Criminal - Tokyo Joe

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Ken Eto worked for the Chicago Outfit for 30 years. He was known as the mob’s bolita expert, bringing in millions of dollars a year for them. But in 1983, they turned on him. Dan O’Sullivan wrote about Ken Eto for Chicago Magazine and Epic Magazine - you can read his piece here. Criminal is going on tour in February! We’ll be telling brand new stories, live on stage. You can even get meet and greet tickets to come and say hi before the show. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com/live. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. In 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 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. The 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. Newspapers called Ken Edo the Bolita chief and the mobs Bolita expert. Bolita 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 Edo 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. So 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. He 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 an 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. And 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. One 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, 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, not Japanese-American. I 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. A 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 a 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, and 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. By 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 Addo got involved with the outfit. You know, one FBI report stated that Ken Addo 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. And 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 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 Caneto 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. But his biggest money maker would have been the Bolita 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. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

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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. Four 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. By 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 where people placed 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. So 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 made a confidential informant for Lane Smith,

and from there, it was just a matter of nailing Ken Edo 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, the 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? But, 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. And he makes it very clear to her, I will never, ever talk. Ken Edo told Elaine Smith, 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 Bolita operation made almost $6 million. 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. They 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. He 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. Jay 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 Caneto 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 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, 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 Gattuso. And he thinks 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 meeting. and she waits out in the car. Gattuso 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, Caneto has a meeting with Gattuso. Gattuso is, like, not prepared for it. He flips open his wallet to give him a card to write down his number on. They'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, Caneto 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. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence.

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They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. A few days after the restaurant incident, Cesar DeVarco had another message for Ken Edo. He gets told something very odd by DeVarco. DeVarco says, so you're going to have dinner with Vince and J Campisi and Johnny Gattuso. And if Edo was just suspicious prior to that, he knows they're going to kill him because in the 30 years he's been working for Vince Solano, he's never been invited to dinner with him. I mean you know, 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. I mean, where's he going to go? The feeling that they could get you anywhere. But I think also he had a feeling that in a weird way that that was what he owed them as a soldier. Like, you know, this gets very romanticized.

But I do happen to think that he felt this was kind of their right to do if they saw fit. But it's certainly hard for me to put myself in that situation, you know? So tell me about what happened that night. around for a little while and then goes home. He takes a bath, he gets dressed, puts on a good suit. He, uh, importantly tells his wife where the life insurance paperwork is, which certainly arouses her suspicion. And he says, I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to go have dinner with friends. I, you know, I hope it works out, basically. And gets into his car and sits in the driveway for about a half hour. And then finally takes off, drives into the northwest side of Chicago to a VFW hall that Jasper Campisi runs a card game at, picks up Campisi and Gattuso.

They get into his Ford. Campisi's riding shotgun, directing him. Gattuso gets in the back. And Edo is trying to make small talk, you know, talking to Gattuso. I didn't hear from you this weekend about your backer. It's like, oh, yeah, it fell through again. Okay.

They drive over to a parking lot behind the Montclair Theater where Campisi directs him to the far end of the parking lot so they don't have to walk far. The restaurant's right there. They're going to meet Vince there. And Edo is, you know, pretty sure and drives past the one other car in the parking lot, parks against a metal barrier and kind of just waits for it. And Gattuso, who's behind him, raises a 22, fires three times into his head and Campisi and Gattuso flee. And Ken Edo has not been killed by this. Yeah, that's the big surprise.

Campisi and Gattuso flee. The other car in the parking lot they had prearranged to have there so they could escape. Edo, after the first shot, he knows, well, it's like I thought, right? They're killing me. But then the second shot hits and he thinks, I'm not dying. So he starts faking convulsions, collapsing, third shot hits, and he slumps over as if he's dead on the front seat of the car. They flee. He can even hear their footsteps running away from it.

