Blackmail, a Budding Reporter’s Best Friend
After a few months as a police beat reporter, I had become friends with several cops, but I still didn’t have a single, solitary scoop that I had dug up on my own.
Getting scoops was difficult. It involved getting wind of a breaking story, finding the detective in the lower ranks who was working the story, gaining his trust and the information he had, then running it up the food chain in such a way that the people at the top didn’t know you were culling data from the bottom.
You might spend hours waiting for your source to come home, hoping that he’d cough up a morsel of information in your brief chat with him. On a big case, your source might not come home for days. In 1993, contact was more difficult since most people didn’t have cell phones, meaning you had to rely on luck to catch them at work, at home, or somewhere in between.
You had to get third-party verification that you had all the facts, and you had to convince your editor that it was safe to run a story with no official press release to hide behind. Sometimes you needed to visit the home of the suspect to confirm that he or she had been arrested, since in Japan arrest records are not publicly available. Often, when you were ready to write the story and gave notice to the chief of detectives, the police would immediately rush out a press release, reducing your scoop—and all your efforts—to nothing.
But I did finally score. How? The old-fashioned way: blackmail.
Every evening between the usual tedious typing of sports records, birth announcements, and obituaries and taking dinner orders for the senior staff, I would get on my bicycle, pedal over to the Omiya police station, and hang out with the cops. Most of the time, if they weren’t busy, I would sit down and shoot the shit with them for a while. We’d drink green tea and discuss politics, past cases, or what was on the television. I’d bring doughnuts, which I don’t think were part of the typical diet of the cops in Japan, but they didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they might have liked them for that reason.
One of my sources who was assigned to the railroads told me about a professional pickpocket they’d nabbed a few weeks back who had confessed to a supposedly huge number of cases. What caught my attention was that the pickpocket would “go to work” every day in suit and tie; he was a true professional. Variations of this story repeatedly show up in the Japanese news, but it sounded interesting to me then because I didn’t know any better.
After triangulating the lead, I was ready to write the article. I had all the facts I needed—except for the number of crimes he’d confessed to, which the story was riding on. The railroad officials didn’t know. My only choice was to talk to someone high up in the Omiya police, since they were handling the case now.
The chief of detectives was named Fuji. He was known as a great interrogator and a great cop but an unpleasant person to deal with if you were a reporter. He was tall and thin, with stereotypical thick glasses, and he always wore suits that were wrinkled and gray. His face had the proverbial five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning.
I don’t think he liked or disliked me. He just considered me a nuisance, another pesky little reporter who would eventually be replaced by another rookie, preferably one who was Japanese. I decided to take the leap and ask him to let me write the story, but he would not budge.
“If you think you know so much, go ahead, write the story. But I bet you don’t know how many pockets he picked before we caught him. Ten? One hundred? Two hundred?”
“It’s over a hundred, then?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, then, I guess this isn’t your story. Why don’t you just wait a week, and you’ll get all the details.”
“You mean you’ll give me the scoop?”
“Nope,” he said. “We’ll announce the case in a week and you can ask all the questions you want.”
“But then it won’t be a scoop.”
“That’s not my problem. I just do the paperwork, the detectives do the investigation, and when we have all the facts together, we announce it. You write it up. Case closed.”
He called over one of the policewomen and pointed at me. “Could you get Adelstein-san a cup of tea? He’s working very hard, and he looks dehydrated.” He left me sitting and sipping at his desk and went downstairs to talk to the vice captain, probably to warn him that I was nosing around.
If I were a cop, I’d feel the same way about me. My scooping the story wouldn’t benefit him in any way. I didn’t have the position or authority to promise him good coverage of the story, nor did I have information to offer him that would make it a give-and-take deal. On the other hand, what harm could it do to give me the story? I was working hard. The story would make the police look good in the local community or, at the very least, not make them look bad.
I had a week before the announcement. The cops loved to make us wait. It was a constant tug-of-war. So I found myself once again whittling away the hours, drinking tea and watching television with the Omiya cops at nine that same evening. That was when I happened to notice a drawing posted on the bulletin board. It was a composite sketch of a thief who had been ripping off large electronics and clothing stores along a major highway of the city. The notice, sometimes called a tehaisho, went into great detail about his physical characteristics, his MO, and each store he’d robbed.
“Hey, do you mind if I take a picture of the police station?” I casually asked a cop whose mouth was full of jelly doughnut. “My dad’s a medical examiner in Missouri, and he’s really curious to see what a Japanese police station looks like.”
The guys were sufficiently impressed by my father’s quasi-police status to ask me about his work while they posed for pictures. I had them stand beside the bulletin board, and as I snapped away, I took a close-up of the composite sketch.
I got back to the office at eleven, ate some cold pizza left in the refrigerator, and developed the film. (This was still in the dark ages of film, when developing photos was a big pain in the ass.) I blew up the notice, cropped it, made bad copies of it, crumpled them up, and took the most ratty version home with me. My purpose was to make it look as if I’d either gotten a copy from one of the victims or a local merchant or fished it out of the trash. I didn’t want anyone figuring out that I’d photographed it while hanging around the police station. Not only could that curtail my access to the police, it could also get my doughnut friends chewed out.
