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Japanese Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa pleaded guilty this week in a Manhattan court to trafficking nuclear materials and narcotics, as well as other weapons charges. The 60-year-old now faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
“As he admitted in federal court today, Takeshi Ebisawa brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” Acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim for the Southern District of New York said in a statement.
“At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma and laundered what he believed to be drug money from New York to Tokyo.
“It is thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the DEA’s Special Operations Division, the career national security prosecutors of this Office, and the cooperation of our law enforcement partners in Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand, that Ebisawa’s plot was detected and stopped.”
Yakuza leader Ebisawa was tripped up by American authorities when, as the U.S. Department of Justice put it, he “unwittingly introduced an undercover DEA agent (UC-1), posing as a narcotics and weapons trafficker, to Ebisawa’s international network of criminal associates, which spanned Japan, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, and the United States, among other places, for the purpose of arranging large-scale narcotics and weapons transactions.”
Ebisawa conspired to broker the purchase of American-made surface-to-air missiles from the undercover DEA agent, as well as other heavy-duty weaponry. He intended to exchange the weaponry with multiple ethnic armed groups in Burma for, as partial payment, large quantities of heroin and methamphetamine for distribution. The narcotics were then going to be distributed in the New York market.
He was busted trying to sell nuclear materials including plutonium, thorium and uranium to an associate of the undercover agent who was posing as an Iranian general.
With the assistance of Thai authorities, the nuclear samples were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement. A nuclear forensic laboratory in the United States examined the nuclear samples and determined that both samples contain detectable quantities of uranium, thorium, and plutonium. In particular, the laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the nuclear samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.
“Our investigation into Takeshi Ebisawa and his associates exposed the shocking depths of international organized crime from trafficking nuclear materials to fueling the narcotics trade and arming violent insurgents,” said Administrator Anne Milgram of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
This week, Takeshi Ebisawa pleaded guilty to six charges including conspiracy to commit international trafficking of nuclear materials, international trafficking of nuclear materials, conspiracy to possess firearms, including machine guns and destructive devices, money laundering, and two counts of narcotics importation conspiracy. The six counts have maximum prison sentences ranging from 10 years in prison to life.