(TAPE 19) Nicola Interview June 17, 1991
(Incl: Marriage & Divorce/Yae, TSK Gangsters, Growing Up in East Harlem, Early Days in Japan, Wives & Lovers)
SIDE A
(Counter 000)
(inre phone books)
(MARRIAGE & DIVORCE RECORD)(YAE)
(YAE)
A: I was looking through these books and I saw Joe Camero’s name in there. And it’s funny how you mention Joe Camero.
Q: Joe Camero?
A: Joe Camero C-a-m-e-r-o. Just like the car.
Q: What was he. Mexican or Puerto Rican?
A: I thought he was Japanese.
Q: Really.
A: Camero could be a Japanese name.
Q: It was written in katakana (in the Japanese gangster encyclopaedia).
A: I know but it could be.
Q: No Japanese has to be kanji, by law.
A: How do you write I George?
Q; That’s a stage name.
A: His real name is Ishikawa….
Q: Camero that’s not a Japanese family name….OK go ahead with marriage and divorce records.
A: OK. I married Yoshiko Iizumi, August 14, 1947. And for your reference, this was also shown on the Don Rather show. Remember that came out when I was on it? They showed that clipping of me marrying. Pathe News. Who was the guy….big man…
Q: Murrow? Cronkite.
A: No. What’s Bob Simon. Would CBS be Pathe News?
Q: No different company.
A: Anyway, they used the Pathe News to show me walking down the staircase of the American Embassy in Yokohama when I got married. OK.
Q: Down staircase?
A: Out. The building.They showed it when the Emperor died. Then I got divorced on June 6, 1957. Then I married Yae Koizumi, my present wife, December 17, 1964. And I divorced her June 25th 1968. Shit. I was only married to her for four years. She got so fucking rich in those four years. Jesus Christ. But, of course, from 1957 to 1964, I really enjoyed life. That was when my restaurant was really booming. And I had a mistress in between. Shall we write that down? OK. Her name was Yoshiko Takaishi….
Q: That’s the famous Yoshiko, the cause of all the …
A: And I put her father in the pachinko business…in Meguro, the hakumon dollar (million dollar) pachiniko…Now, they don’t talk to me. They’re very rich. I opened the pachinko place for them. Nobody knew what pachinko was.
Q: But surely pachinko started before…
A: A little bit before, not much more. Cuz I was going with Yoshiko from 1952 and she was only 17. So she was born in Showa, maybe 35 nen. I mea 1935. Beautiful fucking broad. But anyway. Life is like that. So then I got…Yae-chan gave me such a bad time that I decided to marry somebody else. Then I married Miss Hokkaido. Her name was Mayumi Hori., I married her July 18, 1968. …which would be exactly 24 days after. Course I left her pretty soon, but we were legally divorced February 17, 1975. I let her wait all those fucking years before I gave her a divorce. And then you could see I married Yae again May 2, 1975. Less than three months later, I married her.
Q: Did you ask her to marry you?
A: She wanted to get married. I didn’t want to get divorced. I just let then situation sit as it is. “You gotta marry me.” “You gotta marry me.” “You gotta marry me. I’ll give you all your property back. I’ll give you everything that I took from you. ” And you know what happened? She took more. Japanese name.
Q: Is that what she said, really, “You gotta marry me?”
A: Of course. “You gotta marry me.” “You gotta marry me.”
Q: “I’ll give you back…”
A: Well, you know, “Everything is yours. And this, that and the other thing.” She even says it today. Hey, everything is…you know. Except the other day she said, “The only reason why you got money is because I give it to you.” How do you like that for fucking balls. Anyway, that’s the marriage dates.
(TSK GANGSTERS)
Q: OK. Tell me about Joe Camero.
A: I can’t tell you much about him.
Q: Just tell me what you know,.
A: I don’t know. You even make me wonder whether I spoke to him in Japanese or English. Must have spoke to him in English, right?
Q: What’d you say he looked like. Pug nosed?
A: He looked like he was a fighter.I think if you check real close he was a professional fighter before that.
Q: Pro boxer.
A: If you say he came from the States, well then he was a fighter in the States.
