A Japanese ‘conman’ tried to sell an undercover DEA agent nuclear materials – but how did he get them?

Takeshi Ebisawa with a rocket launcher during a meeting with an informant and two undercover Danish police officers at a warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 3 February 2021, in a photograph from a DEA criminal complaint. Photograph: US magistrate judge/SDNY/Reuters

A plot to supply Iran’s nuclear weapons program, heroin from the Golden Triangle, Burmese ethnic insurgents and rocket launchers were the subject in courtroom 24A in New York’s federal courthouse last week when a man described as a leader in Japan’s Yakuza organized crime syndicate was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The transnational plot, which the US Drug Enforcement Administration had been investigating since 2019, involved Japanese organised crime leader Takeshi Ebisawa, who along with three Thai men, had been arrested in New York in 2022.