Sunny Skies, Shady Characters - Cops, Killers, and Corruption in The Aloha State (PDFDrive)

Sunny Skies,
Shady
Characters
This page intentionally left blank
Sunny Skies,
Shady
Characters
Cops, Killers, and Corruption
in the Aloha State
James Dooley
A Latitude 20 Book
University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu
© 2015 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dooley, James (Investigative reporter), author.

Sunny skies, shady characters : cops, killers, and corruption
in the Aloha State / James Dooley.
pages cm
Memoir of the author’s career as an investigative reporter.
“A latitude 20 book.”
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-5164-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Investigative reporting—Hawaii. 2. Political corruption—
Hawaii. 3. Organ ized crime—Hawaii. I. Title.
PN4781.D55 2015
364.109969—dc23
2015000662
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper

and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Council on Library Resources.
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Inhalt
Chapter One
“A Culture of Corruption”
1
Chapter Two
Kukui Plaza
11
Chapter Three
Organized Crime
20
Chapter Four
Yakuza
32
Chapter Five
Yakuza, Inc.
45
Chapter Six
Vegas
54
Chapter Seven
Bishop Estate
65
vi Contents
Chapter Eight
Ronnie, Henry, and Royale
79
Chapter Nine
Three Dogs and a Vet
100
Chapter TEN
Pay to Play
108
Chapter Eleven
Pearl Harbor
127
C h a p t e r T w e lv e
Huis
136
Chapter Thirteen
Death and Taxes
150
Chapter Fourteen
Teamsters
163
Chapter Fifteen
Larry Mehau
188
Chapter Sixteen
End of the Line
215
Notes 221
Index 231
C hapt e r O n e
“A Culture of Corruption”
Don Ho died on a Saturday.

There was a phone message waiting from a copy editor at the Honolulu
Advertiser when I got home late that evening. “I’m writing the obit on Don
Ho,” Dave Koga said in the message, left four hours earlier. “Mark Platte
says Ho might have had some organized crime connections and I should
check with you.”
I shook my head. It was too late to call back, and there was no point,
anyway. Platte, the editor of the Advertiser, had refused to print that infor-
mation before. Why would he now?
Koga’s obituary was a fine, if uninspiring, summary of Ho’s life. There
were a few glaring omissions, however. There was no mention of Ho’s five
years of service as a U.S. Air Force transport pilot. The story was silent on
Ho’s unusual f amily life, which at one time had seen him cohabiting with
three different women, including his wife, who together had borne him 10
children.1
And there was not a word about Ho’s personal ties to mobsters and mob
associates, including Larry Mehau, his longtime close friend and onetime
business manager.
Platte certainly knew all about Mehau. A year earlier, I reported that the
FBI had identified Mehau in a wiretap affidavit as “a longtime Hawaiian
organized crime figure.”2
And Platte had recently killed a series of stories I had written that con-
cerned, among other things, Mehau’s mob connections. The stories were
based on sworn testimony from numerous Honolulu police officers in the
1
2 Chapter 1
department’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU).3 The Advertiser spent

somewhere around $100,000 in legal fees in a four-year effort to get those
federal court records unsealed, then refused to publish the sections con-
cerning Mehau and his associates, including officers inside the Honolulu
Police Department (HPD). And there were numerous other archived Adver-
tiser stories available to Koga and Platte that detailed the criminal pasts of
some of Ho’s associates, as well as the long-simmering “godfather of orga
nized crime” allegation about Mehau.
Koga’s story the next day quoted Mehau at length about Ho. He was iden-
tified in the story as a “Big Island rancher who grew up with Ho and was a
lifelong friend.” That was it. Nothing about the contents of the CIU files. No
mention of the FBI affidavit. Just “Big Island rancher.”
In the days that followed, no editors raised the subject again with me.
Other media outlets touched briefly on it, but not the Advertiser. Kapu is the
Hawaiian word. Forbidden territory.
Several reporters on the staff did stop by my desk, asking me to repeat
the story of the time I met Don Ho and Larry Mehau together. I had first
shared the story a couple of years earlier when the staff of the paper had
gathered in the m iddle of the newsroom to say good-bye to Walter Wright,
my former partner in investigative reporting, who was retiring.
In 1979, Walter told me he was working on a story about rape allegations
made against Don Ho. The accuser was a young woman from the Midwest
who said she had been assaulted in a Waikiki condo after Ho met her and a
friend in a restaurant, bought them several drinks, and invited them to a
party. The victim ended up naked in the streets of Waikiki, found her way
back to her hotel room, and called the police. A medical examination showed
evidence of intercourse and force used on the woman. Police obtained a
search warrant and recovered the woman’s clothing in the room where she
said the assault occurred.4
Walter then told me that the victim’s parents had convinced her to
withdraw the complaint. The second woman refused to cooperate with
authorities.
I was surprised to hear the allegations against Ho. He was a charming
guy who didn’t seem to have problems meeting and befriending women.
His friends were a different matter. At various times, some of the scariest
men in Hawai‘i had hung out at Ho’s Polynesian Palace showroom on Lewers
Street in Waikiki.
“So, Walter, what do you want from me?” I said at the time.
He explained that we would never be able to write a story about the in-
cident unless we got Ho to confirm that it had happened or at least that it
“A Culture of Corruption” 3
was under investigation. I asked Walter how in the world we were going to
do that.
“We’ll just go down to the Polynesian Palace tonight and talk to him,”
Wright said.
“Are you sure you want to do that, Walter?” I said. “I don’t know if that’s
a very good idea.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Come with me. I don’t want to go down there alone.”
“I don’t blame you. I don’t want to go down there at all,” I said.
But he insisted. So we went to Waikiki.
Ho was on stage when we got there that night. Walter talked us past the
door, and we were taken to one of Ho’s dressing rooms to wait for him.
In those days, Ho had an upper dressing room where he held court after
he finished on stage, signing autographs and kissing grandmas. He sold
albums and posed for photographs u ntil the well-wishers and admirers
were eventually shooed away. There was a bigger adjoining room down
Singer-entertainer
Don Ho. Honolulu
Advertiser photo;
Honolulu Star-
Advertiser Collection;
Hawai‘i State Archives.
4 Chapter 1
some stairs, where Walter and I were taken to wait. It was a long, low-
ceilinged, gloomy room with tables and chairs spread around.
At the far end of the room were several guys watching the movie Tora!
Tora! Tora! on television. We found a couple of chairs and sat down, maybe
10 or 15 feet away from the TV set. The attack on Pearl Harbor was under-
way, with all the gunfire, explosions, and bloodshed that went with it. My
uneasiness increased. One of the men looked up from the television at us. I
couldn’t see him very well through the gloom, but he looked Hawaiian and
very large.
“Who you guys?” he said.
Walter said, “It’s okay. We’re here to see Don.”
The guy looked at us some more. This was obviously not a very satisfac-
tory answer, but he let it go and went back to the movie. A fter a few more
minutes, he looked at us again and said, “No, r eally. Who are you guys?”
Walter smiled and said again, “We’re here to see Don. It’s okay.”
Now, this was Walter’s story and I was just along for the r ide, but I felt
like we probably should say something more than that. I gave Walter a
questioning look. He made a calming motion with one hand. By this time,
the guy was staring hard at us. He got up from his chair and approached
us. He was enormous. Not so much tall as very wide and solid.
He looked very irritated when he said, “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU
GUYS?”
I had had enough of playing second fiddle and blurted out, “We’re from
the Advertiser. I’m Jim Dooley and this is Walter Wright. We need to talk
to Don.”
The guy processed this information, then said, “Why didn’t you just say
so?” and went back to the movie. I whispered sharply at Walter, “What’s
wrong with you? Don’t antagonize this guy. I think it’s Cyril Kahale.”
“Who’s that?”
“I’ll tell you later. Just don’t piss him off.”
I thought I had recognized the man when he approached us. Kahale
was a former professional football player whose feats of physical prowess
were legendary. But it was dark in the dressing room, and I had never actu-
ally met Kahale.
Ho eventually finished his show and his activities in the upper dressing
room. When he came into the lower room, Walter introduced us and said
something like “We’re h ere to talk to you about the rape thing.”
Ho was immediately angry. I don’t remember his exact words, other
than one phrase he repeated several times: “You guys got no class.”
He told us to follow him, that we couldn’t talk where we were. We went
down more stairs, along some narrow hallways until we arrived in a small,
windowless room with just one chair inside. There were generator or ma-
chinery noises in the background. I had no idea where we were. It felt like
the lowest deck of a ship.
Ho sat in the chair and told us to wait. Several of his “boys” listened as
Ho told us again that we had no class. Walter kept him talking and Ho
opened up a bit, saying his accuser hadn’t been raped, that she was a crazy
publicity seeker. And it wasn’t the first time he had been falsely accused, Ho
said. Shortly after Ho spoke with us, People Magazine published a lengthy
profile of the entertainer in which he readily discussed his relationships
with women and alluded to rape accusations made against him. “There
have always been women in Ho’s life—in bizarre combinations and star-
tling abundance,” the story said. Ho joked in the story about why he enjoyed
kissing grandmas after his shows: “I kiss grandmas because they’re clean,”
he said with a twinkle. “I haven’t picked anything up from a grandma yet.
Besides, grandma don’t yell rape; she appreciates.”
Eventually, the doorway to the room darkened, and Ho popped out of
the chair. I looked over, and there was Larry Mehau, a very large man in
his own right. Several more even bigger men filled the hallway behind
him.
“Larry!” Ho said. “These guys want to talk about that rape thing. They’re
from the Advertiser.”
Mehau looked at us with a pained expression on his face. “Tell them to
get out,” he said to Ho.
“Yeah, you guys, get out of here,” Ho said. “Get out! Get the fuck out!” 5
I thought to myself, “Okay, that’s good. We’re getting the fuck out now.”
Even Walter the Oblivious realized it was time to go. We had to turn side-
ways to make it past Mehau and the men in the hallway. Once clear of
them, I resisted the urge to run. But I came pretty close.
We blundered around the hallways and finally found our way outside.
“God damn it, Walter,” I said, “why’d you put us in a spot like that? Did
you see the size of those guys? Next time, you’re on your own.”
“Who’s Cyril Kahale?” Walter said.
Cyril Kahale Jr. worked for many years as Ho’s bodyguard, bouncer,
and aide-de-camp. During his shows, Ho would occasionally introduce
Kahale as his “complaint department.” 6 He had a lengthy arrest record but
only one felony conviction, for burglary, that dated way back to 1960.
The same 2004 FBI affidavit that named Mehau as a longtime Hawai‘i
organized crime figure said Kahale was a pal of Mehau and of Herbert
Naone Jr., a former Honolulu cop and Mehau friend who was chief of security
at the state-run Aloha Stadium facility. Naone, the FBI said, held a “prominent
position in Hawaii’s organized crime and narcotics trafficking underworld”
6 Chapter 1
and “has been able to elude law enforcement action and has directly assisted
others in evading arrest and prosecution.”7
According to FBI wiretap transcripts, Naone partnered with another
ex-cop, James Rodenhurst, to extort cash payoffs from Honolulu bar owners.
They also engaged in a number of other illegal activities, including attempts
to acquire a commercial driver’s license for Kahale so that he w ouldn’t have
to take necessary written and driving tests, according to the FBI. Kahale
was never charged in that case. Naone and Rodenhurst were convicted of
extortion.
Attorneys for both Naone and Rodenhurst said their clients had dedi-
cated their lives to law enforcement. Rodenhurst’s lawyer, Myles Breiner, ac-
knowledged that his client had “made a few mistakes,” but added: “We live
in a culture of corruption that permeates most of our public institutions.” 8
In 1984, Kahale was indicted by a Hawai‘i grand jury on a charge of
participating in the kidnapping and murder of Arthur Baker, an occasional
driver and office helper for Larry Mehau at Hawai‘i Protective Association,
Mehau’s security guard company. Kahale also did occasional work for
Hawai‘i Protective.
The indictment was based on testimony from confessed Hawai‘i mob
hitman Ronald Kainalu Ching, one of the men who used to hang around
Don Ho’s dressing room. Baker, a drug addict and federal drug informant,
was dragged out of the Sunday Lounge, a seedy nightspot on the outskirts
of Waikiki, one November night in 1978 and was never seen alive again.
Ching eventually confessed to burying Baker alive in the sand dunes of
a beach on the Leeward Coast of Oahu. His bones were recovered by au-
thorities right where Ching said they’d be. But Ching recanted his accusa-
tions against Kahale, and the case against Kahale was dropped. Ching was
convicted of murdering Baker.
Kahale and Mehau accused then-Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Charles
Marsland Jr. of conducting a vendetta against Mehau. They said Marsland
believed Mehau was responsible for the murder of Marsland’s son, Charles
“Chuckers” Marsland, in 1975. The Kahale murder charge had been cooked
up by Marsland to force Kahale to falsely testify against Mehau in the
Chuckers murder case, the men charged.9 Kahale filed a $35 million false
arrest suit against the city, and a jury awarded him nearly $500,000 in
damages, which was reduced on appeal to $400,000.
Marsland’s 19-year-old son disappeared after working a shift at Infinity,
a Waikiki nightclub just up the street from the Polynesian Palace. The
younger Marsland was shot to death, and his body was left on a remote dirt
road in the Waimanalo area of Oahu, across the Koolau mountain range
from Waikiki.
Cyril Kahale Jr. and Larry Mehau, rear, flank their attorney, David Schutter, at a news
conference. Gregory Yamamoto, photographer; Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Ching named three other men as his accomplices in the Marsland mur-
der, including two men with ties to Don Ho—convicted felons Eric Naone
and Raymond Scanlan. When Naone was questioned by police shortly
after the murder, his alibi was that he had spent the night hanging out at
Ho’s dressing room with Ching, Mehau, and a convicted felon and city re-
fuse worker named George Perry Jr.
Naone and Scanlan, a former Honolulu police officer, were acquitted of
the Marsland murder in a dramatic state court trial. Ching was convicted.
Ching, Kahale, Naone, and Scanlan had another thing in common be-
sides criminal histories and Don Ho’s dressing room. All worked for years
as Teamsters Union drivers on the sets of films and television shows shot in
the Islands.
I would write many stories about the Teamsters movie d rivers over the
years. Some were published, but others w ere spiked by Platte and Manag-
ing Editor Marsha McFadden. “Readers have no interest in a story like this”
was a favored Platte decree.
The spiking became so commonplace that I came up with my own name
for the process: splatting. I pinned copies of spiked stories on the wall above
8 Chapter 1
my desk in what I called the Splatte File. At the top were the Teamsters and
Larry Mehau stories. This did not improve my prospects at the newspaper.
Ho’s ashes w ere scattered in the waves off Waikiki Beach following a
daylong memorial attended by thousands of well-wishers and fans, cov-
ered in great detail by the staff of the Honolulu Advertiser. I was not asked to
participate.
There was still no mention in any of the coverage of Ho’s Frank
Sinatra–like mob connections or his unusual home life. Those facets of
his life were plainly secondary to Ho’s accomplishments as a singer and
entertainer, but they were certainly salient to an overall portrait of the
man and his times. Except in the pages of the dominant newspaper in
Ho’s hometown.
Ho’s FBI file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act after the
entertainer died, contains 40 pages of records, nearly all of them concern-
ing Ho’s dealings with Larry Mehau. All the documents appear to have
been generated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and most were heavily re-
dacted to remove the names or other identifying information concerning
individuals other than Ho. But it’s a simple matter to fill in the blanks con-
cerning Mehau.
One memo was written a fter the interview of an unnamed entertainment
industry figure who talked about a man identified as a “close associate” of
Ho, who “appears to have total control over the entertainment industry in
Honolulu and has strong influence with Gov. George Ariyoshi.”10
Mehau was a close friend of Ariyoshi’s and organized entertainment at
the governor’s fund-raisers. He also arranged for top entertainers to per-
form at the annual opening day ceremonies of the state legislature.
The FBI informant was concerned about his safety and spoke about
another individual who had discussed Mehau with an HPD official. “This
information was leaked to someone outside of HPD,” the memo said. The
informant said he was willing to cooperate but was “well aware of what
may happen if ever it w ere to become known that he is cooperating with
the FBI,” according to the memo. The only records in Ho’s FOIA file that
weren’t at least partially redacted were copies of newspaper stories about
Mehau, including two written by me.
Don Ho died just two days a fter the death of former prosecutor
Marsland, whose son had been executed gangland-style by at least one of
Ho’s hangers-on. Marsland’s death merited a story obituary in the Adver-
tiser, which I helped to write. But the newspaper did not see fit to cover the
funeral of Marsland, a man whose fervid pursuit of organized crime in
Hawai‘i and perfervid criticisms of judges and law enforcement agencies
made tall headlines for decades.
Honolulu Prosecuting
Attorney Charles
Marsland Jr. Roy Ito,
photographer;
Honolulu Star-
Those two deaths, and the morning newspaper’s treatment of them,