Q: I don’t know. Somebody speculated he was a GI. Got a discharge here, but he was from Mexico or Puerto Rico. Or something. Latin American. Spanish Heritage.
A: I thought he was Japanese. (note: Nick is right) Maybe he told me what he was, but, I ..you know…in those days, there was another guy…you know you talking about the days when they had Shinjuku-san-chome….That used to be where the Shinjuku post office, where the Shinjuku kuyakusho (ward office) is now, go down that street, and the trolley used to go in and out. Trolley used to go in back of the houses. That area there. And that was Tosei-kai area there. Of course, everything in Tokyo was Tosei-kai, especially Shinjuku.
Q: He had a broken nose, or a squashed nose.
A: He was a pug. He had a pugilist nose.
Q: Quashed in.
A: Well you know he was hit by a fucking something.
Q: Battered nose.
A: Joe was a …like I say…most of those guys were nice people. You know. They were not dealing in dope. It wasn’t as bad as today. It’s terrible. It’s getting worse everyday.
(Business talk with Boopie. About buying portable mike for karaoke)
Q: So you don’t…
A: I know Joe was a little guy. I’d say he was …he might have been 135 pounds. He couldn’t have been more heavier than that. He was not a heavyweight.
Q: He was an enforcer.
A: In those days, they didn’t have guy, they had volume. They wanted to do something, they’d call 50 people.
Q: (riff through thick files) This is all Nicola Zappetti here.
A: If somebody ask me what did I probably write it in 3 lines.
Q: Anyway, he was supposedly the only gaijin yakuza.
A: I knew him very well, but I never…I never thought he was a gaijin. Probably in those days, they didn’t want to show it. Eh? Of course, they had other guys. Later on they had Ben Winsinger who thought he was a gangster. And George Kajioka. What do you figure? George Kajioka is what? Japanese? He died in Hawaii. He was the boss of Hawaii for a while.
Q: What was the other guy’s name?
A: Ben Winsinger.He was a German.
Q: What did he do?
A: Oh, he’d try to hang around with them and he’d try to be a gangster. As a matter of fact, Winsinger was the guy who caused this guy from the Post, what was his name, Steve Dunleavy. Winsinger egged this Dunleavy…or he egged Matsubara to fight with Dunleavy. And that was like matching a flyweight with a heavyweight. Cuz Dunleavy was a mean, mother fucking Australian. But I think Winsinger instigated that, in Tom’;s restaurant years ago in Nogizaka. Then, of course, Steve Dunleavy’s days in Japan became numbered. And he left and he became a big wheel.
Q: What did Winsinger do?
A: He just hung around. He was sort of in their group. But he didn’t …like when I’d go out with Riki or Machii, he’s not in that class. He just used to hang around with the low class bums. But you can’t say it that way cuz they’ll come over here and tell me about high class and bring me up to the 10th floor and throw me out the window and say “You’re high class.”
Q: Okay.
A: Course, most of them are not business anymore. They’re old and retired. Cuz you’re talking 30 years ago. Like me. Everybody gets old.
Q: You got married in Yokohama…was that counselate or embassy.
A: Counselate. It didn’t rate as an embassy. When I was marrying the girl from Fujisawa.
Like I said, it’s on the tape. I got a copy of the tape, by the way. That CBS put out. With that guy’s name Dan Rather….You know it’s funny, Bob Simon got stuck in the desert out there and he got back alive. He’s fucking lucky.
(GROWING UP IN EAST HARLEM)
Q: What were your grades like in high school?
A: Oh, normal. Nothing particularly special.
Q: Where you a baseball fan in those days.
A: Oh yeah. Because you see, when you’re a kid you become a baseball fan and if you don’t like somebody and he’s a Giant fan well then you become something else. I was a Yankee fan. But I liked the Yankees because I’m prejudiced. They had a lot of Italians on their team. You know, so. Like today I’m prejudiced. I only cheer for the foreigners.
Q: That was when Joe DiMaggio was on their team?
A: Well, I don’t know…
Q: He came up in 37.
A: Before that they had Yogi Berra, or was that the same time.
Q: Yogi Berra was in the 50’s.
