity from further prosecution for Democrat insiders Gene and Nora Lum. . . .”
“The Lums say DNC Ron Brown who met the Hawaii-based Lums in 1991 asked them at the 1992 National Convention to go to California to help promote the Democratic party to Asian Americans there. They created a PAC. The Lums would testify to this . Working with the DNC in fund-raising they would testify they used conduit contributions – money disguised from its real illegal donors with the knowledge of the DNC personnel.”
They also offer to tell about John Huang’s links with the Indonesian billionaire Moshtar Rhiady and his son James, and Clinton friend and fund-raiser Charlie Trie’s influence with the Chinese government.
Now that you have all that information … who is it that is stepping in the middle and not allowing these people to have immunity to testify? And if you guessed Justice Dept Janet Reno you are 100% on target!
Janet Reno is a joke! She is a joke to the office.
But the problem is, no one, except the Clintons, are laughing. . . .
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GreaterThings by Greg Wongham: FBI Investigates Hawaii Democratic Party. According to news reports, Nora and Eugene Lum were dispatched by the Hawaii Democratic Party to meet with Bill Clinton. The purpose of the visit was to seek the Presidential candidate’s help in pulling the plug on an FBI investigation of Hawaii’s (D) Governor John Waihee.
The Lums admitted to FBI investigators looking into allegations that arose during the “Chinagate” investigation that after Clinton was elected, Webster Hubbell (3rd man in the Justice Dept during the early days of the Clinton administration) pulled the plug.
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The N.Y. Times, 5/24/98 (AP): FBI Documents Suggest Help for Clinton Donors in ’92 Inquiry . . . The FBI gathered evidence as early as 1992 that a Democratic couple who helped start Asian-American fund-raising efforts for President Clinton were engaged in wrongdoing, Justice Dept documents show.
The fund-raisers, Nora and Gene Lum, were not prosecuted for making illegal donations to Democrats until 1997, well after the controversy over the party’s campaign financing efforts broke open.
Now investigators have gathered testimony that accuses the Lums of getting help during the earlier investigation from Ronald H. Brown, who was the chairman of the Democratic Party at the time, and Webster L. Hubbell, a longtime Clinton friend who became an official at the Justice Dept in Clinton’s first term, according to documents and interviews.
Brown was killed in a plane crash in Croatia on April 3, 1996.
Among FBI memorandums obtained by The Associated Press, a 1993 document relying on information from a cooperating witness says that “Nora Lum once stated to him that she transported $150,000 in cash in a travel bag to the mainland to be delivered as campaign contributions on the national level.”
Two years later, a former business associate of the Lums, Stuart Price, told investigators that Lum “brought the two suitcases of money back to the United States and turned the money over to the DNC,” documents say. In 1997, Lum denied that such an incident had occurred….
The advisory council was the start of what would become a much larger Asian-American fund-raising effort for Clinton. It brought the Lums together with John Huang, who later emerged as a central figure in the 1996 fund-raising controversy.
According to documents released recently by Congressional investigators, bank statements and canceled checks showed that the Lums had transferred $159,000 raised by the advisory council, some at an Oct 1992 fund-raiser in Clinton’s name, to their own accounts.
The emergence of FBI files on the Lums comes as pressure is mounting on Atty Gen Janet Reno to name an independent counsel to take over the fund-raising investigation.
In a public statement, the Justice Dept said the decision to shut down the inquiry was made by career prosecutors and there was “not a scrap of evidence or inference that Hubbell ever attempted to inquire about or influence any matter concerning the Lums.”
Hubbell was the No. 3 official at the Justice Dept in the first 15 months of Clinton’s Presidency.
Hubbell was indicted on tax charges this month and remains under investigation by Whitewater prosecutors….
After their 1997 conviction, the Lums admitted to other infractions that the FBI had been investigating in 1992, including bringing in $10,000 in donations to Hawaii’s governor from “Japanese clients” and laundering thousands of dollars in contributions to another candidate.
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Free Republic, 10/14/97, by Linda Franklin (AP):
Death of Man Investigated; He Recorded Fund-Raisers
The state medical examiner’s office is investigating the death of an Oklahoman who tape-recorded business dealings with a controversial husband-wife team of Democratic fund-raisers.
Ron Miller, 58, of Norman died Sunday at Integris Baptist Medical Center, where he had been taken last week after becoming ill at home Oct 3.
Kevin Rowland, chief investigator for the state medical examiner’s office, said the case was turned over to the state because the hospital said the death was not fully explainable….
Miller owned Gage Corp, an energy company that was sold in 1993 to Dynamic Energy Resources, Inc in a transaction studied by federal and state investigators.
Nora Lum, the chief executive of Tulsa-based Dynamic Energy, and her husband, Gene, were sentenced last month to 10 months confinement and $30,000 fines apiece after admitting to using “straw donors” to conceal their $50,000 in illegal contributions.
The money went to the re-election effort of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, and the unsuccessful congressional candidacy of W. Stuart Price of Oklahoma in 1994 and 1995.
Miller tape-recovered phone conversations he had in recent years involving his business dealings with the Lums and their associates. More than 150 tapes have been given to the FBI.
J. Dell Gordon, president of Mid-America Lamborghini, said Miller had turned over boxes of material to a congressional government oversight committee. … Miller and Gordon were partners in Mid-American Lamborghini….
The state Corporation Commission studied an Oklahoma Natural Gas contract that Dynamic received after it bought the assets of Gage and Creek Systems, a Gage subsidiary. Transcripts from a 1995 civil case said a condition of the sale was that Creek Systems settle disputes with ONG….
Gordon said Miller’s death was surprising.
“He went from being healthy to dying in a week,” Gordon said Monday.
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On 3/19/98, five months after his mysterious death, Oklahoma’s Medical Examiner’s Office quietly ruled that Ron Miller died from “natural causes.”…
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For more on methane gas, GO TO > > > The Myth & The Methane
Goldman Sachs – From Goldman Sachs, by Lisa Endlich:
GOLDMAN SACHS had been expanding the size of its partnership steadily for decades. There had been fifty partners in 1973; there were seventy-five in 1983 and one hundred fifty by 1993. But as the size of the partnership increased, the profits of the firm had to grow at breakneck speed if existing partners’ income levels were to be maintained….