ere emblematic of how journalism in Hawai‘i had changed during my
w
three decades as an investigative reporter in the Islands.
The work was great while it lasted, taking me from the depths of the
underworld in Hawai‘i and Japan to top-floor corporate suites and judges’
chambers. Stories I wrote led to prison terms for quite a few men and landed
the colorful and combative mayor of Honolulu in court on bribery charges.
I found secret land partnerships called huis whose investors included
politicians, criminals, business leaders, and judges.
I found contracting cronyism at all levels of government and pried open
the financial and political secrets of an astounding $6 billion educational
charity known as the Bishop Estate.
I interviewed the craftiest and clumsiest of con men. I found prison
guards who changed uniforms on Friday nights and spent their weekends
locked behind bars.
Things changed radically when Gannett Company, Inc., the nation’s larg-
est newspaper chain, bought the Advertiser in 1993 from local ownership.
10 Chapter 1
Outside editors who knew nothing about Hawai‘i, its people, and its his-
tory were brought from the Mainland to imprint the Gannett version of the
news business on the Advertiser.
As I was writing stories in 1995 and 1996 detailing financial shenani-
gans committed by the trustees of the mighty Bishop Estate, I was told to
stop writing about the estate. An assistant city editor told me that the pub-
lisher didn’t like them.
At that point, I began thinking about another job in journalism and
found one in television news at KITV, the local ABC affiliate.
In 1997, not long after I was gone, the Advertiser balked at publishing a
lengthy essay on problems inside the Bishop Estate that was written by
five prominent local residents, including a senior U.S. District Court judge.
Called “Broken Trust,” the essay drew heavily from some of my earlier
stories and was ultimately published by the Advertiser’s competitor, the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin.11
Broken Trust ignited a volcanic controversy that engulfed the estate
and its five trustees. Investigations conducted by the state attorney gen-
eral and the Internal Revenue Service forced out the trustees and im-
posed wholesale changes on one of the richest charitable institutions in
the world.
Among the departed trustees were the former president of the state sen-
ate and the former speaker of the state house of representatives. The trust-
ees, who were collecting nearly $1 million apiece annually from the estate,
were appointed by the five members of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court.
In 1989, the Broken Trust authors reported, two Supreme Court justices
voted to appoint Larry Mehau to the Bishop Estate millionaires’ club, but a
third and decisive vote couldn’t be found for Mehau.12
That was the Bishop Estate and that was Hawai‘i.
I worked as an investigative reporter in television for five years but was
eventually recruited back to print by a new team of editors at the Advertiser.
Everyone involved learned to regret it.
Investigative reporting in the 50th state, particularly long-form news-
paper projects, was like working in a journalism hothouse, a news labora-
tory where all the stories seemed to be part of an organic whole. The stories
stood on their own, but like stands of bamboo, there was a dense root
system underneath that stretched over time and distance, producing new
shoots in surprising places.
It was a fantastic job. I’m sorry it’s over.
C hapt e r T wo
Kukui Plaza
A Greek bearing gifts called me in 1976.

His name was Stamatios Mertyris—Mike the Greek to his friends—and
he had been working as a waterproofing subcontractor on a Honolulu
housing redevelopment project called Kukui Plaza.
The Greek and two employees of the Kukui Plaza development company,
Oceanside Properties, Inc., shared information with me that ultimately led to
state bribery charges against Mayor Frank F. Fasi and sent Oceanside presi-
dent Hal Hansen to federal prison for fraud.
I nearly dismissed Mertyris as a crackpot after his first call. He
wouldn’t tell me his name, and he had a strange accent I couldn’t place.
He wouldn’t specify any of the dark secrets he claimed to know about city
government.
But it was early 1976. Watergate was still echoing through the land. I
was young and eager, new to the city hall beat. I had been a reporter as long
as I’d lived in Honolulu—about three years. I would play Woodstein to my
Deep Throat caller, at least for a little while.
When Mertyris first called, I had never heard of Kukui Plaza. Fresh out
of college, I arrived in Honolulu in 1973 and worked eight months as a wire
service drudge with United Press International (UPI) before landing a job
as a general assignment reporter at the Advertiser in mid-1974.
I had a degree in English literature from the University of California at
Davis, a former agricultural college outside Sacramento that back then was
still mostly surrounded by tomato fields.
I had no formal training in journalism, just summer jobs and school
newspapers. But my f ather, Edmund, was an accomplished newspaperman.
11
12 Chapter 2
He was managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and the Denver Post
before that. My sister Nancy was a reporter, too, first for Newsweek in New
York and later for the Examiner. I figured it must be in the blood. UPI in San
Francisco said I could work four days a week in Honolulu if I would pay
my way out there. It was the only offer I had, and it was Hawai‘i. I could stay
for a year or two, rack up some experience, learn to surf, meet some wahi-
nes, and maybe work out an assignment in Asia. What did I know?
Print journalism even then was a dying business. Just a few years before
I arrived in the Islands, Congress had enacted the Newspaper Preservation
Act, intended to stem the alarming rate of closures and consolidations that
were occurring in metropolitan areas around the country.
The act allowed competing publications to combine u nder joint oper-
ating agreements (JOAs) that merged certain aspects of their individual
operations—advertising sales, printing facilities, and deliveries—but still
allowed the papers to employ separate editorial staffs that produced in
dependent and competing publications. The federal law waived antitrust
prohibitions that would otherwise have blocked such mergers.
When I arrived in Honolulu, a JOA between the Advertiser and Star-
Bulletin was in full force. Like many other afternoon newspapers, the
Star-Bulletin had fallen on hard times as customers arriving home from
work increasingly cancelled subscriptions because they could get their
even ing news f ree of charge from the television.
Similar JOAs w ere fashioned around the country. My father and sister
worked at one that combined the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle. The
Examiner itself was the survivor of a series of earlier mergers that had seen the
amalgamation and eventual disappearance of at least five other newspapers:
the San Francisco Call, Evening Post, Bulletin, News, and News-Call Bulletin.
In Honolulu, the staffs of the two major papers each occupied half of the
second floor of the stately old news building at the base of Kapiolani Boule-
vard, within easy walking distance of the state capitol, city hall, and the
downtown business district.
The first floor was devoted to sales staff who sold advertising for both
papers. On the third floor were the publishers and executive staffs. I found
that the UPI bureau was a windowless, closetlike space accessed by a set of
stairs in the m
iddle of the Advertiser city room. It was filled with clattering
teletype machines and had cramped working spaces for a reporter and the
bureau chief. The job was nothing like I imagined it might be. My principal
duty was to rewrite newspaper stories into wire service copy for UPI’s
radio station clients: 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., boiling down story after story into one
or two paragraphs each, updating police blotter items and weather reports.
Kukui Plaza 13
I was instructed to change the newspaper verbs from past to present tense
whenever possible, making the stories sound more immediate to radio
listeners. “A 29-year-old man is in fair condition this morning following a
single-car freeway accident last night”—that sort of thing.
I did learn to type fast u nder pressure. I learned to wheedle basic in-
formation out of Honolulu police over the phone. And I found that asking
ignorant questions is an occupational imperative.
By that time, UPI had begun its long, agonizing slide into oblivion. In
1974, employees of the company went on a nationwide strike. A similar strike
earlier by Associated Press workers had shut down the news building in
Honolulu, so UPI’s tenancy agreement there required the bureau to move
out of the news building in the event of a work stoppage. My two “Uni-
presser” colleagues and I found ourselves walking a picket line a half mile
away from the news building outside an electrical supply firm, Territorial
Electronics, where the UPI chief had set up shop. Because there were only
three reporters in the bureau, we had to walk solo picket shifts, marching
for a cause that had no apparent connection to Territorial Electronics. It was
pathetic. The strike lasted, as I recall, several weeks, until the union totally
capitulated and we returned to work, minus a lot of dignity and some des-
perately needed income.
In mid-1974, UPI phased out my job and offered me a transfer to Buffalo,
New York. I declined with alarm and managed to hire on at the Advertiser
as an entry-level reporter, paid $14,000 per year. I figured I would give it a
year or so and then head back to California. What did I know?
My first bylined story was a timeless prose picture of a circus parade. I
worked general assignment, wrote obituaries, and filled in on the police
beat during my first several months. The cops, I found, were only slightly
more accommodating in person than they w ere on the phone, and the pid-
gin they spoke frequently baffled me.
I had no idea, for instance, that when a sergeant said what sounded like
“Da bolo head bugga wen’ mawkay,” he was actually telling me, “The bald
guy died.” (Make—pronounced MAW-kay—means dead in pidgin. Putting
went (wen’) in front of it turns the verb to past tense.)
It took me way too long to figure out that the “sippadee” charge police
frequently spoke of was actually criminal property damage, or cpd for short.
When veteran Advertiser political reporter Douglas Boswell jumped to
the competing afternoon newspaper in late 1974, shortly before the annual
start of the Hawai‘i legislature, I was sent to the Advertiser’s government
bureau to help out. The office was in the basement of the state Capitol. I had
never set foot in the building before.
14 Chapter 2
When city hall reporter Douglas Carlson jumped to television news in