A: They had Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti, remember. I can’t remember very well. I know they had Carl Ruffing was a pitcher, and who was the crazy guy, the Spanish guy, the crazy guy, he used to watch the airplanes going over Yankee Stadium, he’d stop the game to watch them. Some …what the fuck was that guy’s name. Lopez?
Q: Pitcher?
A: Yeah. Like Vic Raschi was a pitcher. But in either case I became a Yankee fan because somebody was a Dodger fan and I didn’t like that person. So I became a Yankee fan.
Q: You went to a club called the Club Calabresi one time.
A: Club Calabrese.
Q: Where was that. In Tokyo?
A: I can’t remember.
Q: You were born on Valentine’s Day. Quite a few celebrities in your neighborhood, talking about 3 Fingers Brown. Luchese and those guys.
A: Luchese. Yeah. They’re still active. I’m very surprised. Mike Coppola lived on the same street.
Q: Was he famous?
A: Oh, Trigger Mike. (Trigger Mike was driver for Dutch Schulz. Was driver when Schulz had rival murdered in barber shop.)
Q: How do you spell his last name?
A: Coppola. But all those people are gone. Their sons are gone. I was a 10-11 year old kid on 116th street, these guys were already 50. So they must have had me by 40 years. And you know Tony Franciosa grew up on that street. I think ol Richie Laporra (sp?) is his manager. Or used to be.
Q: Then you learned to operate IBM sorting machines.
A: My first job was a typist for the WPA. Then I went into IBM machines.
Q: What were they called then at the time. IBM Machines.
A: I guess they were.
Q: Those were the primitive kind before the computers came out.
A: Oh, yeah. I remember the unit I was working on was a sorting machine….You know the way the GI checks come in today? Square boxes. We had that kind of shit. But the big machine was a …what do you call it…put the plugs in an out. Like a telephone console.
Q: You went to a place called Picatini arsenal in Dover?
A: Dover New Jersey.
Q: When was the first time you got laid.
A: When I was up in Picatini. We went to Scranton Pennsyvania. So that was 1940. I was about 18-19 years old. You can’t lay no girls in my neighborhood. That’s like committing fucking suicide. They’re all Italian. You don’t know who their brothers and fathers are. You know.
Q: When you went to Scranton, did you go to a whorehouse?
A: Well, it was better than single sex. You know what single sex is don’t you?
Q: Yes. What was the girl like. Do you remember?
A: No. Just a piece of ass. Aw, for Christ’s Sakes, I was so excited, god only knows what the hell really happened.
Q: What did it cost you. You remember?
A: 2 dollars.
Q: For how long? An hour?
A: How long? Never happen. How long does a 19 year old kid…
Q: Two minutes. 30 seconds.
A: .Probably the word is ejaculate before you get there.
Q: You wanted to be a pilot, to fly an airplane, took a test. What kind of test was that? Written test?
A: When I went to the Air Force, 90 Whitehall Street, they give you a written test, they always says I failed. They sez you’re a glider pilot. I said fuck you.
Q: What kind of questions, you remember?
A: Oh, they’re physics. Mathematical questions. I couldn’t get a good score at the Air Force. I got a good score with the navy. I got a good score with the Canadian Air Force.
But in those days war was the greatest thing that ever happened to a poor kid from New York. Like I told you, they give you money, they give you clothing. They give you food. If you live in New York, what’s the difference whether you’re shooting at Japanese and Japanese are shooting at you, and if you live in that fucking New York they play a lot of games with guns there. They still do, don’t they. Now they got promoted to AK-47’s.
Q: There’s a lot of shooting going on in your neighborhood?
A: Well, basically. Those were gang wars. I’d say by 1940 it was pretty well under control. Or before that, wasn’t it a son of a bitch. But then, those days you’re a kid. You don’t give a god damn.
I saw a man that was electrocuted.
Q: You told me that. He was suntan. You asked your dad why he had a suntan.
Frank Hawkes. Commander Frank Hawkes.
A: Yeah. Canadian Air Force.
Q: What did he look like?
A: Oh, I can’t remember.
Q: Big?
A: Oh, he must have been. And he was a commander…I think he was a very famous man.
Q: Was he big or small. Or stern-jawed or typical marine.
