Tokyo Joe

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1:15Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we've got more soccer content for those missing the NWSL. Soccer Power sisters Sam and Christy Mewis join us to discuss the NWSL salary cap, what's different about playing in England, and of course, we talk about their new podcast, Mewis Squared, and the bickers they get into. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

1:45What was the Chicago outfit? It was the organized crime family which controlled the Chicago underworld for most of the 20th century. The most famous boss of it that you're going to be aware of is, you know, someone like Al Capone. But after Al Capone went away to prison finally for the tax evasion charges famously, it became a lot less high profile and a lot more powerful. This is Dan O'Sullivan. He's a journalist who writes about the mafia and organized crime. After World War II, Dan says the outfit was run like a massive corporate conglomerate. It acquired businesses, both legal and illegal, across the Midwest and West Coast.

2:33In Chicago, the outfit started taking control of more and more gambling rackets in the city. The outfit very brutally took over the gambling rackets targeting the Black and Latino communities in Chicago. And to do it, they murdered the Black and Latino operators of those rackets in quite savage circumstances. In the late 1950s, several men who organized gambling around the popular lottery game, Bolita, were found dead. One man, Chavo Gonzalez, was found in a vacant lot, brutally murdered. His widow told the police that she knew who was responsible. She said it was, quote, a Chinese man named Joe.

3:23The police later questioned a Japanese-American man in the outfit about the murder. He was known as Montana Joe, or Tokyo Joe. His real name was Ken Edo. I think Ken Edo's in a category of his own. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:52Newspapers called Ken Edo the Bolida chief and the mob's Bolida expert. Bolida is really a lottery game. Its numbers are drawn from balls. They look like ping pong balls, and each one has a number written on it. The numbers are drawn in San Juan, and word gets back to the Puerto Rican communities in America, in Florida, in New York, in Chicago. And, you know, the numbers you played, if they hit big, you win a prize. And all the income was dark money. It was all going to organized crime. A federal prosecutor described Ken Eto 'o as the most prolific numbers boss that the Chicago outfit had. For a fully Italian-American organized crime associate to ascend through the ranks, there's only one of two ways you do it, which is either you make a lot of money or you're basically a murderer and that's how you prove your worth.

4:51So for a Japanese-American mob associate to ascend basically as high as you could go, that just doesn't really happen. Ken Edo was born in California's Central Valley in 1919. His father worked as a farmer and gardener, and he ran a church out of their home. He was a very strict disciplinarian, later would be described as a religious fanatic. And so he was born into the incredible poverty of Japanese farm labor in really the early part of the 20th century, at a time when, you know, these farm towns would have no Japanese allowed signs on the outskirts of town. When he was a teenager during the Great Depression, Ken Edo ran away from home.

5:42He found work as a farm worker and in canneries along the West Coast. We have some indications that, you know, along the way he started to pick up, you know, in these bunkhouses, gambling as a avocation. Not just a pastime, but a way you could make money as a professional gambler. And he was on his own, really had to rely on his wits, and a really crazy existence for a guy who's barely out of childhood. Ken was 22 years old in 1941, the year the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. The next year, President Roosevelt issued an executive order that authorized the relocation of persons deemed a threat to national security.

6:32And though on paper, of course, it would apply to Italian and German Americans as well, in practice it was really just Japanese Americans. An estimated 120 ,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in internment camps. Ken was taken to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. It held 13 ,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The internment camp superintendent of education wrote, These people are living in the midst of a desert where they see nothing except tar paper-covered barracks and rocks. No flowers, no trees, no grass. The impact must give these people a feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair, which we on the outside do not and will never fully understand.

7:25One of the only things that could be counted upon as sort of a breakup to this tedium with this razor wire around the fence and armed guards would have been gambling. We know from reporting at the time, from subsequent historical records, that gambling rings were pretty common within the internment camps. it's been wondered about by some of the people I talked to for this story what might life have been for him if he had not been interned perhaps it would have turned out differently but gambling became the great focus for him I spoke to Steve Edo, Ken's son and he said that he didn't know if this was gospel or not but he said that one story he had heard was that his father had gotten out of the internment camp by conning the authorities that he was Chinese-American, in fact, and not Japanese-American.

8:28I don't know whether that's true or not, but it gives you some sense of maybe where his career was headed into con artistry as well. And from there on out, he was a professional card sharp. Where did he go once he got out? So he found his way across a lot of the interior west. We know that he was in Denver for a time as a car dealer. He acquired the nickname Joe Montana because he was gambling a lot in Montana. He was most memorably, though, in Pocatello, Idaho. And that's where he started to run into his first real issues with the law. He really puts himself on the map for running a con scheme, a pigeon drop scheme.

9:19A pigeon drop is a con where scammers pretend to find something valuable, which they'll split with a person if they can put some money up front to claim it. In Idaho, Ken told the man he was waiting for some jewels to arrive, but that he needed$5 ,000 to complete the purchase. He promised the man a payout later. The man got a box with just candy bars inside. Ken was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He actually got pretty high marks from the officials within the prison. They said he was of high intelligence, that he seemed to understand that what he had done was wrong. He seemed to be educating himself.

