Authors: Robert Whiting
Each player had, Zappetti estimated, 20 million to 30 million yen on the table, in stacks of freshly minted 10,000-yen notes. Behind each player stood a bodyguard – coat opened and holstered handgun exposed. There were .45s, .38s and .357s. At the door stood two nasty-looking wrestlers – Rikidozan apprentices – holding shotguns. Outside, lurking in the bushes, were more armed guards, Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds at their sides.
It was necessary, given the strict laws against firearms and gambling in Japan, for protection from cops as well as robbers. In fact, if the police had raided the house, there would almost
certainly have been a shoot-out. The players were far too important to let themselves be caught.
The game,
kabu
, was a sort of Japanese baccarat, played with a traditional deck of forty-eight illustrated Japanese
hanafuda
, or flower cards, each representing a numerical value from 6 to 1. A white cloth was spread over the table and along its middle ran a thin line. The dealer, Rikidozan, sat at the head of the table and dealt out six cards face down, three on either side of the line, then called for bets to be placed. The players either bet on which side would have the lowest total or which side would have the highest. The minimum bet was 100,000 yen. After the bets were placed, Rikidozan’s attendants counted the money on each side. Both had to be equal in order to complete a hand, and Riki was the ‘balancer’. If one side had 30 million and the other only 12 million, Riki would bet 18 million yen to balance it out. The house would take a 5 percent cut of each pot, an arrangement, Zappetti did not fail to notice, that was unlikely to threaten Rikidozan’s acknowledged standing as one of the richest men in the land.
Zappetti had laid down 100,000 yen, nearly six months’ salary for one of his waiters, but by far the lowest bet on the table. The cards were turned over and he lost. He put ten more 10,000-yen bills on the table, the cards were dealt, and he lost again. He laid down another 100,000 yen on the table and lost a third time. Around him money was being shifted back and forth in stacks of 1 million yen. Players were cursing to themselves, furiously scribbling in notebooks, jotting down x’s and o’s, making red and blue marks, and doing calculations on tiny
soroban
(abacuses). The air was blue with cigarette smoke. Young wrestling trainees served drinks, lit cigarettes and offered up hot towels – like male geisha. Others counted the house take, stacking it into neat piles.
Zappetti kept losing. He lost the next hand and the next one and the next after that. He lost ten times in a row. While he had gone through his million yen, Zappetti estimated that Rikidozan had bet a total of 100 million yen. Riki had a huge stack of money in front
of him and Zappetti had absolutely nothing. What’s more, he had no more money to bet. All the cash he had brought with him had fit in an envelope, which he had casually stuffed inside his suit coat. Everyone else had carried theirs in bulging briefcases and satchels.
It would have been bad manners, Zappetti thought, to get up and leave, so he borrowed a million yen from the house. Thirty minutes later, he had lost that, too. Then he borrowed and lost a second million, and a third. Zappetti considered himself a wealthy enough man, but he decided he didn’t want to play in this game anymore. Almost all the other players were losing in the house cut alone what he had been betting per hand. Thus when Rikidozan proffered yet another stack of yen in his direction, Nick shook his head.
‘Fuck no,’ he had said. ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Call off the dogs and let me go home.’
All in all it had been quite a lesson. In what, Zappetti wasn’t sure. But later that night, Zappetti stopped thinking of Japan as a ‘poor’ country.
No American ever utilized the Tokyo underground to further his own interests quite like the proprietor of Roppongi’s hot new restaurant. Consider, for example, a dispute that arose between Zappetti and Club 88, one of many nightclubs that had opened in the neighborhood in the wake of Nicola’s success. A shadowy den of dark curtains, begowned hostesses and live entertainment, the 88 had begun serving pizza and advertising it on the menu as ‘Nicola’s Pizza’, without permission. When Zappetti complained to the manager – an Englishman in his forties named Leo Prescott – the man refused to change his menu, arguing that no one could claim a copyright on such a ‘common name’. Zappetti mentioned the problem one night to Rikidozan in passing, wondering out loud what to do, and the wrestler offered to solve it for his favorite restaurateur as a personal favor.
‘We’ll just go make a typhoon,’ Riki had said.
A few nights later, Riki, a burly friend he had recruited, and Nick paid a visit to the 88. While Nick watched, Riki and his companion staged a mock fight. The two men began throwing wild punches at each other, missing intentionally and hitting waiters instead. They threw tables and chairs across the room, shattering a large mirror on one wall and smashing all the liquor bottles displayed behind the bar. Then they demolished a grand piano sitting in one corner. The manager stood by horrified, trying in vain to get them to stop. When the two men had finally finished, the place was a complete shambles.