A: No,no, no. He was Canadian. I’d say he was a big man. Maybe he was a six footer. Well-built. Predominantly arrogant. Strictly a commander. He came into the picture because I passed the test with flying colors and they couldn’t figure it out. How could a commercial student do that. Then he washed me out.
Q: I interviewed a writer, guy named Pete Hamill. Told me he saw a guy electrocuted in the electric chair. The last electrocution in Sing-Sing. He’d strangled two girls. Sexual psychopath. Raped them and strangled them,8 or 9 years old. He came out of the chapel and 30 or 40 people there, reporters, and he came out smoking away.
A: Didn’t give a shit.
Q: Yeah. Stands up in front of everybody. His name was Wood. He stands up in front of everybody and he says, “Ladies and Gentleman. You’re about the see the effect of electricity on wood.”
A: Very funny.
Q: They let him smoke another cigarette and put him in the chair…Where’s Cherry Point?
A: North Carolina. South Carolina is Paris Island.
Q: Your squadron was VND-254.
A: Yes. I was in Platoon 559 in 1942. Paris Island.
Q: What was the name of the island you went to in the Ulithe Group?
A: Mog Mog….Put my Marine serial # down?
Q: What is it?
A: 429835.
(EARLY DAYS IN JAPAN)
Q: I asked you this before but you weren’t the first American in Japan.There were a bunch of other people who went to different places at the same time. Dispatched different groups.
A: When I came to Japan?
Q: Yeah.
A: No, …I came from Japan, I came from Okinawa to Omura Kyushu and, of course, I’m sure that they must have sent other Americans to different places. I was Air Base Command. In case something happened to me, I had to land in Kyushu. Of course, some people went to Atsugi and some went to Sendai and I imagine that they….
Q: They all dispatched in initial group.
A: Yeah, but you never know where they came from. Army. Navy. Marines. I went to Omura Kyushu. Marine base.
Q: Why was there a big grass mat there?
A: That was the air field. It was all grass.
Q: Because they couldn’t afford asphalt?
A: It’s good protection because grass is easier to replace than a concrete runway. And those airplanes were not big those days. Not like what you got today. Zero fight. 3 guys can pick it up and turn it over. Today you get an F-15, it must weigh 5-10,000 pounds for Christ sake….I don’t think one would fit in this room. Did you ever see those airplanes. Today’s airplanes? F-15, 16, 17….I don’t think they’d fit in those room. They’re big mother fuckers….10,000, 15,000 pounds.
Grass mat is easy to repair if you drop a bomb on it. You can repair it the same day.
Q: You said you were in Okinawa. Some Japanese put grenades in these boxes in the graveyards.
A: Yeah, you know …(draw picture), go in, little tunnel, dome shaped crest, in they got these little boxes 2 feet by 1 feet by 1 feet. And they put a cover on them And they put the bodies in there or the ashes in there. I know if you lift one up you might blow your brains out.
Q: Any guys get wiped out when you were there?
A: There was no boxing. There was no violence when I was there. There was no fighting. I left there probably, before the end of April. Now I think I stayed there only three or four days. Five days. So I must have left by April 5th or 6th.
Q: You were in Marine Corps in charge of investigations. What kind of investigation?
A: Fights. Rapes. Accidents off the base. The HQ squadron gets all the headaches.
Q: You get lots of fights?
A: I was walking down the street when a big fucking paratrooper wanted to fight with me. I told you that, right. Fucking, are you crazy. But, of course, if you…I knew one guy, Julie Sterns out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He wasn’t big but he was a hockey player. They picked on him. That son of a bitch would fight ten guys at one time.
Q: What’d the whorehouse in Scranton look like?
A: Nothing special…Separate house. 2 stories. All lined up. Victorian Style house. But they were all lined up. You could go in any one. You could go in any twenty of them probably. Well, I don’t think they’re still there. They could be.
Q: You get to chose the girl?
A: Yeah. Of course, in those days a girl was a girl. A girl is a girl is a girl. You choose anyone.
Q:You remember what she looked like?
A; No. I just didn’t care. Just a girl. Can you imagine first time? You remember your first time. You didn’t give a shit whether it was black, yellow, green, tall, fat, young, old. You didn ‘t care.