1975, I was told to watch city hall while more permanent arrangements
were made.
Not too long after that, the Greek called, asking to speak to the city hall
reporter. I tried to hide my ignorance and inexperience from him, but he
told me later that he had me figured for shallow right away. The only rea-
son he talked to me, he said, was that he couldn’t get anyone else to listen.
The only reason I listened was that I didn’t know any better.
Les Whitten, a very fine reporter and legman for Washington, D.C., col-
umnist and muckraker Jack Anderson, once advised me and other young
reporters to always hear what tipsters had to say. He told a story about the
time he and Anderson were visited in their D.C. office by a disheveled
man who had a length of tinfoil tied to the back of his b elt. “Like a tail,”
Whitten said.
He and Anderson looked dubiously at each other but heard the man
out. He explained that he knew damaging secrets about a sitting U.S. senator,
divulging some convincing details in the process. When asked to explain
the tinfoil, the tipster explained that he had first shared his information
with the FBI, but agents told him he should talk to Jack Anderson. They
said he needed to be “grounded” first, so they attached the tinfoil tail to
his belt and gave him directions to Anderson’s office.
The man’s information turned out to be golden and led to a great series
of stories about the senator’s tangled personal finances, Whitten said.
So I listened to Mertyris. He was reluctant to detail the nasty secrets he
claimed to know. He and the friends he represented were frightened, sus-
picious, and maddeningly elliptical. They were prone to melodrama and
manipulation.
I soothed and reassured, coaxed and cajoled. I sought names and dates
and developed an omnivorous appetite for paperwork that plagues me to
this day.
Some of the hoops they jumped me through w ere preposterous, culled
from cheap spy fiction. They would leave documents for me in hard-to-find
places. “On the front seat of the brown Datsun parked under the banyan
tree behind the state Capitol” was one such instruction.
“Listen,” I answered. “It’s pouring rain outside. Why don’t you just come
to my office? I’m alone here for a c ouple of hours.”
“Too risky” was the reply.
So out I went to find the brown Datsun. The banyan tree in question
covered at least an acre of property, and there were two brown Datsuns in
the large parking lot beneath it. Both cars had papers on the front seat, and
both were unlocked.
Kukui Plaza 15
Which one? I had no way to call the Greek to inquire. I looked around,
but no one else was out in the downpour. If I picked the wrong car, at least
the driver wouldn’t be around to protest. I picked the closest car and found
what I was looking for.
The gist of the allegations was that Oceanside Properties president Hal
Hansen was being squeezed for favors and political support by Fasi and his
chief fund-raiser, Harry C. C. Chung.
In return, Hansen had demanded and received a three-year extension of
control of the public parking concession at Kukui Plaza, an arrangement that
should have been approved by the city council but was not. There were 900
public stalls at the project, and the extension meant that as much as $1.2 mil-
lion in revenue had been diverted from the taxpayers to a private company.
Armed with the basic allegations and guided by government bureau
veterans Gerry Keir and Jerry Burris, I began some discreet checking at
city hall.
I had to be careful in my nosing around. Relations between Frank Fasi
and reporters were never warm. When I took over the beat, a partial cease-
fire was in effect: occasional border clashes but no open hostilities. During
this period, I covered a speech by Fasi in which he pointed me out to the
assembled Rotarians, identifying me as the representative of a worthless
rag of a morning newspaper. I dutifully scribbled notes while the crowd
looked me over.
Fasi’s press secretary, Jim Loomis, advised me after the speech not to
take it personally. “Actually, Frank likes you,” Loomis said.
A few questions around city hall told me that the city council knew
nothing about the parking stalls deal. Then I went to the Department of
Housing and Community Development, the city agency responsible for
oversight of Kukui Plaza, and sought access to the project files.
After some skirmishing with bureaucrats—I tried to blunt their ques-
tions with bland explanations—I was shown the files. And there, right near
the top, was the parking stalls agreement. Finding the document where it
was supposed to be, and saying what it was supposed to say, was a cosmic
event for me. It satisfied serious misgivings I had about Mertyris and com
pany. It meant I had what looked like a very good story in hand. And there
was something about finding the paperwork and laying my hands on it that
was deeply satisfying. A ratchet turned, and parts of my life fell into place.
Other paperwork in the file told me more about the origins of the deal
and discussions between the administration and Oceanside about it. I sought
and received copies of the agreement and other documents. From there, it
was simply a matter of questioning responsible officials about the implica-
tions of the deal and writing the story.
16 Chapter 2
Honolulu Mayor
Frank F. Fasi. Allan
Miller, photographer;
Honolulu Star-
I lived in dread during that period that another reporter would stumble
on the story before I got it in print, or that the mayor would deliver a pre-
emptive speech about it. That didn’t happen, though. My first story about
Kukui Plaza and its troubled history was published in March 1976.1
The story was not a major sensation when it appeared, but it did make
some waves at city hall. None of my competitors rushed to match it, however.
The afternoon Star-Bulletin eventually published a knockdown story, quot-
ing city and Oceanside officials who pooh-poohed the Advertiser report. None
of the three television stations or the news radio station covered it.
This was standard fare in a competitive news market. If you didn’t have
a story, better to ignore it or knock it down, if at all possible. If you can’t do
that and the story is too good to ignore, then match it. Only u nder the most
grievously compelling circumstances would a reporter write, and an editor
sanction, a story that quoted and credited a competitor.
This worked to my advantage. The lack of response irritated Mertyris
and his two friends, who I finally learned were Oceanside vice president
Joseph Zbin and Oceanside employee Eleanor Shinno.
Kukui Plaza 17
That was when they sent me to the Datsun under the banyan. On the
front seat, I found a bill for legal services submitted to Oceanside by Paul
Devens, the recently resigned number-two man in the Fasi administration.
The invoice showed that Devens’ law firm wanted $65,000 for helping
Oceanside finalize its parking stall deal with the Fasi administration. We
printed a copy of the invoice with the next story, and the Kukui Plaza fun
house ride was underway.2
I found that Fasi fund-raiser Harry Chung’s home furnishings company
had received the no-bid contract to supply all the carpeting at Kukui Plaza,
a massive, twin-towered condominium project that combined market-priced
units with price-controlled units for low-to moderate-income buyers. An-
other Chung company was given a concession to supply coin-operated clothes
washers and dryers at Kukui Plaza.
The low-and moderate-income units in the development were supposed
to be set aside first for residents of the area who had been displaced by the
construction project, but city record-keeping was so shoddy that many of
the individuals on that list couldn’t be located.
Then the same units were to be made available to qualified buyers via a
lottery drawing, but many of the apartments were instead sold to an insider
list of buyers who had political and personal connections at city hall.
One of the units went to the secretary of Ralph Aoki, head of the city’s
urban redevelopment agency. When Aoki was called before the city council
to testify on the issue, he was asked if it was equitable that his secretary
was given the inside track on a Kukui Plaza unit.
“Sometimes in our system, the people who have the right kind of friends,
they get what you might call equity,” Aoki answered.3
Years later, I wrote a series of stories that found Aoki pursuing his per-
sonal version of equity when working as a federal bankruptcy court trustee.
Aoki was convicted of fraud and sent to federal prison.
In the early stages of the Kukui Plaza scandal, my sources kept telling
me that Harry Chung’s son had received the contract to write insurance
coverage for the project, but they had no paperwork to back up the charge.
I spent long hours chasing that down but kept hitting walls. Neither
Chung nor his son would talk. The city files had no paperwork on the sub-
ject. But I finally noticed that fine print in the development contract speci-
fied that copies of insurance policies had to be filed with the city. I demanded
to see the required public records, and they were finally retrieved from
Oceanside. Chung’s son Gary was the agent. The cosmic ratchet clicked
again.4
The Honolulu City Council decided to take the unprecedented step of
conducting its own investigation of Kukui Plaza. They hired a private law
18 Chapter 2
Kukui Plaza development at the corner of Beretania Street and Nuuanu Avenue
in Honolulu. Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
firm, equipped it with subpoena powers, and then held a series of public
hearings on the subject.
This occurred after the mayor directed his newly appointed prosecuting
attorney, Maurice Sapienza, to conduct a criminal investigation of the case.
Mertyris and friends insisted to me that Sapienza, after arriving in Ho-
nolulu from the Mainland, had lived rent-free for several months at another
Oceanside Properties development. Sapienza wouldn’t talk to me when I
called him about it. Oceanside said officially it knew nothing about it.
Finally, in checking records of Fasi’s political campaign organ izat ion,
I found that Sapienza had donated money and listed the Oceanside apart-
ment as his residence.
Armed with that information, I called Sapienza again. When he took the
call, he was eating an apple. A big, juicy one, by the sound of it. I told him I’d
found the campaign records listing his residence at an Oceanside project.
Sapienza chomped on the apple for a few seconds and mentally chewed over
the implications of the campaign records. I waited patiently for a response.
“Well,” he eventually said, still chewing away, “I guess you’ve got me.”
He went on to say that he thought Harry Chung actually owned the apart-
ment because Chung made the arrangements for Sapienza to stay there.5
Kukui Plaza 19
I always had a soft spot for Maury Sapienza a fter that. He would shuck
you for as long as he could, but at a certain point, if he had to, he would
level with you. If he happened to be eating an apple at the time, well, hell,
he’d talk to you with his mouth full. I certainly didn’t care. In fact, I liked
and appreciated him for it.
After the city council finished its look at Kukui Plaza, the state attorney
general’s office stepped into the act. They brought in a Los Angeles attor-
ney, Grant Cooper, to head a new investigation that eventually indicted
Fasi and Chung on bribery charges. The chief prosecution witness was to be
Hal Hansen.
At the time, Fasi was mounting another campaign to be elected gover-
nor, running against incumbent George Ariyoshi, the attorney general’s
boss. That dropped a heavy political overlay on the court proceedings. Fasi,
a consummate politician, made hay with it, scoffing at Ariyoshi and his
“hired gunslinger” Grant Cooper.
At the same time, Hal Hansen had been indicted by the federal govern-
ment on fraud charges, and serious friction developed between the federal
and state prosecutors. Hansen wanted an immunity deal with the feds if he
was to testify in the state case. The feds wouldn’t play ball.
Hansen eventually refused to testify when the state case went to trial,
even after he was locked in prison during the Christmas holidays for con-
tempt of court. The state was forced to drop the charges.
Kukui Plaza lasted two years. The final legal installment was written
when Hansen was packed off to a federal penitentiary for fraud.
Fasi ran and narrowly lost to George Ariyoshi in the 1978 gubernatorial
Democratic primary election; he blamed his defeat on the Kukui Plaza
case. He later lost three more tries for the governor’s office.
The Kukui Plaza years w ere a maelstrom of investigations, charges and
countercharges, speechifying and court proceedings. I learned a great deal
during this period about people, politics, journalism, lawyers, and life. For
my craft, I learned the indispensable value of documentary research and
how to go about it. And I learned that documents mean little without
people to explain, or explain away, their contents. I learned that courts are
imperfect places to find the truth, and political chambers even less so.
And I learned that investigative reporting is tedious, glorious, and a hell
of a lot of fun.
C hapt e r T hr e e
Organized Crime
An unusual group of “security guards” was hired to protect cooperating

witnesses in the city council’s Kukui Plaza investigation. Where the chair-
man of the investigating committee, Councilman Kekoa Kaapu, found
the guards, or exactly why their employment was necessary, was never
made clear.
What was clear, though, was that some of the guards were downright
menacing.
Several had past and future connections to Honolulu’s underworld.
One, a man with the unlikely name of Francis Scott Key, was later murdered
in prison. Another, Richard “Chico” Avilla, had his nickname tattooed
prison-style across the backs of his fingers. He l ater served time for narcot-
ics trafficking. A third, Sherwin “Sharkey” Fellezs, had previously worked
as an informal investment counselor to one-time Hawai‘i organized crime
boss Wilford “Nappy” Pulawa and testified as a prosecution witness when
Pulawa was convicted of federal tax crimes.
In an encounter with Fellezs one evening at city hall, we shook hands,
and he pressed a fat l ittle joint of “pakalolo” (the pidgin term for marijuana)
into my hand. I didn’t want to offend him by giving it back, so I held onto
it. It was just his way of saying hello, I figured. What did I know?
I changed my mind about that after Fellezs called me several days later.
“You know, when I wen’ see you da odda night, was Tuesday, yeah?” he
said.
“No,” I said, “it was Wednesday.”
“No, brah, was Tuesday. You rememba?”
“I remember. It was Wednesday.”
20
Or
ga
nized Crime 21
“You shua?”
“Positive.”
“Cuz, some guys like know whea I was Tuesday. I tot I was witchu.”
“Not me,” I said, getting the message that he wanted me to alibi him.
“I saw you Wednesday.”
“Oh, okay. Catch you layta.”
I didn’t know what he was doing Tuesday night, but I was glad I wasn’t
there. Later, though, I decided that he probably wasn’t doing anything at all
that night but was just sizing me up. First, I hadn’t said anything when he
passed me pakalolo. Then he sounded out my willingness to tell a lie for
him. I’m not sure if I failed the test or passed it, but he never tried to slip me
weed after that.
We stayed on friendly terms, however. Fellezs later helped me out on sev-
eral stories, including one about his days as a protected witness in the Pul-
awa case. He and other witnesses had been housed in a building at the
Makapu‘u Light House, built on a remote headland hundreds of feet above
the Pacific Ocean on Oahu’s southern shoreline. Protected by U.S. Mar-
shals, the witnesses were ferried by helicopter to and from the courthouse.
Francis Scott Key, Chico Avilla, Sharkey Fellezs, Nappy Pulawa . . . just
the names alone made good copy.
When Kukui Plaza finally wound down, I had developed a taste for in-
vestigative journalism and thought it was time for a move.
I was still nominally assigned to the city hall beat, but the atmosphere
there was a bit tense. During a break in the bribery trial, when I was stand-
ing outside the courtroom on what is now the second floor of the supreme
court building, Fasi came out of court, saw me, and quickly walked up. My
back was against a balustrade that circled the central rotunda, and I braced
myself when the mayor advanced on me so quickly.
He didn’t say anything, but the expression on his face, and the look in
his eyes, made me think that he r eally wanted to push me over that railing.
When I flinched defensively, he smiled, shook his head, and walked away.
Also during the trial, my colleague Gerald Kato and I went to the office
of mayoral spokesman Jim Loomis, seeking follow-up reaction to a story
we had run that morning.
Loomis hadn’t wanted to say much the day before, when special prose-
cutor Grant Cooper accused Loomis in court of perjuring himself during
earlier testimony before the city council.1 (No charge was ever filed against
Loomis.)
When Kato and I walked into Loomis’ office, we found him literally
speechless with anger. He had a copy of the newspaper on his desk, and he
grabbed it, jumped up, and began waving it at us, shouting incoherently.
22 Chapter 3
Then he threw the paper on the floor and kicked it into a corner. Gerry and
I watched as Loomis yelled imprecations and stomped the newspaper. We
took it as another “no comment” and made ourselves scarce.
So I thought the timing might be right for a move to another beat. The
switch to investigative reporting was complicated because the Advertiser
had only recently hired Walter Wright from the Seattle Post Intelligencer to
do full-time investigative work. But when I asked for the chance to try it
myself, Editor George Chaplin, Managing Editor Buck Buchwach, and City
Editor Gerry Keir agreed on a trial basis. The decision would give all of us
occasional heartburn in subsequent years. Investigative reporting is by its
nature aggressive. Editors are cautious creatures. The mixture makes every-
body bilious at one time or another.
But my overall experience with editors when the Advertiser was locally
owned was that, even when a story troubled them, they wanted to find a
way to fix it and get it in the paper. Too often in later years, editors looked
for reasons to keep stories out of the paper.
I wanted to take a look at organized crime in Hawai‘i. Kukui Plaza had
given me a glimpse of criminals and the criminal justice system, and it was
fascinating.
The Advertiser had a rich tradition of crime reporting, thanks primarily
to Gene Hunter, an associate editor of the paper who was in failing health
by the time I was hired. Hunter had come within a whisker of winning a
Pulitzer Prize in the early 1970s for his detailed and colorful coverage of
Hawai‘i’s often violent underworld. I pored over the stories Hunter and his
contemporaries had authored about Hawai‘i’s criminals and soon found
myself writing about some of the same men and a central theme of much of
their work: gambling.
Illegal gambling has always been a linchpin of Hawai‘i organized crime
and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Here’s the lead from a story I wrote two decades ago about the local
syndicate: “The recipe for organized crime in Hawaii has been a simple
one, first written in the 1960’s: Take gambling revenue and mix it with
liberal amounts of bloodshed. The recipe has been seasoned along the way
with other traditional ingredients of organized crime activity—narcotics
trafficking, prostitution and pornography, labor racketeering—but gam-
bling has always been the traditional mainstay.”2
The Hawai‘i Crime Commission in 1978 pegged the beginning of orga
nized crime in the state to the early 1960s, when “a group of thugs, known
as the Pakes [pronounced paw-KAYS] or Orientals, led by Yobo Chung, be-
gan to extort professional gamblers on Oahu who sponsored gambling
events.”3
Or
ga
nized Crime 23
“Organ ized criminals rely on terroristic threatening and violence to

