50 Million Yen Keitai - The Aichi Drug Wars

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]Asahi: Police hit back as drug war heats up in Aichi
Police here say a turf war is escalating among gangs of Iranian drug dealers in Aichi Prefecture. As evidence for this, they don't just cite the occasional shooting or kidnapping. Police increasingly are coming across moshi moshi denwa, cellphones which contain the numbers of dealers' customers. Moshi moshi denwa are so-named because dealers greet their customers simply with moshi moshi (hello), but never give out their names. Last month, the Aichi prefectural police seized 13 cellphones from Tarbit Lakhmani, a 31-year-old Iranian arrested on suspicion of violating the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law...Moshi moshi denwa are sometimes sold for astonishing prices. A phone can fetch as much as 10 million yen in Nagoya and a whopping 50 million yen, the price of a new house, in the Mikawa region of eastern Aichi Prefecture, sources said. Some Iranians sell their phones at high prices to group members before they return to their homeland, the sources said. Police suspect the recent increase in incidents is due to a Nagoya-based group and a Toyohashi-based gang from the Mikawa region that are scrambling to monopolize existing Moshi moshi denwa for users in the Mikawa region...more...

[Mulboyne]

The Mainichi ran this story a couple of weeks ago but police have now released some pictures which feature in this Sankei piece (Japanese).

Iranian nabbed for dealing drugs to housewives
An Iranian man has been arrested for selling drugs to housewives in a residential area in Tokyo, law enforcers said. Farid Yazdani, 38, (above) an unemployed man of Iranian nationality living in Suginami-ku, stands accused of violating the Stimulants Control Law. The Kanto-Shinetsu Regional Bureau of Health and Welfare arrested Yazdani in April on suspicion of possessing stimulants and marijuana with the intent to sell them to housewives in a residential area in Suginami-ku. The arrest came after another Iranian was arrested in January for selling illegal drugs to housewives in Tokyo's Setagaya-ku. The cases underscore the widening spread of drug use in residential areas...more...

Police filmed the dealer in Setagaya-ku riding his mama-chari to meet his customers. Clip here.

[Iraira]

Is this a case of Japanese style "Mother's Little Helper"?

Or just an indication that even Japanese babas can't handle J-afternoon TV without some THC?

[Buraku]

I was told he was making $10,000 per big sale?!?!?
the article says the value was 1.2 mil Y for what amounts to a few grams

pretty sure the Qoran/Mohammed forbids drug use, guess it don't matter if you sell the stuff to infidels

[Buraku]

I guess Japan's strict narcotic laws can only do so much and have actually helped push up prices in Japan earning the gangsters more money in the long run

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Just before 6:00pm on Sunday evening, a foreign man, thought to be Middle Eastern, got out of a car in the Shinei district of Nagoya with multiple stab wounds and cried for help in Japanese. A passerby called an ambulance but he soon died of his injuries. A witness claims he saw another man, also thought to be foreign, struggling with the victim before running off and he is now being sought. Police found a blood-stained knife around 20cm long inside the car along with a mobile phone, bag and some powder thought to be some kind of stimulant. There were also over a hundred syringes in the boot of the car leading police to believe this could have been a dispute over a drug deal. Foreign gangs have made inroads in Nagoya's drug trade: one Iranian street dealer was found to have over 6,000 contacts on his mobile phone when he was arrested earlier this year. Sunday's incident took place in a residential area around 500m south-west of Chikusa JR station. Police are hoping to identify the victim shortly.

From Japanese reports. Mainichi version here.

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Drug dealers keep addict lists / Iranian rings pass on data from cell phones even after arrests

The Metropolitan Police Department recently cracked down on two drug trafficking rings organized by Iranians, and confiscated about 30 cell phones with contact numbers of about 3,000 drug addicts registered in the dealers' phonebooks, it has been learned. According to the MPD, many of the contact numbers were identical to those that the police had found had been compiled by another Iranian drug dealing ring, the biggest of its kind in the metropolitan area, which the MPD smashed in 2004. Members of the two rings told the MPD they had obtained the data from the defunct ring, according to the police.

Contact numbers for drug addicts are reportedly traded at several hundreds of thousands of yen among dealers. The MPD believes an underground network exists to pass on lists of addicts maintained by trafficking rings in case they are broken up by police. According to an MPD senior officer, the MPD raided an apartment in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, in May that was used by Navand Mojtaba and four other Iranians who were arrested and indicted over dealing illegal stimulants.