10:03and he insisted to them that he would never wind up back in prison again. Ken Edo was paroled less than a year into his sentence. When he got out, he went back to Chicago, where he'd lived briefly before. How did he find himself in Chicago and why Chicago? After Japanese Americans started to be released from the camps in America, there was a concerted effort by U.S. officials to break up the Japanese American communities which had prospered mostly on the West Coast prior to World War II. And what that meant in large part was directing them to cities like Chicago, which had never had a Japanese American community before.

10:53By the time Ken Edo returned to Chicago, there was more of a Japanese-American community right in that smack dab in the north side of Chicago. The Chicago outfit had established itself on the north side before the war. They were largely headquartered downtown on Rush Street. There are a few stories about how Ken Edo got involved with the outfit. You know, one FBI report stated that Ken Edo had become delinquent on a juice loan, which is an extortionate loan from an outfit loan shark, and was beaten by outfit enforcers for not paying. And that he so impressed these mobsters that they said, we need to keep an eye on this guy.

11:39And that was one story I heard. The other was that his son, Steve Edo, told me Ken Edo's first wife, who was Polish-American, also ran a card game. And, of course, if you were going to run anything involving gambling in Chicago at that time, you would have to pay a tax on the game to, you know, whoever the local mobsters were. And so what did he start to do? the outfit bosses were you know fundamentally quite racist right but they uh recognized that there was money to be made off of the minority communities of Chicago just like any other right and what that meant was that Canetto could carve out a kind of fiefdom for himself as being the specialist on gambling rackets targeting the black and Chinese and Japanese and Latino communities in Chicago.

12:40But his biggest moneymaker would have been the Bolida racket. That was what made him the real money, the income he was bringing in. I mean, it was in the millions and millions of dollars per year.

12:54We'll be right back.

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15:25Tell me about Elaine Smith. She is also a native Chicagoan from the, I believe, the northwest side of Chicago. So she knew the area quite well. She was originally a grade school teacher, but her husband was an FBI special agent. And Elaine Smith, to look at her, she was a very fashionable, attractive young lady who was always bedecked in nice clothes. But her husband had said to her, you know, I think you'd be a good FBI agent too. And at a relatively late age, in her 30s, she applied for and entered the FBI and was accepted. And from the beginning, the assignment that she wanted was with the Organized Crime Bureau back in Chicago.

16:19Four months after starting with the FBI, she got her dream job. And eventually she gets handed a file on this guy, Edo, to Elaine Smith. She described him as, you know, he seemed like a creep at first, like kind of a piece of trash. She read in his file that he was linked to more than one unsolved murder from the 1950s and 60s. She also saw that Ken's name was linked to 50 other FBI files. And thinks, well, this guy is flying under the radar, and nobody has, you know, managed to put the cuffs on him. Nobody seems to realize how important he is to the syndicate gambling operations. and she starts trying to build a case against Ken Edo.

17:06By the 1980s, Ken was in his 60s. He'd been working for the outfit for almost 30 years. The way Ken received messages from the higher-ups in the outfit was through two men, Joe Arnold and Cesar DeVarco. But about once a month, Ken met with his reputed boss in person, Vincent Solano. Vincent Solano allegedly ran all of the outfit's business on the city's north side. Ken would call and say he was the pizza man. It was their signal to meet at an IHOP, so Ken could update him on how much money they'd made or lost. The FBI started following Ken's runners. Runners were the men who collected the bolita slips from the bars, newsstands, barbershops, and restaurants.

17:59where people place bets. Those bets would be collected, and would always be on the same day of the week, right? Because there's going to be this announcement out of San Juan that night. So they need to be collected. They need to be eventually tabulated the next day to determine if anyone won or not. And so what you have is this weekly routine of a couple flunkies of Edo's converging to collect all these slips, pass them on to him. And then the next day, he would go to a motel with a Royal Portable adding machine and work out all the math, see who hit, who didn't, what their takes were for that week, if they were out anything.

18:40So by surveilling them, they were able to start identifying weak links in the chain, and that would be his underlings. And one of those underlings was made a confidential informant for Lane Smith. And from there, it was just a matter of nailing Canetto in the room with the betting slips and proving that he was involved in the gambling racket. The FBI got a room in the same motel where Ken Edo counted up the Bolita money so they could watch him. Elaine was one of them. She was one of the few women working as a special agent for the FBI at the time. You know, maybe a sign of the chauvinism of the FBI at that time.

19:22the male FBI agents played a prank on her, which was to say that they were in Edo's room. And so she knocked on the door, and Ken Edo opens it, and they're face-to-face. And she blurts out, oh, you're not my husband, and he closes the door. And then she goes into the room across the hall where the FBI agents are all cackling, of course. Doesn't that seem like a really dumb joke? I mean, you're working so hard to get this guy? Yeah, I mean, that's, you know... Why would you blow it for that? They fortunately didn't blow it. Maybe the chauvinism against women led Edo also to think that, you know, there's no possible way that lady was an FBI agent, right?