establish monopolistic gambling territories for themselves, or to prey on
smaller gamblers for protection money,” the commission reported.4
Once in control of gambling, the report said, organ ized criminals
extended their reach into other criminal endeavors, such as narcotics
trafficking.5
Hawai‘i is one of two states in the u nion without any form of legalized
gambling. (Utah is the other.) Every year bills are introduced at the state
legislature to approve some form of gaming. They fizzle every year.
Just a few years ago, when I was working for the online news publica-
tion Hawai‘i Reporter, I wrote a story about last-minute, backroom legisla-
tive maneuvering for passage of a bill allowing casino gambling in Hawai‘i.
A bill that had nothing to do with gambling had been gutted and re-
placed with pro-gaming language. But the measure was short-lived.
“Like Frankenstein, the bill-w ith-a-new-brain lived only briefly,” I
wrote.
“Senate Bill 1247 proposed creation of a gambling casino in Waikiki. It
died today but one of its backers, lobbyist John Radcliffe, said it is sure to
rise again.” 6
Radcliffe l ater told me, à la Gene Wilder, to refer to him in the f uture as
“Fronkenshteen.”
He has reanimated the creature annually for decades, and I am confi-
dent he will continue to do so.
Lacking legal outlets for their love of wagering, planeloads of local
gamblers regularly jet off to Las Vegas, where they are valued customers at
casinos like the California H otel, which makes sure that food favorites
from Hawai‘i like Spam musubi and boiled peanuts are on the restaurant
menus.
The appetite for gambling is so strong in the Islands that underground
casinos, chicken fights, and sports books are always in operation.
To a certain extent, the attitude of local law enforcement and lawmakers
toward illegal gambling has been rather laissez faire—the allure of illicit
gaming is durable and recognized as an essentially ineradicable activity
that is legal elsewhere in the country. And professional gamblers—the
people who make a living at it by operating games, paying protection, col-
lecting debts, and washing money—are a very valuable and reliable source
of intelligence to law enforcement about more serious felonies like drug
trafficking that flourish in the shadows of illegal gambling.
As waves of immigrants arrived in Hawai‘i from Asia and the Pacific
region, they commonly brought with them more relaxed attitudes toward
gambling. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Samoan immigrants
24 Chapter 3
have successively moved into positions of authority in the local underworld

through gambling activities.
In the late 1960s, things got out of hand in the gambling dens of Hawai‘i.
The local underworld, as Hunter and others described it, had been
controlled following statehood in 1959 by a succession of men—George
“Yobo” Chung, John Sayin “Seni” Kim, Alema Leota, and Wilford “Nappy”
Pulawa—whose authority rested on control and exploitation of gambling.
Honolulu witnessed an alarming increase in violent incidents associated
with turf wars over control of gambling and, to a lesser extent, other vices.
There were murders, spectacular car bombings, beatings, and kidnappings.
Yobo Chung, identified by Hunter and others, including the Hawai‘i
Crime Commission, as the first true head of local organized crime, was shot
to death in 1967 at a gambling game he operated on Maunakea Street in
Chinatown.
The murder, which was never solved, occurred shortly after a powerful
bomb had mangled the legs of Seni Kim and destroyed the brand new
Cadillac Kim was driving on a Chinatown street. Kim recovered and be-
gan a short-lived reign as boss before voluntary retirement.
Numerous other bombings, shootings, and violent incidents followed
in succeeding years as warring underworld factions struggled for control
of gambling and related crime.
In 1971, federal authorities combined with Hawai‘i law enforcement to
try to crack down on illegal gambling in the Islands. The campaign, which
involved dozens of police officers, federal investigators, undercover agents,
prosecutors, and court personnel, resulted in an indictment of seven men
on charges of violating newly enacted federal laws covering large-scale
gambling operations.
The case centered on a gambling casino operated in Club International,
a Chinatown nightspot run by career criminal Walter W. C. “Hotcha” Hong,
who had a record of more than 60 gambling arrests. Three years after Hong
and the o thers w
ere indicted, the case had fallen to pieces. Hunter reported
that one prosecution witness refused to testify, saying he “didn’t want to
spend the rest of his life on crutches.”7
Hong pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and was fined $50.
Another defendant, Benjamin “Benny” Madamba, was acquitted out-
right. A third, Joseph “Chocolate Joe” Kang, was murdered while the case
was pending. The remaining defendants paid fines totaling $90.
Official statements made at the outset of the case that it was a blow to
organized crime were never validated in court. A law enforcement official
told Gene Hunter in the aftermath of the trial, “What we know to be true
because of our intelligence system can’t always be substantiated in court.” 8
Or
ga
nized Crime 25
I studied Hunter’s archived stories of past crimes and criminal trials,

annotating them like a graduate student. I started making more contacts
inside and outside law enforcement and became a regular visitor to the
basement of the supreme court building, where old trial records were stored.
In those days, security in the file room was virtually nonexistent, and visi-
tors had the run of the stacks, free to choose whatever files struck their
fancy. It was Aladdin’s cave to me.
The building, on King Street just a 10-minute walk from the News
Building, is a Honolulu landmark and features a large statue of King Ka-
mehameha outside the front entrance.
In 1977, one of my newfound law enforcement sources tipped me to a
big story on the Big Island. Organized crime figure Benny Madamba—the
defendant who was acquitted in the Club International case—had dis
appeared from a Hilo bar several weeks earlier. A body believed to be
Madamba’s had been found in a sugarcane field. Two other sources, one a
criminal and the other a Big Island bail bondsman, confirmed to me that
the body was Madamba’s, and I was able to piece together a detailed story
of the murder, tying it to a turf dispute between syndicate factions led by
former Nappy Pulawa lieutenants Alvin Kaohu and Henry Huihui. The
story ran before an autopsy formally confirmed the identity of the victim.
Four men—Kenneth Lendt, Henderson Ahlo, James Palama, and James
Kealohapauole—were subsequently charged with the murder. Prosecutors
and police said Madamba was killed after he switched allegiance from
Kaohu to Huihui. I had met Lendt several months earlier. He had been in-
troduced to me in a bar by one of the p eople I met while covering Kukui
Plaza.
When the case went to trial in Hilo, I was assigned to cover the first week
of testimony because our Big Island reporter, Hugh Clark, was tied up with
other matters. Lendt became a prosecution witness, testifying that he helped
murder Madamba on the orders of Kaohu. Lendt owed Kaohu $600, and
the debt was forgiven after Madamba was murdered, Lendt testified. He
admitted stabbing Madamba but said that happened only after Ahlo had
caved in the victim’s head with a rock.
Ahlo, known as “Henny Boy,” was so strong that he could “tear quarters
in half,” Lendt told the jury. During breaks in the trial, assembled reporters
asked Ahlo if it was true about the quarters. He said it was. When we gave
him a quarter and asked him to prove it, he did. Several times. Ahlo didn’t
actually tear the coins in two. He bent them in half with his bare hands,
back and forth, until they fractured. It was very impressive.
Ahlo and the others w ere convicted and sent away for long prison
stretches. Kaohu was convicted of manslaughter.
26 Chapter 3
More than 20 years after the trial, after I had moved to television report-
ing, KITV news anchorman Howard Dashefsky told me one day that he
had met a guy in a bar the night before who tore quarters in half with his
bare hands. Dashefsky hadn’t caught the guy’s name, but when I checked
with the parole board, I found that Ahlo had been released from prison.
Henny Boy was out and about.
Several years after that, I found myself writing more stories about
Henderson Ahlo, the Honolulu Police Department, and Larry Mehau.
When the Madamba murder trial ended, I helped to cover another
high-profile homicide case, this one in state court in Honolulu. Nappy Pul-
awa, Henry Huihui, Alvin Kaohu, and another alleged syndicate lieutenant,
Robert “Bobby” Wilson, were in court on charges of murdering two men,
Lamont “Monte” Nery and Dennis “Fuzzy” Iha, in 1971 over control of Las
Vegas gambling junket revenue.
A deputy prosecutor on the case was Charles Marsland Jr., who in later
years was elected Honolulu prosecuting attorney. Marsland had been a
deputy corporation counsel for the city, handling civil court matters, but
moved to criminal prosecutions after his son “Chuckers” was murdered
in 1975.
The murder turned Chuck Marsland into a crusader against organized
crime with a personality that combined John the Baptist with Eliot Ness. If
you didn’t agree with him, you were likely a fool or corrupt and probably
both. He would tell that to your face in profane and very personal terms.
At one time when Marsland was on particularly bad terms with Adver-
tiser editors, I was asked to arrange a meeting between him and personnel
of the editorial page, including the dignified and professorial John Griffin.
It didn’t take long before Marsland was verbally attacking and insulting
the astonished Griffin, calling him a “flapping twat” before stomping out
of the meeting.
Marsland once got into a fistfight in the hallway outside his office with
a colorfully named local criminal, Penrod Fanene. Fanene (whose friends
called him Tommy) was angry because Marsland had called Fanene’s
uncle, former syndicate boss Alema Leota, “total scum” in a speech to the
Chinatown Chamber of Commerce the previous day. (Penrod Fanene, by
the way, is one of my all-time favorite local names. Heidi Ho is still at the
top of the list. Sterling Silva is way up there.)
The Nery-Iha murder case was a reprise of a 1974 state court proceeding
that had ended in a mistrial. During the first trial, the main prosecution
witness, former Pulawa lieutenant Roy Roosevelt Ryder, was given immu-
nity from prosecution and testified that Nery and Iha were killed in retali-
ation for the 1970 slaying of Las Vegas gambling junket operator Harry
Or
ga
nized Crime 27
Otake. Marsland and other prosecutors charged that Otake had been pay-
ing “appreciation” money to Pulawa—part of the $800,000 haul that Pulawa’s
gang collected from gambling operators, bookmakers, and others from 1969
to 1971.
In the first trial, Ryder implicated Pulawa and the other defendants in
the Nery-Iha murders, but he told a radically d ifferent story the second time
around. Like Hal Hansen in the Kukui Plaza bribery trial, Ryder turned
out to be a truly terrible witness for the prosecution. Instead of implicating
Pulawa and the other defendants, Ryder said nothing about them but
claimed to have slain Nery and Iha with another underworld character,
George “Fat George” Arashiro. Arashiro was no longer alive to confirm or
deny. His girlfriend had shot him to death in 1972.
It wasn’t the first time Ryder had assigned posthumous blame to
Arashiro for a notorious underworld slaying. In Pulawa’s 1974 federal tax
trial, Ryder testified (under immunity) that he arranged to have Arashiro
and another man, Paul Kea Lono, shoot Pulawa competitor Francis Burke
to death in the middle of an October 1970 day in the Chinatown district of
Honolulu.
Burke reportedly had close ties to Mainland mafia figures and had
served prison time for narcotics offenses. He was shot in the head and died
in the gutter of Maunakea Street near a gambling den he reportedly con-
trolled. The killer fled the scene so quickly that he ran right out of his rub-
ber slippers. A $5 bill was clutched in Burke’s hand when police covered
his body from the view of passing pedestrians.
Arashiro and Lono were tried but acquitted of the Burke murder in
1971—before Ryder had turned state’s evidence.
The 1978 Nery-Iha murder trial reprise was Ryder’s last stand as a gov-
ernment witness. In fact, city prosecutors desperately tried but failed to
revoke his immunity deal before he took the witness stand. With complete
aplomb, Ryder told the jury in detail how he and Arashiro kidnapped Nery
and Iha at gunpoint and took them to a lonely stretch of beach near the end
of Farrington Highway on Oahu’s North Shore. The victims were stripped
naked and forced to kneel in a grave dug about 10 yards from the shoreline
before each was shot in the head. Ryder expressed admiration for Nery,
who submitted quietly to his execution. Ryder used a pidgin word for a
local male, “blalah,” in testifying about Nery’s dignity.
“Those kine blalahs, they go straight like that. Everybody else screams,”
Ryder said. Iha tried to escape and was felled with a shovel before he was
shot, Ryder said. The bodies were coated with a mixture of lime and sea-
water before they were covered with sand. The skeletons were exhumed
after Ryder led police to the gravesite.
28 Chapter 3
During the retrial, Pulawa refused to stand for the judge or jury be-
cause he said that, as a Native Hawaiian, he was not subject to the laws or
jurisdiction of state and federal courts. Pulawa had already been convicted
in the federal tax case and was transported in chains from federal prison
to face the state murder charges. Based on Ryder’s new version of events,
Pulawa and his codefendants were acquitted, and he returned to federal
prison. Ryder was never charged with perjury because he testified under
immunity in both the 1974 and 1978 trials, and there were no other wit-
nesses available to refute his version of events.
Covering the two murder t rials, as well as Kukui Plaza before that, had
helped me begin to develop a network of sources and contacts in and out of
law enforcement. Those connections began to pay off after the Nery-Iha
case imploded. I began to hear rumblings about the kidnapping and murder
of an underworld character named Arthur Baker.
I located family members and friends of Baker and began piecing to-
gether a story about who he was and what had happened to him.
Baker was a drug user with a criminal record of two felony firearms
convictions. He had served time at a federal prison in California and was
awaiting sentencing for the second conviction when he disappeared.
He was a casual employee at a sleazy hostess lounge on the outskirts of
Waikiki called the Sunday Lounge when two or three burly men entered
the bar about 11 p.m. on the night of November 12, 1978. They beat Baker,
handcuffed him, and dragged him outside to a dark-colored station wagon.
The car exited Sunday Lounge’s parking lot on Kalakaua Avenue, turned
right on Kapiolani Boulevard, and disappeared into the night.9
Baker had also been working part-time for Hawai‘i Protective Associa-
tion, Larry Mehau’s security guard company, occasionally acting as a driver
for Mehau himself, sources told me. One friend said Baker worked at HPA
as an errand boy and general gofer. The company and Mehau declined to
discuss Baker but later said Baker was fired for bad work habits and because
he refused to remove a “Leota for Governor” bumper sticker from his car.
Mehau was a big wheel that year in the reelection campaign of his close
friend, Governor George Ariyoshi. And Alema Leota, former syndicate
boss, had mounted one of the most improbable gubernatorial election cam-
paigns in the history of Hawai‘i politics. Leota’s run for office was possible
because he had never been convicted of a felony. He had misdemeanor con-
victions for drug sales and several brutal assaults, but nothing that would
bar him from public office.
The son of a devout pair of Mormon immigrants from American Sa-
moa, Leota grew up in the Kahuku area of Oahu. In 1950, he and his brother
Reid first made news when they w ere involved in a violent altercation with
Or
ga
nized Crime 29
the elderly owners of a Windward Oahu bar. They broke one man’s jaw and
beat the other man’s face black-and-blue—all because the proprietors had
repeatedly asked the brothers to tone down their profane language.
The following year, the Leota brothers were arrested after they alleg-
edly threatened to kill an African American pimp in Chinatown. The vic-
tim, Henry T. Scott, refused to press charges, but Reid Leota was carrying a
gun and was convicted of a weapons charge. A police officer testified that
Reid Leota said when he was arrested, “If you guys had come five minutes
later, there might have been four dead Negroes.”
Reid Leota was sentenced to six months in jail but appealed and was
out on bail when he and his brother committed more mayhem. Another
pimp, Charles Levy Nelson, was shooting pool in a Chinatown dive when
Alema Leota attacked him with a pool cue. Nelson was struck on the
head and forced onto the sidewalk outside, where Reid Leota stomped
him to death.
Gene Hunter reported: “Nelson suffered a ruptured heart, a skull frac-
ture, bruises to both lungs and numerous broken ribs. It was then that po-
lice described the Leota brothers as having a ‘wild hatred’ for Negroes.”10
While awaiting trial in that case, Alema Leota was arrested on federal
drug charges. Police described him in that case as an underworld thug
known for beating drug dealers, leading the presiding federal judge to tell
Leota he was “one of the worst criminals I have ever had before me. You
are vicious.”
Leota was later tried but acquitted in the same federal tax case that en-
snared Nappy Pulawa. Two months before Leota declared his candidacy
for governor, the IRS filed a $26,221 lien against him for taxes owed when
he reputedly ran Hawai‘i organized crime with Pulawa.
Leota’s run for governor was a short-lived but entertaining chapter in
the Islands’ political history. His campaign manager was Ofati “Al Ofati”
Malepeai, a Waikiki fringe figure who had been manager of Don Ho’s
showroom for years. I would deal with Malepeai on other stories in later
years.
I was present when Leota took out his official campaign papers at the
Capitol. Asked why he was running, Leota said, “There’s so much bullshit
going on, it’s just incredible.”11
He later discussed organized crime in a television interview, using
words that w ere to be incorporated into a Hawai‘i Crime Commission re-
port on “linkages” between the syndicate and the government. “To say that
we have organ ized crime involves great government participation and
sanction,” Leota said. “It means that government is guilty because it takes
government help to make organized crime work.”12
30 Chapter 3
Alema Leota, who ran

