Japanese police emblem

1974-1975

For many Japan-based businessmen, gambling trips to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada turned nightmarish.

Kikumaru Okuda, 46, also a resident of the Land of the Rising Sun, and a film producer with Toho Film Company, organized numerous trips on behalf of the Nevada hotel-casino, at the request of its president, Harry Wald. Caesars Palace paid Okuda, who’d met all of Nevada’s requirements for junketeers, $3,000 ($15,000 today) a month for his services.

The agreement with junket guests, which was typical, was that the resort would pay their airfare and hotel bills in exchange for them gambling a certain number of games while in Sin City. If they won, the casino would pay them in U.S. dollars on site. If they lost, the guests would pay in yen what they owed after returning to Japan.

Illegal Collections

In the case of a 32-year-old, Yokohama dry goods dealer, upon his return home, Okuda told him he owed $93,000 (about $455,000 today) and demanded payment. (It’s likely the man hadn’t known the size of his marker or how fast it had grown when he was in Vegas.) He refused to pay.

Soon after, Okuda’s partners —Yoshihisa Kuroda, 45, and Manabu Nakajima, 40, both corporate executives — told the debtor they had Mafia and Yakuza (Japanese organized crime members) associates who’d “liquidate” him if he didn’t pay immediately (Las Vegas Sun, July 17, 1975). He gave them $18,000 (probably all he could at the time) then reported the incident to police. (Such extortion by junketeers is why the state of Nevada, in 1972, had augmented its regulations concerning junkets.)

Consequently, in 1975, members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) investigated possible links between organized crime and gambling junkets to Las Vegas.

“In general, the situation occurred at about the same time as the movie, The Godfather, was being run in Japan, and from the point of view of the Japanese the entire affair appeared to have been engineered by organized crime interests,” wrote Jerome Skolnick in House of Cards.

Police discovered other victims, including:

• A golf course proprietor who was forced to repay $670,000 ($3.3 million today)
• A nightclub owner who had to come up with $100,000 ($490,000)
• A Tokyo jeweler who’d lost $50,000 and paid about $10,000 ($49,000)

They learned Okuda had begun the junket enterprise in January of 1974 and since then, had taken to Las Vegas 85 men, whose gambling losses had totaled $83 million ($407 million today)! Okuda had collected about $600,000 ($3 million today), two-thirds of which he’d sent to the casino through a U.S. attorney living in Japan.

The MPD arrested Okuda, Kuroda and Nakajima on charges of extorting millions of yen from Japanese citizens.

Nothing Doing

Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) agents also looked into the allegation, in the United States and in Japan. When they questioned Wald, he said he was clueless as to the intimidation tactics Okuda had been using. Further, he claimed Okuda had offered to take over junket debt collection, but Okuda asserted Wald had asked him to do it. (Caesars Palace already had been in the NGCB’s crosshairs over junkets in 1969.)

When overseas, Japanese police prevented NGCB agents from reviewing any and all related documents, saying they were being held as evidence for the trio’s upcoming trial.

Back home, Nevada gambling regulators noted that opposition to and a major media campaign against gambling and junkets was growing in Japan and said the climate there toward the U.S. industry was “economically and emotionally bad” (Reno Evening Gazette, Aug. 19, 1975). Silver State officials were displeased with the circumstances surrounding the junkets from Japan and the resulting strained relations with the country.

As for Okuda, the Tokyo MPD arrested him a second-time in 1975 on different junket-related charges, but what ultimately happened to him, his henchmen and Caesars Palace — if anything — is unknown.

Sources

Art from Wikimedia Commons: by Mononomic

1950

In late 1948, Hollywood movie producer, Frank N. Seltzer — known for the movies, Jungle Patrol and Let’s Live Again, which debuted that same year — began research for his next project, 711 Ocean Drive, starring Edmond O’Brien and Joanne Dru.

He intended for it to expose the “bookie racket,” or “wire service as a new industry for the hoodlums who lost out through repeal” of Prohibition,” he said (Nevada State Journal, June 15, 1950).

He planned to film in a handful of California and Nevada cities. However, Lieutenant William “Bill” Burns, with the Los Angeles Police Department, warned Seltzer he was “walking into a bear trap” in Las Vegas.

In 1949, after the script was ready, someone from the public relations firm that represented the City of Las Vegas told Seltzer they could make available famous hotel-casinos on the Strip for filming. A separate hotel owner directly offered his property for the Sin City sequences. Further, a city councilman and Chamber of Commerce member assured the producer they’d cooperate fully with production.

Obstruction, Harassment Begin

Two months later, however, when production manager, Orville Fouse, went to Las Vegas, the hotel-casino owner who had offered his property for filming asked him to his office, where there were three “bruisers leaning against the wall,” Seltzer described. The hotelier told Fouse the trio believed making the movie would be “harmful to the best interests of the city.” The PR company also reneged. Seltzer’s cameramen were denied a rental car and city airport facility services and told to return to Los Angeles where they belonged.

A false rumor that Seltzer was working on a biopic of the late mobster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, spread around Sin City. The bogus story that Seltzer was filming for a story about mobster Mickey Cohen was perpetrated in Palm Springs.

“We are going to stop you in any way we can,” Las Vegas gamblers made clear to Seltzer.

“Frank didn’t realize what danger was in this flicker until some mobsters from Las Vegas threatened

to run him out of town — loaded with lead — when we went there on location,” O’Brien said (Lubbock Morning Avalanche, Aug. 17, 1950).

At that point, LAPD’s Burns assigned himself and four of his Gangster Squad men to escort Seltzer and the cast throughout filming.

Despite the warnings and obstructionism, Seltzer moved forward with his cinematic project as best he could. He and his production team were prevented from filming in Vegas, at Lake Mead and a well-known Los Angeles restaurant. He was nearly stopped from shooting in Palm Springs.

When attempts were made to block them from shooting scenes near Boulder Dam, Seltzer had his attorneys ask the Secretary of the Interior, Oscar L. Chapman, to intervene, which he did. Consequently, U.S. forest rangers were assigned to the crew, and filming took place but allegedly remained fraught with danger.

For instance, O’Brien, the movie’s leading man, recalled what really happened during the final sequence when his character, Eddie, was supposed to be shot with blanks by 20 riflemen during a chase through Boulder Dam, “After the take, I turned around and there were three bullet holes in a car windshield — about a foot from my head” (Lubbock Morning Avalanche, Aug. 17, 1950). “The cops cleared out all spectators including a few hoods in their midst. We had to do that scene over three more times — and, believe me, I ‘died’ each time.”

The International News Service reported, “As police know, 711 was in constant danger from hoodlums and was protected by a battery of police and plainclothesmen … 711 almost cost the lives of a few persons connected with it, including O’Brien’s.”

Seltzer presumed the gamblers’ main objection to his picture was that it revealed how past posting — faking odds and placing bets after races occurred — could beat the bookies.

Reactions Upon Movie Debut

Upon 711 Ocean Drive’s 1950 release, some critics claimed it fell short of being a hard-hitting, revelatory movie about the gambling industry. Instead, they said, it was a modest melodrama at best, “no more than an average crime picture with some colorful but vague details thrown in,” reported the Los Angeles Times (July 20, 1950).

Others lauded it for being the first to portray “the inside story of the infamous syndicate and its hoodlum empire, with its terror and violence,” and “forcefully reveal[ing] the many facets of the bookmaking business which takes millions of dollars daily from thousands of small bettors: housewives, mechanics, office workers, students,” according to Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune (July 31, 1950).

Sources