[ad_1]<\/p>\n
The Romanian drug lords of Tokyo want Jason White\u2019s head. He gets it; he poached their customers.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n White is, by his own admission, a \u201cscum sucking\u201d criminal; a North American expat and international fugitive selling bulk quantities of cocaine in the world\u2019s most populated city. But he\u2019s also a businessman\u2014and right now business is booming.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cEvery fucking finance guy, lawyer guy, banker\u2014the foreign dudes with money here\u2014all they want is Japanese pussy and coke,\u201d says White, who VICE agreed to refer to under that pseudonym. He is speaking down the line of an encrypted phone call from a caf\u00e9 in central Tokyo.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOur thing here is famous as fuck right now,\u201d he says. \u201cBut there could potentially be some troubles coming up, because a huge influx of clientele that I gained is a lot of the [Romanians\u2019] clientele. They\u2019re not too happy with what I got going on.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n What White\u2019s got going on, as he told me via email in November 2020, is \u201cthe largest cocaine distribution ring in operation in central Tokyo.\u201d Despite its strict narcotics laws, zero-tolerance government policy, and a reputation for being a drug dead zone, Japan\u2019s trade in illicit substances is thriving. And as the influence of the infamous Yakuza fades, it\u2019s foreign players like White who appear to be seizing the reins.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n A few weeks after receiving that first email, I got on a call with White to hear a bit more about what it was that he was offering to dish up: a rare look through the peephole of Japan’s highly secretive drug trade\u2014a galaxy of cocaine, methamphetamines, and ecstasy pills that lines the pockets of the local gangs and keeps the foreign bankers ticking.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cJapan likes to push that it is a low crime country, but I\u2019d like to guarantee to the world that such a claim is far from true,\u201d he explains. \u201cThere is a lot of crime in Japan. Much of it doesn\u2019t go reported nor prosecuted, but be aware: there is as much or more crime here than anywhere else I\u2019ve been.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cMy claim is not a theory, but first-hand,\u201d he adds. \u201cI am committing hardcore crime in this country every day.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White makes a lot of other claims, many of which VICE could not independently verify. He speaks with brutal candour and a gallows humour, but he\u2019s predictably leery when asked questions that could compromise his anonymity. There are lines that he refuses to cross. Yet while the innermost details of his personal life remain off-limits, there is good reason to believe that the portrait he paints of Tokyo\u2019s criminal underworld, as seen through his eyes, is credible.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n During a year\u2019s worth of back and forth correspondence, pockmarked with sporadic periods of silence, White walked me through his story, rattling off obscure and precise details about his life, and sent dozens of photos not fit for publication: crack rocks and dildos and naked women presenting for the camera, one of them doubled over with a price list for \u201cmolly\u201d and \u201ccoke\u201d written in black marker on her arse.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n Other photos showed the inside of drug dens and fat wads of thousand-yen notes. Eventually, following months of correspondence and questions about details he didn\u2019t want in print, he offered to meet in Tokyo, so that I could \u201csee how it is\u201d with my own eyes.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n That meeting never took place. Almost a year after we first spoke, White disappeared for good.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Three ounces. That\u2019s all it took for White to translocate his drug dealing operation more than 4,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, from North America to the streets of Japan. Three ounces of cocaine, stuffed into a fistful of Kinder Surprise egg capsules and supposited like a heavy dose of hemorrhoid medication. He is not Tse Chi Lop<\/a>, he tells me; not Asia\u2019s El Chapo, or some international mafioso moving mass shipments of contraband across global borders. His is, and always has been, a street level operation.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White started peddling drugs as a teen\u2014\u201craking in 600 bucks a week; banging chicks, making small cash, but thinking that’s the shit.\u201d After leaving school he was taken under the wing of a friend\u2019s brother, a \u201cwell-connected shot caller,\u201d put on payroll as a dealer for a local drug crew, and by his mid-20s had struck out to join ranks with another, notoriously violent syndicate.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n By this point, White was making $15,000 to $20,000 a month selling drugs: coke, meth, ketamine, weed. But the purple patch was short-lived. Before long, the syndicate\u2019s rapacious, voracious business methods caught up with them.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cA death happened, and a bunch of really fucked up shit happened after that death,\u201d White says, carefully measuring his words. \u201cWhen I say death, I mean like, the M word death. That’s the worst thing in the world that can happen, because that’s when the feds start to care.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This is how White ended up on a flight to Japan, on some unspecified date in the mid-2010s that he doesn’t wish to divulge,<\/strong> with enough cocaine to kill 10 adults nestled behind his prostate. He\u2019d raked his wardrobe into a suitcase, stuffed $9,300 cash into a Gucci duffle bag, and flown the coop before the police could pin him with a crime so egregious he still refuses to talk about it. In a few more hours he\u2019d be back on solid ground and walking, close-legged and tightarsed, out into the Tokyo sunshine.