Japan's top yakuza (gangsters) boss won’t get a second chance. The court decided that he should be jailed after they rejected his appeal. The boss’s case was about gun control violation.
The boss, Kenichi Shinoda is the head of Japan's principal underworld crime association. He was jailed today, and prosecutors immediately rejected his claim for an appeal. Shinoda, 63, turned himself into the Osaka Prefectural Police. It was there that he was placed in a detention center, before jail.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court sentenced Shinoda to six years in prison, for conspiracy wit a bodyguard in the illegal possession of a gun in 1997. Prison is nothing new to him, nor is crime. Shinoda has already served 13 years in prison in the 1970s for stabbing another gangster to death.
Japanese yakuza bring in billions of dollars annually from extortion, gambling, the sex industry, weapons, drugs, and real estate and construction. By the end of last year there were 87,000 gangsters, and 45.1% were members of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Shinoda was just one of the big bosses. |
