CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The white Mercedes of Armageddon

Saigo had a knack for extortion. He was only arrested on extortion charges once in his entire career, even though he probably did it over 100 times. Even then, he was never convicted of it. The best extortionists never are.

Aum Shinrikyo was a new religion founded in February 1984. It espoused a mixture of science, occultism, Buddhism, and new age theology. The founder of the group and its guru, Shoko Asahara, was legally blind, but highly intelligent and charismatic. He recruited the brightest minds he could find and, over the years, began turning the cult into a brutally efficient war machine. They would eventually recruit hundreds of members.

By 1988, the cult was engaging in criminal behavior that caught the attention of those in the legal community.

On November 4, 1989, disciples of Asahara raided the home of Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer handling complaints against the religious group. They kidnapped his wife and his one-year-old son, killed them elsewhere, and disposed of the bodies. One member of the hit-squad was a former soldier in the Yamaguchi-gumi.

TBS Broadcasting had filmed an interview with the lawyer, Sakamoto, a few weeks prior to the killing in which he discussed his great concerns about the cult and its fanatical tendencies. TBS had shown the tape to Aum Shinrikyo senior members, seeking comment. Tipped off to the problematic interview and increasingly annoyed by Sakamoto’s actions, the guru ordered him killed.

Asahara convinced his disciples that anyone opposing the activities of the group was a force of evil, and that killing them would speed their misguided souls onto a new incarnation.

The Kanagawa police did a sloppy investigation, even failing to find an Aum Shinrikyo badge that had fallen at the scene of the crime. Some speculate that their failure may have been partly due to the presence of an Aum sympathizer within the police force.

TBS did not air the interview or alert the police to the fact that they might have given Aum Shinrikyo a reason to abduct the lawyer and his family.

After one set of murders, the leaders of Aum Shinrikyo didn’t have qualms about committing a few more. In June 1994, they did a test run of sarin, a deadly nerve gas first developed by the Nazis, in a residential area of Matsumoto City, killing seven people and seriously injuring others. The police arrested a local man for the crimes, and tried to force a confession from him.*

[* He was later cleared of all charges.]

By January 1995, the police were fairly certain that Aum had released the nerve gas in Matsumoto City, but they still did nothing. On March 20, 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing twelve people and injuring more than 5,000. It was the first case of chemical-weapon mass terrorism in modern history. It caught the police and the nation off guard, although there had been warning signs a year before the attacks.

An organized crime detective, K. Shirakawa, was able to find out that Aum had a helicopter, purchased from Russia, which they were planning to use to spread sarin nerve gas all over the city of Tokyo. The attack would have injured thousands and killed hundreds. This has never been reported. The police knew they did not have much time to move.

On March 22, police launched massive raids on Aum and their facilities.

On March 30, the National Police Agency commissioner-general, Takaji Kunimatsu, was shot and severely wounded in front of his home in Arakawa Ward. Everyone believed that Aum was responsible, but the case was never solved.

For certain yakuza groups, this chain of events was seriously bad news. Especially for the Yamaguchi-gumi.

During the period up to the sarin gas attacks, Aum Shinrikyo needed to collect as much money as they could, and began making methamphetamines. The purity was suspect and the color was red, but it worked. Aum Shinrikyo used their former Yamaguchi-gumi members to connect to the Goto-gumi faction, and began selling drugs, weapons, and powerful incinerators to the Yamaguchi-gumi. It was a good match.

Hideo Murai was one of the chief liaisons to the Yamaguchi-gumi. He had been in charge of designing the cult’s chemical weapons compound in the Yamanashi prefecture. As the investigation progressed and the organization feared their connections to the group would be made public knowledge, they decided that Murai would have to go.

On April 23, 1995, Yamaguchi-gumi member Jo Hiroyuki stabbed Murai multiple times in front of a crowd of reporters outside Aum’s Tokyo headquarters. Murai died a few days later. Hiroyuki initially insisted that, although he was a South Korean Japanese national, he was also a rightist and had acted on his own. (During his trial, he claimed he had been ordered to make the hit by Kenji Kamimine, a senior leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi Hane-gumi. According to Hiroyuki, they had promised him a great promotion if he did it. The Tokyo High Court cleared Kamimine of his alleged part in the murder.)

The murky links connecting the yakuza to the group, the assassination attempt on the head of the National Police Agency, and the successful assassination of Hideo Murai were a cause of concern to everyone.

