The Underworld Podcast - The Yakuza Boss Caught Selling Burmese Nuclear Material to Iranian Generals (Sort Of)

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

You may have seen the news last week, about a Yakuza boss caught in Bangkok trying to sell nuclear material to a fake Iranian general. Takeshi Ebisawa and a group of co-conspirators are behind bars, awaiting extradition to the US, the dopes in a sting operation that could’ve been lifted straight from Hollywood. But how legit is the bust? And who is Ebisawa, the stout, goateed gangster cops have been saying for years is a Yakuza don—despite that not really being a thing? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's February 12, 2022, in a hotel room in the Thai capital city of Bangkok. A city famed for its temples, nightlife, and sleaze. But in this particular hotel room, Three very disparate men are catching a glimpse of products you don't often see amongst the strip clubs and painted women of the Pechaburi Road. The room itself belongs to a man claiming to be a member of a major Burmese rebel group. The Shan State Army or Koren National Union, we don't know for sure. And in two plastic containers, in two wooden boxes, are samples of what he and a second man in the room, a Japanese gangster named Takeshi Episawa, claims a uranium and thoriswis,

and thorium, two radioactive elements associated with nuclear energy, or bombs. The uranium is enriched, Ebisawa says. It's what scientists know by a simple but somehow ominous nickname, yellow cake. The third man in the room is a broker, or at least he says he is, for an Iranian general who Ebisar and several Burmese friends believe wants to buy the elements to help his nation build a nuclear weapon. He's been clear about this, making sure on several occasions that Ebisawa knows full well, the uranium is for quote W purposes. That's weapons, not peaceful ones. The broker checks the stuff out.

It looks legit. He takes a couple picks and says, yeah, the Iranian general is going to want in on this. The men shake hands and they say their farewells. Then the Burmese rebel takes his little wooden boxes and heads to one of his group's safe houses across town. Thing is, he's been followed all the way by Thai cops. The broker is, of course, a DEA agent. And is Iranian general?

Pretty one-dimensional character, if you ask me, but a fiction nonetheless. The agent has been working Ebisawa, a purported boss of Japan's Yakuza, for three years, brokering all kinds of drugs and weapons deals. Catching him trying to traffic nuclear material to Iran? Well, that's the cherry on top of the yellow cake. Within days, Ebisarwa and a group of co-conspirators are behind bars, awaiting extradition to the US, the dopes in a sting operation that could have been lifted straight from Hollywood. But how legit is the bust?

And who is Ebisawa? The stout, goate, gangster, cops have been saying for years as a yakuza don, despite that not really being a thing. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to the podcast about global organized crime, where two journalists with bylines at esteemed publications, including the Barking and Daggering Post, pimp guides and vice bring you weekly tales from the black market. Now, you might have read some new stuff about today's show generated all kinds of headlines

last week, and it was too mad not to write about. And actually, we've jointly written a show today, which is a bit different and perhaps exciting. But I promise you, this Yakuza, yellow cake, Burmese rebel, Iranian general, Bangkok undercover agents thing is way, way dumber than you think it is. I just want to interject that you should be punished for writing the line, cherry on top, of the yellow kid. You should be glad that I'm getting the shit puns in right at the top of the show. I mean, I'm trying to use them up early on.

Anyway, we're going to go deep on this thing and some of the underlying issues behind it in just a few moments. First, I request to follow and subscribe on all our social, so we get a few pennies off big tech. And we've got a ton of bonuses coming up, as always, for Patreon members who are, let's face it, way, way better people than those of you just listen and don't pay a stuff. I actually bought one of those Halo lights to do video interviews with, so you might even see my my face on this thing, which is a, it's pretty terrifying. Yes, our YouTube channel was all, they were all in, in, in, in, in, in, in, their hearts were fluttering because Sean did a face review, because I don't even know, I mean, you can just Google me, I'm fucking too much, until vice pulls all the videos down,

because they're doing that. But, uh, yeah, anyway, patreon.com slash internet world podcast, and you can also subscribe on iTunes or even on Spotify and get the bonuses right to you there. But yes, anyway. Anyway, yeah, briefly, before the yellow Kate, I just want to say a quick RIP to Flacco the Central Park Eurasian owl. I guess like Star of New York City died last Thursday, age just 13. Peace up, brother. But yeah, was he murdered?