With his ascendency in 1990, (Robert) Rubin openly discussed with the partnership the need for an expanding pie …
In addition to the firm’s limited partners (retired partners who choose to leave capital in the firm), Goldman Sachs has taken on three groups of financial partners. Sumitomo’s investments in 1986 entitled the Japanese bank to 12.5 percent of the firm’s annual profits.
Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate, the giant Hawaiian education trust, which also made two major cash infusions into the firm, first in 1992 and again in 1994, receives about 11 percent of what the firm makes every year. Finally, a group of insurers* has injected $225 million into the capital structure.
Limited partners do not receive a percentage of the profits, but rather receive interest rate payments as compensation for the use of their capital. Payments made to outsider investors, before the partners see a dime, have run between $300 million and $400 million a year….
Goldman Sachs will go down in history as the last major partnership on Wall Street…
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Quoting one former partner: “Greed changed the firm, and the view was to take as much risk as we can, and make it as fast as we can.”
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“NINETEEN EIGHTY-SIX,” Institutional Investor magazine proclaimed, “was the year they sold Wall Street.” During the five preceding years John Weinberg had watched his major competitors incorporate, merge, or simply cease to exist….
GOLDMAN SACHS, TOO, SOLD A BIT OF ITSELF IN 1986. The roots of the transaction took hold the year before when one morning a man who refused to identify himself telephoned Ann Ericson, John Weinberg’s secretary. Would Mr. Weinberg, he asked, be in the office on a Tuesday, three weeks hence?…
Two weeks later the same unidentified caller contacted Ericson to confirm the date, and this time she indicated that Weinberg would be in the office. When the appointed day arrived two Japanese men, a speaker and his interpreter, appeared in Weinberg’s office.
The man who spoke only Japanese identified himself through his assistant:
I am the president of Sumitomo Bank, Koh Komatsu told Weinberg. I came here in disguise to see you.
Komatsu had tried to hide his tracks.
From Tokyo he flew to Seattle, Washington. There he changed planes for a flight to Washington, D.C. From Washington, he boarded the shuttle to La Guardia. He felt certain that he had made the journey undetected….
Weinberg was baffled by the visit. He had no way of knowing that Sumitomo Bank had long been interested in gaining a toehold in the U. S. investment banking market and had been looking at Goldman Sachs. Sumitomo, at that time the world’s third largest and Japan’s most profitable bank . . .
As Weinberg listened to Komatsu’s proposal he was amazed. The valuation given to Goldman Sachs by Sumitomo was far above the firm’s own. Komatsu was offering cash, an equity injection, in return for a share of the profits.
The deal was almost too good to be true.
By offering to make a $500 million investment in exchange for 12.5 percent of the firm’s profits, Sumitomo was implicitly valuing Goldman Sachs at $4 billion — four times book value. Morgan Stanley had just floated itself at under three times book value, and other publicly traded investment banks were selling for less.
The deal, it was stipulated, would be conducted in total secrecy, with Goldman Sachs acting as its own investment banker….”
See also: Sumitomo Bank
* For more, GO TO > > > Ace up the Sleeve; AIG; Allied World Assurance; The Poop on Aon; The Chubb Group; Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Marsh & McLennan: The Marsh Birds
Heiwa Corporation – Established in 1960, Heiwa Corp is a leading manufacturer of pachinko (Japanese pinball) machines. Packinko is a major form of gambling in Japan.
In April, 2001, Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano announced that Heiwa Corp has set up a captive insurance subsidiary in Hawaii, Heiwa Insurance Inc., which the state calls the first foreign company to base its internal-insurance operations here.
In captive insurance, an organizer incorporates a new company in Hawaii or other domicile, and gets a special license to insure itself and its affiliates. Hawaii has licensed 96 companies to operate captive insurance subsidiaries, placing it among the top 10 such locations worldwide.
For more, GO TO > > > Claims By Harmon; Predators in Paradise; RICO in Paradise
Katsuhiro Kawaguchi – The Japanese purchaser of “Gilligan’s Island” (otherwise know as Coconut Island), later to be deported for “criminal activity.”
From: www.zorro-me.com
MY FAMILY
The year I was born was a very disgraceful one to be recorded in golden letters in our long national history.
In the midst of confusion following the nation’s defeat in World War II, I was born as the fourth and last child to my family in Fukakusa Fukuine Takamatsu-cho, Fushimi Ward, Kyoto Prefecture, on October 25, 1945. My father, Kiyochika Miyazaki, then 43 years old, was the founder-leader of Teramura Gumi, a Yakuza1 organization based in the Fushimi area. . . .
Rascals and Bubble
The year 1987 saw Japan right in the middle of the bubble economy with the Tokyo land price shot up 85% in just one year, as newspapers and journals frequently using such headlines as “runaway land price” which was reminiscent of the “runaway price” of the decade before.
When NTT went public, its share fetches the price of 1.6 million yen with so many eager to buy them, pushing the Nikkei index share price over 25,000 yen.
The Resort Law went into effect in that year as if to encourage the entire nation to build practically as many hotels and golf courses as you wished. The bubble economy was in full swing….
As there remained less and less land, the reward for finding a plot of land for speculation was skyrocketing, about 20,000 yen for the 100 yen million piece of land he found.
“Find bare ground” became a buzzword for land speculators and lots of those shady people, plotters and agents as I mentioned before, were seen traveling across the country looking for land.
People like Kawaguchi Katsuhiro known as the “First land price raiser” of Yadai Sangyo set an eye to the Kansai region, and paid the local yakuza men to find him as much land as possible….
See also: Coconut Island
Ken Mizuno – Reputed high-rolling, high-tipping, money-laundering, politician-buying, Yakuza-connected, Japanese citizen.
From The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, by Sally Denton and Roger Morris:
Outwardly, Ken Mizuno had been one of the more notorious Asian high-rollers along the Strip in the 1980s. When the former baseball star moved to open a gourmet Japanese restaurant and health spa in the Tropicana and applied for a liquor license, even the usual desultory investigation uncovered his long-standing associations with the Yakuza, Japanese organized crime.