20:06But, yeah, it doesn't seem like the time for horseplay to me, at least. A few days later, the FBI decided it was time to make an arrest. They waited for Ken Edo to arrive. Then they knocked on the door with a warrant. One of Ken's men vomited when he saw the FBI agents. So you have this surreal, you know, scene where Edo is totally cool and collected while his assistant is vomiting. And he is cuffed. He asks the FBI agents to take his glasses out, put them on for him to read the warrant. and that's now the second time that Elaine Smith has been face-to-face with him. He is charged on a syndicated gambling charge that doesn't carry that much time, but Elaine Smith, while fingerprinting him, tries to get him to open up a little and talk.

21:06And he makes it very clear to her, I will never, ever talk. Ken Edo told Elaine Smith, I understand that you have a job to do, and trying to convince me to be a snitch is part of it. But that is not who I am. And Ken didn't fight the charges. On January 18, 1983, he was convicted of gambling and conspiracy. The Chicago Tribune reported that in three months, Ken's Bolida operation made almost$6 million. dollars. Ken expected to be sentenced to a couple of years in prison. While he was awaiting sentencing, he was allowed to live at home, and his boss, Vincent Solano, asked to see him. To put it as bluntly as I could, if there was even the suspicion that you had informed, the odds would be that you would be found in an abandoned car in the trunk with your throat slit, And that would just be how that would be dealt with by the outfit.

22:10They did it many times. And they would do it for much less than simply seeming to inform. Ken Edo met Vincent Solano at their usual spot, an IHOP. They took a walk while they talked. Solano seems nervous. He asks, all right, are you going to do the time? And then he directs him, actually, I want you to appeal. And he's all jumpy. At one point, he says to Edo, what's that you got in your pocket? And he just takes his hand out of his pocket and he has a, you know, a pack of cigarettes. And he says, I thought I saw something. So he's all jumpy. And then Vincent Solano said he wanted Ken to meet with a man named John Gattuso.

22:55He wanted him to rent John Gattuso an empty restaurant Ken owned in the Chicago suburbs. It was called Mary Lou's, named after Ken's wife. He said a man named Jay Campisi was interested in taking over the restaurant, along with John Gattuso. That also strikes Edo as odd, because John Gattuso is a low-echelon guy in the outfit at that time, of which there were many, who is not quite an outfit member. Gattuso operates kind of the most despised rackets within the outfit. And that would be legitimate restaurants and bars that they have or have influence over, but also gay bars and bathhouses on the north side of Chicago.

23:48Jay Campisi is mentioned in this conversation as well as the man who's going to be the partner with Gattuso on renting out this space that Ken Edo has. Campisi is more senior. He's in his 60s. He would have been a specialist in juice loans, a loan shark. And, you know, someone who, you know, has a cigar always clenched in his mouth. Campisi's a soldier. When Ken heard that Solano wanted him to meet with these guys about the restaurant, in his head, would he have been thinking, hmm, this doesn't quite add up? Yeah, I mean, what's remarkable is he goes to this meeting at this vacant space he has that he's going to maybe lease out to John Cattuso.

24:37And he thinks they're going to they're going to kill me here. What happens is he had a leak in the radiator of his car. So his wife, Mary Lou, drove him to this to this meeting and she waits out in the car. Cattuso eventually turns up in this dented orange car and goes in to meet with him in there. Mary Lou's waiting outside in the car. She notices also that two men also pull up in another car with gloves on and hats on and wait outside until the meeting concludes. Now inside, Canetto has a meeting with Cattuso. Cattuso is like not prepared for it. he flips open his wallet to give him a card to write down his number on.

25:23They'll figure it out another time. He says his backer fell out or something like that. And an interesting side note, when he opens the wallet, Canetto sees a Cook County Sheriff's Deputy badge. The reason for that is John Gattuso is a one or two day a month Cook County Sheriff's Deputy, which was a common sort of trick in a very corrupt police force at that time that outfit guys would have a job as a sheriff's deputy. But anyway, he thinks, oh, they were going to kill me right there, but maybe my wife being there, complicated things, messed it up. So if that's the case, that leaky radiator, you know, saved his life that day.

26:13We'll be right back. Thank you.

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27:55With 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers plus tax and$35 device connection charge. Credits end and balanced due if you pay off earlier. Canceled. Finance agreement, 256 gigs,$830. Eligible port in a new line,$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit T-Mobile.com. A few days after the restaurant incident, Cesar DeVarco had another message for Ken Eto. He gets told something very odd by DeVarco. DeVarco says, so you're going to have dinner with Vince and Jay Campisi and Johnny Gattuso. And if Edo was just suspicious prior to that, he knows they're going to kill him.

28:34Because in the 30 years he's been working for Vince Solano, he's never been invited to dinner with him. I mean Solano's a guy who's so cautious about discussing any sort of business about even socializing with his men that they used to have a regular Christmas party every year for the Northside crew which he abandoned due to FBI surveillance so they're not even doing that anymore and now he's going to have dinner with him so he knows that's it and he walks back to his car and he knows they're going to do it then I mean, was it just that there's no point in me running? There's no point. I think that's part of it.