CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 115
nanced the establishment of the Liberal Party. Merging with the Democratic
Party in 1955, the resulting LDP has continued to rule Japan from a foundation
built in part on criminal money.
Released from prison in 1948, Kodama was promptly recruited by U.S.
intelligence and for the next 35 years moved at the highest levels among
yakuza bigwigs, right-wing politicians, and U.S. businessmen. Among corporations
that came calling on Kodama was Lockheed Aircraft. Anxious to
sell Starfighter jets, Tristar airliners, and Orion anti-submarine planes,
Lockheed paid more than $12 million to Kodama over 20 years, most of it
in yen notes, much of which he used to bribe politicians and defense and
airline officials. When the scandal broke in 1976, it led to passage of the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States the following year, barring
bribes to foreign government officials. Japanese ex-prime minister
Kakuei Tanaka was convicted in 1983 of accepting more than $2 million of
Lockheed’s bribe money, while earlier press reports alleged that more than
$250 million of illicit money had been passed through dummy corporations
to his LDP faction. 128
Today, yakuza ranks are estimated at about 80,000, among more than a
thousand gangs spread across the Japanese islands and dozens of other
countries. This gives organized crime a far heavier presence in Japan than in
any other industrialized democracy. The largest syndicate, Yamaguchigumi,
is based in Kobe and Osaka, has a membership of about 17,500, and
in recent years has operated thousands of businesses in most of Japan’s prefectures.
The next four largest syndicates are headquartered in Tokyo and
have a total membership of some 15,000. Combined criminal revenues are
estimated by cowed police officials at $10 billion and by other analysts at
vastly higher figures.
The range of yakuza activities in Japan is breathtaking, mixing illegallyderived
revenues with semilegitimate businesses across the economic spectrum.
Trillions of yen are generated from both usual and unique forms of
crime.
Drugs. Before World War II, the yakuza controlled importation of opium
and heroin from China. Frenetic years of economic expansion in the postwar
occupation period produced a huge market for methamphetamines,
with China, Taiwan, and South and North Korea providing pills and powder
from dozens of labs. By the 1980s, meth may have accounted for half of