Initially, the Clark County commission had denied Mizuno the license; but in a subsequent session a few weeks later – a distant echo of Bugsy’s experience with the same body – the commissioners promptly reversed themselves. For nearly a decade Mizuno would be one of the city’s leading international citizens, attended by his own personal hostess at the Mirage where he gambled hundreds of millions.
Then, in the 1990s, wealthy Tokyo investors pressured Japanese police to implicate Mizuno in a $853 million golf club pyramid scheme. His fall was mourned by casinos where he had been known as a “whale” for his $100,000-a-hand bets at baccarat, and Mizuno eventually ended up in a Japanese jail. His fall was long in coming.
In 1991, the small U.S. Customs office in Las Vegas received warnings about Mizuno from the Customs attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Las Vegas agents began to trace not the gambler’s links to the Yakuza, or the massive expatriation of funds to foreign organized crime – one of the city’s thriving industries, and to law enforcement a more familiar pattern – but rather the pouring into Las Vegas of hundreds of millions through foreign criminal combines.
At one point following a path from the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco to the Las Vegas Strip with bills bound in casino wrappers, the Customs agents traced an enormous traffic. While Mizuno had a locker at Shadow Creek next to Wynn’s, and was a popular high-tipping man-about-town, he was bringing in as much as $220 million through bank channels, wire transfers, and other means that escaped currency reports.
There were additional indicators that he transferred to southern Nevada as well much of the remainder of his $800 million taken from the Tokyo fraud – altogether hundreds of millions more than even he wagered at Las Vegas tables.
As the investigation continued, many of the trails led to the luxury Mirage. Mizuno’s girlfriend turned out to be working in the “international department” of the casino. The high roller himself was “said to have…dropped upwards of $75 million in two years” at the Mirage tables.
Often met by a Mirage limousine at a private landing strip when he returned from trips abroad, and then whisked to the casino behind darkened windows, arrangements that defeated Customs surveillance, Mizuno went on to buy from his close friend (Steve) Wynn a personal DC-9 jet later seized by Customs authorities and implicated in the massive financial crimes they suspected.
Agents as well as at least one prosecutor familiar with the accumulating evidence came to believe that looming behind Mizuno was the shape of a vast new criminal investment in, and thus control of, the new mega-resorts going up on the Strip, casinos like Treasure Island and others supposedly funded entirely by Wall Street investment in their new corporate proprietors.
Even the sums visible in Mizuno’s “gambling” – a minimum of $150 million by one account at a time when Kerkorian had purchased both the Desert Inn and Sands for $167 million – made the Customs calculus only too plausible….
But when the beleaguered Las Vegas agents asked their superiors for the obvious support a major investigation required – more personnel, undercover money, and authority to go to the top of what they termed under the federal racketeering statute “the continuing criminal enterprise” they saw in and behind Mizuno – their requests were effectively denied, buried or put off in organizational delays, never openly rejected with any individual liability or record but quietly stifled by bureaucratic device.
Eventually Customs would seize more than $60 million in Mizuno’s assets, including golf courses in the Las Vegas Valley and Palm Springs, real estate and other assets in Clark County. By most measures it might have seemed a success – the largest single non-narcotics money-laundering case in American history. But agents on the inside knew, as one describe it, that it was only “the tip on an iceberg here in the middle of the desert.”
The agents never knew why they had been called off before following the case to its conclusion….
“We were at the edge of unraveling Las Vegas,” a Customs agent in Nevada would say of the Mizuno case….
* * *
Money Brought Here
Japan is a most prosperous nation, and it has a thriving — and truly organized — criminal element: the Boryokudan, more commonly known as “Yakuza.”
Although with ancient roots, it was during the years following World War II that modern organized crime groups took their forth in Japan. Since then, these groups have been changing their organization, diversifying, and more discreetly concealing their activities in an attempt to adapt themselves to the era of Japan’s high economic growth, the ensuing period of stabilized growth, and also to evade police control.
Japan’s National Police Agency estimated in 1992 that annual revenues of Boryokudan were about $10 billion. The total annual income for all factions of Boryokudan is currently estimated at $13 billion.
Given the traditional Japanese reliance on cash, and the relatively new and weak financial controls that could otherwise provide intelligence to Japanese law enforcement agencies, there is little need for Boryokudan to move money abroad for laundering. More likely as pure investments, or in an attempt to develop additional operational bases, Japanese businessmen with ties to Boryokudan have been known to purchase real estate and gambling casinos in the United States.
The Ken Mizuno Case is instructive. That investigation, in many ways continuing, is recognized as the second-largest non-drug money laundering case in U.S. history. (The BCCI Case was the largest, although it did involve undercover agents posing as drug traffickers.) It featured the first large-scale seizure in the United States of proceeds from foreign fraud and involved approximately $1 billion in proceeds. Of that amount, $440 million was determined to have accrued to Mizuno alone — and only $280 million of that has been located. . . .
Importantly, the Mizuno investigation also revealed a vulnerability of the U.S. financial system to sophisticated introduction of capital from international criminal activities and a particular vulnerability of U.S. financial institutions, gambling casinos and their parent corporations to foreign criminal manipulation.
Specifically, the investigation revealed a complex web of financial transactions, the majority of which essentially avoided and evaded U.S. reporting requirements as called for by the Bank Secrecy Act. Moreover, given the Asian predilection for gambling, as well as the recent expansion of the U.S. gaming industry to 22 market centers, the potential for money laundering has become enormous.
(Mizuno was convicted in Japan of tax fraud, but is currently free pending appeal. U.S. authorities hope to deal with him in the United States, and, interestingly, Mizuno wants to be extradited to the United States. He has much money located somewhere here and probably expects to strike a deal with prosecutors that will leave him with some of the money and require no jail time.)
US Dept. of State – IIP: Chinese Human Smuggling
Kenji Osano – The largest individual Japanese investor in the United States.
From Hope of Israel Ministries (Church of God):
The Coming War with Japan!
By Joseph Huang
The yakuza have also arrived in the United States. You can spot them at international airports. A typical member is a trim, alert man with a thin moustache, sharp eyes and, perhaps, wearing a false fingertip. According to Al Gano, a Customs Patrol Officer in the Honolulu International Airport:
“There’s a couple of ways you can spot a yakuza. For one thing, your average Japanese tourist … walks humbly. The Boss – the oyabun – is usually surrounded by his boys – the kobun – and they’re carrying his bags, lighting his cigarette, and saying ‘Hai! Hai! (yes, yes).”