Aum Shinrikyo had one of their major headquarters in Fujinomiya city, where the Goto-gumi also had their headquarters. The city had a small population of 100,000 people, and nothing that mattered got done there without the Goto giving permission. Thus the police believed that the Goto-gumi was handling the distribution of the meth and other products created by the cult. They also believed that the Goto-gumi had likely played a role in the attempted assassination of the national police chief.*

[* The senior investigator noted that when the Yamaguchi-gumi assassin finally got out of jail in 2007, he went to work for right-wing groups connected to the Goto-gumi, and worked directly with Goto from 2011 to at least 2014. For a while, Hiroyuki was blogging about his life, but deleted all previous mentions of Goto from his page. His current whereabouts are unknown. ]

However, while the Yamaguchi-gumi faction had been happy to do business with the cult, they probably hadn’t known they were dealing with a group of homicidal terrorists. Yet other organizations, including the Inagawa-kai, had refused to deal with the cult.

In May 1995, the Sankei newspaper reported that Aum Shinrikyo members had approached the Inagawa-kai, offering to supply them with methamphetamines, but that the Inagawa-kai had turned them down. Then a weekly magazine published an article saying that the police had raided the Yokosuka-ikka headquarters looking for evidence that they had supplied the gun for the attempted assassination of the police commissioner-general.

There was no truth to the second article, and Coach was livid. Coach was well known for his general dislike of all reporters and publicity. Other oyabun loved to be interviewed for the yakuza fanzines, but he always refused. That wasn’t his style. But Coach was so angry that he ordered Saigo to organize a press conference.

Saigo didn’t know how to call a press conference, so he called Detective Lucky, and asked him how to do it. Detective Lucky didn’t know, either. However, he knew there was a press club inside the Prefectural police department. The reporters there mostly played mah jong and wrote up police press releases. Sometimes, they actually left the office to do work. Lucky gave Saigo their number.

Saigo called the club, and arranged the impromptu press conference. It was held at the Ikegami Honmonji temple, where Ishii had been buried.

Coach wasn’t tall, so Saigo managed to rustle up a beer crate to make a pedestal for him. Coach was dressed to the nines, wearing his signature sunglasses and a brightly colored, almost garish, necktie. To a gaggle of reporters, he read out loud a very flowery, long-winded, and angry speech. He denied that the honorable Yokosuka-ikka had anything to do with Aum Shinrikyo, said they had no part in the assassination attempt, and affirmed that they greatly respected the police.

The press took notes, took some pictures, and adjourned. There were no questions asked.

Saigo had his crew watch all the TV shows that night to see if they’d made the evening news, but they had been politely ignored. However, the spokesman for Aum Shinrikyo and their head of public affairs, also known as the information minister, Fumihiro Joyu, was prominently featured.

Joyu had graduated from an elite university. He was very bright and glib. He was quite fond of arguing with reporters, and often seemed to win the debate. He even developed a cult following of teenage girls who thought he was sexy. He rubbed Saigo the wrong way. And what really pissed off Saigo was watching footage of Joyu driving away from a press conference in a Mercedes. A white Mercedes.

That was a yakuza car. Saigo drove a Mercedes. He was not going to have the leader of some crazy cult driving a Mercedes around Tokyo.

Saigo went to have a chat with Inoue about the whole thing, in his office in the Lion’s Mansion in Kabukicho, which was on the seventh floor. Inoue had become a Buddhist priest, and his office was decorated with an imposing statue of Fudo Myō, the fierce guardian of hell, who was said to be able to change the hearts of evil demons and make them angels — an iconic figure also carved as a tattoo onto the backs of many yakuza. The statue was the centerpiece of the large Buddhist altar in the room. In front of the statue on the altar was a small incense burner, a candlestick, a flower vase, and a signal bell (suzu).

When Saigo entered the room, Inoue was putting his hands together in prayer, having just tapped on the bell with the tiny stick next to it. Saigo didn’t say a word, but waited in silence as the clear, reverberating tone of the bell faded into silence and Inoue finished mumbling an incantation. The bell was rung before meditation, or prayer, or the chanting of Buddhist sutras, but for Saigo, who had by now attended many funerals, it wasn’t the signal for meditation — it was the sound of death. It always creeped him out a little. The smell of sandalwood from the incense, mixed with the reek of sake and the cigarette smoke, made him feel like he’d walked into a Buddhist theme bar.

Inoue noticed Saigo after a few seconds and stood up to greet him with a smile on his face, and motioned for Saigo to sit down. Saigo told him his plan. Surprisingly, Inoue approved.