The MPD confiscated from the hideout about 60 rental cell phones, 25 of which had contact numbers of about 2,500 drug addicts. One of the five arrested told the MPD that they had purchased the information from another drug trafficking ring, according to the police. Around 1990, an Iranian illegal drug trafficking group with more than 1,000 drug dealers under its wings was identified as being active in the metropolitan area. For 10 million yen to 30 million yen, drug dealers rented a cell phone from the group containing the contact numbers of addicts. The group also collected a portion of the dealers' sales proceeds, generating about 30 million yen a month, according to the MPD.

In October 2004, the MPD arrested the group's leader, Mahmoud Kadhodaei, and broke up the ring. However, some of the ring's members avoided arrest and are believed to have continued selling stimulant drugs, using the lists of drug addicts contained in the group's cell phones. Mojtaba is suspected to have taken over the cell phones and drug dealers from a former member of Kadhodaei's group and begun selling stimulant drugs and marijuana in Ikebukuro and other areas of Tokyo in January.

Meanwhile, another group comprised of Abolfazl Eghdami and five others, which was active in Shibakoen in Minato Ward, Tokyo, also had four cell phones which contained the contact numbers of about 600 drug addicts. Some of these numbers were found to overlap with those registered in a cell phone of a Kadhodaei dealer, according to the MPD. The MPD therefore believes the Eghdami group also obtained these numbers.

Addicts often spend hundreds of thousands of yen a month on illegal drugs, so their contact numbers are considered very valuable to drug dealers. The subscription on one of the 30 confiscated cell phones began seven years ago, the MPD said. The MPD believes drug dealing rings frequently transfer such contact number data to new cell phones to prevent information loss in the event of a dealer or addict being arrested and triggering a police investigation.

[Blah Pete]

Addicts often spend hundreds of thousands of yen a month on illegal drugs, so their contact numbers are considered very valuable to drug dealers.

They must not be hard core addicts if they can spend hundreds of thousands of Yen on shabu and still have money for a keitai.

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]Another foreigner seems to have been stabbed to death in Nagoya in the early hours. The newspaper reports can't confirm the victim definitely is foreign because he had no ID on him but he did have two mobile phones which raises suspicions that it's another drug-related murder. There appears to have been an argument among a group of men and a housewife claims that they weren't speaking Japanese. The other men disappeared in several cars.

[Mulboyne]

Here's a Kyodo report in the Japan Times:

Man found slain on Aichi street

A Brazilian man was fatally stabbed on a street of Kitanagoya, Aichi Prefecture, early Saturday, police said. A passerby found the man bleeding and lying on the street and alerted police. He was taken to a hospital but pronounced dead shortly afterward, according to police. He appeared to have received several stab wounds to the neck and back. The man was identified as Brum Tadashi Namekata, a 31-year-old Japanese-Brazilian. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and carrying two mobile phones, police said. Before the passerby called police, neighbors saw four or five men quarrel and three cars leave the area, according to the police. One of the three cars appears to have crashed into a guardrail, and Namekata was found on the street near the accident scene, which is in a neighborhood some 2.5 km west of Nishiharu Station on the Inuyama Line.

[Greji]

Yomiuri: Drug dealers keep addict lists / Iranian rings pass on data from cell phones even after arrests

Obviously, we're not going to get more of the sensitive drug intelligence information, but all of those "thousands" of names of "addicts" should result in an arrest or two, should'd it?

You never hear of any follow up until the next Iranian/Brazilian ring is uncovered, which may, or may not be, connected to the first ring.

[Mulboyne]

Police here say a turf war is escalating among gangs of Iranian drug dealers in Aichi Prefecture.

A foreign man was found dead in Komaki, Aichi on Saturday night. He was spotted by a passer-by slumped inside a car. When emergency services arrived, they found that he had been shot five times. He died before he could be taken to hospital. The man is said to be white and in his forties but police have not yet confirmed his identity.

[Mulboyne]

From the Kyodo report:

Two mobile phones and two purses containing 740,000 yen in cash were found inside the car, along with a black bag containing packages of drugs, police said. Police suspect the man was murdered over drug deals

The car is said to be registered to a Nikkei Brazilian.