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201c[Smuggling those drugs] was honestly the easiest thing ever,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was like \u2018mission accomplished,\u2019 and that was that. I went and shat it out in a love motel.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It didn\u2019t take White long to find his feet, put down roots, and start selling coke again. The first thing he did was get himself a place in the centre of Tokyo. Then he joined a fighting gym, started frequenting the local expat bars, and began working as a security guard at a British pub.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n His stash was gone within a matter of weeks\u2014but in that time he\u2019d not just got a cash boost, but also forged the connections he needed to get his foot in the door of Tokyo\u2019s seedy underbelly: through his job, through his gym and, most pivotally, through a British sex worker named Summer.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cI was bartending at this pub, and this girl is like \u2018You’re a bad guy, aren’t you?\u2019\u2014taking the piss,\u201d White recalls. \u201cThen she’s like, \u2018You really got to meet my people because I know what kind of guy you are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Summer happened to be an authority on White\u2019s kind of guys. As he tells it, she was a six-foot, 30-something Essex expatriate with a penchant for vaporised crack cocaine\u2014always drunk, always high, \u201calways sloppy,\u201d but a loyal customer. In time, she would also come to introduce White to one of Tokyo\u2019s most prolific drug bosses.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou gotta meet Red,\u201d she would tell him. \u201cHe’s a British dude. They call him Red, or Dread, or Doctor Red.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Edward James Montague Reid is an Oxford graduate with a triple degree in maths, physics, and chemistry, and a master\u2019s in Japanese oriental studies. Until recently, he was also one of the single biggest drug dealers in Tokyo. Now he\u2019s serving a 12-year sentence for the possession and trafficking of illicit substances, after being arrested by Japanese police in July 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White describes Red as \u201cthe furthest thing from a gangster\u201d: a \u201cgeeky ass English boy\u201d who liked to party hard\u2014on coke, ecstasy, ice, opium, and a psychedelic stimulant called 2C-I\u2014and who ultimately got sucked into the vortex of Tokyo\u2019s criminal underworld.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cRed was my boss, he was my dude: the most fucked up cat in the world,\u201d White says, warmly. \u201cI started working for him, and that\u2019s how I learned everything over here.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n At his peak, authorities believe Red was selling gear to between 40 and 50 customers in Tokyo\u2019s Roppongi clubbing district, accepting payments in the form of Bitcoin to cover his tracks. It wasn’t enough. Tokyo Metropolitan Police raided his fortified inner city apartment and seized 239 grams of cocaine, 92 grams of methamphetamine, 467 grams of marijuana, and 750 MDMA pills. In the words of local newspaper the Tokyo Reporter<\/a><\/em>, \u201cthe residence contained what can be best described as what might appear at an illegal drug fair.\u201d It had a collective street value of about 20 million yen, or a little over $182,000.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cJapan likes to push that it is a low crime country, but I\u2019d like to guarantee to the world that such a claim is far from true\u2026 I am committing hardcore crime in this country every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n White says he immediately went to ground after the sting, convinced that the police would identify him from the security footage at Red\u2019s main base. For reasons unknown they never came knocking, and when he finally emerged from hiding six months later, he, the apprentice, took up the mantle and absorbed the majority of Red\u2019s clientele: a well-heeled milieu of mainly foreign lawyers, bankers, and IT executives.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n Now he claims to rule the roost. And he\u2019s making a killing.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a very unique game here in Tokyo; nothing like I\u2019ve ever seen before,\u201d he says. \u201cTwo-and-a-half times the profit margins with 1 percent the threat of daylight shootings against opps like back home.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe are laughing. This is Candyland.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Japan\u2019s zero tolerance drug policy has fomented a lucrative and high stakes market for illicit substances, where dealers prepared to run the gauntlet are compensated by customers willing to pay a markup price. Supply is low, demand is high, and as long as you don\u2019t get pinched dealing, then, in White\u2019s words, it\u2019s \u201ccake.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n But he didn\u2019t run there for the money. Japan, a famously insular nation, has also become a relatively secure hideaway for a cohort of international outlaws, due in no small part to the fact that it holds bilateral extradition agreements with just two other countries<\/a>\u2014the U.S. and South Korea\u2014and rarely extradites<\/a> international criminals, even for serious offences. Tokyo is a bolthole, and White, who is neither a U.S. nor South Korean citizen, can hide in plain sight in the East Asian megacity with little fear of being arraigned for his crimes back in the West.