Fake Yakuza conman tried to sell drugs, weapons-grade isotopes and rocket launchers to Iran

[Winehole23]

well short of the violent destruction of Iran qua political state, war materiel will be flowing in every region touched or threatened by the attempted destruction of Iran, in addition to well-established illicit networks

rogue actors will do rogue things trying to take advantage of international chaos

A plot to supply Iran’s nuclear weapons program, heroin from the Golden Triangle, Burmese ethnic insurgents and rocket launchers were the subject in courtroom 24A in New York’s federal courthouse last week when a man described as a leader in Japan’s Yakuza organized crime syndicate was sentenced to 20 years in prison.


The transnational plot, which the US Drug Enforcement Administration had been investigating since 2019, involved Japanese organised crime leader Takeshi Ebisawa, who along with three Thai men, had been arrested in New York in 2022.



In court last week, Ebisawa, 62, pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to traffic nuclear materials, including uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, from Myanmar to other countries, as well as his participation in international narcotics trafficking, weapons and money laundering.


According to prosecutors, Ebisawa had arranged to sell an undercover DEA agent large quan ies of heroin and methamphetamine from Myanmar’s rebel United Wa state army, and then sought to buy automatic weapons, rockets, machine guns and surface-to-air missiles, some taken from US military bases in Afghanistan, for Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Myanmar’s Karen National Union, Shan State Army and United Wa state army.


But it wasn’t the 1,100lbs of drugs, known as “cake and ice cream” in Ebisawa’s intercepted communications, or even the weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, known as “bamboo”, but the trafficking of nuclear materials that attracted the attention of US prosecutors in the southern district of Manhattan.


“The illicit trafficking of nuclear materials is an existential threat to every New Yorker and every American,” said US attorney Jay Clayton. “Ebisawa tried to sell uranium, thorium, and plutonium to fuel a purported nuclear weapons program, along with deadly drugs destined for US streets. In exchange, Ebisawa hoped to procure battlefield weapons for insurgent groups and profit for himself.”
According to the complaint, Ebisawa had unknowingly been introduced by a source to an undercover DEA agent, posing as a narcotics and weapons trafficker, to his international criminal network that spanned Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the US.


Ebisawa, the government said, conspired to sell uranium and plutonium to a DEA agent posing as an Iranian “general” in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.


Asked whether the uranium was enriched above 5% because the Iranian government needed it for nuclear weapons, Ebisawa said: “I think so and hope so.” He later forwarded an email in the name of a mining company offering 50 tons of uranium U3O8 concentrate powder known as “yellowcake” for $6,850,000.


Ebisawa provided photographs of samples, alongside a Geiger counter measuring radiation, and promised the “general’ that the “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” for Iran’s use. Prosecutors said the nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country.


Samples of the nuclear materials were obtained and a US lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade.


But Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, says that his research into Ebisawa did not produce a connection to any Yakuza groups. “He’s just a conman who was probably introduced to the DEA running a sting operation as a Yakuza and they ran with it,” Adelstein adds. “Ebisawa definitely has a history of being a conman. Even his friends who like him say it.”
The prosecution, part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) operation, comes at a moment of heightened tensions around nuclear materials that have fallen out of regulatory control.
David Kenneth Smith, a former nuclear security officer at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and now at the Stimson Center supporting nuclear security initiatives, calls the Ebisawa case “a perfect confluence” of international nuclear trafficking co-operation that he calls “a resounding success”.


But, he says, the case has highlighted “something that all of us in the business worries about – material that was out of regulatory control and an exemplar of what we need to be very serious about”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...uclear-weapons

[Winehole23]

the DEA and DOJ used to be way more focused on stuff like this before the US government became preoccupied with punishing Trump's internal political enemies

(like in Trump's first term, which is when this OCDTF investigation started)