Katry and Ironhorn at the New York Times thinks he could have been, and she wrote this, frankly, brilliant lead. Quote, Flacco spent a year defying expectations, an owl born into captivity, who quickly learned to hunt and fend for himself in the white. wilds of New York City. That ended on Friday when he flew into a building this central park. What went wrong? Did he hit a window that he failed to perceive as glass like hundreds of millions of birds across the United States each year? Or was he compromised in some way that impeded his ability to navigate New York's concrete canyons? Jesus. I mean, first of all, I want everyone to know that Sean laughed when he talked about, he chuckled when he talked about that bird hitting a window. These were tears. These were tears. You just don't, you don't get my emotional cues.

But also like the New York Times, man, it's just that is. It's, uh, anyway. I mean, they're just asking. Failure or media. What can you? Um, I just want to point out that Barry, another celebrity New York Al, died after hitting a car in 2021, reportedly had high levels of rat poison in her system. Another theory is lead poisoning or avian flu.

I mean, we're going to keep a close eye on this one, guys. Yeah, I don't know. No, we're not. No, we're not at all, are we? But the Elching Gito, the narco monkey thing, did really well. online so I thought I'd just tee this up. Anyway, that is enough of Flacco and Owls and Chingwito. Anyway, to the main show, Takeshi Ebisawa.

I mean, you may have missed it, but this month's indictment, it's actually the continuation of an indictment from April 2020. And that's when Ebisawa was first nabbed for guns, drugs and money laundering charges. Back then, US Attorney Damien Williams praised the undercover agents involved in the narcotic side of this case, saying, quote, The drugs were destined for New York streets, and the weapons shipments were meant for factions in unstable nations. Members of this international crime syndicate can no longer put lives in danger and will face justice for their illicit actions. Yeah, also new season of Tokyo Vice by a friend of the pod, Jake Edelstein, is, it's great, so you should really be watching.

Oh, man, I watched like the first episode of that on a flight recently, and then the only other episode they had was like episode eight. Why do airlines do that? What's the point? So it's dumb. Anyway, yeah, definitely should watch that. The indictment from this year anonymizes Ebersaw's three co-defendants. But weirdly, you don't even need to go back

to the April 22 filings to find out their names, which are Thai and about 28 syllables long, so I'm not going to say them here because, as we well know, you guys don't like names. But anyway, all three Atai Nationals, one as dual U.S. nationality. Before that, I can't find any record of Ebersawar whatsoever, which could be

because he's a criminal master. mind yakuza boss guy although as we're about to find out that is pretty unlikely given he can barely rub two brain cells together and because there's really no such thing as the quote yakuza as a unified thing anyway they're all disparate groups like the yama goosha gumi the sumyoshi kai yeah you know but i feel like that's kind of always the case with these groups right like we say mafia boss or kamara boss or even like you know leader of the bloods gang right when there's like 15 different versions of bloods i don't even probably even more same thing with various Mafias. So, I mean, that's not the kind of thing that I think right away, like, makes me

suspicious. You know, it's just something that they do for the general public who isn't aware of the intricacies of these groups and how divided they are. Well, that's what makes me wonder about it, because why does Japanese gangster not work? Why do they need to throw this Yakuza thing in? It's just because they want headlines and whatever? Yeah, it's the kind of thing that gets attention. And, like, you know, he could be a boss of a Yakuza group, but it's the same thing. Like, when they indict a guy, like a mafia boss, they don't say, like, well, maybe we, with the mafia in New York, but they don't say like the boss of the this family or that family for the most. They start off saying mafia boss. And you see the same thing with the bloods or,

you know, other gangs, other groups that we just know. Like there's no such thing as the actual Russian mafia, right? There's just organized crime groups. So it's kind of like, I think it's just something that that law enforcement does initially to, like you said, get headlines, but also because they don't have to, they don't want to go into specifics right away because it won't making it. If you said he's the boss of the Yamaguchi, like no one's going to know what that means, right? Okay, well, that one's debunked by Danny Gold. So in fact, anyway, the DOJ indictment, right? So I read all,