The next day I went to one of the stores, talked to the manager about the crime, and asked him if he knew of any similar cases. He showed me his copy of the police notice but wouldn’t give it to me. Around two in the afternoon, I walked into the Omiya police station and asked permission to go up and see Fuji.
Fuji motioned for me to sit down and planted his elbows on his desk, forming his fingers into a temple and peering over them with some amusement.
“How’s the big story coming along?” he asked.
“I’ve given up on that one,” I said.
“Given up?”
“Yes, I’ve got a better one. I’m going to write a public interest piece about the recent rash of roadside robberies in the Omiya area. I think I’ll include this composite drawing as well.”
I showed him the copy but didn’t hand it to him.
“Where’d you get that?” he sputtered.
“I’ve already talked to some of the victims.” It wasn’t an answer and it wasn’t a lie, but it was misdirection.
Fuji wasn’t amused. “We’re in the middle of that investigation right now. If you publish that, you’ll scare him off and we’ll never catch him.”
“That’s not my problem,” I said. “My job is to gather the news, write it, and publish it as soon as possible for the good of the community. I can write that you’re investigating, if you like. I promise.”
“Don’t write that story.”
“I’m a reporter. I have to write things. That’s my job. Just like you investigate things and catch criminals
for a living, I investigate things, and they’re published in the newspaper. If I’m not writing, I’m not working, and I don’t have anything better to write right now.”
Fuji’s eyes narrowed behind the thick glass. “I could give you something better to write about. Maybe something better than a little public service announcement about unsolved crimes.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll give you stuff on the pickpocket that none of the other papers has.”
“That would be nice, but I’m only interested if it’s a total, hands-down, noncompetitive exclusive.” I was feeling cocky.
“We don’t do that. If we give you the exclusive, all the other reporters who cover this police station are going to come in here whining about unfair treatment.”
“Let them whine. I have to tell my boss in thirty minutes what I’m turning in for the morning edition. Right now, this serial thief thing is all I’ve got.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Give me thirty minutes.” He motioned the policewoman over. She brought over a cup of green tea and was about to set it before me when Fuji motioned her to stop. “Would you like coffee instead?”
“No, no, green tea is fine.”
“But you prefer coffee, right?”
“Well …”
Fuji nodded at her.
“Cream or sugar?” she asked.
“Both, please.”
“Okay, wait here,” Fuji said, stepping away and heading downstairs.
The coffee was terrible, instant stuff, but it was better than the green tea.
Fuji returned twenty minutes later. “All right. Meet me at the dojo training hall tomorrow at noon. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about the pickpocket. Think of all the questions you want to ask beforehand, because I’m only doing this once.” And that was that.
That evening in the press club I told Yamamoto about the deal I’d made. He was pleased but pissed off at the same time.
“You blackmailed the chief detective for that story?”
“I didn’t blackmail him. I exchanged one story for another.”
“You blackmailed him.”
“Did I make threats?”
“Well, no.”
“Okay, then it’s not blackmail.”
“Adelstein, you’re a real piece of work. You have balls. And you’re sneaky too.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“For all that, you should have gotten a better story out of him, that’s what. A lousy pickpocket was the best you could do?”
“There wasn’t anything else I wanted.”
“All right,” he said. “Get the story, type it up, and I’ll try to get the desk editor to give it scoop treatment.”
When I got to the training hall the next day, Fuji was inside waiting, sitting cross-legged on the tatami with a sheaf of papers in his lap. I took off my shoes, stepped onto the tatami, and sat across from him in the formal seiza position, knees together and feet tucked under my ass.
Fuji took off his glasses, put them down beside his knees, and looked me over. I took out my notepad and pen.
“Adelstein.”
“Yes, Fuji-san.”
“Your socks don’t match.”
I looked down. It was true. I had on one gray sock and one black sock. I hadn’t planned on being shoeless. “I’m sorry. I was in a rush this morning.”
Fuji shook his head. “You’re a strange one. I thought you were clueless, but you actually seem to know what you’re doing. Then again, you can’t even match your own socks.”
“This is true.”
“In the eight years I have been a detective, I have never given a reporter a scoop.”
“I am honored to be the first.”
“And the last. You are to tell no one I told you about this case. If people ask you how you got the scoop, what are you going to say?”
“I’m not sure anyone will care.”
“Oh, they will. I know your kind.”
“My kind?”
“Reporters. So what will you say?”
I thought for a moment. “I’ll say that someone leaked the story out of headquarters to my boss and I was forced to write it up because it was on my beat.”
“Excellent answer.”
Fuji then outlined the sequence of events leading up to the arrest of the pickpocket, the interesting angles to the story, the pickpocket’s date of birth, and the number of cases he’d confessed to. He then patiently answered all my other questions.
He never gave me another scoop in the entire time I covered the Omiya police. He did, however, continue to ask me whether I wanted green tea or coffee whenever I went to chat with him.
