The suspected mastermind of Japan’s biggest ever fraud, Kazutsugi Nami, had no intention of going quietly when the police came to nab him earlier this month. Having spent the night with TV crews, he dressed in the morning, packed a change of underwear and headed to his favorite eatery for an early morning beer. His press entourage ballooned on the way, forcing detectives to push their way through a scrum of cameras and microphones to take Nami, 75, into custody.
At an alleged $2 billion dollars-plus, it’s a substantial scam, but less than Bernard Madoff’s suspected ripoff, and it’s smaller than the amount being mentioned in fraud allegations surfacing against Allen Stanford, operator of Stanford Financial Group. But for the Japanese public, the shock is less about the money and more about the realization that so many people could fall for the antics of a futon salesman.
Madoff’s company got its money from investment funds and well-heeled investors. Nami’s target was the average Tanaka. Altogether 37,000 people fell for his promise of an annual 36% return on their investments. Nami even issued his own money dubbed “enten” (translated as divine yen), which his fellow schemers exchanged for goods at markets sponsored by his company.
Scamming in Japan is rife. From salarymen lured by high-priced honey pots to housewives forking out hundreds of dollars for second-rate soybean paste, unscrupulous Japanese have devised myriad ways to part the gullible from their cash. A notorious con is the “ore ore” scam. Perpetrators call elderly folk pretending to be a grandchild or other relative in trouble. “Ore ore” in Japanese means “it’s me.” In a panic the victim is cajoled into transferring thousands of dollars to the swindler’s account. Last year more than 20,000 cases were reported with crooks netting an estimated $30 million.
Like Nami, suspected miscreants often know exactly when they will get collared by law enforcement because newspapers print details of their impending arrest a day or two before it happens. Suspects like Nami get time to savor a last beer, while media outlets enjoy a prime-time news blitz and the police get to be seen dragging their prisoner away to face justice. Nami added a little extra to his part by refusing to show the head-bowing remorse that the public expects of accused wrongdoers. It made him even more compelling to his Japanese audience.
On his blog Nami pleads his innocence. In one post he even claimed to be a modern-day Oda Nobunaga, a medieval samurai lord credited with rescuing Japan from decades of civil war. Sipping his beer as the police dragnet tightened, Nami still insisted he had done nothing wrong. How, he asked the assembled cameras, could he have slept well the night before if his conscience hadn’t been clear? He described himself as central victim rather than the leading villain as detectives swooped.
Nami’s snake oil selling career began 40 years ago, when he reportedly began duping investors in a company hawking car exhausts. When it went belly-up after only a few years, he moved on to hawking stones he claimed could turn ordinary tap water into mineral water. That scam earned him a short stay in prison. Free again, he morphed into a pressure cooker salesman, eventually starting, in 1987, his own company, L&G, that sold futons and bedding.
A happy retirement for Nami seems improbable and, as with Madoff, sympathy is scarce. Japanese courts convict almost everyone they try and Nami’s celebrity will probably be short-lived if he ever has to face a judge. In Japan, white-collar crime is a fast-paced drama that airs only once
Source: Forbes.com ; By Tim Kelly, Tokyo Despatch
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