Free Tokyo Underworld by Robert Whiting

screaming like a madman. Then, just as suddenly, like a freight train that had passed, the attack was over. MacFarland had sat back, massaged his bloodied knuckles and brooded in silence for the rest of the trip. That was when Zappetti realized his new friend was not always playing with a full deck. It was only later he found out about Mac’s extended stay at the Long Beach Mental Hospital.
    ‘Well, if you gotta have a gun,’ Zappetti finally said, ‘then I gotta get out. That’s just asking for trouble.’
    MacFarland professed displeasure at this defection but relented on condition that Zappetti get him the firearm. So Zappetti contacted an Army friend, who came up with a .38 caliber revolver, a holster and several bullets. He threw away the bullets as a precautionary measure and delivered the gun and holster, as requested, to one of MacFarland’s young paramours, an eighteen-year-oldKorean high-school dropout named ‘M’ who was given to wearing black rhinestone-studded Latin clothes and big pompadours – fashion inspired by a mambo craze that had swept Japan. ‘M’ had been brought into the caper after Zappetti’s withdrawal along with two more accomplices from Tokyo’s foreign underworld, one of them a friend of the son of the vice manager of the Imperial, who would provide MacFarland with a personal introduction to the diamond concessionaire.
    On D-Day, January 15, 1956, at 10.20 a.m., Imperial Hotel arcade jeweler Shichiro Masubuchi carried a briefcase filled with a number of expensive diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies to MacFarland’s room. Within a half-hour, bruised and bloody, he found himself bound and dumped into the hotel bathtub, the gems on the way out the door and in the possession of the robbers.
    A rational criminal would have probably taken the back way out, especially if he was 6′4″ tall with a red duckbill haircut, in a land of small people who all had black hair, and more especially if it was a face that was recognizable to millions of Japanese television watchers.
    But MacFarland had his own demented modus operandi. After leaving the hotel room with ‘M’ he took the elevator to the main lobby, where he agreeably stopped to sign autographs. Then he stood in line for a taxi in front of the hotel and met his cohorts at a Ginza coffee shop, where he handed over the gun and twelve of the sixteen diamonds in his possession to another accomplice with orders to hide them. Keeping the remaining four, he headed for the Latin Quarter, the deluxe nightclub in Akasaka in Southwest Tokyo co-owned by Lewin, where, he later testified, he sold them to the club’s manager, the ex-CIA operative Shattuck, who then left for Manila.
    By this time, an Imperial Hotel maid had discovered the jeweler where he had been jettisoned in the bathtub and the police had launched a citywide manhunt for the perpetrators. At 6.30 that evening, a detachment of plainclothesmen had arrived at the LatinQuarter, its chief detective holding an evening newspaper just off the presses with a photograph of MacFarland on its front page.
    Because of the huge size difference between MacFarland and the detectives, none of whom stood over 5′5″ or weighed more than 130 pounds, a plan of attack had been devised at police headquarters. It called for a team of seven plainclothesmen to bring him in using physical force if necessary. Each officer had been assigned to grab a body part – one for each leg, one for each arm, one man to grab the torso, another for the neck, and a detective to snap the handcuffs on.
    To everyone’s amazement, however, when the police approached, MacFarland meekly extended his hands and let himself be cuffed without protest.
    A quick search revealed there were no diamonds on his person.
    The story of MacFarland’s arrest was headline news in all the Japanese dailies the following morning; featured prominently was a photo of the stern-faced chief detective, leading his man, handcuffed hands covered