He stays there until he's pretty sure that they're gone. Writes himself up. Staggers out of the car. And he did not lose consciousness even. He stumbles to the street. He's bleeding from his head. He slips on the ice. He gets up and he sees a pharmacy,

terminal pharmacy, goes in there. He can barely hear, but he sort of shouts, I need an ambulance, I need a... And that's when the police show up and an ambulance shows up. And he points at the rookie police officer and says, I want you in the ambulance with me because he's worried he's going to be finished off and that ambulance whisks him to Northwest Hospital

where they discover after three shots to the head, none of them cracked the skull, he's going to be fine After three shots to the head, none of them cracked the skull. He's going to be fine, but he is a strange zombie of a mob victim who has survived, which basically never happens. At the hospital, the doctors did an x-ray. One doctor said, quote, the bullets just ricocheted right off his skull. The FBI put agents all around Ken's room to protect him in case the outfit attempted another hit.

And then they called a federal prosecutor named Jeremy Margolis and told him to get to the hospital as soon as he could. They said if Ken Edo would talk, Margolis could offer him immunity. It's very, very interesting reading the transcripts to see all these FBI agents and police officers and prosecutors crowding around his room and talking a lot and Edo not really saying much, but just sort of evaluating everyone.

He's quick enough to determine that if he's going to talk at all, he needs indemnification from any charges. And so he hones in on Margolis and actually says that he wants everyone else to leave the room while he talks with this prosecutor. And that's when Margolis has to make his pitch, basically. So Edo is even, you know, not being able to hear very well. His head is wrapped in gauze. The blood is still coming through the gauze and getting everywhere because they're actually even kind of holding back doctors from working on him further after surgery to try to get him to talk.

Even in that condition, Edo is still being pretty calculating. So Margolis makes his pitch, and I think, you know, Margolis is talking to me, is sort of self-effacing about it that, you know, three holes in the head are a pretty good convincer. But I think what Margolis does right is he doesn't insult his intelligence. He says, look, you and I know what was done to you was not right. They had their shot. They missed. And they tried to kill you unfairly, on specious grounds, on the idea that you're an informer. We know you're not an informer.

I know you're not an informer. You know you would never talk, but they didn't know that. And the reason is that you're Japanese. They don't trust you. They never will. You might make money for them. They're never going to trust you, right? You're going to be the first to go. So the only thing that's right now is you have to give us those names so we can go after the men who did this. And that's your only shot. Otherwise, you're dead. You know, you can go out there again

and they'll get you eventually. You know that. And Edo seems to reflect on this. And he says, okay. And so the exact machinations of his thoughts are always going to be a mystery but

it seems to be to me at least from everything I've you know talked to people about with this and read about and researched I think it's just that same gambler's instinct that this is the only this is the only hand he has to play, you know.

And so they bring everyone back into the room. He gets it on tape that he's indemnified, and for the first time he begins to talk. The FBI made arrangements to move him to a naval hospital and closed off an entire ward for him, surrounded by guards. They let his son Steve come visit. At the time, Steve was living in Minnesota.

Steve remembered his father saying, quote, You're gonna hear a lot of things. That I turned rat. I gave them their shot, so now it's my turn. Elaine Smith, the FBI agent who first arrested Ken at the hotel, also came to see him. When she arrived, she asked if he remembered her. He said, how could I forget? You run the show. And they fall into a very easy conversation suddenly.

He can finally talk candidly about what had happened to him, what his reasoning had been, and in an almost weirdly kind of fatherly way. Elaine says she asked him about the night he'd been shot. He told her about the supposed dinner with J. Cam P Campisi and Johnny Gattuso and Vincent Solano. She asked why he'd gone, knowing they were probably going to murder him. He told her, I thought maybe there was a small percentage of an edge, but very small, and I had to take it. The police arrested Johnny Gattuso and

Jay Campisi on attempted murder charges. And then the FBI tried to get one of them to become an informant. They make their pitch to both of them, and Campisi is arrogant. He says, no way, and basically implies he's going to get a pass. He and basically implies he's going to get a pass. He screwed up. He's going to get a pass. Gattuso, who's the weaker of the two, you know, Margolis described him to me as being utterly beaten, having this hangdog look on his face, and that he just did not have the strength to turn,

to turn on his family, on everything he knew. And so what happens is the two of them somewhat unexpectedly pay an enormous federal bond to be released. And of course, what the prosecutors and the FBI realize is the outfit put that money up. A few months after their release at a pretrial hearing, federal prosecutors said they had found a few strands of Johnny Gattuso's hair in Ken Addo's car. A few days later, on July 12, 1983, J. Cam Pese and Johnny Gattuso went missing.