I think 87 pages of it so you guys don't have to. Calls Ebisawa, quote, leader of the kuzer, organized crime syndicate, a highly organized transnational Japanese criminal network that operates around the world. And it also says he's been doing narcotics and weapons trafficking, and his network extends throughout Asia, Europe and the US. So he's pretty big time, according to that. I mean, Ebersawa's lawyer told in New York Times that he wouldn't comment on the specific charges in this case,

but adds that, quote, when this case is tried, it will be clear that Mr. Ebersawa is not a leader of any sophisticated criminal syndicate, Yakuza, or otherwise. Well, if that's the only thing he's fighting the case on, then I think, Oh, Takesh, he's a little bit screwed, but yeah, maybe that's true. But fine, let's not get too lost in semantics because again, I don't think you guys like names, but this strange tale actually begins back in early 2020 in a quote series of telephonic and electronic communications. And by the way, the feds are saying this is encrypted, in quotes, to make it seem like cloak and dagger,

it's actually WhatsApp. This bozo is doing a nuclear deal on WhatsApp. I think we need the curb theme tune after like half of these bits of information. Yeah, don't WhatsApp your crimes, but also like a lot of people do. And even like things like Signal get, you know, they get taken,

they get leaked as well. So, you know, just don't discrust them in electronic conversations. I think the best thing people were doing, right, was back in the day over like video games or a draft folder of emails. I think that was ingenious until they caught on. I think a lot of syndicists now use the code

beneath like shopping websites to hide stuff. So I read that loads of stuff, if you go on like IKEA somewhere, then if you go under the thing for like, I don't know, they call them like spunk them or whatever, the chest of drawers, you can find code that's actually people dealing drugs and stuff under that, which is pretty ingenious. It's not WhatsApp is what I'm saying. Anyway, Ebisawa tells an undercover DEA agent,

named in the indictment as UC1 and a DEA confidential source. called CS1, that he has access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wants to sell. I mean, he's screwed from the beginning, isn't he? So here's the scene setting. We've got one alleged gangster and two other guys, both of whom are government assets. And on February 8th that year, Ebisal reaches out to our CS1, that's the informant, if he has a buyer for, quote, uranium that he claims is, quote, dangerous and not good for your health. so not the health serum

form of uranium, just to be clear. Then Ebisawa sends a bunch of photos of a dark, rocky material next to a Geiger counter. That's a handheld phaser-looking thing that measures radioactivity. I mean, this is all starting to sound like some elaborate Nigerian scam right now.

Yeah, but it's actually, it's interesting because I assumed it was going to be a situation from what you were saying about it not being smelling fishy, that it was going to be a situation where the undercover agents asked him to procure this firm, not the kind of thing

where he was straight up offering it out of the blue, you know? So here's what I think, because there are some whispers in the stuff that I've read about this going on for a year beforehand. So I don't know who reached out to whom to begin with. There was something in the indictment about this being activity that had been going on since 2019, but then they don't actually start the story until 2020, which makes me a little bit suspect that they actually might have reached out to him. but I don't know. So, yeah, I guess we'll find out in due course.

Anyway, as luck would have it, CS1, that's the informant, does have a buyer for uranium. That's lucky, isn't it? Guess who? Yes, the undercover DEA guy, UC1. In June and August that year, so 2020, Ebisawa sends a load more photos of this brown stuff to the agent, alongside pages of what he claims a lab analysis

showing elements of uranium and thorium. Thorium is an element that's long been claimed to be used in nuclear devices, but as far as I can tell, it actually isn't. It's like a debunk thing. Anyway, at this point, it starts getting really Mel Brooks, because CS1, the DAA agent, says he or she has got just the guy who'd be interested in buying nuclear material like this, and Iranian general, no less. On August 31st, 2020, Ebassar asked the agent if Iran might quote, buy directly from us. Yeah, no problem, the agent says. Just intro you guys via email, as you do with Iranian generals. But the general the agent says in the subsequent message is, quote,

the decision maker on the stuff you have available for sale, and he is very interested. And then a week later, he sends Ebassawa another message. I mean, see if this one wouldn't have pricked up your ears a bit. Quote, how enriched is it? Above 5%. They don't need it for energy. Iranian government need it for nuclear weapons. I mean, come on, man.