To carry on their activities in the United States, and because of their limited English, the yakuza has had to work in collaboration with other gangs ranging from the notorious Hong Kong 14K Triad to other Mafias.
Perhaps the major figure of interest in Hawaii, with the same fame as [Yoshio] Kodama, is Kenji Osano. Osano’s wealth was estimated at over $1 billion, and he used that money to become the largest individual Japanese investor in the United States, buying up five Waikiki hotels: the Sheraton Waikiki, Royal Hawaiian, Surfrider, Moana Princess Kaiulani, plus the Sheraton Maui on that island….
The Japanese have also found a permanent base in Las Vegas. As early as 1971, the multibillionaire Kenji Osano was negotiating the purchase of the Sands Hotel and Casino, but was forced to withdraw because of his links with the Lockheed scandal.
The yakuza are in America, and are here to stay. Once entrenched it is extremely difficult to dislodge them. Now Australia and the United States are great deficit nations and Japan has huge assets and other investments in each of these countries to protect….
Lockheed Martin – From tripod.com, by Kaplan and Dubro: . . . Perhaps the best-known case of underworld involvement with political figures is the bribery scandal in the early 1970s involving Lockheed Corp’s attempt to win All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd’s business.
A key figure in this affair was Yoshio Kodama, a liaison between politicians and underworld groups.
Using money from Lockheed, Mr. Kodama, whose power and influence with gangsters as well as politicians remains unmatched even after his 1984 death, targeted payments to key government officials– including former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka– and employed the yakuza in a variety of capacities … to ensure that ANA selected Lockheed’s TriStar L-1011 wide-bodied jet over the competition’s planes. . . .
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For much more, GO TO > > > Tarnished Wings
Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan – From Foreign Press Center/Japan, 10/30/98: The Long-Term Credit Bank is Nationalized . . .
The Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan applied for temporary nationalization on Oct 23, the same day that the recently enacted Financial Rehabilitation Law went into effect. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi responded immediately by recognizing the LTCB as a bank that has failed and placing it under special public management under Article 36 . . .
The bad debts of the LTCB are to be taken over by a Japanese version of the U.S. Resolution Trust Corp. . . .
See also: Xiamen International Bank
Mitsui Trust and Banking Company – From Pacific Business News, 06/24/96: Landmark back on market. . . . The architecturally distinctive 35-story Waikiki Landmark has languished since its completion in 1993, a victim of the evaporation of interest in expensive Hawaii real estate …
In June 1995, Los Angeles-based Oaktree Capital Management bought the $155 million mortgage on the 196-unit building for an estimated $50 million from Mitsui Trust & Banking Co. Ltd. And in January, Oaktree filed a foreclosure suit against owner Waikiki Landmark Partners, headed by controversial Indonesian developer Sukamto Sia, also known as Sukarman Sukamto. . . .
* * *
U.S. News & World Report, 04/13/98, by David Kaplan: Yakuza, Inc. – . . . U.S. News obtained a … portfolio of 108 properties offered to Western investors by Mitsui Trust & Banking Co., one of Japan’s largest banks. . . . Thirteen of the properties … are held by Azabu Building, a company that might not mean much to Americans but is quite familiar to Japanese police. . .
For more on Mitsui Trust, GO TO > > > Broken Trust
For more on Sukamto Sia and the Bank of Honolulu, GO TO > > > The Indonesian Connection
Peter Savio – Honolulu-based real estate broker, whose firm, Savio Realty, was selected by Kamehameha Schools to handle the estate’s vast residential condominium leasehold-to-fee conversions, worth millions in commissions.
From Washington on $10 Million a Day : . . .
Lobbyists and Nuclear Visigoths
Big money corporate lobbyists don’t always win their battles, but when they are defeated it’s rarely because Congress or the White House rises to defend the public interest. More likely, the scheme being advanced was so loopy that even official Washington was too embarrassed to take up the cause.
That’s the case with a multi-billion plot put together by a cabal of beltway con men who hoped to dump tons of nuclear waste on a Pacific island.
Despite having been defeated, the would-be scheme is noteworthy in showing that well-connected capital honchos and aggressive lobbying can keep even the nuttiest projects in play. . . . The corporate vehicle for the plan is U.S. Fuel and Security Inc. (USF&S), a Washington-based firm. . . .
USF&S had an easy time lining up money and influence peddlers to back its plan. Finding a dump site proved more difficult. Like a crew of punch drunk sailors lost at sea, Murphy & Co have desperately scouted the horizon for a Pacific Island where they can come aground. (Alex) Copson explained to me that the Pacific was chosen because it lies between Russia and the U.S., and because it is littered with “useless dots of real estate.” As he sees it, sacrificing a “tiny piece of bullshit in the Pacific” is a small price to pay in order to avoid the doomsday scenario of nuclear annihilation. . . .
* * *
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12/13/00: Savio to Buy Waikiki Hotel . . . Developer Peter Savio is buying the Diamond Head Beach Hotel in Waikiki and plans to resell its units individually, a deal that could lead to fee-simple conversion of the leasehold property.
Savio signed a contract this weekend to buy the 59-unit condominium building at 2947 Kalakaua Ave for just under the asking price of $5.5 million. The seller, Sports Shinko of Japan, had bought the hotel for $13.5 million in 1990, according to state records. . . .
The Gold Coast beachfront land under the hotel is held by the trust of Jeanne Chan, which does not want to sell the fee interest voluntarily, Savio said…
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From Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Feb 5, 2001: Hawaii developer Savio files for Chapter 11 – He says an eviction notice from Central Pacific Bank to move out of his Realty office prompted the action.
Developer Peter Savio says he blames Central Pacific Bank for causing him to file personal bankruptcy by demanding that Savio Realty Ltd. move out of its Moilili offices by this Friday.
“I’m absolutely shocked that a local lender would act this way,” said Savio, who filed Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy on Friday afternoon.
The petition lists 20 unsecured creditors with total claims of $45.6 million, mainly comprising personal guarantees of loans borrowed by Savio Development Co., which also filed Chapter 11 last year. Personal debts were a small factor in the latest petition, which was filed jointly by Savio and spouse Phyllis Savio.