the syndicate and
then ran for governor.
Honolulu Star-
In addition to helping out on the Leota campaign, Arthur Baker was also
working as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. One
family member denied that assertion, saying Baker had been approached by
DEA to be a snitch. Another acquaintance said Baker was snitching to the
feds. Court records and documents later obtained under the Freedom of In-
formation Act stated categorically that Baker was an informant.
DEA Agent Robert Aiu, a personal acquaintance of Baker’s, refused to
discuss the man when I asked. He said he c ouldn’t talk about “a pending
investigation” and referred me to his boss, who also declined to comment.
Honolulu Police Detective Manuel “Manny” Rezentes likewise told me
he couldn’t talk about Arthur Baker. I had tried to ask Rezentes about per
sistent reports that a professional killer named Ronald Kainalu Ching had
been involved in Baker’s disappearance.
Or
ga
nized Crime 31
Rezentes warned me about asking too many questions about Ronnie

Ching. Others also told me to watch my step because Ching was a very
dangerous man.
I didn’t have a phone number for Ching, but I did know that he lived in
a unit at the Chateau Blue apartment building on Kapiolani Boulevard,
near the Ala Moana shopping center. I spoke with the m anager of that
building, a sad little man named Thomas K. W. Wong, about reports that
he and Ching had been involved in an altercation in the Sunday Lounge
parking lot shortly before Baker’s abduction. Wong was uncommunicative
but agreed to tell Ching that I was interested in talking to him.
Ronnie Ching called me at my office not long after that. It was my first
and last interview of a working hit man.
Ching was polite and well-spoken. He told me that he knew I was ask-
ing a lot of questions about him but I should be careful not to believe
everything I heard. He said he had had nothing to do with Arthur Baker’s
disappearance. He denied being a contract killer in a matter-of-fact and
even pleasant tone.
Ching said he didn’t like p eople asking questions like that about him
but understood that I had a job to do. That was it. He wasn’t interested in
answering any more direct questions about Baker but said he would be
around if I wanted to talk with him again. End of discussion.
Ching spoke no threatening words, but he succeeded in completely
creeping me out. Up to that point, I had regarded him as a concept more
than a reality, but he clarified my thinking in a direct way. Ching was to
use the same m atter-of-fact tone in court several years later when he admit-
ted to committing some of the most heinous homicides in modern Hawai‘i
history, including the Arthur Baker slaying.
But that was in the future. I tucked Ching’s name away for future
reference.
For the time being, I had new fish to fry: the yakuza.
C hapt e r F our
Yakuza
While I was covering the Pulawa murder trial in 1978, a law enforcement
source asked me if I knew anything about the yakuza—Japanese organized
crime. I didn’t have a clue. The source said I should check out a guy named
Takeshi Takagi, a Japanese national living and working in Honolulu.
I was busy at the time and dubious. Who ever heard of Japanese
mobsters?
But I was told that Takagi and the yakuza would be worth finding out
about. So I made contact with Clarence “Japan” Handa, a Japanese-born
criminal who had been a prosecution witness in the Pulawa murder and
tax t rials. “Japan” had a heavy accent that grew even thicker whenever he
was asked about someone or something that he really didn’t want to talk
about. When I asked him about Takagi, the only word I could understand
was my own name.
“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy,” Japan said sorrowfully, shaking his head and
lowering his eyes.
“What, Japan? What’s the m atter? Tell me about Takagi.”
“Oh, Jimmy, no,” he said. He lapsed into Japanese and finally a brief
phrase in pidgin: “I no can say.” I c ouldn’t get anything more out of him,
but that was enough for me. Takagi was definitely worth checking out.
Takagi, I learned, was a Japanese citizen, living in a rented luxury home
on a hillside that overlooked Waialae Country Club and the posh Kahala
neighborhood of Honolulu. He owned a company that staged sex shows in
a subterranean theater in Chinatown, catering primarily to Japanese tour-
ists. Takagi was good-looking and a very sharp dresser. He drove expen-
sive cars, and he was missing half the little finger on one hand and the tip
32
Yakuza 33
Yakuza gang member

Takeshi Takagi,
smoking a cigarette,
departs Honolulu
District Court. Half of
his left-hand little finger
is missing. Honolulu
Star-Advertiser.
of the other. He was also reportedly heavily tattooed on his back. The phys-
ical characteristics were classic signs of a yakuza.
Missing digits and dragon tattoos! Here was a story that would write
itself. The more I looked, the better it got. Takagi was not the first yakuza in
Hawai‘i. There were others before him and more working with him. The
dimensions of the subject and the possibilities of a series on yakuza in
Hawai‘i were taking shape in my mind when Takagi was busted by Hono-
lulu police on a gun possession charge. The lead story of my planned series
was about to become public property when Takagi appeared in court to
answer the gun charge against him.
There were no other reporters in court when I showed up at Takagi’s
hearing at the old district court building on the edge of Chinatown. I prob-
ably could have held back on publication, but the decision was taken out of
my hands by a picture shot by Advertiser photographer Roy Ito as Takagi
emerged from court that day.
Framed in the courthouse doorway with his girlfriend and an associate,
Takagi looked like he had been centrally cast for the part of a high-powered
international hoodlum. He was handsome and impeccably dressed. His
girlfriend was very attractive, and his companion was menacing. The photo
was just too good not to use immediately.
Coupled with court testimony from HPD officer Donald Carstensen
identifying Takagi as a yakuza, the photo and story ran a fter the first day of
the court hearing.1
34 Chapter 4
Takagi and his l awyer had had nothing to say when they left court that
day, and when the story ran the next morning, I went back to court to cover
the continuation of the hearing. I had gone considerably beyond the court-
room testimony in the story, naming Takagi as a member of a Tokyo-based
yakuza gang called the Sumiyoshi-ringo.
Before the hearing began, I approached Takagi and his interpreter in
the hallway. How did Mr. Takagi like the story this morning? Did he wish
to make a statement now?
The interpreter translated my questions, and Takagi answered.
“Mr. Takagi says you have made a serious error,” the interpreter said.
I don’t care how ironclad you think your information is, those words
will freeze a reporter’s blood. I asked what the error was, expecting him to
say something like “I’m a businessman, not a mobster, and I’m going to sue
you for every penny you’ve got.”
But the interpreter said, “The name of his group is Sumiyoshi-rengo,
r-e-n-g-o, not ringo.”
I assured him that I would correct that error in the paper the next day,
and I was happy to do so.
I wrote another story that focused on two local syndicate figures who
accompanied Takagi to both days of the court hearing.2 One, Wallace S.
“Wally” Furukawa, achieved notoriety in 1970 when his brand-new Lincoln
Continental automobile was destroyed by five sticks of dynamite planted in
the engine compartment. Furukawa was a Nappy Pulawa lieutenant and
frequently used the car to ferry Pulawa around town. Furukawa miracu-
lously survived, suffering injuries to his feet and lower legs. The bombing
was widely seen as a warning, and a headline on one Gene Hunter story
about it said, “Wally Gets the Word.”
The car bomb was detonated on the same morning that high-level offi-
cials of federal, state, and county law enforcement had convened on the Big
Island for a first-ever summit on combating organized crime in the Islands.
Furukawa was later a prosecution witness in the Pulawa tax trial. Not
long after that, he pleaded guilty to participating in a massive bookmaking
operation busted by federal investigators.
Furukawa drove to and from the Takagi court hearing in a yellow Cor-
vette owned by the defendant.
The other man with Takagi at court was John “Haole John” Deems,
identified in the Pulawa tax case as a bagman who collected tribute money
for the syndicate from gambling operators. I watched Deems carry on
lengthy conversations with Takagi in Japanese during breaks in the court
case. I reported that Deems had become a close associate of Seiji Nakahara,
a top official of Sumiyoshi-rengo in Tokyo.
Yakuza 35
Organized crime figure