Ebisawa, quote, I think, and I hope so. I mean, you still think this guy's a criminal genius? Nah, me neither. This goes on and on. Ebersawa claims he's got almost $7 million of the stuff, and the agent and the Iranian general being like, hell yeah, man, just give us all you got.

We're building a big fat nuke to destroy the evil West. In mid-September, Ebisar was on a call, and he's like, just so you guys know, I don't have a license to deal with these materials. He also says he can supply plutonium that's even better than uranium for Iran, which is clearly BS. The agent doesn't mind this one bit. Quote, this is going to be a very quiet and secret illegal transaction, they say.

Yes, Ebisawa shoots back. So that is why we need to talk fast about that. This guy must have been just like punching the air every time Episar was sending a message. You may have guessed already, but yeah, the Iranian general is course of another confidential source. So now Ebisar is one of four participants in all of this, and the other three are all plants.

I mean, you might be having sympathies for our man to Keshe at this point. He's no mega spy. He's doing deals for uranium on WhatsApp and emails. Come on, man. But he's getting stitched up pretty hard when all it seems he's trying to do. It scams on black marketeer in the Iranian government, which, you know, isn't that bad. Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends, right? Is he a grifter or is he seriously trying to procure it?

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anniversary. U.N. must be 21 to enter. Yeah. You know, if he straight up came out with the offer, a different story. But if he's a grifter, then you got to respect that sort of hustle and screwing over those sort of people. So I guess we'll find out, won't we? We'll find out incredibly shortly.

So now it's May 2021, and yeah, things are going to change a little. Remember the Fed said Ebisawa is a weapons dealer? Well, on May 9th that year, he sends a list of stuff he wants the DEA agent to get for his clients.

Again, this entire list is just casually sent on WhatsApp. I mean, this guy does less secure deals than your neighborhood weed dealer. Ebisar once, and here we go, 5,000 AK-47s with 25,000 clips and a million rounds. That's your standard fare, I guess. 5,000 M-16s, same ammo and clips, 20 M-20s. So these are fat, recoiless, anti-tank machine guns used extensively in that famously modern war career. Ebersauer wants 35,000 traces, 35,000 regular rounds for these. I mean, this is not stuff you can get down the local gun show, although I'm not American, to be fair.

Maybe you can. Can? Or already have, listener? Well, I mean, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, as they say in New Zealand with guns. Next up, some mortars, because who doesn't need mortars? Ebersau wants 80 units, varying calibers, of course. He wants 20 sniper rifles, doesn't specify which, just sniper rifles. rifles, 10 with regular scopes, 10 with

Nike vision scopes, thousand rounds for those bad boys, whichever models they are, and then he wants 50 RPGs, 500 rockets, because why not, and 50, quote, portable SAMs, which are, I think, man pads similar to javelins, if you heard about them from the war in Ukraine.

Ebersar wants, quote, reloadable, if yes, then additional rockets, 100 pieces. Yeah, he might not be that good a guy. I'm just going to throw that out there. No, no, I think this is sort of harming defense somewhat. Funnily enough, Ebersaw is careful enough to code name weapons as bamboo

before then just writing them all down on WhatsApp. Two of the ties, that's his code conspirators, believe the weapons have been filtered from a U.S. base in Afghanistan. So there may be among the millions of pieces of weaponry left behind by the Americans when they pulled out in May 2021. Who knows? But who is Ebersawah's buyer for this stuff? Okay, so he wants the stuff for his business.

buyers. He wants to swap that basically for the nuclear material. Well, he says it's a buyer's boss named as CC co-conspirator one in the file who is the leader of an ethnic insurgent group in Burma. Then Ebisawa introduces the agent to two other brokers, also unnamed in the indictment, but this is probably the most believable stuff here because, and I don't know if you guys have picked up from the last three years of doing this show, Burma is. is an absolute mess and it has gotten worse lately. Yeah, things are not great there. I'll have a little bit of a rundown of that.

But if you want more, definitely listen to the Insight Myanmar podcast. Our friend Joa runs that and he's great. So yeah, let's talk about Burma. First of all, the reason I call it Burma and not Myanmar is because the military unit actually changed the name to Myanmar. And once I was in Thailand like 15 years ago and I was hanging out with some Burmese guys that fled the country and they were like, don't call it Myanmar, or call it Burma.