Central Pacific Bank, Hawaii’s fourth largest bank, is one of Savio’s smaller creditors in the personal bankruptcy, with $1.6 million owed. The largest creditor is Dallas-based Beal Bank, which is owed $20 million linked to Savio’s Queen Emma Gardens project on Nuuanu Avenue. Savio said today most of the creditors were close to being paid off and that Savio Development could have emerged from bankruptcy within a month.
Late last week, Central Pacific Bank gave him final notice to move Savio Realty out of its offices in University Plaza out in five days. The bank previously acquired the offices in a loan workout for Savio Development. . . .
Central Pacific Bank declined comment today, citing its practice of keeping client issues confidential. . . .
Savio is also said he is proceeding with his bid to buy 17,780 acres of former sugar land from Kauai landowner Amfac/JMB Hawaii LLC. Amfac listed the acreage for $26 million in September and announced plans to close two sugar mills and lay off 400 employees. Savio said he has three letters of interest from lenders who want to participate in a deal for the property. They are aware of Friday’s bankruptcy filing, he said.
Savio is known for having converted several thousand leasehold apartments to fee-simple condominiums since 1981, many in connection with Kamehameha Schools.
See also: Central Pacific Bank; Sports Shinko
Prescott Bush, Jr. – Former Connecticut state senator and former President George H.W. Bush’s elder brother.
From a web posting by Tripod.com: . . . There is another yakuza incident that hits closer to home. West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based real estate firm, bought two American companies with help from none other than Prescott Bush, Jr., President Bush’s elder brother. . .
What wasn’t known at the time was that West Tsusho is an arm of a company run by the Inagawa-kai’s leader, Ishii Susumu.
Tsusho purchased Quantum Access, a Houston-based software firm, and Asset Management International Financing & Settlement, a New York City-based company.
Bush received a $250,000 finder’s fee for Asset Management, and was promised another $250,000 per year for three years in consulting fees. . . .
For more looks behind the Bushes, GO TO > > > Hail to the Chief
Quantum Access – Houston-based software firm purchased by West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based real estate firm connected with a company run by Ishii Susumu, the late head of the Yakuza syndicate, Inagawa-kai.
The individual who helped broker the deal was none other than Prescott Bush, Jr., older brother of former President George H.W. Bush.
Sanwa Bank – The Chicago branch of this Japanese bank played an interesting role in the Clinton – Rubin – Goldman Sachs – American International Group – Coral Reinsurance – and Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA) shell game in 1987.
Watch carefully! Sanwa loaned $5 million to ADFA. ADFA then purchased slightly over $5 million in stock of Coral Reinsurance, the Barbados company founded by American International Group. Coral then deposited the $5 million, along with $55 million in other investors’ funds, in Sanwa Bank.
Under which shell is ADFA’s $5 million???
Surprise! It never left Sanwa Bank (at least not until it found its way into some of the executives’ pockets).
This strange deal was the scheme of Goldman Sachs, headed at the time by Robert Rubin.
* * *
February 16, 1998
Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Toyko-Mitsubishi (BTM)
Linked to Bribery Scandal
Rueter’s News Service
Two of Japan’s leading banks, Sumitomo and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, were implicated on Monday in a widening bribery scandal involving officials at Japan’s powerful Ministry of Finance (MoF). . .
Tokyo prosecutors on Monday issued a fresh arrest warrant against two MoF inspectors . . . on suspicion of receiving bribes from Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, as well as Sanwa Bank, in exchange for confidential information. . . . Many of them were encroached by Kanto-based yakuza, incurring massive losses in failed stock and land speculation. . .
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March 14 2001
19 Japanese Banks Placed on Credit Watch
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
After the close of today’s trading in Asia, Fitch IBCA placed 19 Japanese banks of “Rating Watch Negative” because of concern about their asset quality. . . .
Among the banks are Japan’s largest, including Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Fuji Bank, Sumitomo Bank and Sanwa Bank….
Much of Japan’s bad loan problem is related to the decreased value of land offered as collateral during the bubble economy of the 1980s.
Although billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been funneled to help resolve the bad loans racked up by banks, problem loans still total a staggering 64 trillion yen ($331 billion) …
The newest big fear on Wall Street is that Japan’s economic problems will cut into demand in that country for U.S. goods and services – leading to a further drop in American stock prices….
Seibu Group – Another Zaibatsu lurking behind the “black curtain”?
From: Land and Power in Hawaii, by George Cooper and Gavan Daws:
MAUI: DEVELOPING KIHEI
Compared to most other islands, Maui had few cases of anti-development protest.
When there were objections, generally they came from recently-arrived haoles – people of little or no political consequence who could be and were for the most part ignored by state and county governments….
The two Maui projects that drew the most fire were the 1,000-acre Seibu Group Enterprises resort planned at the southern end of the road along the Kihei coast, and the 184-unit Makena Surf condominium, on oceanfront land just in front of the north end of the Seibu project.
Seibu in 1973 bought its land from Ulupalakua Ranch, and in 1974 asked the Land Use Commission for urban districting. The Makena Surf developer went to the LUC in 1978. Both applications occasioned some outcries against development of the then-remote Makena, the last substantially undeveloped streatch of the entire Kihei coast….
As mentioned, those who objected were mostly mainland haoles, and not necessarily haoles with money. They could be and largely were ignored by the largely nisei political establishment on Maui and in the state government, that generally approved all Seibu and Makena Surf applications.
~ ~ ~
Part of the reason why government rolled so readily over these anti-development protests was that a rather large number of high-ranking public officials, including several with land use authority, were personally involved with Seibu and Makena Surf.
Once again there were good reasons of public policy, widely accepted on Maui, why those projects should advance. Once again, the investments and consulting and legal work by then-current and former public officials were to a great extent expressions of a general belief that developing Makena was both inevitable and good. But the heavy participation by people in key positions in government also helped ensure that the forward momentum of development would not be braked by protesters….
At about the time in 1973 that Seibu bought its Makena property, Mayor Cravalho said that he initiated discussions with several major landowners/developers, including Seibu, to have them participate in financing a new water source and transmission line, primarily to serve the Kihei coast. An agreement was announced in 1974. Most of the cost of these facilities was to be met by three large developers, including Seibu, with some of the money they fronted to be refunded later out of income generated by operating the new facilities….
