Tokyo Underworld Read Online Free Page B

his application rejected. Just call me when you get ready to come back and we’ll work something out.’
    Zappetti placed his call and in June 1950 boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in New York City. Sixty hours later he landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and passed through immigration without incident. After a brief unproductive visit with his wife, who had wearied of his philandering and his criminal ways, he moved into a small house in the southwestern part of Tokyo. Then he began cobbling together the venture that would take its own unique place in Tokyo underworld history.
    By bribing someone in the 8th Army, Zappetti obtained a permit that allowed him to sell goods legally to authorized military personnel. He established a company and, in late 1950, set up shop in a two-story ferro-concrete building located on a broad WestGinza avenue that was perpetually jammed with military personnel, street vendors and smoke-belching oil drum fires.
    The new company’s name, Lansco, was a play on the first names of Zappetti and his new partners, a Russian Communist with a taste for booze and expensive cars, named Leo Yuskoff, whom Nick had met during his CPC days, and an entrepreneurial US Army lieutenant named Al, who was transferred back to the States shortly after the company began operations. Yuskoff was a stateless White Russian in his early forties who had been born in Kobe, Japan, where his parents had settled after fleeing the Russian Revolution. One of an estimated 500 White Russians living in Japan after the war, Yuskoff could read and write Japanese better than most natives. He was simultaneously a devout Marxist and a shrewd, dedicated businessman, capable of calculating complex profit margins at the drop of a hat.
    Displayed on the ground floor of the Lansco building was a wide variety of merchandise: canned and dry goods, including silk, wool and imported London tweeds. There was assorted hardware and appliances, like Gibson refrigerators and Servo stoves, along with luxury items such as Capehart phonographs – all procured from the PX by legitimate or other means. Although the store would turn a huge profit, it had originally been intended for show – to deceive the MPs and disguise the important part of the operation, which was conducted upstairs and which was the business of illegal checks.
    Among Lansco’s first clients was a major American shipping company with an office in Tokyo that was looking for bigger earnings on its cash reserves than the banks were paying – at the time, 5 percent. The company deposited $2 million in Lansco’s account at the Tokyo branch of the Bank of America, and Lansco sold dollar checks on that account to black market buyers for yen. The official bank rate had been fixed at 360 yen to the dollar in 1949 as part of a tight new SCAP policy following a period of wild inflation that had seen the currency balloon all the way from 15yen. (The dollar would stay at the 360 level until 1973, when US President Richard Nixon took it off the gold standard and allowed it to float on the international market.) On the street, however, with demand high due to stiff currency exchange laws and restrictions, a dollar would fetch anywhere from 480 to 520 yen, which meant considerable profits for those with greenbacks to sell. Other Lansco clients included American and Canadian construction companies under US military contract who wanted a better exchange rate on their government-issued dollar checks than the banks were paying when they converted them to Japanese currency. Lansco would buy their checks at the rate of 420 yen to the dollar, then sell them on the street at 480–520 yen. Since the checks in question were seldom under $100,000 a piece, the company realized a substantial return on each transaction.
    Lansco’s most notable accomplishment was creating a bank out of thin air. The Bank of Texas, as it was called, was an entirely fictitious bank with no assets, no liabilities, and no legal