But I don't even know if it was called a Junta back then, right? It may have been just your standard military dictatorship. Wait,

is there a difference between a military dictatorship and a junta or Junta? I don't know. Is it also pronounced Hoonta? I think so. Is it Spanish?

I don't know. I think Hoonta is more of a group. But yeah, because, you know, the country had that weird period where it looked like

they were liberalizing and reforming a bit. And then, of course, that ended in 2021 when the junta kind of regained, re-grab the power, although most people will tell you

that they really never gave it up in the first place. But yeah, we've done a few episodes on Burma and what goes on there, going way back, I think, to one of my first episodes on the Rohingya and the human trafficking gangs

that prey on them. I've done a documentary on that. To Sean's stories of billion-dollar meth labs to our recent episode with Patrick Wayne about the Wa and opium, heroin, Yaba smuggling. And without rehashing everything,

like one thing you should take away from this is that Burma is a hug, for smuggling and trafficking, people, copious amounts of drugs and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons. Part of this has to do with the fact that since its independence and then more so since it became that military dictatorship in 1962, it's been home to something like, well, I don't know, dozens of ethnic militias, maybe only a dozen prominent ones that have been fighting against the government for decades, like decades-long wars.

But of recent, you know, we're talking the last two to three years or so, the country has faced an unprecedented civil war after that military coup, though most people say, like I said, the military was always really in charge despite the supposed loosening of their power in the last decade as, you know, more and more people in the main ethnic group, the Bomar people, they've risen up and are fighting in the more central cities, whereas the ethnic militias, it was usually fighting in the borderlands. the ethnic militias too they typically haven't been so friendly with each other but they're more united than ever at taking down the governments and they've been making massive gains like never before

and the government is actually seriously under threat and things have gotten just brutal I mean the Burmese government has always committed lots of massacres and executions and all that and they've always been particularly brutal and known for like you know just demolishing and killing entire villages

and the current low estimates put the number of at around 50,000. And of course, with all these militias, you've got tons of weapons floating around, and the smuggling networks are just crazy. Not to mention, the two biggest suppliers of weapons to the military junta are, who else, China and Russia.

So, yeah, lots of weapons, lots of lawlessness and deals with, you know, shady, shady country, shady organizations, and a complete breakdown of the state, along with the government willing to do anything to stay in power. Sounds nice. I just thought of another one.

What's a cadre? What's a posse? Are these the same? I think cadre. I think cadres and junta have similarities, but I have not checked a dictionary definition. Okay, we'll do that next time. And then, yeah, I mean, on top of even all this craziness, right?

You've got these criminal groups using all of the chaos to build these illegal betting syndicates set of casinos buried in the jungle, scam compounds. We've done a couple episodes on that. I'm actually banging down the doors of a couple of editors to send me out there soon, so I really want to do that. I mean, I don't know if this is going out before, after my latest bonus interview, I think probably before, but I spoke with a guy last week who helps people escape slavery in Southeast Asia.

And he was telling me that now Burma is the biggest place for escape he's to come from. But just a few years ago, he didn't really deal with the country at all. I mean, Edwin Starr really didn't think about the gangsters when he was right in tune, did he? So anyway, Burma, real hot mess. And the Yakuza? Well, there's no strangers to elicit weapons stills either. I mean, if you remember the show that we did, God knows how long, like three years ago about the history of them, and now they've come to be pretty toothless overall. They were all over Hawaii in the mid-1980s when Japan and the US were booming, and so were the houses of major crime family bosses in the land of the rising sun, lots of people

getting killed. In one bonkers episode in 1985, members of the the Yamaguchi Gumi, that's the biggest Yakuza group, buyers a stack of weapons from what turns out to be FBI agents in Hawaii, including free rocket launchers, paid for with 52 pounds of meth and 12 pounds of heroin, worth $56 million, which is a lot nowadays. I mean, it's literally a smoking gun case, right? No, the defense argues that the Japanese word hi doesn't just mean yes, but, quote, I understand what you're saying.

And the jury lets them off. massive massive hat tip to that lawyer incredible work. Yeah, you talk about that, I think, the Yakuza episodes, right, from like the first few months of the podcast? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Remember back then when we didn't think we'd make tons and tons of money from this? And look at them now. Anyway, Ebisawa, our errant alleged Yakuza boss, has long said high on his own dodgy deals, right? He's chatting to informants and a DE agent, and his rough plan is to sell a bunch of nuclear material to an Iranian general, who of course is not real, to finance a weapons deal to sell to a group of ethnic Burmese insurgents.