In an interview for this book, Elmer Cravalho said he endorsed the Seibu plan as mayor when it was first presented to him about 1973. That year, as mentioned, he said that he also initiated discussions involving Seibu concerning a major new water supply for the Kihei coast. Also as mentioned, in 1969 MDG Supply Inc., in which Cravalho held a 15% interest, bought a 14.5% interest in 9.7 acres of beachfront at Makena….
The water agreement involving Seibu would bring a water line past the MDG land, running down to the Seibu property. It would help ensure that the whole Seibu resort would go forward, thus helping to pay for a paved road past the MDG property, and bringing the full range of resort amenities into Makena. MDG, having bought in 1973 for $162,000, sold in 1974 for $350,000, about the time that an agreement in principle was apparently being reached on the water agreement….
The Seibu property was purchased from Ulupalakua Ranch in 1973. The ranch had initially listed the land for sale through one realtor, but when that firm proved unsuccessful, Masaru Yokouchi of Valley Isle Realty got the listing. He found a buyer in Seibu and brokered the sale on behalf of the ranch. Afterwards he became a consultant to Seibu on Maui. As such, when Seibu’s Land Use Commission application was pending in 1974, Yokouchi contacted members of the LUC and asked that they meet privately with Seibu representatives.
Given his years in politics and his position as the governor’s chief aide on Maui, Yokouchi was personally acquainted with several LUC members. The Maui member, Tanji Yamamura, was on the Commission because Yokouchi nominated him to the governor. Yamamura, an independent pineapple-grower, was appointed in 1969 after Yokouchi was directed by the governor’s office to recommend someone from Maui who was a farmer. … For whatever reasons, Yamamura subsequently voted in favor of Seibu, which got urban districting for 500 acres.
Yamamura at the time was also a member of a hui named Makena 700, which had purchased 670 acres from Ulupalakua Ranch in 1971 for $1.8 million. The parcel sat inland between Wailea and what later became the Seibu resort area.
In 1973 the hui resold to a Japanese firm, Taiyo Fudosan Kogyo Co., for $6.2 million….
See also: Tsutsumi Yoshiaki
Sports Shinko – This Japan-based real estate development firm invested heavily in Hawaii in the bubbling 1980s (these were big bubbles, not tiny bubbles). The Queen Kapiolani Hotel in Waikiki is one of the better known properties purchased by the company.
* * *
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 7/6/98, by Rick Daysog: . . . House Speaker Joseph Souki was questioned by the state attorney general’s office over a Maui land deal involving the Bishop Estate that netted him a $132,000 commission….
According to Souki, the state subpoenaed the Bishop Estate for information about its $5.3 million purchase of a 100-acre parcel in Pukalani, Maui, from developer Everett Dowling. Souki had served as a consultant to Dowling….
Bishop Estate plans to build its permanent Maui campus on the site….
Estate critics have cited Souki’s involvement as a conflict of interest, saying he led opposition to a bill to limit the compensation of trustees of the Bishop Estate and other charitable trusts. After it failed on an initial vote, public pressure prompted the House to pass the measure….
Souki has denied any wrongdoing, saying it was a private real estate transaction….
As part of its inquiry into the Maui land deal, the state also has subpoenaed Dowling and state Sen. Joe Tanaka….
Tanaka earned $42,000 commission from Dowling last year but said his consulting work did not involve the Bishop Estate.
Tanaka, who has not yet met with state attorneys, said he helped introduce Dowling to Sports Shinko, Inc., which originally owned the Maui property….
State records show that Dowling acquired 273 acres from Sports Shinko in Dec. 1996, before selling 100 acres of it to the estate….
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The Honolulu Advertiser, 5/8/86: Mililani Golf Course sold to Japanese firm . . .
Oceanic Properties, Inc. yesterday announced sale of the Mililani Golf Course to a Japanese company …
The new owner, Sports Shinko Co. Ltd, plans “to beautify and improve the course …”
The seller, Oceanic Properties is the real estate subsidiary of Castle & Cooke, Inc. . . .
Sports Shinko Co was organized in 1959 by its president, Toshio Kinoshita, and opened its first golf course in 1962. It currently manages 26 golf courses in Japan . . .
Sumitomo Bank – This Japanese financial giant pumped around $500 million into Goldman Sachs in 1986. After Goldman’s IPO in 1999, Sumitomo held about a 6% interest in Goldman. In Hawaii, Sumitomo owned a major interest in Central Pacific Bank.
* * *
From The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider, by Al Martin:
INSIDER STOCK SWINDLE FOR “THE CAUSE”
I’d like to interject at this point the infamous case of the Peruvian Gold Certificate Scam, engineered in 1988 by George Bush, Sr.
George, himself, was involved, and so was his counsel C. Boyden Gray. Helping in this fraud was George’s personal friend and very loyal Republican scamskateer, then Nevada Secretary of State, Frankie Sue DelPapa. . . .
This is the famous case of that Peruvian gold certificate which was one of the unusual gold certificates issued by the Trans-Continental Agreement between the United States and certain South American countries in 1875, wherein the United States agreed to support certain South American countries which were then in some financial difficulty, including Peru.
The United States Treasury issued a limited number of high-value gold certificates based on its own deposits. Simply put, these were then hypothecated by South American central banks, which could then be used to borrow bullion against the U.S. Treasury.
Almost all of these certificates were redeemed in 1913 and 1914. However, one certificate was left outstanding, which it’s believed was an oversight at the time. These certificates were compounded in perpetuity, that is, they had no limitation.
The interest was payable in gold … And the compounding of said gold payment was accrued at a fixed price of $20 an ounce.
Now what happened, therefore, is that this one remaining certificate consequently became worth a fortune.
Although it had been technically listed as canceled by the United States Treasury after the expiration of the redemption period in 1914, George Bush was able to get a waiver (as he knew he would, given his position) from the U.S. Treasury, indicating that this was still a valid and negotiable instrument. . . .
This certificate, through a long series of transactions, ultimately winds up in the hands of a retired Secret Service agent, Mr. Durham, who at one time … had worked with one of George Bush’s Secret Service security details.
