Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is presented as a crucial publication partner in Jake Adelstein’s account of reporting on Tadamasa Goto’s liver transplant at UCLA and the FBI intelligence deal connected to it. After Japanese outlets left the story largely untouched, collaboration with the newspaper helped move the investigation into public view; its later coverage also recorded the limits of what an official review had established.

Reporting Collaboration

Adelstein began speaking with the Los Angeles Times before his Washington Post article was ready. Andrew Morse, then formerly of The Wall Street Journal, had introduced him to the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau chief, John Glionna. Adelstein worked with Glionna and Charles Ornstein for weeks on the story. Their version included UCLA, which the Washington Post article had not mentioned, and Adelstein says the Los Angeles Times made it a front-page story on May 31.

The investigation concerned Goto’s effort to obtain a U.S. visa for a liver transplant at UCLA in exchange for intelligence he had promised the FBI. Adelstein’s account placed the arrangement against Japan’s stringent transplant system, where donors were scarce and many people in need of organs either went abroad or died waiting. The Los Angeles Times collaboration thus carried a story that connected a Japanese criminal organization, U.S. law enforcement, cross-border access to medical care, and questions about how scarce organs were allocated.

Publication and Reception

Adelstein sent the article to the Yomiuri before publication, but it ignored it, as did the other Japanese newspapers he approached or monitored. Once the story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Japanese outlets could no longer ignore it altogether. Yet, according to Adelstein, most outlets that covered it attributed their account to the Los Angeles Times rather than independently verifying the claims or pursuing them further. The paper’s reporting therefore became both a route into public discussion and a source that other news organizations could cite without taking on the same investigative burden.

That role contrasts with the press-club environment described elsewhere in the book. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s press clubs had no foreign media representatives, while major Japanese outlets did not challenge that exclusion. The account does not establish that this arrangement directly shaped the Los Angeles Times’s reporting, but it situates the paper’s cross-border collaboration within a news system where access and institutional habits could limit who pursued a story and how far it traveled.

Coverage of the UCLA Review

The Los Angeles Times also reported that an investigation conducted by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services together with UCLA found no evidence of improper conduct by the medical center or its staff in performing transplants for four Japanese patients. Adelstein carefully distinguishes that finding from the unresolved questions: UCLA and Dr. Busuttil said they treated patients according to medical need and did not make moral judgments, but, as he notes, they did not explicitly address what they knew about the patients’ yakuza connections or when they knew it.

Adelstein further reported that federal law-enforcement sources believed UCLA might have become involved, unwittingly, in money laundering if payments from patients with yakuza ties derived from criminal proceeds in Japan. He said he knew of no investigation of the four men for money laundering and that any such inquiry would require cooperation from Japanese authorities. The newspaper’s account of the review did not resolve those questions; it marked the boundary between a finding of no proven improper conduct and concerns that remained unexamined or unconfirmed.

Significance in the Book

The Los Angeles Times matters in the narrative not simply as a venue but as part of the route by which a stalled investigation reached a larger audience. Japanese newspapers’ silence and later reliance on attribution to the Los Angeles Times stand against the paper’s willingness to work with Adelstein and publish the UCLA dimension of the story. In the book’s account, that publication made the reporting harder to contain, even though it did not by itself settle the factual, ethical, or legal questions surrounding Goto’s transplant and the FBI’s deal.