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n As far as potential run-ins with the local police go, the riskiest date in White\u2019s calendar is \u201creload day,\u201d once every couple of months, when he has to replenish the crew\u2019s supplies by procuring a bulk batch of wholesale drugs from global importers. He refuses to get into the details about who or where these importers are, revealing only that he orders the top-ups in advance\u2014usually about a kilo of cocaine and as many pills as are available\u2014before arranging to meet them in a specific rendezvous location.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Even these transactions are improbably blas\u00e9, though. They take place not in the backseats of cars or shady side-alleys, but in pubs, restaurants, caf\u00e9s, the occasional Starbucks. When White and the wholesaler meet at the designated drop site, the exchange is casual. They\u2019ll smoke, drink coffee, swap the briefcases under the table, and part ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The most White does in the way of precautionary measures is to make sure he wears a button-up to \u201ctry and look like a nice boy.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe cops don’t understand the scene well\u2014they think if you do gear, you\u2019re a black man with ripped jeans and dreadlocks walking around in a stupor,\u201d he explains. \u201cThey have some stereotypical idea of what the game is and they don’t know how it really works.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n White paints Tokyo police as paper tigers: toothless, gormless disciplinarians who are too far out of the loop on drug crime to even enforce the iron-fisted laws they\u2019re meant to represent. Part of this, he suggests, is either an inability or an unwillingness for local, traditionally-minded detectives to innovate and reconcile themselves with anything \u201cnew\u201d or \u201cforeign.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White deals in ecstasy, meth, and cocaine, but it\u2019s the latter where he makes most of his money. Using a small team of dealers and delivery drivers he moves more than a kilo of coke each month and rakes in about $400,000 gross profit. For context, the same amount of gear in the U.S. typically fetches $120,000.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n He runs things from a rotating cycle of cell phones, shifts our correspondence to a new encrypted messaging account every few weeks, and is supremely selective about who is and isn\u2019t allowed into his small inner circle of clientele\u2014vetting customers with the kind of ruthless VIP admission criteria you\u2019d expect from The Carnegie Club.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe cops don’t understand the scene well\u2014they think if you do gear, you\u2019re a black man with ripped jeans and dreadlocks walking around in a stupor.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n White refuses to sell to tourists or fly-in-fly-out workers, instead consolidating his base of long-contract corporates who are familiar with the city and carry less risk of getting arrested. One of his customers, an Australian named Griff, is a hedge fund boss who buys bulk, 500,000-yen ($4,500) shipments of gear at a time. White schedules a dropoff, meets Griff, Griff pays, and the deal is done.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cThat\u2019s generally how it is here,\u201d says White. \u201cYou don’t have guys calling you for small amounts throughout the night. It’s mature, professional guys that also handle their drug use in a mature, professional way.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Back home he catered to a sprawling market of ravers, students, \u201ccrackheads\u201d and \u201criff raff.\u201d In Japan, his client base is smaller but stronger, made up of well-to-do expats who mostly buy bulk quantities at a time. \u201cThe biggest way to get pinched,\u201d he points out, \u201cis via sloppy clientele.\u201d And in terms of professionalism and purchasing power, 20 clients in Tokyo is worth 200 back home.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere are power players behind logistics and pipeline that definitely handle much more gear than we do,\u201d he says. \u201cBut in terms of a street level operation with steady input? I feel as though we\u2019re the most active. What I do is run a team that pushes a lot of gear at ridiculous profit margins.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI took a marketing class in Uni when I was a kid,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt worked.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n There are just 10 people in White\u2019s Tokyo crew\u2014a motley rabble of students, caf\u00e9 workers, and Uber Eats delivery drivers\u2014but between them he claims they account for a sizable portion of the cocaine that gets distributed throughout the centre of the city. That said, he\u2019s far from the only player in the game.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White divides the drug clans of Tokyo into a small handful of ethnogeographic tribes: the Africans, the Colombians, the Iranians, the Romanians, the Russians, the Turkish, and the Vietnamese. Chief among his competitors are the Africans, who run the Roppongi district and sell cheap gear to undiscerning tourists, and the Iranians, a slightly more discerning outfit who sell some of the best gear going.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n He loses no sleep over the former: the Africans\u2019 drug runners and bosses are always knocking each other out over petty squabbles and small-fry territorial disputes. A business that caters primarily to the day-tripper market is also no skin off his nose. The latter, however, is another story.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSome of the Iranians are pretty psycho,\u201d White says. \u201cNot shoot-you-on-the-street type psycho, but if I was gonna worry about getting stabbed somewhere, it would be from some Iranian cats.