I mean, there's a meth craze going on in Japan. The Akusa run legit businesses. Is this really the best way to make a buck over there? Yeah, I mean, we've tried to educate our listeners. First, it was don't Instagram your crimes. Do get involved in real estate developments. You know, buy a laundromat or a car wash instead of a giant chain. But if you are overseas, it is really important.

not get involved in anything that is bringing weapons or drugs into the U.S. or supplying weapons or drugs to enemies of the U.S. It's just, it's going to get you on lists you don't want to be on. There are so many other countries with incompetent law enforcement agencies who don't have global footprints. Like, there's money to be made there. Focus, focus on that. Yeah, I mean, just do Pachinko. I mean, I just read the people who eat darkness and like everyone's into Pachingo, right? Just, just build an arcade. Yeah, big money, big money in Pachinko. Oh, God. Anyway. Bonjour, compadre. It's the

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On June 30, 2021, in a, I've got to stress this, a group WhatsApp chat with the Burmese guys and the agent. So he's just bringing them all in now, guys. Hey, meet my friends. I mean, what the F? he sends a photo of a handwritten note claiming he's had stuff with quote U3-08 80% purity and that is referring to a substance

called tri-uranium octaside thanks guys I've got to be in GCC science which is more commonly known as yellow cake this is a powder you get around halfway through the process from uranium mining to enrichment for nuclear power and yes sometimes bombs the agent is of course down for this and sweetens the fantasy by telling Ebassawa the Iranian general, the fake one of course,

wants to quote, send either his nuclear physicist or one of the engineers to see and inspect the powder, which, I don't know, I'd be pulling out the trust-me bro at this point, but Ebassawa responds, thanks, my friend, that's T-H-X, thanks. This is really getting a bit slapstick. Ebisawa sends a photo of himself then, holding a Geiger counter to a bunch of yellow barrels. he's literally getting himself over a barrel, saying one of the Burmese rebels has been mining this stuff in his region. Now, that doesn't sound all that true either. According to the NGO nuclear threat initiative, which is really cool, quote,

Myanmar's government has also undertaken some uranium exploration, though the extent and specifics of these activities are unknown. According to Myanmar Ministry of Energy, there are five areas for potential uranium mining. Myanmar has no confirmed mining or milling facilities despite allegations by dissident groups of the existence of sites near Mandalay, which is right in the middle of the country. And yeah, it gets funny. A quote, experts at the Institute for Science and International Security, which is ISIS, based on independent satellite and photographic imagery analysis, wow, easy for me to say, that the facility in question is most likely a cement plant. So this is more evidence that Evasawa and his rebel mates are perhaps pulling a fast one.

I mean, we don't know for sure, right? But of course the agent doesn't actually need to get his hands on this stuff. So when Ebisawa then goes to his Burmese guys and one of them says he has 100 kilos of enriched uranium, quote, ready to go. Well, these guys are just digging their own graves. Yeah, so let's talk smuggling nukes and nuke material. Remember the days of like suitcase nukes and all that? I feel like usually this is the thing associated with former Soviet Union stuff, you know, Pakistan, Iran. But starting in like 1991, there was a huge panic with, I think, good reason about rogue countries, organized crime and terrorists getting their hands on material from the former Soviet Union.

It was also the plot line for, I think, what, 60% of action movies from the year 1993 to 2014. The Soviet Union had 30,000 nuclear weapons at 600 tons of material. And after it fell, you know, countries like Moldova, they didn't exactly have strict security measures in place. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, that was, of course, before now, right? Where Moldova has excellent security and absolutely no organized crime of any kind. I just want to stress that. Anyway, carry on.

Sean, how dare you? In recent years, here's a quote from an atomic archive website. A total of 146 incidents of illegal or unauthorized activities involving nuclear and other radioactive material were reported in 2022. The International Atomic Energy Agency said today, in an annual fact sheet summarizing data from the IAEA incident and trafficking database, the numbers, which include some incidents

connected to illicit trafficking or malicious use, remained at around the same level as in recent years, which, you know, neat. Look, I don't know too much about this sort of stuff in this episode as very last minute. I know there's people who do, but it always kind of struck me as, you know, kind of boring nerd shit, not going to lie.

