Tokyo Underworld by Robert Whiting Read Free Book Online Page B

Riviera Club in Manila and had reportedly maintained a business relationship with the Japanese ImperialArmy there during the early stages of the war – had a fairly good idea of how things worked in Japan. He had paid a $25,000 bribe to a certain Japanese politician, one of the first recorded post-Occupation bribes, and that was enough for the concerned authorities to look the other way while he opened up an operation on the Ginza.
    The set-up looked like something out of a Warner Brothers movie. On the first floor was a nightclub restaurant, with a Filipino band, called the Club Mandarin managed by Lewin’s Taiwanese unwitting landlords. On the second, down a narrow back corridor near the restrooms, was the casino. There was a peephole, several levels of guards, and double-layered walls enclosed by iron shutters. In the inner sanctum stood a big Las Vegas – quality roulette wheel, as well as craps, blackjack and baccarat tables. Thanks to the patronage of the diplomatic crowd, Japanese politicians, and assorted black market gang bosses, several hundred thousands of dollars changed hands there every night.
    Lewin also opened another club, the Latin Quarter, in Akasaka, noted for its red curtains and risqué entertainment. As one Japanese journalist wrote, describing live sex shows and rampant drug use, ‘It was a real 100% American style club, meaning that the mood was one of freedom and that it operated outside the law.’ Lewin’s Latin Quarter partner, Yoshio Kodama, was a former operative in the Japanese military who had taken part in the rape of China. His floor manager was an ex-CIA agent named Al Shattuck, a tall, rugged, bespectacled man in his thirties who, as shall be seen, was about to become famous in Japan – but in a way that he perhaps never imagined. Shattuck’s Japanese assistant was a veteran of naval intelligence. Lewin’s chauffeur and interpreter was a Korean-American from Hawaii with ties to the Tokyo-based ethnic Korean gang Tosei-kai.
    Lewin’s political contributions in high places served him well. Although police closed down his casino twice in widely publicized raids, each time, after a short interval, Lewin was back in businessin a new location in the same general vicinity – operating under the Mandarin moniker. He was later reported to be involved in gunrunning, drug smuggling and prostitution as well. It was only after a phony stock scheme was uncovered in which Lewin swindled Japanese and Chinese investors out of hundreds of millions of yen that he wore out his welcome.
    That other notorious foreign operation of note, Lansco, remained in business, continuing to generate profits by going into the pachinko business, a craze that swept Japan at the time. Pachinko was a form of early American pinball, introduced to Japan in the 1920s as a crude candy store game, which produced various prizes. Due to the space limitations Japan faced, the machine had evolved into a compact, upright, glass-fronted apparatus using tiny silver steel balls. The player sat in front of the device and by manipulating a lever propelled a rapid succession of balls up to the top of a board covered with a maze of steel pegs, the idea being to maneuver them into special payoff slots producing bonus balls redeemable not for free games but for prizes. In the postwar era, the prizes became daily necessities like coffee, canned fruit, sugar, soap and domestic cigarettes like Golden Bat. Since it cost so little to play and was the essence of simplicity itself, the popularity of pachinko skyrocketed. By 1953, there were over a million machines housed in some 50,000 pachinko parlors, all filled to capacity, day and night. Critics complained the pachinko boom was creating a nation of idiots and that it also increased the crime rate. Indeed, people were so eager to try it, they would literally steal for the money to play.
    Under Japanese law, pachinko was technically not gambling because the prizes were goods, not currency.