Wallace Furukawa is
treated by emergency
workers after his car was
bombed. Honolulu
Star-Advertiser.
I was always very interested in Deems and tried hard over the years to
get him to talk to me. He was the only Caucasian who ever occupied im
portant positions in both the Hawai‘i and Japanese underworlds. We would
occasionally talk by phone and later by e-mail, and Deems always seemed
to be on the verge of opening up to me. He was plainly proud of his achieve-
ments and wanted to share.
But it never quite happened. Deems died in 2011 after moving home to the
Mainland. I learned after he died that he had recorded a series of video remi-
niscences about his underworld activities that have been posted on YouTube.
I recommend them. He was a funny, profane man with fascinating stories.3
As I looked into Takagi and the yakuza story, I found that Japanese
mobsters had been living and working in the Islands since at least the early
1970s and w ere connected to local and Mainland syndicate figures in a va-
riety of ways.
36 Chapter 4
They were smuggling drugs into the state and guns out to Japan, as well
as supplying prostitution, pornography, and gambling services to Japanese
tourists.
I found that one kobun—a soldier in the huge yakuza gangs known in
Japan as boryokudan—named Wataru “Jackson” Inada had been murdered
in his Honolulu apartment shortly before he was scheduled to go to trial in
a federal drug-smuggling case that was linked to Los Angeles mafia figure
Peter Milano.4
Yakuza and their associates had been operating bordellos in Waikiki
hotels. One establishment, named Utamaro after a famous Japanese erotic
artist, had employed runners to pass out business cards on Waikiki Beach
to Japanese tourists.
“The Toruko [Turkish bath] Utamaro is like the enjoyment of watching
the 11 p.m. T.V. program,” the card said in Japanese.
The reference was to surprisingly raunchy television shows aired nightly
in Japan. (A colleague of mine who was an occasional traveler to Japan told
me that he was taken aback by the programming when he turned on late-
night television in his hotel room on a Tokyo visit. “It seemed to be some
kind of game show but the contestants—men and w omen—were seminude
and were riding each other around like it was a rodeo,” my friend said.
“Everybody was squealing and whooping and the audience was roaring with
laughter. It was amazing.”)
The Utamaro flyer continued: “You can be proud to say this is the best
setup in the U.S. You can drink and watch porno movies and have the ser
vices of a beautiful blond girl for your enjoyment,” the card said.5
Waikiki civic leaders complained about the operation, which was in a
detached annex of a major h otel. Utamaro was eventually closed, but I
found another operation, Hotel Tsuru, going strong in a different location
just a block from Waikiki Beach. The building was across Kapahulu Ave
nue from the Honolulu Zoo, so I spent several evenings in my car in the zoo
parking lot, watching the activities at the Hotel Tsuru.
Those were strange evenings. Occasionally I could hear lions roaring
and chimps screeching in the night b ehind me while I watched a raging
hormone show in front of me. In the background, waves washed placidly
over Kuhio Beach.
There was a steady flow of taxicabs and white Cadillacs with red roofs
that dropped off and picked up customers at the hotel, the same private
cars that had earlier serviced Utamaro.
At one point, Advertiser colleague Mike Keller and I inquired at Hotel
Tsuru about checking in for the night. We were told that was impossible by
Yakuza 37
the front desk staff. When we persisted, we were told that all the rooms had
been booked five years into the future.
A friendly cabdriver explained the Hotel Tsuru operation to me. The
price per customer was $70, $20 of which was kicked back to the driver
who delivered the customer. The proprietors were very suspicious of non-
Japanese johns, I was told.
Eventually I found a Japanese exchange student from the University of
Hawai‘i campus, paid him $70 to get laid, and then interviewed him about
the experience. I was probably guilty of criminal pandering and had to
really finesse that particular expense past the Advertiser’s editors. But the
story ran, and H otel Tsuru was closed not long after.6
Two months later, Honolulu police busted another prostitution opera-
tion in a condominium rented by three Japanese “students” in a very ex-
pensive residential building at the base of Diamond Head. When the cops
raided the unit, they found a dozen male Japanese tourists and three Cau-
casian women inside. Although a cache of X-rated videocassettes was avail-
able for customers’ viewing, police found three of the tourists in a room
watching a Japanese-dubbed copy of the Lassie television show.
When I checked with the apartment owner’s agent, I found that one of
the men who had rented the condo for $2,000 a month was an officer of the
company that had operated Hotel Tsuru.7
The initial yakuza series generated a variety of new story lines that I
followed in later months. One involved yakuza connections in professional
boxing. Kuwashi Shimizu, a former featherweight boxing champion in Japan
who had emigrated to Honolulu, had business ties to both Takeshi Takagi
and to Takatsugu Yonekura, a yakuza convicted of smuggling guns from
Hawai‘i to Japan.
Shimizu told me he had known Yonekura since high school in Japan,
when both w ere amateur boxers. Asked if he knew Yonekura was a yakuza,
Shimizu said, “You know, he don’t have a finger, he have a lot of tattoos, [he]
looks like the yakuza, but inside, he’s not. I like his heart, he so good.” 8
Shimizu admitted he had worked as a bouncer for nearly a year at Uta-
maro because the management there was having “syndicate” problems.
Asked if there was prostitution at Utamaro when he worked there, Shimizu
said, “I cannot say. This is a custom, you know.” Shimizu said he eventually
quit Utamaro because “I don’t like the syndicate. I don’t like the drugs.”
Shimizu explained to me that the boxing world in Japan was heavily
influenced by the yakuza. When Shimizu was learning the ropes as a
young boxer, yakuza would frequently give him clothes and money. “I cannot
say no,” Shimizu told me.
38 Chapter 4
A Honolulu boxing promoter who was in business with Shimizu and

Takeshi Takagi, Sukeji “Skippy” Miyashiro, told me that yakuza w ere
deeply involved in the sports and entertainment industries in Japan.
“Look at Japanese sumo wrestling,” Miyashiro said. “Whenever they win
a bout, they have an envelope that’s all kinds money. They [yakuza] give
them thousands of dollars, Japanese ways, you know. I hope the Americans
do the same thing.”
Another story line I followed led me to a yakuza affiliate named
Takehiko Nozaki who had worked as a federal informant and eventually
became the first Japanese national to be enrolled in the U.S. Witness Pro-
tection Program.
Nozaki’s role as a snitch surfaced when the feds went to court to revoke
the probation of Hawai‘i syndicate figure John Chang Ho Lee.
Lee had made headlines several years earlier when he was sentenced to
20 years in state prison for a robbery conviction but was given day passes
almost immediately so that he could attend high school football games and
go shopping.
Police were outraged when they spotted Lee out and about in the
community. So was the judge who sentenced Lee. “I know the man, his
record, and I sentenced him to 20 years—no conditions,” said the judge,
Allen R. Hawkins.9
But prison officials said Lee qualified for the conditional release pro-
gram, saying that he was being “intensely supervised.” Police and the
judiciary had no say in the m atter.
While under that 20-year sentence but out and about in the community,
Lee turned up as the star of an undercover audiotape recorded by law
enforcement. The hour-long tape recorded a meeting between Lee and No-
zaki. Its contents, plus testimony at the revocation hearing, made for a mo
ther lode of information for an enterprising reporter.
In addition to his state court charges, Lee had also pleaded guilty to a
heroin-trafficking charge—the same case that connected to the Milano
crime family in Los Angeles and ended with the murder of Lee’s codefen-
dant Jackson Inada. It turned out that Lee had been cooperating with the
feds and police in that case but never had to testify because Inada and Inada’s
girlfriend had been murdered shortly before the trial was to start.
In court, a federal drug agent said Lee “tacitly admitted” to murdering
the pair because he didn’t want to testify in the case.10 The girlfriend
died because she disobeyed orders from her killer not to look at him, the
agent said.
On the audiotape, Lee bragged about his organized crime connections.
Among the names he dropped was Marcus Lipsky, a reputed former Chicago
Yakuza 39
syndicate figure who later moved to Los Angeles and invested heavily in
the Don Ho show. Lee also repeatedly mentioned Ofati “Al Ofati” Male-
peai, the Waikiki denizen who had worked for years for Don Ho and had
managed Alema Leota’s short-lived foray into politics.11 Malepeai had been
partners with Lee and Nozaki in an importing business that brought fresh
tuna to Hawai‘i from Western Samoa. Federal authorities alleged in court
papers that the business was actually a “front for narcotics smuggling
activities.” In a long interview, Malepeai admitted to me that he had been
in the tuna venture with Lee and Nozaki but said it was a legitimate busi-
ness that faltered because of licensing problems with the government of
Western Samoa.12
Malepeai also was close to Lipsky but didn’t know why Lee mentioned
Lipsky on the undercover tape. “John does not know Mr. Lipsky,” Malepeai
said. He speculated that Lee may have been trying to impress Nozaki be-
cause of Lipsky’s reputation “from his younger days.”
Lipsky was once named by a U.S. congressional committee as a member
of the Al Capone mob in Chicago, where Lipsky was born and raised. Lip-
sky was also identified by federal authorities as a one-time associate of Jack
Ruby, the fringe mob character who murdered John F. Kennedy’s assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald, on national television in Dallas. Lipsky had lived for
years in Southern California, staying clear of the law and pursuing philan-
thropic interests and business investments.
Malepeai told me Lipsky was “a very influential man” but said Lee’s
words on the audiotape were “a lot of big talk about nothing.” Malepeai
acknowledged knowing many of the mobsters and felons named by Lee on
the audiotape but said that was because of his work for the Don Ho show
and other entertainment ventures.
“They come in, I buy them rounds, you know, buy them drinks, known
hoodlums, known guys,” he said. “Ever since I got involved in the night-
club business, I take care of the [hoodlums],” he continued. “Nothing il-
legal about that, but because of me doing that, I’m indirectly involved.
That’s a sad state of life. I’m indirectly involved and all I wanted to do
was help.”
Malepeai was very unhappy with my subsequent news story and
threatened legal action over it. He never followed through on the threat.
Years later, Malepeai was convicted in federal court of smuggling
hundreds of pounds of cocaine and crystal methamphetamine into the
Islands.13 He received a lengthy prison sentence and was dubbed “a local
organ ized crime figure” by the U.S. Justice Department.14
Yakuza stories continued to develop for me, as state and federal law
enforcement began paying increased attention to the subject.
40 Chapter 4
Four Japanese nationals carrying pounds of heroin concealed in duty-

free cigarette cartons were stopped by Customs agents at Honolulu Inter-
national Airport. In Japan, police searched the apartment of one of the
mules and found detailed instructions on how the courier was to carry the
contraband from Thailand and how he was to behave when he arrived in
Hawai‘i.
Then there were the yakuza who disguised their severed fingertips by
wearing false rubber pinkies when passing through airport immigration
checks. One successfully cleared immigration but removed the ersatz digit
before he hit the Customs inspection line. When he was asked to empty his
pockets at Customs, the phony fingertip tumbled into view, and he was
taken into custody.15
In 1982, a court source tipped me to a lawsuit filed in federal court
that concerned a proxy fight then underway for control of a local finan-
cial institution, City Bank. One of the parties in the suit had enlisted the
aid of a Japanese racketeer named Kaoru Ogawa for his help in the proxy
fight.
I had been collecting information about Ogawa for a year or so after I
learned that he maintained a home in Honolulu and was friends with Larry
Mehau, former HPD officer and convicted drug trafficker Raymond Scanlan,
and local businessman Charles Higa.
On one visit to Honolulu in 1978, Ogawa, who owned a large chunk of
stock in Japan Airlines, received VIP treatment at the airport, where a spe-
cial Customs line was opened for him and where he was met by Mehau,
Higa, and Maurice “Mutt” Matsuzaki, a state law enforcement officer who
moonlighted as an official of Hawai’i Protective Association, Mehau’s com
pany that held the contract to provide security services at the airport.
Ogawa told Customs that he was carryi ng $10,000 in cash and omiyage—
gifts for friends—that included live koi, the ornamental carp whose breed-
ing and hybridization had developed into a virtual art form in Japan.
Ogawa technically was not a yakuza, but a type of businessman pe-
culiar to Japan called sokaiya. The sokaiya made their living by squeezing
“donations” from Japanese corporations by gathering, then suppressing,
embarrassing secrets about the companies. For a fee, the sokaiya also kept
embarrassing questions from being asked at annual stockholder meetings
of major Japanese companies.16 Ogawa published a magazine called J&A
that he used as part of his sokaiya activities.
I got my hands on a 1980 Tokyo Metropolitan Police report that called
Ogawa “Japan’s most influential racketeer” and detailed his criminal his-
tory, which included a conviction for extortion in 1979. For that offense, he
received a five-year suspended prison sentence that was still running when
Yakuza 41
the City Bank suit was filed and Ogawa came to town in August 1982 to
testify in the case.
The Tokyo police report said that in 1980, Ogawa had collected between
$6.8 million and $12 million from as many as 1,000 of Japan’s most impor
tant companies.17
Through an interpreter, I contacted Ogawa at his J&A office in Tokyo
and asked for an interview the next time he came to town. To my surprise,
he agreed. Ogawa came straight to the News Building from the airport,
and we talked in a conference room for 45 minutes or so.18
He was quite candid in the interview, acknowledging his criminal
problems in Japan and elaborating on a $1.2 million claim pending against
him by Japanese tax authorities. He said he was not a yakuza but knew
many of the gangsters, explaining that they wielded considerable influence
in business, sports, and entertainment in Japan. He also spoke of his friend-
ship with Mehau, saying that he had once incorrectly identified Mehau as
Hawai‘i’s “godfather” in J&A magazine.
In the middle of the interview, one of the clerks from the city desk inter-
rupted and said I had an important telephone call. I left the room to take
the call, which turned out to be from a Customs agent who demanded to
know if I was talking to Kaoru Ogawa.
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Why?”
“Because there are a half-dozen of us who followed him from the air-
port outside in the street right now, trying to figure out why this joker
stopped by the newspaper for an hour or so,” the agent said.
I laughed and told him to read the paper the next day.
In a twist of irony, Ogawa complained in the interview that attorneys
for City Bank “had dug up this dirt on me” and w ere trying to use it against
him in the proxy fight—the same sort of business tactics that had made
Ogawa a fortune in Japan.
After the story of Ogawa’s visit and background was published, attor-
neys in the bank suit successfully petitioned the court for an a fter-the-fact
sealing of many of the records that had been filed in the case. The court’s
acquiescence in the sealing request rankled me and Advertiser editors, but I
had already copied the paperwork and publicized its contents so there
didn’t seem much point in fighting the closure of the records. But I didn’t
forget it.
Businessman Charles Higa, Ogawa’s Honolulu friend, had frittered away
a family fortune amassed by his father and grandfather. He was later con-
victed in a state court extortion case. Higa and two codefendants had at-
tempted to extort protection payments from the operator of a Waikiki X-rated
book and video store that catered to Japanese tourists.
42 Chapter 4
In court, Higa said he had ﬁrst met yakuza in Japan in the late 1950s.
The Higa family trucking business in Japan depended on a labor force con-
trolled by the yakuza, and Higa said he followed local customs by giving
gifts—money or sake—to yakuza representatives. After that, he said, he
met with yakuza leaders and was personally acquainted with the top three
bosses of the Sumiyoshi-rengo. Higa also said he had met twice in Hawai‘i
with Kazuo Taoka, boss of the biggest yakuza gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi,
and also acknowledged his acquaintance with Kaoru Ogawa.
The biggest yakuza story of all came in 1985, when DEA agents busted
two very high-ranking officials of the Yamaguchi-gumi in Hawai‘i on
charges of conspiracy to import drugs into the Islands and export an arse-
nal of weapons, including military rocket launchers, to Japan.
It was a huge coup for the DEA and the U.S. Justice Department. But the
case eventually disintegrated into a major disaster for the government. The
case foundered on problems with the main prosecution witness.
The charges depended in large part on an inform ant named Hiro
Sasaki, a part- t ime professional wrestler and so- called entertainment
promoter who met with the Yamaguchi-gumi officials in Japan and Hawai‘i.
A naturalized citizen whose real name was Tsuneo Soranaka, Sasaki had
mixed personal business with government work during the yearlong inves-
tigation, testimony and evidence showed.
While acting as an intermediary between the yakuza and undercover
drug agents who posed as Hawai‘i syndicate members, Sasaki was sepa-
rately talking to the yakuza about a plan to stage concerts in Japan by
American entertainers, including Michael Jackson.
How much the federal agents actually knew about Sasaki and the
concert plans was never made clear. But they plainly didn’t know enough.
Sasaki was paid $550,000 by the yakuza for the Jackson deal. The U.S.
government paid Sasaki $102,000 for his informant work. And the govern-
ment also paid to relocate members of Sasaki’s family from Japan to the
United States.19
The yakuza defendants testified at the trial that the main purpose of the
visit to Hawai‘i that ended in arrests and headlines was to retrieve the
$550,000 they had invested in the Jackson deal, which never came close to
completion.
Clearly, they were also interested in gun and drug deals. At the time,
the Yamaguchi-g umi was involved in a violent turf war in Osaka and
Kobe with a splinter gang, the Ichiwa-kai, formed by Hiroshi Yamamoto
after he was passed over for ascension to the oyabun—boss—position of
Yamaguchi-gumi.
Yakuza 43
In January 1985, Ichiwa-kai assassins had murdered the new Yamaguchi-

