Word: yakuza
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...Nishinomiya sports center and other large shelters--enough, in fact, so that authorities claimed everyone was getting two good meals a day. In some neighborhoods, the resumption of running water reduced the prospect of disease. Makers of goods ranging from helicopters to lingerie donated wares (the local yakuza had already turned themselves into neighborhood godfathers by dispensing necessities in their district), and tractors and cranes began working day and night to dig out victims and remove the huge hulk of the collapsed highway...
...traffic became two-way, with Filipina and Thai prostitutes migrating to Japan. Despite the efforts of citizens' groups to publicize the problem, little has been done to help the estimated 70,000 Thai "hostesses" now working in Japan as virtual indentured sex slaves in bars usually controlled by yakuza gangsters. The women, many of them ignorant villagers, are sold by Thai brokers for an average of $14,000 each and resold to the clubs by Japanese brokers for about $30,000 -- a sum they are obliged to work off, but rarely...
EVEN AS THE FBI IS GAINING GROUND ON THE AMERICAN branch of the Mafia, it is getting ready to take on a new threat: the YAKUZA -- Japanese mobsters. An estimated 100,000 yakuza in Japan rake in some $10 billion a year from narcotics, extortion and loan-sharking. As the gangs channel that cash into legitimate investments in the U.S. and Europe, the FBI will be hard pressed to decipher the money trail. One reason: money laundering is not a crime in Japan, so the mobsters can operate through shell corporations without the kind of close scrutiny at home that...
...Europe and as far afield as Hungary and Israel. DEA informants report that Cali is looking for sales representatives to man branch offices in Japan, where the going wholesale price for cocaine is as high as $65,000 per kg. "If the Cali cartel makes an alliance with the yakuza ((Japan's organized-crime network))," warns a Colombian presidential aide, "watch...
...yakuza is Japan's version of the Mafia, a shadowy mob brotherhood that often operates behind a shield of what appears to be legitimate business fronts. According to Japanese press reports, one such business is West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based real estate firm that has bought into two American companies with the help of an unusually well-placed U.S. middleman: Prescott Bush Jr., 68, the President's elder brother...