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to marry a Japanese woman. The event was such a rarity that film footage of him and his bride, an English-speaking dentist, was shown on the Pathé movie news – the announcer pointedly noting the existence of something called the Oriental Exclusion Act, which prevented Americans from taking such war brides home. By March 1948, however, he was back in full swing running an extremely lucrative black market beer operation in partnership with a predacious lieutenant colonel in charge of ration tickets in the Occupation Finance Office and a fellow investigator in the CPC, a nisei who spoke fluent Japanese and could communicate directly with thecity’s gang bosses. Once or twice a week they would take the ration coupons out to an Occupation-approved brewery, a rusting metal structure on the Sumida River in the eastern part of Tokyo where, for a fee paid under the table, a compliant Japanese clerk would quietly fill the order, in violation of GHQ rationing laws prohibiting individuals from making such large purchases. They would fill up a large military truck with hundreds of cases of beer and sell their goods to buyers at secluded warehouses and bombed-out factories around town for a profit of 40 cents a bottle. The next day, their beer would be displayed in the open-air markets.
    Profits from such activities made it possible for him to buy a plot of land in the suburb of Fujisawa and build a large American-style house, where he ensconced his wife and two infant children. He had also acquired a fancy new car, a wardrobe of new clothes, and several mistresses, whom he would entertain at the Dai-Ichi Hotel, a Western-style establishment in Shimbashi built for the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics. One of his young lady friends was a law student, destined to become a successful attorney, who paid her law school tuition by providing Zappetti and his friends with oral sex on demand. There are those who vividly remember the sight of Zappetti being driven around downtown Tokyo in the backseat of an open convertible in broad daylight, drinking Champagne, and enjoying the X-rated ministrations of a semi-clothed female companion.
    In early 1950, the beer operation was infiltrated by a zealous undercover detective from the MPD, which resulted in Zappetti’s arrest by the MPs and deportation. But it didn’t take long for the enterprising young New Yorker to make it back to Japan. Although his passport had been seized on his arrival in the United States and he had been subsequently booted out of his local congressman’s office when he had gone to ask for it back, he simply went to pay his respects to the local Mafia Office on 116th Street, between 1st and 2nd avenues. The bosses who ran the neighborhood were more than willing to help one of their own.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said one of the men, a distant relative of the family. ‘We can take care of the situation.’
    And they did. Shortly thereafter, the relative told him to fill out an application for a new US passport as well as one for a commercial entrant visa for Japan and to deliver the documents to a certain someone in the mayor’s office downtown. A few weeks later, Zappetti’s passport came in the mail, with a visa stamped inside.
    Also helpful was a ‘business associate’ in the GHQ, a cryptographer from Brooklyn named Bob, with whom Zappetti had made preparatory inquiries before leaving.
    ‘You see the way it’s happening now,’ Bob had said at the time. ‘They got something called a Form 26. That’s a list of all commercial entrant visa holders who want to enter Japan. If there are any traitors or criminals on it, which means people like you, then the GHQ puts a check mark by it, meaning entry not allowed.’
    ‘Shit,’ Zappetti had said. ‘I’ll never get approved.’
    ‘Fortunately,’ Bob continued, ‘the list goes through my hands. If your name is checked off, all I have to do is switch it with someone else’s. That way you get in and some other poor slob gets