The story came out in late September in “The News Inside and Out,” a feature section of the local Yomiuri. Since it was a feature, I actually got a byline.
In the annals of crime, the story of the professional pickpocket is a minor thing, but I’m going to relate it here as an example of the professionalism of Japanese criminals.
Kosuke Sato, 45, was arrested by Omiya police in the act of picking someone’s pocket on a train. It’s a hard bust to make, for unless a pickpocket is caught in the act, it’s hard to prove in court. The standard defense is that the accused “found the wallet and was going to take it to the police as soon as it was possible.” Intent is hard to disprove.
By his own account, Sato had, in the space of less than a year, committed 420 thefts. He might have committed more, but he apparently didn’t keep perfect records.
He lived in a small fishing village in Niigata Prefecture. He would be away weekdays; he told his wife he was helping a friend run a bar in Tokyo. He would come home on the weekends, pay the bills, and give his wife what amounted to about a thousand dollars a week.
He would leave his house in a suit and tie, then get on a train to Tokyo, Osaka, or one of ten other prefectures. During the day, to pass the time he would play pachinko or sleep at a sauna. At night he would board whatever train struck his fancy—usually a late-night express train—and ply his craft. He’d look for salarymen drunk and passed out. What made his job easy is that many Japanese feel safe enough to sleep on trains.
He’d sit next to his target and, using a briefcase to conceal his actions, would lift the mark’s wallet. He’d take out the cash, not touch anything else, and return the wallet to the owner, all without waking the poor bastard up. But buranko, removing a wallet from a suit jacket hanging from a hook next to his seat, was his specialty. His skill in this, he claimed, was unmatched. He could pull the wallet out of a suit jacket regardless of whether the train was empty or full, whether a potential witness was sitting next to him or across from him. He was of course good at picking a pocket while pretending to be asleep.
Everything in Japan, even theft, is an art. Even assault is an art—judo, aikido, and kendo, all of these are more than just learning to decimate your opponent, they’re about learning to master yourself. In many ways, Sato was a master of his art.
Personally, I wish I’d spent a little more time mastering the martial arts in college; I’d find that surviving as a Yomiuri reporter was a little more physically demanding than I’d anticipated.
It’s the New Year, Let’s Fight
The end of the old year and the beginning of the new are monumentally important events in Japan. On New Year’s Eve, thousands of Japanese flock to Buddhist temples to hear the tolling of the bells called joya no kane. The temple’s big bronze bell is tolled 108 times, one for each cardinal sin in the Buddhist universe. It’s believed that hearing the bells purifies you of your sins and allows you to start the new year fresh and clean.
If at all possible, I go to the bell ringing each year, since it never hurts to be on the safe side. A few temples now have Web sites that let you ring the bell virtually, which I’ve tried; it’s not the same.
After the temple bells are rung, huge throngs of people make pilgrimages to Shinto shrines to pray for good fortune in the upcoming year. No one works for
three, four, or, depending on the calendar, five days; many people return to their hometowns, and the streets of the business and government districts grow quiet and deserted.
Before any of this happens, however, the most important ceremony in company life takes place. Usually held in the first half of December, the bonenkai is a “forget-the-year party,” and in many cases, given the amount of alcohol consumed, it is not an idle threat. Everyone—employees and bosses—is supposed to let his hair down and have a good time. For the Yomiuri’s Urawa office this has traditionally meant getting into a drunken brawl. My first bonenkai was no exception.
It was held at a local izakaya with the usual menu: fish (raw and cooked), yakitori, tofu, pickles, rice balls, and, since Urawa was famous for catfish, catfish tempura. Generally speaking, the Japanese don’t eat catfish (the flavor isn’t subtle), but I was happy to see something on my plate that reminded me of home.
The first act went reasonably well. All the freshmen were requested to do some kind of entertainment. Someone did card tricks, someone twisted balloons into animals. I managed to push a 500-yen coin up my nose, which was considered an incredible feat. It was at the party after the party where things got weird.
We left the restaurant and were heading toward a hostess club when Kimura, the right-wing, emperor-worshipping head of the Kumagaya branch office, seemed to get wound up. Kimura was a short, stocky fellow with a tight-permed hairstyle reminiscent of the yakuza from my internship story. When he was sober, he was a great guy. He was a mean drunk, however, and he’d been putting it away all night. He kept picking on me as we entered the next izakaya, and once we were sitting down, he looked over at me and sneered. “I look at you, Adelstein, and I can’t figure out how we lost the war. How could we lose to a bunch of sloppy Americans? Barbarians with no discipline, no culture, and no honor. It beats me. Long live the Emperor! Tenno ni banzai!”
In my five-plus years in Japan as a college student, I don’t think I’d personally met any nationalists. I knew they existed. I knew that Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s major writers, was a bodybuilder, gay, and a nationalist. I’d seen the right-wing groups driving their black vans around town, blaring imperial marching music from loudspeakers. But I didn’t really know how to deal with Kimura. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry we won the war”?
Tokyo Vice Page 6