Through some underhandedness, Bush was able to garner control of this instrument through essentially out-and-out fraud committed by Frankie Sue DelPapa regarding a Nevada corporation, which had been formed by Mr. Durham and others to hold this certificate and the rights thereunto, called the Cosmos Investment Corporation.
DelPapa essentially switched all the officers and principals and directors of the Cosmos Corporation into another corporation that had been formed by George Bush and some others known as the Hellenic Investment Holding Group, Limited.
It was absolutely a blatant fraud.
Durham subsequently died. His widow tried to pound the drum on this thing for a long time, but couldn’t get anywhere with it. Simply put, the mainstream media … considered it too old and too conspiratorial to touch.
But I have a lot of the documents. . . .
It’s interesting to note the route that this certificate takes once it gets in the hands of George Bush. It winds up getting hypothecated at both Sumitomo and Daiwa Banks in Tokyo. It is re-hypothecated at Jarlska Bank of Copenhagen. Re-hypothecated again through the Greek National Bank.
Papandreou was still in power. Papandreou and George Bush Sr had been involved in many marginal business transactions involving the surreptitious hypothecation of gold bullion at the Bank of Greece through the Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Lyonnais in France and Bank Paribas. . . .
You can see through the continuation of this deal a pattern where new fraud has to be committed to pay back old fraud and so on.
I think what frightened the mainstream media is the incredible sums of money that are involved. And ultimately, a Peruvian gold certificate turned out to be the seed or germination of a series of transactions that ultimately forced Daiwa and Sumitomo to create fictitious trading losses in order to cover losses incurred in a series of fraudulently obtained, politically related loans. . . .
It was only in recent years, in 1995, that I was again retained by representatives of the original owner, or his widow, should I say, in an effort to negotiate with Bush . . .
So I talked to an attorney who had previously represented me in Miami, Neil Lewis, who is very closely aligned with Republican interests in Miami and is a personal friend of both Neil and Jeb Bush. . . .
After a few days, Neil Lewis got back to me and said that the Bushes feel that there are so many layers of protection between them and this transaction that nobody will ever be able to uncover it and they simply did not wish to deal.
So, that ended that. . . .
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Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 3/14/01: 19 Japanese Banks Placed on Credit Watch – Negative Rating Outlook Sends Worldwide Stock Markets Reeling and Pushes the Yen to a 20-Month Low Against the Dollar – . . . After the close of today’s trading in Asia, Fitch IBCA placed 19 Japanese banks of “Rating Watch Negative” because of concern about their asset quality. . . .
Among the banks are Japan’s largest, including Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Fuji Bank, Sumitomo Bank and Sanwa Bank. . . .
Much of Japan’s bad loan problem is related to the decreased value of land offered as collateral during the bubble economy of the 1980s.
Although billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been funneled to help resolve the bad loans racked up by banks, problem loans still total a staggering 64 trillion yen ($331 billion} . . .
The newest big fear on Wall Street is that Japan’s economic problems will cut into demand in that country for U.S. goods and services – leading to a further drop in American stock prices. . . .
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Rueter’s News Service, 02/16/98: Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Toyko-Mitsubishi (BTM) Linked to Bribery Scandal: Two of Japan’s leading banks, Sumitomo and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, were implicated on Monday in a widening bribery scandal involving officials at Japan’s powerful Ministry of Finance (MoF). . .
Tokyo prosecutors on Monday issued a fresh arrest warrant against tow MoF inspectors . . . on suspicion of receiving bribes from Sumitomo Bank and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, as well as Sanwa Bank, in exchange for confidential information. . . . Many of them were encroached by Kanto-based yakuza, incurring massive losses in failed stock and land speculation. . .
The article by Insider said: “MOF at the end of 1984, through the underground connections of former officials, requested the then leader of Yamahuchi Gumi, the late Takenaka Masahisa, to come to Tokyo and help kick out Kanto-based yakuza from Sogo banks.” . . .
At the time, Yamaguchi Gumi was in the midst of an internal breakup, and Takenaka needed money. He immediately complied with the request and went to Tokyo to start talks with the Kanto-based yakuza. But immediately after, he was killed by an unknown assassin.
However, taking advantage of this situation, Yamaguchi Gumi not only expanded its business territory but also started interacting openly with the bank’s top management with the consent of the Ministry.
For instance, Sumitomo Bank, originally headquartered in Osaka and weak in Tokyo, acquired a Tokyo-based Sogo bank, Heiwa Sogo Bank, from 1985 to 86. Through the acquisition, the Sumitomo offices in Tokyo increased, leading to their ascent to the number one position in the nation’s banking industry.
That was made possible by the Ministry and then Finance Minister Takeshita Noboru at the front, and Yamaguchi Gumi in the back….
For much more, GO TO > > > Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs?
Sumitomo Corporation – The big Japanese conglomerate allegedly involved in banking, insurance, manufacturing, racketeering, bribery, etc.
From The Courier-Journal, Nov 30, 200l, by Bill Wolfe:
SUMITOMO TO CUT 900 JOBS IN KENTUCKY
Company blames labor costs, will shift production to Mexico, Asia
Bowling Green-based Sumitomo Electric Wiring Systems, Inc. said yesterday it is closing some operations in south-central Kentucky, eliminating about 900 jobs, as the company shifts production to Mexico and Asia. . . .
“We make a quality product here in Kentucky, but our labor costs are too high for us to be competitive…,” David Jean, executive vice president, said in a prepared statement. . . .
The decision strikes an especially painful blow in Morgantown, where Sumitomo is the single largest employer, accounting for 35 to 40 percent of the community’s jobs, said Mayor Charles T. Black. . . .
Black blamed the pressures of globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he thinks makes it easier for companies to move manufacturing plants out of the United States.
“They have plants in Mexico already. They can make a wiring harness in Mexico for less than half of what they make it in Morgantown,” said Black, who has been mayor since 1972 and helped recruit Sumitomo to Morgantown.
The closing will also cost the city several hundred thousand dollars a year in tax revenues, which will have a large impact on Morgantown’s finances, Black said. . . .
Sumitomo Electric Wiring Systems is a U.S. company formed by Sumitomo Electric Industries of Osaka, Japan, and Sumitomo Wiring Systems of Yokkaichi, Japan. . . .