gumi boss, Masahisa Takenaka, older brother of Masashi Takenaka, one of
the defendants in the Hawai‘i case.
Takenaka and his codefendants, who included the Yamaguchi-g umi’s
financial officer, Toyohiko Ito, “seemed rather amazed” when they met in
a Honolulu hotel room with the undercover DEA agents and were shown
an array of weaponry that included automatic weapons, rockets, and
rocket launchers available for purchase, DEA Special Agent Robert Aiu
testified.
Takenaka picked up a rocket launcher “and suggested that this be
used to kill” Yamamoto of the Ichiwa-kai, Aiu said.20
“We agreed that in the near future we would kill this leader,” Aiu
testified.
The case had created immense media interest in Japan, and a large num-
ber of reporters from that country were on hand for the trial. The yakuza
defendants even had on hand their own attorney from Osaka, Yukio
Yamanouchi, to informally advise them and h andle media matters.
I discovered that while the investigation was underway, Sasaki had
been arrested by Honolulu police for allegedly trying to extort $120,000
from a Waikiki restaurant operator.21
During one of his visits to the restaurant, Sasaki was accompanied by
Todd Ariyoshi, the son of Governor George Ariyoshi. Todd and Sasaki were
partners in a short-lived ice cream business in Honolulu that had used
Washington Place, the governor’s mansion, as its mailing address.
Todd Ariyoshi was never arrested, and he told me that although he had
accompanied Sasaki to the Waikiki restaurant, he did not know what Sasaki
had discussed with the owner during the visit. He said he had met and
become friendly with Sasaki while taking a martial arts class.22
The federal case was further undercut when a shipment of 18 pounds of
amphetamines and four kilos of heroin bound for Hawai‘i was seized by
Hong Kong authorities who were supposedly cooperating in the investi-
gation. The seizure actually short-circuited the entire Honolulu case and
caused the DEA to arrest the defendants early—before the planned arrival
of the narcotics.
The federal court jury in the trial acquitted the main defendants of all
charges. When I interviewed some of the jurors later, they ridiculed the
government’s case.
“How much money did they spend on this case? A million dollars?
They got almost nothing out of it,” foreman Russell McLain said. He called
Sasaki “a crook to the max, a scammer. If there was a scam, he’d do it.”23
44 Chapter 4
Another juror, April Lum, said the jury simply didn’t believe the testi-
mony of Sasaki and defendant Koichi Maruyama, who turned prosecution
witness.24
“They contradicted themselves. They didn’t help the government’s case
at all.”
One of the defendants, Yamaguchi-gumi underboss Toyohiko Ito, told
me in an interview before he returned to Japan that he was d ying of liver
cancer and w asn’t expected to survive the next six months.25 Liver disease
is a common ailment among yakuza, attributable to their hard-drinking
lifestyles and perhaps to the toxicity of the traditional inks and needles
used in the tattooing process. In 2008 and 2009, the Los Angeles Times, Wash-
ington Post, and 60 Minutes produced stories, based on the reporting of
Tokyo-based journalist Jake Adelstein, on four liver transplants that had
been performed on yakuza gang leaders at the UCLA Medical School.
Ito of the Yamaguchi-gumi was not among the transplant patients. He
told me in 1985 that he was resigned to his imminent death. “It is my fate,”
he said.
He complained about the undercover nature of the investigation
mounted against him, part of which was conducted in Japan. Such tactics
should have been “unthinkable” in his home country, Ito said.
“I intend to discuss this matter when I return home with Mr. Shintaro
Abe, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is an acquaintance of mine,”
Ito said.
Ito was serious. The yakuza wielded enormous political influence in
Japanese society, operating from public offices that were emblazoned with
their gang names and logos.
The Japanese National Police compiled a list of more than 100,000 offi-
cially recognized yakuza gang members and distributed the list to Japa
nese media. I was given a copy, complete with an English translation of the
names and gangs, by one of the many reporters who covered the trial for
Japanese media.
I became good friends with one reporter, Naoji Shibata of the Asahi
Shimbun newspaper, and also maintained contact with Yukio Yamanouchi,
the Yamaguchi-g umi lawyer based in Osaka. Both men would be very
helpful when I finally visited Japan on more yakuza-related stories that
focused on the sport of golf.
C hapt e r F iv e
Yakuza, Inc.
The tsunami of Japanese investment that washed over Hawai‘i and much
of the world in the late 1980s brought with it a multitude of new yakuza
stories.
It was really a fish-i n-t he-barrel exercise for me. Over and over again,
I found yakuza connections or criminal histories in the backgrounds of men
and companies investing in real estate, particularly golf courses, and other
businesses in Hawai‘i and on the Mainland.
To a large degree, these connections were a function of the role the
yakuza played in Japanese society, particularly in real estate development,
construction, and speculation, which produced many of the biggest players
in this new wave of investments. Repeatedly, when I asked these men, or
their advisers, about their yakuza connections, they said yes, they had them,
but they were unavoidable.
The president of the company that bought the beautiful Turtle Bay
resort on the North Shore of Oahu had been a member of the Yamaguchi-
gumi. He was deported home after his background was made public.1
The developer of a brand-new golf course in the Mauanawili Valley area
of Oahu, who made his fortune in the pachinko parlor warrens of Osaka,
likewise was sent home after it was discovered that he had failed to dis-
close a criminal history when he applied for a U.S. visa.2
The man who bought picturesque Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay,
multimillionaire Katsuhiro Kawaguchi, was repeatedly identified by re-
spected Japanese news media as a jiage-ya, a type of real estate speculator
who used yakuza to evict tenants from commercial and residential proper-
ties he had acquired.3
45
46 Chapter 5
Kawaguchi was fined $100,000 and deported to Japan in 1988 for visa
fraud violations. Coconut Island, which was filmed in the opening shots of
the Gilligan’s Island television series, was eventually acquired by the Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i and is now a marine research center.
Kitaro Watanabe, a Japa nese businessman whose Azabu companies
spent $500 million acquiring Hawai‘i real estate in the 1980s, was connected
to the Sumiyoshi-rengo Tokyo yakuza group through a right-wing national-
istic group called Nihon Seinensha (Japanese Youth Company), a Tokyo Met-
ropolitan Police official told me.4 Watanabe’s Hawai‘i lawyer, Jon Miho, told
me the yakuza had “no connection” to Azabu’s investments in the Islands.
Miho added that yakuza-business ties were “a fact of life in Japan and I
think that many, many, many large corporations, especially those that deal
with the public, have to deal with these guys.”
Saying that yakuza had “control or major influence” over the corpora-
tions would be wrong, Miho continued. “But if you want to say that they
have to deal with the yakuza, or have dealt with them, or do deal with
them, I think that’s probably true.” 5
I found that Leo Orii, a member of the Sumiyoshi-rengo who was living
in a rented house on the Waialae golf course, had opened a furniture busi-
ness in Honolulu with the son of Sumiyoshi-rengo official Kusuo Kobayashi.
The company had sold rattan furnishings to the Ala Moana H otel, one of
Azabu’s Hawai‘i holdings.
When I knocked on Orii’s door seeking an interview one a fternoon, he
answered it with a six-pound sledgehammer in one hand. “I have nothing
to do with Sumiyoshi Rengo-kai,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I hate those
kind of people.”
When I pointed out that David Kaplan, a friend and reporting colleague
of mine who had coauthored the book Yakuza, had quoted Orii as saying he
was a member of the Sumiyoshi Rengo-kai, Orii denied ever talking to Ka-
plan. “I didn’t say anything to nobody,” he said.
But he went on to tell me that he was personally acquainted with Sumi-
yoshi vice chairman Kobayashi and acknowledged being in business with
Kobayashi’s son.
“Right-wing man, yes,” Orii said of the elder Kobayashi. “A nice man, I
know him. From my point of view [there’s] nothing wrong with him. I don’t
have anything to do with him, that’s all,” Orii said. Throughout the inter-
view, which took place on his doorstep, Orii kept the sledgehammer at his
side. He never brandished it, but he never put it down, either.6
The family of Ken Mizuno, purchaser of the Olomana golf course on
Oahu, strenuously argued to me that Mizuno had repeatedly fought at-
tempted yakuza incursions into his golf course developments in Japan.7
Yakuza, Inc. 47
Mizuno was later convicted of perpetrating a massive fraud in the sales of

country club memberships in his home country.
I turned out stories about the enormous pressure being placed on local
golf courses and country clubs by the influx of Japanese investors. One
local farmer, who was being threatened with eviction by a new Japanese
landlord intent on developing the property as a golf course, said in an
interview with another reporter, “No can eat golf balls.” That phrase became
a rallying cry for antidevelopment protestors in Hawai‘i.
Country club memberships were marketed as securities in Japan but
were nontransferable at most American clubs, which led to a dual-tier
membership structure at clubs like the Honolulu Country Club, where
local members paid $19,000 to join but “international” members paid
$150,000.
By 1988, most privately owned golf courses on Oahu were Japanese-
owned.
Virtually all proposed new courses were controlled by Japanese interests.
Some of them were on property ill-suited for commercial development. But
that sort of problem, and even the insanely inflated prices the investors
were willing to pay for raw land, didn’t blunt the buyers’ enthusiasm.
After much cajoling, Advertiser editors approved my proposal for a trip
to Japan to explore generally the new golf course investors and specifically
their yakuza connections.
It was a very hard sell. There was considerable expense involved, and I
was proposing a different sort of trip than, say, sending a reporter to cover
a football game or political convention. In those instances, you know you’ve
got a story before you get on the plane. In this case, I was positive the stories
were there, but I couldn’t absolutely guarantee them. I had amassed a great
deal of information and lined up numerous interviews ahead of time, so
the prospects looked good. The trip was finally approved amid dire warn-
ings that I was mortgaging all f uture travel possibilities of Advertiser staff-
ers and I had better produce. Ten years after I had begun writing about
yakuza, I was finally going to Japan.
The highlight of the trip was an interview with Masaru Takumi, the
number-t wo boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi, in Osaka. Arranged months in
advance through Yukio Yamanouchi, the Yamaguchi lawyer I had met dur-
ing the federal guns-for-drugs trial in Honolulu, the interview almost
didn’t come off at the last minute.
Underworld violence had broken out in Osaka shortly before I arrived.
Three police officers watching the home of Ichiwa- k ai boss Hiroshi
Yamamoto had been shot and seriously wounded during an attempted
assassination of Yamamoto by rival gang members. After firing automatic
48 Chapter 5
weapons at the policemen’s car, the assassination team then tried to explode
a bomb at Yamamoto’s house, but the device misfired.
Police then made a week’s worth of wholesale arrests, raiding the
headquarters of various yakuza groups and subgroups. While I was still
in Tokyo, attorney Yamanouchi told me by telephone that it looked like the
Takumi interview would have to be cancelled. But I had other research to
pursue in Osaka, so I went ahead.
While visiting with Yamanouchi and Asahi Shimbun reporter Naoji
Shibata at Yamanouchi’s office the day a fter I arrived in Osaka, the lawyer
took a phone call from Takumi, who had changed his plans and was will-
ing to do the interview.
Takumi was being chauffeured around Osaka with nowhere to go be-
cause police w ere raiding his office, Yamanouchi explained to me. Takumi
would come to Yamanouchi’s office if I still wanted to talk. Of course, I
said, but I noticed that my interpreter, a local woman I had hired for the
day, was clearly discomfited by the prospect of translating for a yakuza
boss. I w
asn’t going to lose out on a chance at the interview, and I figured
that between all of us, we would be able to figure out what was being said.
It was like the arrival of a head of state when Takumi’s car pulled up. He
travelled in a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes Benz limousine, and two
other carloads of his soldiers arrived in Jaguar sedans. With horns blaring,
the Jaguars barricaded each end of the block where Yamanouchi’s office
building was located, a block away from Osaka’s main courthouse. I gawked
out the window and saw Osaka office workers doing the same thing, peer-
ing down at the street scene from high-rise windows and doorways.
Takumi wasn’t what I expected. Discreetly and expensively dressed, he
was quite handsome and self-assured. Except for the fact that his right pin-
kie had been chopped off at the middle knuckle, he seemed more like an
entertainment celebrity than a gang boss.
An underling who accompanied Takumi was more the part. Stocky,
with a brush cut and gaudy clothes, the man told me he very much wanted
to visit Hawai‘i but was concerned that he would not get past the airport
inspectors. Did I have any advice? Rather nonplussed, I outlined the pro-
cedures for obtaining a visa, explaining as delicately as I could that a
criminal record was not necessarily grounds for exclusion from my coun-
try. Most individuals who were refused entry, I said, suffered the indig-
nity because they failed to disclose their criminal records, not because they
had them. The man’s physical appearance positively screamed yakuza, so
I advised him to dress as much like a typical tourist as possible if and when
he arrived in Hawai‘i.
Takumi insisted throughout the conversation that the Yamaguchi-gumi
was a fraternal organization, whose members were considered outsiders in
Yakuza, Inc. 49
Japan’s rigidly stratified society. Yamanouchi asserted that his client’s re-
marks w ere accurate. No one denied that the gang members lived outside
the law, but they w ere given little choice in the matter, the lawyer said.
“We are different from the mafia,” Takumi told me, “like Japan is different
from America.” 8
Takumi readily confirmed to me that Kitaro Watanabe, head of the Az-
abu Corporation, “has good friends among the yakuza.” He was puzzled
by my interest. “That he has such friends is not unusual. He has no yakuza
on his ‘brain staff,’ his business staff,” Takumi said.
He also confirmed that Kizo Matsumoto, head of the company that bought
the Turtle Bay resort on Oahu, was a former member of the Yamaguchi-gumi.
“That was a long time ago and there might be some speculation that he still
has something to do with Yamaguchi-gumi, but that is not so. He has noth-
ing to do with it,” Takumi said.
I asked Takumi about the truth of police reports that there were nearly
86,000 yakuza gang members in Japan. He said police badly undercounted
the membership rolls. “They only enter the names on the membership lists
after individuals have been arrested,” he said. “The police can’t keep track
of the lower-level members. In reality, the total yakuza membership figure
should be more than 200,000,” Takumi asserted.
He also verified for me that a businessman named Yasumichi Mor-
ishita, who at the time was busily buying golf courses in Southern Califor-
nia as well as making other American investments, had very close ties to
the yakuza. Morishita, widely identified in Japanese media by the nick-
name “Mamushi” (Viper), was a moneylender whose main company, Aichi
Corporation, charged astronomical rates of interest on its loans. Morishita
at one time had tried very hard to buy First Hawaiian Bank’s Japanese
subsidiary.
“Mr. Morishita has used the yakuza to collect debts owed to his com
pany, but that is only to make things go smoothly,” Takumi said. “In Japan,
if you have a friend who is a yakuza, that might work beneficially for
you. Just to mention that you have such a friend may be enough to make
things go smoothly for you,” he explained.9
Takumi and I had exchanged business cards at the outset of the meet-
ing, and when it was over, he asked what hotel I was staying in. When I
told him, he advised me to show the staff his business card when I checked
out and I would not be charged for my stay.
I later asked my journalist colleague if that was true. He assured me
that it was. For the hell of it, I showed Takumi’s card to the hotel staff after
I had paid my bill and was checking out. They w ere thunderstruck by the
card and fell all over themselves to assure me that I wouldn’t be charged
for the room, but I insisted and the charges did go through.
50 Chapter 5
A precondition of my interview with Takumi had been that I could not