That was the end of the pizza problem. After that Riki saw fit to create yet two more such typhoons against businesses in the area who had somehow offended Zappetti. The three typhooned establishments eventually moved out of Roppongi.
And then there had been the matter that arose in 1959 with the opening of a branch restaurant of Nicola’s in front of Yokota Air Force Base in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Yokota Nicola’s was a big, white, brightly decorated concrete building with a large parking lot, a neon sign, and a sea of red-and-white checkered cloths inside that, from the start, was always brimming with pizza-hungry servicemen and their girlfriends (not to mention bored military wives and their off-base Japanese lovers). It had started out as a joint venture. Zappetti had bought the land and put up the building while a Japanese partner handled the day-to-day operations. Things went smoothly for a while until there was a dispute over money the partner had spent from the company’s checking account. When Zappetti went out to Yokota for a confrontation with his partner about it, he found a local gangster waiting for him instead – a tall, reedy figure dressed completely in white – white summer suit, white shirt, white tie, white hat and white shoes. He looked like a character out of the
Untouchables
, then playing on TV – dubbed into Japanese. The Japanese Frank Nitti, without so much as uttering hello, informed Nick that his
organization, the Tanashi gang of Yokota, was taking over the restaurant.
Nick discussed the matter with Rikidozan, who in turn discussed the matter with Machii, who then arranged for a meeting with the Tanashi gang leader the next day. At ten the following morning, the Tosei-kai chieftain and a dozen short, hollow-cheeked, pasty-faced men in dark, baggy suits entered Yokota Nicola’s, all of them bearing guns or knives of one sort or another and very nasty scowls.
They sat down at a large table, facing their opposite number, and talked, if that was the word for it. There was a great deal of guttural underworld slang punctuated by a lot of finger pointing and posturing. Zappetti had no idea what they were talking about. Finally, the Tosei-kai boss put forth an offer in which Mr Nicola would buy out his partner at a fair price and gave everyone a night to think about it. The next morning, the two sides reached an agreement. The Japanese partner would sell, the Tanashi gang would vacate the premises, and Nick would pay a sum of money to the Tosei-kai that would be used as a solatium to the mother of the nineteen-year-old Tanashi gang member who had had his intestines sliced out with a butcher knife the previous evening in a Yokota city snack bar during a confrontation with a foot soldier belonging to the Machii family.
For a country like Japan, where business decisions are made only after weeks, sometimes months, of meetings and consensus achieving to foster the desired
wa
, or harmony, this was warp speed.
The events of Yokota were a reflection of the gang turmoil that was increasingly afflicting Tokyo. According to the National Police Agency, which attempted to keep track of such things, the number of badge-carrying gangsters in the nation as a whole had swollen alarmingly. From a prewar total of several thousand, the total had risen to 56,000 by 1951 and then from there nearly quadrupled by the end of the decade. It was the largest concentration of organized crime members in history, several times the number of Mafiosi in
the United States, and was attributed in part to Japan’s precipitous economic growth, which had spawned thousands of new bars and nightclubs ripe for shaking down – as well as to the maturation of Japan’s baby boomers, which created new legions of juvenile delinquents.
In the subsequent battle for territory, there had been a wave of violent confrontations in which the old yakuza motto ‘Wash Blood with Blood’ was taken quite literally: a lieutenant in the Shibuya Ando-gumi instantly disemboweled with a butcher knife for accidentally stepping on a pack of cigarettes dropped by a rival gang member; a Shinjuku foot soldier tied to the railroad tracks for a grisly early morning meeting with the first commuter train in reprisal; an Asakusa gang boss shot dead in a midnight cemetery shoot-out – his opposite number slain in a predawn machine-gun battle in front of Ueno Station.
Extortion, assault, and theft rates skyrocketed. Although Tokyo would later develop a reputation as one of the world’s safest cities, in that era, the burgeoning entertainment hubs were being described in the press as ‘hotbeds of crime’ and the surrounding streets unsafe for anyone after midnight. The radio carried public service announcements urging people to hide their kitchen knives so that intruders could not use them as weapons.
