Tokyo Underworld Read Online Free

crates were opened and the contents were discovered to be missing. Throughout it all, an assortment of small-time smugglers continued their operations from a downtown office building right next to the Provost Marshal’s office.
    By the time the exercise was over, it had become increasingly clear that the new era of democracy and bilateral friendship being forged had a powerful, resilient underside. A pattern of illicit collusion had been established through an extraordinary mix of desperation and opportunism, and it was not about to go away.
BANK OF TEXAS
    Of the many black market ventures during the Occupation involving Japanese and Americans, perhaps none was quite as successful as a company known as Lansco, a bizarre Ginza-based ‘general store’ that was engaged in everything from illegal banking to gumball sales. Its founder was an ex-Marine sergeant from New York named Nick Zappetti, a thickset, swaggering Italian who, it might be argued, was as representative of his era as the kindhearted, chocolate-giving, children-loving GI of popular lore. Lansco was one of a series of memorable Zappetti ventures, of both the legal and illegal variety, that would highlight a long and quixotic career in the Far East.
    Like many others in the Occupation netherworld, Zappetti came from a Depression-era background of poverty – in his case, the northern Manhattan Italian ghetto of East Harlem. He belonged to a family of eleven children who grew up in a cramped cold water tenement. Their father, an immigrant rough carpenter from Calebresia, made barely enough to feed everyone and pay the rent.
    Zappetti was no stranger to crime, thanks to the Mafioso who controlled his neighborhood. Gaetano Luchese, better known as ‘Three-Finger Brown’, was a second cousin. Family acquaintances included Joe Rao, who was the ‘Boss of Booze’, ‘Trigger’ Mike Coppola, aka ‘King of the Artichokes’, and Joe Stretch, a mobster who had his own chain of restaurants. The doctor across the street sold bootleg whiskey, and the next-door neighbor was a professional hit man – as young Nick discovered one afternoon in 1935 at age fourteen when he attended the man’s funeral. The corpse had been laid out in an open casket in the adjoining flat and its face was burned a deep red.
    ‘What happened?’ he had asked his father. ‘Did he lie out in the sun too long?’
    ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘He died at Sing Sing last night in the electric chair. He was executed for murder.’
    That was the kind of environment Zappetti had come from, a place where it was the cops who were regarded as the enemy and the robbers the role models in life. He believed that World War II was the best thing that ever happened, given the somewhat limited opportunities for advancement at home, for it got him into the military and all the way to Japan, where the choices for someone with brains and a larcenous heart were far more numerous.
    Zappetti had arrived in Northern Kyushu in late August 1945 as a twenty-two-year-old first sergeant in charge of the aforementioned MAG-44 party assigned to commandeer the Omura Air Field near Nagasaki, where he had made the decision to occupy the geisha house instead of the abandoned base while awaiting reinforcements. In February 1946, when his Marine Corps hitch ended, he took a local discharge and assumed one of the 6,000 US government jobs available in the GHQ – which, ironically enough, was a post as an investigator for the Civil Property Custodian Section, a department created to oversee the return of property looted by Japan in other Asian countries to its rightful owners. In early 1947 he made a trip back to the United States and returned with a Ford convertible, inside of which he had concealed several sacks of lighter flints, a highly prized commodity in Japan. There were 20,000 flints in each sack, and he sold them on the Ginza black market for more money than the car had cost.
    In August of the same year, he took time out