Inoue knew a great deal about Aum Shinrikyo. He told Saigo that what he found most troubling about the group was how they had perverted the teachings of Buddha, a religion of peace, into a justification for murder.

Inoue told him the first principle of Buddhism was to cause no harm to others and to love every living creature. This was important in generating good karma. If you hurt others, you were bound to get hurt. Even a five-year-old could understand this.

But the guru of Aum had turned the principle upon its head. Aum Shinrikyo was almost like a yakuza group in which the senior members would beat up the lower-ranking members for any act of insubordination or failure. The group called this “getting rid of bad karma” — a way of getting rid of the spiritual and moral baggage that slowed up a disciple in this life or the next. This was also their justification for killing enemies of the group in a brutal fashion. The Aum Shinrikyo leaders would tell their followers that they were not killing people, but were helping them — by speeding them on their way to their next incarnation, lightened of their false beliefs and karmic baggage. Inoue found the whole concept appalling.

Inoue wished Saigo would give Joyu a stern lecture as well, but Saigo wasn’t into wordy sermons; he was more of an action kind of guy.

The next day, Saigo, Yamada, and a few other gang members drove up to the Aum Shinrikyo headquarters and waited for Joyu’s car to leave. When it did, Saigo’s car blocked the entrance of the driveway, and Saigo got out.

The police who were guarding the area seemed flustered, but didn’t do anything. Saigo pounded on the front window. “Get out of the car.”

Joyu stayed calm. He stared down Saigo and informed him, in a beatific manner, that he was speaking to a spiritual leader.

In Saigo’s mind, he was talking to a pirate and fucking traitor. He wanted to know where Joyu had got the white Mercedes. Saigo said this with such venom and barely controlled anger that Joyu was slightly flustered, but he quickly attempted to take control of the situation.

Joyu told him the car was a present from Yamauchi Taro of the Yamaguchi-gumi, and that Taro had it specially made for him. That was probably a lie, but by telling Saigo this, Joyu was saying he had the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group, backing him up.

Saigo wasn’t impressed. The headquarter they were at was in Inagawa-kai territory, and a traitor like Joyu didn’t deserve to ride around in a white Mercedes Benz — a car that was basically a yakuza symbol. It disgraced all yakuza.

Saigo thumped on the window as hard as he could with the bottom of his fist. The thick window didn’t shake. It was made of bulletproof glass.

“Well, you don’t need that. If someone shoots you to death, you deserve it. You’re giving us this car.”

Joyu was dumbfounded. He looked over at the police, who had all stepped 300 yards to the right. They were standing in a circle smoking cigarettes. Saigo called out to a detective he knew, and asked him if he could hear what he was saying.

The detective shouted that he couldn’t hear a thing. None of the cops could. They were all on their cigarette break. “Let us know when you’re done.”

“Okay,” said Saigo, shouting back. “Just wanted to let you know that Joyu-sama is giving us his car for safekeeping.”

“That’s very nice of him. Congratulations.”

It wouldn’t have been smart for Saigo to drive off with a car that Joyu was donating to the Inagawa-kai, so he ordered Joyu to drop it off at a designated intersection that night. Joyu nodded meekly, but the police wouldn’t allow him to leave the building. So many people wanted to kill Joyu that the police said they couldn’t protect him if he left. In the circumstances, Saigo decided Joyu would have his lawyer drive it over.

Having reached an agreement, Saigo made his parting greetings to the detectives, and took his entourage of thugs back home.

Joyu’s lawyer delivered the car ten minutes early. A good source told Saigo that the specially fitted car had cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. He figured that the resale value would be at least $100,000, but Saigo quickly discovered that no one wanted to buy, drive, or even touch anything related to Joyu.

The white Mercedes turned out to be a giant white elephant in disguise. The Aum cult had failed to do proper maintenance on it, and parts had to be replaced frequently, making the upkeep expensive. All the adjustments that had been made invalidated the warranty. Plus, the retrofitted bulletproof plating made the car so heavy that it ate gas like it was a mini tank. There was some discussion of pressuring the Mercedes Benz dealership to fix it for free, but Mercedes had good connections with the cops, so they nixed the idea.

Saigo considered repainting it, but the car was in such bad shape that he decided it wasn’t worth paying for the paint job. Eventually, he ordered one of the foot soldiers to dump it in a parking lot outside Tokyo with the car keys in it. Three days later, the car was gone.

Saigo didn’t make any money on the shakedown. In fact, financially, he took a hit. But among cops, right-wingers, and yakuza, he bought himself a huge chunk of credibility, and that was a very hard thing to buy in the underworld.