Q: All I could think about was I hoped to god I didn’t get her pregnant. That’s all I kept thinking about for a week afterward. 2 weeks.
Q: You said you started gambling then too? What kind of gambling, poker?
A: Well, we used to shoot crap, play poker. In the Marines, you learn everything…..we used to play poker all the time. We were not good poker players. And most of the time, …I remember we had an Italian guy there who was the victim. We used to cheat him all the time. We thought we were really smart kids. Deal from the bottom and the sides and every other place….
Pitch pennies. Pitch pennies against the wall. Shine shoes for a nickel.
(phone call from Frank Nomura. Discuss box to use karaoke microphone. Antenna in the dining room for the wireless)
Q: What was the smell in Omura like when you first went there?
A: (shrugs)
Q: How about the geisha house you went to. What did that smell like.
A: It smelled beautiful. For ten yen you could fuck all night. Can you imagine that.
Q: But no special smell. Fresh tatami, something like that. Nothing struck you?
A: No, they did a lot of charcoal grilling. Sweet potatoes and they had beer. They had mikan. That was a fair…everybody ate the same thing. …They had characoal, little one, the old one remember the old one, and they grill sweet potato. Plus it’s all they had.
You go there and you give them ten yen and you can fuck ten times a night if you want to. They didn’t care. And you eat and drink and …so you ate mikans and drank beer and ate sweet potatoes. But they were not mean vicious people or anything like that. They were just whores and one dick is just as good as another dick, I guess.
Q: When you were in Omuro, how long after you arrived, did the officers start coming in?
A: The American. Well, they came in…don’t forget, we’re aviation. Then they brought their F4U’s in. But they could ‘t fly much because there was no fuel. Rainy season, it was typhoon at that time. August. So there were very very few officers.
Q: Well, Tyrone Power came in. How long was it after that?
A: Oh, he came in probably a few days after I came in. But he came in. We made him the mailrun. So he come in, in and out, in and out. Nobody likes that fucking mail run, especially in August. It’s typhoon season. They didn’t have the electronics that they got today. I told you we had a guy named Hansen, who had 20-25 airplanes to his credit already. And he got lost in the ocean. Him and the whole squadron. They went from one island to another and they got lost….That’s history….Got lost ferrying airplanes from one island to another. Bad weather. Poor electronics. You name it. You know that’s 50 years ago. And you had to do a dot and dash to communicate…..Amelia Earhart got down in 1936-37. You talking 1942, not many years difference.
Q: You said there were snipers in the mountains in Yokosuka. Did you ever see anybody get shot?
A: No, but they used to shoot at us.
Q: You could hear the bullets?
A: Oh, yeah. They hit the vehicle. That was when we used to run from Yokosuka to …what was the name of that fucking town, it’s near Oppama, it used to be a whorehouse area. We used to go there shacking up. It’s Oppama. But it’s not Opama Station. It’s near Opama. We drive on that road down there between Opama and Yokosuka. You go different houses. Powered up.
Q: Whorehouses there?
A: Yeah. Of course. Sex was all over. Some people liked to go to concert halls. I preferred to go to a whorehouse.
Q: What were the whorehouses like there?
A: Japanese tatami places.
Q: Same as Omuro?
A: Yeah. All the same. Japanese whorehouses in those days were not fancy. They were plain tatami rooms? They didn’t have no red draperies.
Q: They actually shoot and hit the vehicle? This is hard top?
A: Carry all. Little ..carry all is a what. What do you call it, an open truck? Not the big, they call a big one Fallby, I think.
Q: Room for about 8 to 10 people on either side. 2 rows. 2 benches.
A: Right.
Q Canvas top.
A: Canvas top.
Q: So you actually hear the bullets hitting the side.
A: You know it’s dark. There’s nothing there. And if somebody shoots at you, you’re gonna know it. And we shoot back. We don’t give a fuck.
Q: Just open up fire?
A: You know if they fire once, it’s ok. If they fire twice, you’re gonna see the light. You’re gonna see the flash. Especially black of night.