The rivalry between the Sumiyoshi and the Tosei-kai, which had begun in the ashes of postwar Tokyo, had intensified. The older Sumiyoshi had grown to some 8,000 members in twelve loosely allied subgroups in the greater metropolitan area and ports to the north had gained control of the Tokyo docks, among other things. (The 7,000-member Inagawa-kai ran the Yokohama and Yokosuka ports to the south.) Although the Tosei-kai had solidified at 1,500 members after taking over the West Ginza, the two gangs were also competing fiercely for territory in the growing Roppongi–Akasaka area – as the center of the city began moving westward – vying for the right to ‘protect’ the scores of tiny bars popping up in the region’s new multistoried concrete buildings.
Nicola’s continued to be caught in the unrest. Twelve young Sumiyoshi thugs had refused to pay for a large meal at the restaurant one night in 1961. They told the American owner that Roppongi was
their
territory and that free meals were the price he had to pay for their protection. The cement-necked Zappetti, an ex-marine boxer who had learned to fight on the streets of New York, had coolly invited them to a parking lot across the street to fight – either one by one or all at once – and in the end, they had backed down. It was a story that had instantly spread in Roppongi because the youths were ‘trainees’ attached to a notorious Tokyo wing of the Sumiyoshi yakuza syndicate known as the Kobayashi-kai. The next day their leader, Kusuo Kobayashi, had paid him a visit to apologize and settle the bill, but that incident had been followed by more trouble, highlighted by a sword battle a block away, outside a club run by a captain in the Machii family, involving some twenty participants of the Sumiyoshi and Tosei-kai. In that scuffle, a Tosei-kai soldier named Kaneko had had his left hand sliced off. The hand was lying nearby on the pavement, wristwatch still attached and ticking, when the police arrived.
It was not what one would call a stable business environment.
As Machii’s Tosei-kai carved out its territory in Roppongi, Nicola’s became the gang’s informal headquarters, tables occupied every night by pizza-munching yakuza, in apparent emulation of their boss. Sales of alcoholic beverages rose in proportion. Given the yakuza’s somewhat menacing presence and the volatile personality of the proprietor, conflict was perhaps inevitable. And it came in the form of a famous encounter between the American owner and a well-known, renegade mobster affiliated with the Tosei-kai, ‘Killer’ Ikeda.
Ikeda was a wiry, hollow-cheeked, sinister-looking desperado with a nasty temper, a missing little finger, and a leather case he constantly carried around containing six handleless ice picks
sharpened on both ends. He reminded people of Richard Widmark’s psychopathic killer in
Kiss of Death
, which had been popular in Tokyo. The word around Roppongi was stay out of his way because he was the meanest gangster in town.
He had walked into Nicola’s one night in the summer of 1963 with five other gangsters and a touring professional wrestler from the States who, coincidentally, went by the name Killer Austin and demanded the proprietor join his party for a drink. Zappetti had been sitting at the bar in his restaurant, drinking with a visiting stand-up comic from Los Angeles named Kenny Pearce, who was appearing in a Roppongi-area club. It was past midnight, he was well on his way to getting drunk, and he refused. The reply was a curt ‘I don’t sit with gangsters’, which was not exactly true because the fact of the matter was he
always
sat with Machii and his friends whenever they came in. But Zappetti simply did not like the churlish Ikeda and he didn’t care who knew it. Besides, he thought that Ikeda was just trying to impress everyone at his expense.
Killer Ikeda naturally took offense. He rose to challenge Zappetti and Zappetti blasted him in the mouth, sending him sprawling to the carpeted floor. Then the unstrung American flattened a second, then a third member of the group. Then he straightened his tie, and, nimbly stepping over bodies, made his way out the door and into the Roppongi night.
Ikeda and his companions regrouped and set out in pursuit. They scoured the Akasaka and Roppongi area for the next three hours with no success, until finally at 3.30 in the morning, they arrived at Tom’s, a seedy, all-night watering hole on the northern end of the Roppongi strip. Tom’s was a simple, narrow, glass-front saloon, enveloped in a constant haze of blue smoke. It consisted of a counter, several bar stools and booths, a lower level, and a video jukebox imported from Europe that played such tunes as ‘The Ballad of the Alamo’ in French and ‘Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ in Italian. A sign on the wall, in English and Japanese read, ‘Out of money, out of Tom’s.’ Tom’s was
patronized by gangsters, hookers, people from the entertainment industry,
Stars and Stripes
personnel, Russian embassy workers and
gaijin
expatriate drifters who were all attracted to its film noir ambience and general sleaze.