A rift has emerged in Japan’s largest yakuza organized crime syndicate, the government said on Friday, with police warning that the split could lead to a wave of gang violence.
Like the Italian mafia and Chinese triads, the yakuza engage in everything from gambling, drugs and prostitution to loan sharking, protection rackets and white-collar crime.
However, unlike their foreign counterparts, they are not illegal and each of the designated groups has its own headquarters.
“The government is aware that some member factions of the Yamaguchi-gumi, regarded as Japan’s biggest crime syndicate, are showing moves toward secession,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said.
“Police are working to collect information. We hope police will use this opportunity to take measures to weaken the organization,” Suga said.
The syndicate boasts 23,000 members and associates.
Periodic crackdowns and police efforts to choke off the Yamaguchi-gumi’s sources of funding have gained momentum, while a poor public image and Japan’s flaccid economy have made life difficult for the gangsters and made membership less attractive for potential recruits, experts said.
Local reports said the Yamaguchi-gumi kicked out 13 leaders of its member factions and that 11 were moving to form a new group, which could ally with other mobsters to build a new syndicate, the Mainichi Shimbun said.
Police were on high alert expecting inter-gang conflict to turn violent, the Kyodo news agency said.
Japan’s National Police Agency is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments surrounding the yakuza rift, the Nikkei newspaper said.
Japanese police officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.