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the infamous Romanian crew, the ones who want White\u2019s blood, the Remi\u2019s\u2014so-called because all six of them go by the same name.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt’s spooky shit: every one of them is Remi,\u00a0and they look like how you imagine an Eastern European mafia guy from a movie would look,\u201d White says. \u201cThey\u2019re actually not to be fucked with. They’re spooky cats.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n And yet in Tokyo, he adds, even the hottest feuds rarely boil over into serious acts of violence.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cNobody’s rushing into this cafe and shooting my girl\u2014I say that with confidence right now,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I had to fuck with the Remi\u2019s back home I’d be having weekly security briefs with my boys.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Of least concern to White, it seems, is Japan\u2019s most infamous criminal syndicate: what police call B\u014dryokudan, or \u201cviolent groups,\u201d but the rest of the world simply calls the Yakuza.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n It\u2019s a name that has garnered a fearsome reputation, associated as it is with full-body tattoos, finger-shortening rituals, and gang violence. In White\u2019s eyes, though, this is all just fable.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Yakuza are the least dangerous motherfuckers I’ve encountered during my time here,\u201d he tells me. \u201cAn old school fairytale.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The so-called Japanese mafia are on the brink of extinction<\/a>, as new laws prohibiting members from accessing bank accounts, office space, and respectable business channels have depleted their formal ranks from a height of 180,000 in the \u201860s to less than 30,000 today. Their diminishment has largely been the result of the 1992 Anti-B\u014dryokudan Act: a campaign that saw police systematically targeting Yakuza, and which continues to yield results today. In their 2020 annual report<\/a>, Japan\u2019s National Police Agency boasted that they arrested 14,281 Yakuza members in 26,761 cases throughout 2019.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The group\u2019s hard-fisted grip over Tokyo\u2019s underworld has loosened. And muscling in to fill the gap are foreign criminals like White, the Iranians, and the Remi\u2019s\u2014outsider groups known as \u201cHangure,\u201d which roughly translates to \u201chalf delinquent\u201d or \u201chalf in the grey zone.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In a 2017 interview with Nippon Japan<\/a>, Shibata Daisuke, a former boss of hangure group Kant\u014d Reng\u014d, noted that the Yakuza lifestyle \u201cjust didn\u2019t seem appealing or cool\u201d to young people anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cAs toughened legislation sent Yakuza power into decline<\/a>, the younger generation saw the world differently,\u201d he explained. \u201cFor people like me, who were born and raised in Tokyo and started out in Shibuya or Roppongi, the Yakuza lifestyle was not impressive.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White echoes the sentiment.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cNo one wants to be a Yakuza,\u201d he says. \u201cJapanese teens these days want to be YouTubers; being Yakuza is far from a cool or lucrative job opp amongst the masses.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat the police have done in Japan is they’ve made it very difficult to be a gangster, and they’ve created this new system for hangure to flourish. The big drug gangs here that I know of, and the big gear being moved, it\u2019s not by Yakuza\u2014it\u2019s by foreigners.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This much is supported by the data. According to a recent white paper published by the Japanese Ministry of Justice, foreigners being charged for drug-related offences in Japan saw an uptick of about 30 percent between 2013 and 2019. Of those who were charged in 2019 for infractions of Japan\u2019s Narcotics and Psychotropics Control Law\u2014which covers the smuggling, supply, possession and use of drugs like cocaine and ecstasy, among others\u2014more than a quarter were foreigners, while just over 10 percent were Yakuza members or affiliates.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n And that\u2019s only the ones who were caught.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at seizures of drugs as one indicator, it\u2019s not like the activity has disappeared\u2014in some cases it\u2019s increased,\u201d David Brewster, a researcher working with the Criminology Research Centre of Ryukoku University in Kyoto, told VICE World News. \u201cSo that leaves the question: What is going on, and who is doing all of this?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Brewster admitted that it\u2019s hard to know for sure. If anything, he suggested, Japanese police\u2019s single minded campaign against the Yakuza may have simply created a vacuum for certain other black marketeers to fill.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI just don\u2019t think we know enough about the overall situation of drugs in Japan,\u201d he said. \u201cI assume that the B\u014dryokudan are still heavily involved in drug market activities. But if you crack down on some groups then other groups are going to come in. So one possibility is an increase in foreign criminal organisations.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Yakuza are the least dangerous motherfuckers I’ve encountered\u2026 No one wants to be a Yakuza. Japanese teens these days want to be YouTubers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n This also squares with White\u2019s own claims: that the new main proprietors of the Tokyo drug trade are all gaikokujin, or foreigners, whose foreignness has become their greatest criminal asset. As he points out, \u201cThe cops just don’t have the insight into that world.