Q: I got the list, all sorts of information on the Tosei-kai…there’s been a lot of stuff written in Japanese. Lots of magazine articles. When he opened up his TSK.CCC there was a list of directors, Jesus Christ. I mean all the top guys…from Mitsubishi, the guy who is now the president of the Yomiuri Shimbun, Tsuneo Watanabe is one of the directors. A famous author. People, so-called respectable people in society, were directors in Machii’s company. I got all the pamphlets and stuff from when they first opened up.
A: Life is sort of very interesting. Who would think you know that the Mitsubishi President would be a member of a crime group. A director at that. But maybe a lot of people had no choice but to say yes.
(phone call from Frank Nomura)
(WIVES & LOVERS)
Q: What’d your first wife look like? What kind of personality did she have?
A: Dull. Very dull.
Q: You mean quiet?
A: No disco baby. But she was…the attraction was, I told you, English. She was a doctor. She was nothing special. But in those days, nobody spoke English, so I had me somebody I could converse with.
Q: She didn’t like sex either.
A: I was sleeping the fucking enemy, not the wolves.
Q: She just married you because you were a foreigner and had money?
A: Well, they had no money in those days. There’s no, well, even today, I don’t think anyone can find passionate feelings among Japanese girls. I admit that they will fuck like a mink, but as far as offering would you say a warm relationship between male and female, I doubt it. Of course, there’s always the exception to the rule, but I would say out of a thousand, you might find one who might be passionately in love. But I doubt it, because the fucking propaganda in this country is so fucking anti-foreign, that nobody would expose themselves to the opposite of what they hear all day long.
Q: She used to get on the train at Taura?
A: Taura. The one station before Yokosuka.
(phone call from wife. You don’t have to be here. Just take it easy. Stay home)
A: She won’t come here. She knows you’re here.
Q: I’d forgotten about that.
Q: What’d your first wife look like?
A: Plumpy. 5’2″. They all are 5’2″ Round “maru” (round) face.
Q: She was introverted you would say?
A: An introvert. She still is.
Q: You just went up and talked to her on the train?
A: You see in those days we used to command the green car. What you call the green car. And if we seen girls, we let them come in …the fucking men, they’d have to ride shoulder to shoulder and ass to ass. So we controlled one car on the train. So we let her in on the train, talked to her, she spoke English, wow.
But I have to admit, I married her without feeling either. It was just somebody who spoke English. She wouldn’t come to Tokyo. She wouldn’t go to a GI club. She wouldn’t do anything. So,
A: Did you meet my pretty Indonesian girl here?
Q: No.
A: NO? My gosh. She’s pretty, yo. You like pretty girls?
Q: Like’em all. Especially the pretty ones.
A: She’s wondering if anybody knows the song Bali-hai.
Q: I know it….I thought everybody in the world knows that.
A: She’s asking. I said I know the song Balihai. She said, “you do?”
Q: So you just went up and talked to her.
A: Let her come in the train. And talked to her. And it worked. Like I said, the attraction was English. But I didn’t know she was a doctor…a dentist….She used the expression, which in those days was true, “I work in a dental office.” Because in those days the dental offices were not owned by the dentist, they were owned by somebody else.
And you know Bobby in those days if they could steal one stick of charcoal, they were happy. If they could figure out how to get charcoal and keep their house warm.
(meet Indonesian girl)
A: He said he knows Bali hai too….but then I gotta tell you the bad news. She’s living with a waiter. Good news to him. Bad news to me.
Q: Is the green car heated?
A: yes
Q: The whole train
A: Very hard to say. It might have been. Yokosuka line…..I used to live in Kamakura. In Okamoto hospital, near Buddha statue….That was one place. In those days you had to live like a rat. You had to find different places all the time. The MP’s were chasing you….They didn’t want you to stay overnight in a Japanese house..It was illegal….the military made those rules.
Q: Why?
A: To be son of a bitches like they are. Course the military top wheels they were free to do whatever they pleased. They lived in the Imperial Hotel.
Q: They think it was dangerous or something?
A: Just miliary regulation.
Q: There must have been some reason. Some logic behind it.
A: I don’t think the military ever has any logic….Well, they don’t want to lose troops. And if they’re shack rats….But that didn’t stop anybody. It stopped only the timid.
Q: What was your wife’s background? They doctors too?
A: They doctors too. Come from Mita.
(TAPE END)
Tokyo Junkie 