By Dan Papia for Tokyo Journal

Hideo Ohira may be a yakuza and a confessed criminal, but both the police and gangsters agree that he is a jovial thug. As one of his gangland associates remarked, "He's the kind of guy who can crack a joke at the same time he's beating your head in." But the 53-year-old outlaw wasn't joking when he turned himself over to Saitama's Konosu police station last September. He was wanted for perpetrating a major pachinko parlor fraud. He was sorry, he said. Pachinko was all he knew. He just couldn't find any other way to make ends meet and pay his dues.

Ohira was not alone in his difficulties. Scores of his cohorts had been cut adrift by the passage of the anti-organized crime bill in March 1992. As early as 1990, the police had begun offering help to gangsters who wanted to defect. Yakuza contacts in legitimate businesses like securities and trading companies were drying up. Even some pachinko parlors - a mainstay of income - began breaking mob ties.

In 1992, a group of parlor operators around Omiya city in Saitama - one of the biggest gangster strongholds in Kanto and a steady source of cash for Hideo Ohira - signed a pact with local police vowing to cut their mob connections. In return, the police offered them increased protection.

This was unacceptable to Ohira and his "family" within the huge Sumiyoshi-kai syndicate. Though the parlor owners' action would cut the yakuza out of only Y100,000 a month (the Sumiyoshi-kai reaps some Y2.15 billion annually from Tokyo parlors), they were feeling the pinch. Ohira began plotting revenge.

He was not the first to target the once-obedient pachinko parlors. This year alone, the papers have been shouting about a bizarre range of pachinko crimes: forged 10,000-yen notes turning up in ball-dispensing machines in Musashino and Chiba; a thief in Ueno killed a shop employee for a week's receipts, and several suspicious characters in Itabashi-ku were observed using radio waves to confuse ball-counters and rack up extra credits.

Ohira, however, targeted the way pachinko parlors and their gift-exchange booths operate independently of each other. He knew that the printed vouchers which patrons receive from the ball-counting machines after they finish playing are the only receipts needed to acquire cash from the exchange booths around the corner. So he assembled a squad of "players," liberated a Jet Counter voucher machine from the Glory Trading Company (the world's largest distributor of pachinko ball-counters), and - after a little tinkering with the mechanism - went into the voucher-printing business.

Ohira recruited former pachinko cashier and friend Iwao Handa earlier this year and stuffed Y30,000 worth of gift vouchers into his pocket. Handa spun balls for an hour in an unnamed parlor in northern Saitama on 11 February, cashed his vouchers at a nearby booth, and rendezvoused with Ohira later that evening. Ohira gave Handa a cut - a Y10,000 note. Before the month was out, Ohira had formed a gang of some 25 assorted printers, players, and scouts and was netting a million yen a week.

Ohira took his show on the road, spending his time in hotels, bars, and coffee shops while his cronies took all the risks. He didn't realize at first that the law had been onto him almost since the beginning. But in August, after a few of his underlings were picked off by the cops, Ohira suspended operations and decided to lay low.

The chief investigator for Saitama's Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describes Ohira's plot as an example of gang-related crime changing with the times. "Ohira's whole scheme," he explains, "is typical of the so-called 'new yakuza.' It was well-planned, carried out over several prefectures, and perpetrated in such a way as to make investigation and prosecution nearly impossible. We've seen the yakuza doing similar things with telephone cards, bars, even inside politics. We're suddenly finding signs of intelligent life in these guys, and it's unnerving."

Ohira's greed did him in. On 16 March, he sent four players into the Million Dollar parlor in Kitamoto City, Saitama (one of the establishments that had cut Ohira's family out in 1992) and let them stay from l:00 p.m. to just after 7:00 p.m. During that time, the men moved from the pachinko machines to the ball-counters and out to the exchange centers enough times to exchange 143 receipts for 1,986 ballpoint pens (local pachinko-ese for Y1,986,000 cash).

"There's no way we could have lost that much in one day," roars handsome, hefty Mr. Dono, the floor manager who was in charge at Million Dollar that day. "You work in a place like this and you develop a sixth sense about the machines. You know when they're spewing out balls. The people in the gift center, of course, didn't know what the mood was like. But I told my boss: either the machines are busted or we're getting ripped off."

So Million Dollar owner Hiroshi Ojima took a closer look at the serial numbers on the receipts. They were, of course, inconsistent. Five years before, no pachinko merchant would ever have thought of calling in the cops, but Ojima had signed a pact and he decided to honor it. He filed a complaint with the Konosu bureau which, in equally untraditional fashion, called around to discover that similar complaints had been made in Tokyo, other parts of Saitama, and as far away as Nagano and Hyogo. The cops then brought in the Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, who eventually pulled in a suspicious character by the name of Yasu Ishiwatari.

It was early in the evening on 11 May, and the police weren't even sure they had a suspect. But a chance mention of the Million Dollar parlor scam started Ishiwatari singing. It soon became apparent that he was one of the four front men. Within a week, Ishiwatari was in detention awaiting trial, Ohira's name had been added to the most-wanted list and the police were trying to dig up clues to his whereabouts. They failed, but on 5 September at 4:15 p.m. Ohira showed up at the Konosu station and turned himself in.

He was cowering like a dog with its tail between its legs. "Sure, it was partly just a line to get the justice system on his side," admits a Saitama crime-beat reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. "But at the same time, it's probably true. Think about it. You're old, scarred, tattooed, and you've got a haircut that looks like a deflated afro. Just what are your odds for re-employment in the straight world?"

Yet it seems that jolly old Hideo Ohira may wind up with the last laugh. Had he not confessed, the chances that he would ever have gone to trial, with nothing but circumstantial evidence against him, were extremely small. The fact that he did confess, on the other hand, suggests he's probably fronting for someone even higher up. At any rate, Ohira can't be tried for theft, only fraud, and it would be a miracle if he spent more than a year behind bars.

The National Police Authority has been pushing for a bill to legalize the exchange of pachinko gifts for money or negotiable goods, and it seems that yakuza revenue from pachinko will continue to dwindle as the century draws to a close. In Saitama, however, one man seems to have been vindicated. Having raked in at least Y10 million, and possibly as much as five times that, Hideo Ohira has no intention of refunding anybody's money. At worst, he will leave prison after several months a very rich man. Prison might even prove good for business: a stint in the "pig house" remains a badge of honor among the "new yakuza."