They were found two days later in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. They had been stabbed. Their bodies were left in the trunk of J. Campisi's car. No one was ever convicted for their murders. Ken disclosed his own involvement in the Outfitz murders. He helped to close unsolved homicides from the 1950s and 60s. Some of the same ones Elaine Smith had seen in his file when she first started investigating him.

Most of the culprits were already dead, so prosecutions weren't forthcoming. But at least for the families of those victims, they were able to give some closure. Edo was able to provide more insight on what had happened. You know, Chavo Gonzalez had just been in the way of the outfit. One of the other victims had thrown a pipe at a bodyguard outside an outfit game, card game,

and that was enough for him to be murdered. Something that was stressed to me over and over again was that mob witnesses are typically evasive. They typically lie about some aspects of things. The fact that he was fairly blunt about his own involvement in those murders and that his story didn't change led a long way towards proving his credibility in the eyes of law enforcement. The FBI called the investigations based on Ken's information

Operation Sunup. Ken Edo gave the FBI information on how the outfit was run, what businesses they were involved in, and who they were bribing. The same year Ken Edo was shot, Ronald Reagan announced the creation of the President's Commission on Organized Crime. Its goal was to expose the mob's reach in America.

Two years later, in 1985, Ken Edo testified at the commission. At the time, he was in the Witness Protection Program, and he appeared in disguise. He wore a black robe and a hood covering his face. There were holes cut out for his eyes and mouth. He testified about being shot, and who had ordered the hit. Bang! I got shot in the head, and I thought, well, I knew it.

Second time I got shot, and I thought, wow, it's not taking any effect. Who do you believe ordered the hit on you, Mr. Ito? Vincent Solano. Would Mr. Solano have had to receive permission to do this hit? Yes. From who? Either Joey Alton or Jackie Cerone. Was there a sense in the, you know, in the 80s around this time that organized crime, we have to do something? You know, that in Chicago, at least, I mean, this has been going on for way too long. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I mean, what followed after Ken Edo turned, more important, I think, than any individual case, was he gave them kind of the Bible on how the outfit was structured in Chicago, how it operated, and who the key players were in it.

And that really gave them a textbook that they then had to start these RICO prosecutions. Now, RICO is the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations statutes, which had been started to be employed in the 1980s to go after these mafia families as criminal enterprises, conspirators, basically, and make more of these charges stick to them as being commissioned as part of this ongoing conspiracy, namely to run a mafia family, right? And I think absolutely by the 80s, you know, the mafia was so enmeshed in legitimate enterprises that if you were buying concrete in New York,

it was coming from a mafia sourced firm. You know, Las Vegas, those casinos were operated by the mafia with the skim going back to them. So there's finally a successful effort to batter the mafia in the 80s, really, I think, following Ken Edo's turn and entrance into the Witness Protection Program.

Ken Edo testified at the trial of several leaders in the outfit, including Joey Iupa and Jackie Cerrone. Both men were later convicted. He also testified at the trial of his former associate, Joe Arnold. Vincent Solano was never convicted. What happened to Ken? Did the mob ever try to find him? One of the most remarkable things that his son Steve Edo told me

was that he had been approached by Joe Arnold and he was told, we will give you a lot of money for a name, an address, something to get to your father. But Steve wouldn't talk. He said that most of the time, he didn't know where his father was while he was in witness protection. In fact, most mobsters who enter the witness protection program, they don't last in it because the strictures are kind of tough.

Ken Edo did. And spent, I think, almost 20 years in the witness protection program. Eventually, kept testifying over the years, testified in some big cases, testified before the subcommittee on organized crime and labor, gave a lot of information, and eventually was rewarded with a healthy retirement check from the federal government and a new life. Ken spent the end of his life in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. He died in 2004.

His obituary didn't say Ken Edo. It used the name he was given in the Witness Protection Program, Joe Tanaka. The obituary reads, quote, Joe Tanaka, 84, died Friday. The family will have a private service. Mr. Tanaka was a native of Livingston, California, and a restaurant owner. Dan O'Sullivan wrote about Ken Edo for Chicago Magazine and Epic Magazine. The piece is called The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Thank you. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris This episode was mixed by Emma Munger Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com

And sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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