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n \u201cThey don’t know how we talk, they don’t know how we move,\u201d he says. \u201cJapan should have let the Yakuza stay in power. There wouldn’t be so many [foreigners] doing [stupid] shit if the Yakuza ran shit like they allegedly did back in the day.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n While the group has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, however, there are enduring stories of B\u014dryokudan enforcers exerting their influence from the shadows.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cRed had Yakuza connections, and what he told me about how the actual murder game works here is that shit does happen,\u201d White says. \u201cIt\u2019s not on the news; it\u2019s not shootings in the club or drive-by\u2019s or kids getting stabbed. When it happens, somebody\u2019s just gone.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n He\u2019s heard stories of at least one Yakuza clan, the Sumiyoshi Kai, chopping off the arms and legs of their enemies and sinking them to the bottom of Tokyo Bay\u2014some of them in barrels, some of them just torsos and heads anchored to the sea floor.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n But these are just rumours.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI often had the feeling that info was more like a story to make people afraid,\u201d White says. \u201cMind you, I have heard there are hella murders that just get clocked up as \u2018disappearances.\u2019 But again it\u2019s just stories I’ve heard.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Stories, rumours, or otherwise, there\u2019s little White can do to escape whatever other predators happen to be roaming Tokyo\u2019s concrete jungle. He\u2019s hedged his bets on Japan\u2014where else in the world could he go?<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI haven’t been home in over four years, and I’ve been advised by my lawyer that I would definitely be denied entry trying to cross into another country right now because the warrants will show up,\u201d he says. \u201cIt’s like I’m in exile, but I\u2019m in exile in a dope ass place. I fuck bitches and buy Louis Vuitton all day\u2014it’s the most luxurious jail in the world\u2014but nonetheless, I\u2019m in exile.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n White is trapped, maybe permanently, in a Faustian limbo, where the price of his power and riches has been alienation, immobility, and exile. Short of changing his identity, fabricating a passport, and smuggling himself over the international border, there is no way he can escape Japan without his history catching up with him.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s not sympathy he\u2019s looking for, though. The way White sees it, you reap what you sow.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t complain,\u201d he says. \u201cI always say: a regular person getting cancer is tough. A young kid getting smashed by a drunk driver is tough. But scum-sucking street life choosing to live by the sword? One shouldn\u2019t complain of the repercussions, right?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a rare moment of self-deprecation from White, and it hints at an answer to the question that\u2019s been hovering over our entire correspondence: Why make contact and take the time out of his life to tell me all these things? What\u2019s in it for him?<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Absolution, apparently.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI’ve done some pretty atrocious things,\u201d he explains. \u201cPerhaps doing something like this, shedding some light on the devil, could be good for my soul.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI’m not religious,\u201d he adds. \u201cI just think that sounds nice.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Still, White shows little interest in changing course. Without a shot at redemption, an escape hatch, or a viable exit strategy, it seems like he\u2019ll just keep doing what he\u2019s always done. Provided he doesn\u2019t get pinned by the police, stabbed by the Iranians, beheaded by the Remi\u2019s, or mutilated by the Sumiyoshi Kai, he\u2019ll continue living the high life in so-called Candyland. At least, for as long as such a life can last.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In late 2021, White dropped off my radar for what must have been the fifth or sixth time. After weeks of radio silence, I sent an email to one of the burner addresses that we\u2019d previously used to communicate, asking if he was still there. On Christmas Eve, my phone lit up with a notification.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYes bro\u2014am here. Alive and well.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I responded, asking for the best way to reach him. The story was coming to a close, I explained, but there were certain details I wanted to clear up. Repeated emails were met with nothing for two weeks\u2014until, finally, another message dropped into my inbox. It was my own email, bouncing back.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAddress not found,\u201d it read. \u201cThe email account that you tried to reach does not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Follow Gavin Butler on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\nPART 1: Red and White<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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PART 2: Rich Bankers, Soft Cops<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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PART 3: Gangs of Tokyo<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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PART 4: Disappearance<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n