Investigation and Seizure of Kajiyama’s Overseas Funds

The investigation into Susumu Kajiyama’s overseas funds turned an obscure lead about gambling in Las Vegas into a cross-border financial story. A tip from Cyclops, checked through an FBI contact and developed alongside the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, connected cash held in Tokyo with Kajiyama’s American casino activity and, later, a Swiss account reportedly holding more than $50 million. The reporting also revealed the limits of what a single source could disclose—and how carefully journalists and police coordinated the release of information.

The Las Vegas Lead

Cyclops began giving Adelstein the story after a discussion about who counted as a victim in the collapse of Saitama Shogin. He said Kajiyama had lost a couple of million dollars gambling at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, adding that the losses might also be understood as money laundering. Kajiyama, according to Cyclops, had spent considerable time in the United States, keeping cash in a safe-deposit box there and withdrawing it when he travelled; he also had overseas bank accounts.

Cyclops gave more specific figures in a later conversation: roughly $4 million across two casinos, another million dollars in American bank accounts, and $2 million in cash deposited with the MGM Grand’s offices in Tokyo. He described Kajiyama as an organizational liability, saying that people had begun removing his name from rosters two years earlier to avoid leaving a paper trail. Yet, as Cyclops explained it, the absence of a formal expulsion meant Kajiyama remained within the organization. The financial investigation therefore touched a second problem: an organization could distance itself from a figure on paper without clearly severing the relationship.

The tip had boundaries. Adelstein spent another hour talking with Cyclops about their families, but learned nothing more about the Yamaguchi-gumi’s role in Kajiyama’s operations. Rather than treating the source’s account as sufficient proof, Adelstein privately contacted a trusted friend at the FBI in Washington, D.C. The friend confirmed that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had already visited Las Vegas and seized $2 million in cash from the MGM Grand’s Tokyo office. The confirmation matched Cyclops’s figure closely enough to give Adelstein a basis for approaching his colleagues, though the FBI contact would provide no further details.

Building the Investigation

The reporting widened from a single cash deposit to Kajiyama’s repeated movement of money across borders. The account prepared for publication described him as a Las Vegas “whale,” a term for a high-spending casino VIP. It said that he had visited Las Vegas for more than ten years, maintained casino accounts and an account with a California bank, and withdrawn money in the United States. Following a tip from U.S. authorities, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had been sending officials to investigate his Las Vegas transactions since the summer.

The case was not confined to one police force. The Department of Homeland Security, the Nevada Gaming Commission, and the FBI were investigating Kajiyama on suspicion of violating U.S. money-laundering laws. The MGM Grand was described as making a limited effort to cooperate. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, meanwhile, was preparing a Japanese money-laundering case based on more than $2 million seized in Tokyo, which police believed was likely to have come from illegal loan-sharking operations.

Adelstein and his colleagues built a reporting arrangement with a local Las Vegas journalist: the Japanese story would appear first, after which the reporter in Las Vegas could publish the scoop there. The time difference and the small American readership for Japanese newspapers made the sequence workable. In parallel, Chuckles negotiated with a police division chief over the timing of publication and the subsequent announcement of the seizure. The plan linked separate revelations: first Kajiyama’s Las Vegas activity, then the Tokyo cash seizure, followed by a rearrest under Japan’s money-laundering laws and coverage of the American investigation.

Publication and Confirmation

By mid-November, the coverage began with a report announcing that more than $2 million had been seized from Kajiyama’s safe-deposit box. Follow-up articles addressed the FBI investigation and Kajiyama’s Las Vegas spending. Three consecutive stories gave the newsroom a run of scoops, while the police department’s tightly managed sequence made it difficult for competitors to break ahead.

Adelstein sought independent confirmation before relying on the reporting. A Las Vegas journalist told him that the Nevada Gaming Commission had publicly addressed the case, easing his concern about publishing without an official announcement in hand. That caution mattered in the Japanese reporting environment he describes: the consequences of a factual error could outweigh the professional reward for getting a scoop. The arrest of one of Kajiyama’s associates added another concrete strand. The man had withdrawn more than a million dollars from Kajiyama’s account and made repeated trips to the United States carrying attaché cases filled with cash.

The work briefly altered Adelstein’s routine. He celebrated by running a mile and a half in under twelve minutes, a personal first, and went home early to collect his daughter from preschool. He and his family ate dinner together, an unusual evening after the reporting’s late nights and sustained attention. The episode places the professional satisfaction of a successful investigation beside the ordinary family time that his police work often displaced.

The Swiss Account and the Story’s Limits

Several weeks later, the story grew dramatically when it emerged that Kajiyama had more than $50 million in a Swiss bank account, reportedly with help from a Japanese employee of Credit Suisse. Swiss authorities froze the account. The figure eclipsed the sums in the initial Las Vegas reporting and shifted the investigation’s centre of gravity from casino transactions and cash in Tokyo to offshore banking.

The book sets the revelation in a wider pattern of foreign financial institutions being used for suspected yakuza money laundering. It notes that Citibank lost its private-banking licence in Japan in September 2004, partly over allegations of such use, and that the Japanese government punished the bank again in June 2009 for similar problems. These broader examples frame Kajiyama’s Swiss funds not as an isolated banking anomaly but as part of a recurring difficulty in tracing criminal money through institutions operating across national boundaries.

Once the investigation moved to Switzerland, Chuckles and another senior colleague took over the story. Adelstein turned to other reporting, particularly the investigation of Tadamasa Goto and his liver transplant. The change did not resolve every question about Kajiyama’s financial network; it marked the point where the overseas-funds story passed beyond Adelstein’s immediate assignment, after a verified Tokyo seizure had opened a path from a casino tip to a much larger international account.