Crime Yakuza boss trafficked nuclear material from Myanmar

Mr. Ebisawa, 60, is being held in a federal jail in Brooklyn after being charged in 2022, along with three co-defendants, with international drug and weapons trafficking crimes. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges. He is scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in Manhattan on the new charges on Thursday. [...] In September 2020, he offered to sell 50 metric tons of uranium and thorium for $6.85 million. A week later, he told the undercover agent that he could supply plutonium that would be "better" than uranium for Iran's purposes. He added that he did not have a license to sell such materials. The transaction, the agent acknowledged, would be "very quiet and illegal." As part of the trafficking scheme, the indictment says, Mr. Ebisawa sent the undercover agent a list of weapons he wanted, including surface-to-air missiles and AK-47 assault rifles. He then sent the agent a picture of the leader of an ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the scheme, referring to the person as "No. 1."

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mdchachi said:

He doesn't look like a crime boss he just looks like an actor playing a crime boss.

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If you only read the headlines, you know this as the case where a yakuza boss tried to sell nuclear material to bad actors on the world stage. If you read the court file, you see something very different: a broke 61‑year‑old confidence man from Utsunomiya who had never before been arrested, talking big to an undercover DEA agent who needed him to be bigger than he really was.

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