Trinity Holdings – From: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 7/31/97: . . . A Chicago-based partnership is buying the 318-room Keauhou Beach Hotel on the Kona Coast.
Trinity Investment Trust LLC, which is also purchasing the mortgage to the Aloha Tower Marketplace, has signed a letter of agreement to acquire the beachfront hotel from Azabu USA.
The hotel, built in 1970, sits on land leased from the Bishop Estate. . . .
Azabu, headed by maverick deal maker Kitaro Watanabe, acquired the Keauhou Beach Hotel in 1987 for $13 million. During the 1980s, Azabu invested about $600 million in Hawaii, acquiring the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, the Ala Moana Hotel, the Maui Marriott and the Kona Lagoon [also on land leased from Bishop Estate].
Since then, Azabu has run into a string of financial difficulties. In 1993, lender Mitsui Trust & Banking filed a foreclosure suit on the 1,200-room Hyatt Regency. In 1994, Mitsui wrote off $1 billion in bad debts from loans to Azabu.
Last month, Tokyo officials arrested Watanabe and two other Azabu officials alleging that they illegally concealed company assets from creditors. Azabu’s Hawaii subsidiary said then that the arrests had no effect on the company’s local operations.
Trinity, meanwhile, is part of a new wave of American buyers who are purchasing properties from financially troubled Japanese investors. . . .
The company — whose investors include former VMS Realty executives George Ruff, local attorney Jon Miho [of McCorriston Miho Miller & Mukai, defense attorneys for the Bishop Estate trustees] and hotel developer Charles Sweeney — is trying to acquire the $60 million mortgage to the Aloha Tower Marketplace from Mitsui and take over the waterfront complex.
Last year, Trinity and Apollo Advisors L.P. bought the $130 million mortgage to the nearby Harbor Court luxury office and condominium complex for an undisclosed price from Mitsui.
Trinity has also joined up with Apollo, time-share operator Signature Resorts Inc. and Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Fund [another Bishop Estate investment] to buy the 413-room Embassy Suites Resort on Maui for $78 million….
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[A Catbird Comment: Note that nowhere in this news article is there the slightest tweet about Azabu’s connection with the Yakuza.]
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For more, GO TO > > > Apollo Advisors; The Blackstone Group; Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Investigating Investcorp; Paving Paradise
Tsutsumi Yoshiaki – Head of the Seibu Group.
From Deep Black Lies:
HIROHITO’S GOLD
Explosive Japanese WWII Secrets Revealed
By David Guyatt
American author, Sterling Seagrave, has previously received international for his penetratiing investigative books: “The Soong Dynasty,” and “The Marcos Dynasty.” Now, in his latest work, “The Yamato Dynasty”, Seagrave unveils some of the most enduring secrets of the war in the Pacific….
As Sterling and Peggy Seagrave make clear, the ruling family of Japan has always been governed by others more powerful than themselves. The emperor and imperial family are figureheads used to conceal from the public the real power brokers who lurk behind the “black curtain.” These are the family owned and managed businesses or Zaibatsu that include such trans-national corporations as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo amongst others.
The authors say this corporate power has grown stronger, not weaker, and that the “postwar financial cliques share power with nobody. Not with the emperor, who is only a magic wand, and not with elected politicians, who are only hand-puppets. Financial cliques are the most powerful forces in modern Japan.” Moreover, Japan’s post-war business structure is unlike any other modern industrial society for the simple reason that organised crime are openly factored into it. Hence the zaibatsu include not only “financiers, bankers and heads of corporations, but underworld bosses” – the so-called Yakuza crime clans….
The most powerful man in Japan today is virtually unknown in the west, and is only rarely mentioned at home because of his connections with international sporting events. As head of the Seibu group, Tsutsumi Yoshiaki’s power snakes out to over 100 Japanese corporations and numerous international businesses.
Yet, the authors say that Tsutsumi Yoshiaki is probably the richest man in the world with declared assets greater than those of Bill Gates before the American computer whiz-kids bank balance hit $50 billion. Meanwhile, Tsutsumi’s undeclared assets are greater still, the authors believe….
See also: Seibu Group
Xiamen International Bank (XIB) – In Nov 1985, Panin Group, with three Peoples’ Republic of China-based institutions, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; Fujian Investment and Enterprise Corp; and Construction and Development Corp of Xiamen Special Economic Zone, jointly founded XIB, the first joint venture bank in the People’s Republic of China.
In Nov 1991, XIB was joined by three more shareholders: Asian Development Bank; The Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, Ltd.; and Sino Finance Group, Ltd. (owned by Hawaii’s Bishop Estate and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, William Simon).
For more GO TO > > > Dirty Money, Dirty Politics and Bishop Estate
Zenith National Insurance Corp. – Zenith is a holding company whose subsidiary, Zenith Insurance Company, provides property-casualty insurance and workers’ compensation insurance, and develops land and constructs private residences for sale in Las Vegas, NV through its subsidiary, Perma-Bilt.
Zenith Press Release, 3/1/99: Zenith National Insurance Corp announced today that Bob Miller has been elected a director of Zenith . . .
Mr. Miller, who ended ten years as Governor of Nevada this past January, has been in public life since 1975 . . .
Zenith Press Release, 10/25/99: ZENITH ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL RISCORP-RELATED RESERVES. . . . As previously reported, Zenith … has recorded the fair values of certain of the assets and liabilities acquired from RISCORP on April 1, 1998 consistent with the values determined by the Neutral Auditor and the Neutral Actuary in the dispute resolution process associated with the determination of the purchase price for RISCORP. . . .
As a result of the review, Zenith will record, in the 3rd quarter of 1999, an increase in the estimated liabilities for unpaid losses and loss adjustment expenses acquired from RISCORP . . .
Zenith Press Release, 5/18/00: Zenith … announced today that Leon E. Panetta has been elected a Director of Zenith …
Mr. Panetta, Founder and Director of the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, was White House Chief of Staff (1994 to 1997) …
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Some of the top institutional shareholders in Zenith National include American Financial Group, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Morgan (JP), Texas Teachers Retirement System, California Public Employees Retirement System, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, and Trinity Investment.
See also: Trinity Holdings
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For more Yakuza doodling, GO TO > > >
Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate
Marsh & McLennan: The Marsh Birds
Last update October 23, 2005, by The Catbird.