I feel like there was a super early vice doc, like before Vice News, one of their first video pieces where they sold like, you know, they sold DVDs of them about them attempting to buy smuggle material in Bulgaria or something like that. But with all Vice stuff made back then, I don't know.

I think it's fair to assume it was heavily exaggerated. But nukes, people do want them. Bad people want them. There is, of course, the infamous AQ Khan smuggling network. He's the father. Pakistan's nuclear weapons program who was involved in trying to sell material and tech to fund countries like North Korea,

Libya and others. Yeah, he was the Islamic bomb guy, right? I mean, when he was released from house arrest in Pakistan, the Obama White House issued a warning that he was still, quote, a serious proliferation risk. I mean, that is a pretty badass name to get from the U.S. state. Yeah, I've always thought it was great

that a country that's always teetering on the edge of falling apart, that's a haven for extremists, both in and outside of the government has a whole bunch of nukes, but, you know, what can you do? Here's another quote from, uh, from Smithsonian Magazine. That's, uh, you know, not that reassuring. Between 2000 and 2019, the National Nuclear Security Administration reported the disposal interception of almost 16,000 pounds of the material and plutonium. Enough, according to NNSA administrator Lisa Gordon Haggerton for more than 300 nuclear weapons.

So while I was looking into this, yeah, not, not reassuring. But while I was looking into this, there were kind of lots of mixed messages. Take the story of Oleg Kinsagov. This is February 2006. He leaves southern Russia with 80 grams of enriched uranium and is planning on selling it for a million bucks to what's said to be a serious Muslim group in Georgia,

the country. The buyer was happy with it. He's going to go get him a lot more. Except when he gets to Georgia to make the deal, the serious Muslim organization ends up being the Georgian governments, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Energy, and he gets arrested, and he gets eight years in prison,

which seems, you know, kind of light. But here's the thing, and this is from American public media. I think this came out in 2017 or 2018, quote, The story of Oleg Kinsagavs encapsulates the threat from a smugglers carrying nuclear material across the poorest borders of the former Soviet Union. This type of nuclear smuggling is a staple of Hollywood films and is often cited as the most dangerous source of nuclear proliferation. But the Kinsagov's case illustrates something else. that nearly all reported smuggling cases of fissile, fissile, material involved...

Fissor, nucleicin. Yeah, I can't pronounce anything. Material involved low-level figures and only minute amounts of radioactive material. Nowhere close to enough fuel to make a bomb. So yeah, kind of different from what we heard above from those experts, and I don't really know if we should put faith

in American public media too, but look, I don't know, but I do think it's good that the authorities are constantly on the lookout for this sort of thing, and they should be, but that's important to keep in mind that maybe, you know, it isn't as dire as we think it is. At the same time, this was clearly a test case for Oleg, so who knows?

You know, he's probably going to sell, or he said he was going to sell. He's supposed to sell a little bit and then get a lot more. But yeah, Sean, it seems like from hearing from you this week, this case is kind of fishing in that way. Yeah, I mean, just in case anyone is confused, I just want to reiterate that I'm not a nuclear physicist, but maybe. I mean, there's tons of informants in this, like the almost over-comers. crowd in the actual criminals.

I mean, a low-level dealer seems like it, although maybe the weapon stuff isn't that small time. And a small amount of material, yeah, I doubt you're going to make a nuclear bomb out of like a snuff case full of brown stuff. But I could be wrong. I don't know. Anyway, let's continue with our boy Ebisawa.

Now, it is February 4th, 2020. The three Burmese rebel co-conspirators meet in Thailand, where they get on a group video call to the undercover DEA agent where they discuss all kinds of stuff about quantities of various nuclear materials. Then a couple weeks later, Ebersal meets with the agent

and the informant in Puket, Thailand. Nice gig if you can get it. Where they seal the deal for the guns, some drugs, because of this Southeast Asia, so why not? And of course, the yellow cake. Then there's another meeting of everyone in Bangkok, the Thai capital.

Weapons, rebels, criminal traffickers, Bangkok. Does that ring a bell? Well, if you listen to our show on Victor Boot, the so-called Merchant of Death, and that's another one, maybe way back in October, September or something, 2020. Good old days, it's how the Fed's got him too, as well as arms traffic of Montalal-Kassar before him. In Boots case, it's DEA agents posing as members of the FARC, Colombia's leftist rebels, making sure they get him discussing RPGs

that we'd be used to shoot down American helicopters. That's the key, right? Getting the guy to admit something that we use to kill U.S. service members. And Bangkok? Well, because it's a close ally and Alex Jedi folks. Yeah, I don't even know if it's just U.S. service members, right? It's any U.S. citizens. But it kind of sucks that Bangkok gets a rep for this kind of thing and, you know, sleaziness too, because it actually is just like a wonderful city, just like great people, cheap, amazing food, high quality of life, a lot of exciting, you know, companies starting up, young people. I think it's becoming like a tech hub too,

that in Shanghai. So, um, Bangkok's great. Like, don't, uh, Don't associate it with just, you know, sleasiness or weapons traffickers. I never thought about the possibility of us getting ads for like, you know, country tourism stuff. But yeah, Bangkok, not all brothels and drugs is a pretty good tagline. Although, I guess for a lot of our listeners, maybe that's not what they're there for. Anyway, that's not necessarily suss in itself, right? All this stuff in Bangkok.

I mean, it's probably a good thing that countries are working together to prosecute dangerous. people, isn't it? But, like, this case has so many informants and as many agents as it does so-called bad guys. And there have been a ton of cases in the past where undercover agents have either pressed people in doing crimes or just completely instigated them themselves. Yeah, that's not the case here, though, right? He's the one who instigated this. Yeah, the weapon stuff. That's why this is so weird this case. I mean, there's all stuff going to tumble out in court, and I think they're going to push this through pretty quick because doesn't have a chance in hell, so we'll find that more soon.

But, yeah, I mean, Patrons might remember a really interesting interview I did with a reporter Trevor Aronson about his podcast, Alphabet Boy is a while back, it's maybe even last year, which digs into sting operations just like this one. That might be on YouTube. I think a lot of our videos are. Go check it out. There's tons of stuff there. Back to Episawa.

It's Feb 12th now, and the hotel room meeting I described at the top of the show. After it, Thai cops follow the Burmese rebel back to his. his Bangkok safe house, and a couple months later, authorities raid it, grab the samples, and hand them over to the feds. A lab then determines that it is, in fact, uranium and thorium. Quote, in particular, the laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in a nuclear samples is weapons grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon. Damn, so he really done did it, huh?

I mean, he's got stuff. He's got stuff. He's got a tiny bit of stuff, but he's got stuff. What Takeshi Ebisawa is actually on the hook for? Well, yeah, I mean, it's a lot now, right? First off, smuggling nuclear material. That's a pretty big one. I don't think many people get done for that each year.

Count two is brokering the sale of nuclear material. Okay, yep, that makes sense. And count three claims that from June 2019, see, that's the key. That was what else were getting at the top of the show. until April 22, when he was busted, Ebisawa and a 60-year-old co-defendant named Som Pop Singateri, who I'm guessing is Thai, traffic, meth and heroin.

So that's the key, right? I was forgetting about that. So why would they say June 2019 and then start the story the next year? It's like, I don't know, that's just tiny bit fishy to me. I could only find a Twitter account for Singer Siri with no post at all and a profile photo of him shaking hands with Avanda Holyfield.

who like, yeah, I mean, he attacked his wife and lost like a third of a billion dollars on cheap business deals, but I don't think he's into drug trafficking. Ebersawa and Singer Syria are also on the hook for weapon smuggling, of course, while Ebersawa alone is getting done for a bunch more weapons, drugs and money laundering offenses. I mean, we're not saying he's not a bad guy. It's like, it's just the nuclear stuff is a bit weird. Of the eight counts, five carry a maximum life sentence, and only half of a single percentage point of defendants in. federal criminal cases get acquitted. So I reckon Altakeshi is up a creek without a paddle on this one. So anyway, there's your case, guys.

What do you reckon? Rock solid or stinks like weeks old sushi? Don't Instagram your crimes. Rest in peace, flacco. And yeah, we'll see you all next week. Patreon.com slash general world podcast. Do it up.