use his name in the stories I wrote. Normally, he said, he wouldn’t mind,
but relations with police and government authorities were so tense at the
time that he didn’t want to further aggravate the situation by being quoted
on the record.
I did not quote him by name in my stories, but the pledge of confidenti-
ality was dissolved in 1997 when Takumi was shot to death by rival yakuza
while walking through an Osaka hotel.
After the Takumi interview was over and the yakuza boss and his
convoy of underlings had swept away, I went out for drinks and dinner
with Yamanouchi, a l awyer colleague of his, and my friend from the Asahi
Shimbun.
Before we left Yamanouchi’s office, the lawyer opened a walk-in safe
built into one wall and emerged with multiple stacks of yen. He stuffed the
money in various pockets as I tried my best not to goggle. Cash was king
in those days in Japan, and I was consumed with worry about how I was
going to cover my end of the tab.
We went to a seafood restaurant, and I was at their mercy when it came
to ordering. One dish consisted of some small dumplinglike objects with
an unrecognizable flavor. I asked what they were. “Very expensive” was the
response.
“These come from a fish?” I asked.
Yamanouchi searched for the English words. “Yes, fish, fish . . .” and
his eyes brightened when he thought of the right word. “Fish sheman!” he
announced.
“Fish sheman,” I thought. What the hell is that? Yamanouchi’s friend pro-
duced a large Japanese-English dictionary and searched for the translation.
“Go-nads,” he read. “Fish gonads!”
I took another slug of sake.
The main course was a pale-fleshed raw fish. I love sashimi, so I ate
heartily. I asked what kind of fish it was. “Like catfish” was the response.
“Very expensive.”
“Catfish is expensive in Japan?” I asked.
“Not catfish. Fugu.”
“Fugu!” I nearly shouted. I had heard about fugu. It is the highly poi-
sonous blowfish, considered a delicacy in Japan. It is quite lethal if not pre-
pared correctly. The best quality gently tingles the palate. The worst numbs
all of you permanently. My mouth did feel a bit numb, but after all the sake,
what did I know? My extremities were functioning. I smiled and said it
was delicious and had another bite.
After dinner, I feebly offered to pay the bill, or at least part of it. The tip,
maybe. They laughed me off. I doubt if I could have covered a tenth of the tip.
Yakuza, Inc. 51
On February 24, 1991, three years after my trip to Japan, attorney Yama-

nouchi was arrested by Osaka police and charged with attempted extor-
tion of a man trying to build a small commercial building near the offices
of the Takumi-gumi, the yakuza subgroup headed by Masaru Takumi.
Yamanouchi beat that rap and went on to become quite a well-k nown
novelist, regularly turning out books that featured yakuza and ex-yakuza
protagonists. Three of his books formed the basis for Another Lonely Hitman,
A Yakuza in Love, and The Fire Within, movies directed by Rokuro Mochizuki
that are considered to be yakuza noir classics.
I returned to the Islands and wrote a series of stories about golf courses
and the yakuza, l ater turning out additional stories about Yasumichi “Viper”
Morishita and Ginji Yasuda, another Japanese investor with long-standing
Hawai‘i ties, who had wasted a $100 million personal fortune by buying
the Aladdin H otel Casino in Las Vegas and running it into the ground.
Friends described Yasuda “as a proud but naïve businessman whose
silver-spoon youth and lavish lifestyle were better suited to the role of
gambler than gambling czar,” I wrote.10
After finding direct financial and yakuza ties linking Yasuda to Mor-
ishita and to another Japanese investor named Tomonori Tsurumaki, I tried
many times to obtain comment from Yasuda, who by then was seriously ill
in Los Angeles. The allegations about him were extremely serious, he had
access to a great deal of money, and my editors were very nervous.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Yasuda was terminally ill and would
pass away several months later. I sent certified letters to him and to several
of his executive employees and advisers, laying out my findings about his
yakuza ties and requesting comment.
The only response I ever got was from a television reporter in Las Vegas,
who had somehow gotten a copy of my detailed letter to Yasuda. This guy
informed me that he was preparing a story about the contents of my letter
and had the chutzpah to ask me for additional backup information.
I was appalled. Where had this clown gotten my letter? How could he
possibly contemplate doing a story based on my work, my years of re-
search? He primly informed me that he c ouldn’t reveal his sources and said
he was going to do a story w hether I talked to him or not. Didn’t I want my
viewpoint represented?
The guy was trying to muscle me and was using some of the same tac-
tics that I had used on other people in the past. It made me squirm. I eventu-
ally told the guy that I had learned that some of the information contained
in the letter was inaccurate but I wasn’t going to specify what it was. He
could use the contents of the letter at his own risk. That seemed to cool him
off, and his subsequent story focused on Yasuda’s financial predicament at
the Aladdin and only mentioned my letter in passing.
52 Chapter 5
My final foray into things yakuza was an interview with Tomonori

Tsurumaki, the yakuza-connected businessman who had partially financed
Yasuda’s venture into Las Vegas. The catch was that the interview had to
take place in Chicago. Tsurumaki had travelled there to buy classic and vin-
tage automobiles for display at Autopolis, a bizarre $300 million museum-
racetrack he was building on a mountaintop on the island of Kyushu.
I pitched the trip to Advertiser management and was turned down. Get
real, I was told, there’s no budget for this, and it doesn’t have much to do
with Hawai‘i. I blustered and sniveled, but it was no sale. Finally, I hit on an
alternative. I would use “mileage plus” benefits generated by my previous
work trips for a quick flight to Chicago. A red-eye flight would get me there
by 10 a.m., and I’d talk to Tsurumaki and catch a return flight the same day.
I could do the whole thing in 24 hours.
The editors threw up their hands. It’s not worth it, they said, but go
ahead.
It all would have worked out if Tsurumaki had stuck to my plan. But he
had other things in mind besides talking to me. Most of them involved
spending a great deal of money on cars.
I talked my way into accompanying Tsurumaki, his Honolulu-based
attorney, and other advisers on a van r ide to Old Volo Village, some 50 or
60 miles outside of Chicago, where acres of old cars were on sale in ware
houses built in the m iddle of Illinois cornfields.
Tsurumaki and his associates selected 10 automobiles, including a 1930
Packard, three vintage Corvettes, and a 1963 Cadillac convertible. The
sticker prices totaled $605,000, but after some old-fashioned used-car hag-
gling, Tsurumaki pried cash, volume, and “international goodwill” discounts
out of seller Greg Grams to get the final price down to $540,000.
“I’m getting slaughtered in this deal,” Grams complained in mid-
haggle.11
By the time we got back to the city, I still hadn’t been able to ask my ques-
tions of Tsurumaki and had to rebook a flight home. I arranged a pricey
overnight room at the same Swiss Air–owned hotel where Tsurumaki was
staying and was invited to accompany Tsurumaki to dinner.
It turned out to be a business meal at a lovely Italian restaurant owned
by car fancier Joseph Marchetti. Over pasta, Tsurumaki told me that he had
come from a h umble “country” background and made his money in steel,
agriculture, real estate, and stock investments. One of the purposes of the
Autopolis facility, he said, was to provide a recreational outlet for Japan’s
growing motorcycle gangs.
He acknowledged personal acquaintances with yakuza leaders, partic-
ularly Kakuji Inagawa, boss of a large Tokyo-based gang called Inagawa-kai.
Yakuza, Inc. 53
Tsurumaki said he had played golf twice with Inagawa, once as part of a
group that included former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka.
But he was not a yakuza and was pressing defamation charges against a
Japanese newspaper that had labeled him a financial adviser to Inagawa-kai,
he said.
Although he had been charged in Tokyo with extortion three years ear-
lier, he had not known that the collection agency he hired to collect a
$500,000 debt was run by an Inagawa-kai member, Tsurumaki said.
He had done business deals in the past with “Viper” Morishita, Tsuru-
maki said, but no longer worked with the man because he did not care for
some of his business methods. Morishita got his nickname “because three
years after he bites you [lends you money], the interest payments kill you,”
Tsurumaki said.12
After dinner, the group repaired to a riverfront warehouse where Mar-
chetti stored part of his automobile collection. Tsurumaki and Marchetti
began dickering over prices for some of the machines, but that all stopped
when Marchetti unveiled what he called his “pride and joy,” a replica Fer-
rari P4 race car.
Marchetti refused to take any offers for the vehicle, saying that only three
of the originals had ever been built and w ere worth up to $15 million apiece.
Then he fired the car up, and the roar of those 12 cylinders in that
enclosed warehouse space made my hair stand on end. I told Marchetti I
wanted to buy it.
My stories about Yasuda, Morishita, and Tsurumaki ran in August 1989
and pretty much closed out my explorations of Japan investors and their
yakuza affiliations.
I did produce one more, several months later, after Tsurumaki and Mor-
ishita made international news when they spent more than $100 million
each on European artwork. Tsurumaki laid out $51.3 million for a single
Picasso painting. Morishita paid $55 million for works by Monet, Renoir,
Gauguin, and Picasso. He even spent another $53 million to buy a major
share of Christie’s International, the London auction house. I was the only
reporter in the western world, as far as I knew, who had already publicly
connected these two men to each other and to the yakuza.
On one buying trip they made, they stayed in a Trump Tower apart-
ment in Manhattan, took in the Kentucky Derby, sported at Yasuda’s Las
Vegas casino, and finished the trip at one of Morishita’s Palm Springs golf
courses.
I wrote a summary of my findings about the two, noting that they w ere
“better known for collecting bad debts than fine art.”13 The artwork was
eventually seized by Japanese banks a fter the borrowers defaulted on loans.
C hapt e r S ix
Vegas
In mid-1978, a man straight out of the movie Casino called on his friends in
Hawai‘i for help with gambling regulators in Nevada.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board had denied a “key employee” ca-
sino license to Irving “Ash” Resnick at the Aladdin H otel, listing among its
reasons Resnick’s ties to organized crime figures in Hawai‘i and his asso-
ciations with “undesirables” in organized labor.
At one time in his life, Resnick had been a semiprofessional basketball
player in New York, where he grew up, but when I encountered him, he
was a gambler and self-promoter par excellence. Resnick had moved from
casino to casino in various Las Vegas management positions, always bat-
tling gaming authorities who had concerns about his murky past and shady
associates.
Resnick helped pioneer the production of big-time boxing matches in
Nevada, at one time working as Sonny Liston’s manager. The FBI investi-
gated allegations that Resnick helped fix the championship bout that Lis-
ton shockingly lost to Muhammad Ali, according to FOIA files.1 There are
even stories out there on the Web suggesting that Resnick had a hand in
Liston’s death.
Resnick put Joe Louis to work as a greeter at Caesars Palace, saying the
two had been friends since they first met in an Army lunch line in 1942.
The FBI identified Resnick as an associate of several notorious New
York–based mafiosi, including Charles “Charley the Blade” Tourine and
Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo.2
Resnick was a regular visitor to Hawai‘i, collecting gambling debts and
cultivating high rollers. He annually hosted a golf tournament on Maui
54
Vegas 55
called “Ash’s Whip Out” that attracted gamblers from around the country
as well as the Islands.
In 1973, somebody stitched Resnick’s car with bullets while he was driv-
ing in Vegas. The following year, police removed eight sticks of dynamite
wired to blow up his vehicle when he turned the ignition.3
Like I said, Ash was straight out of Casino.
In 1978, his problems with the Gaming Control Board came to a head
when he was denied a license to work as casino manager at the Aladdin.
Honolulu police had surveilled Resnick during visits to the Islands and
seen him in the company of undesirables, including organized crime mem-
bers like Masato “Tramp” Kawakami, a Honolulu illegal gambling opera-
tor who was also working as a Teamsters Union driver for the Hawaii Five-0
television show, Gaming Control Board investigators reported.
United Press International then moved a story in May that Resnick had
appealed the license denial to the politically appointed Gaming Control
Commission, which reversed the control board’s decision after hearing
from influential friends of Resnick in Las Vegas and Hawai‘i.4
Among Resnick’s backers were Hawai‘i Governor George Ariyoshi and
Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi. Ariyoshi said he wrote his letter at the request
of Don Ho.5 The governor’s letter said he had a “slight” acquaintance with
Resnick but knew that he helped Hawai‘i entertainers and “enjoys a high
reputation here.” Fasi went further, calling Resnick “a close personal friend”
who “would be an asset to any employer.”
But the letters w
ere nothing compared to in-person testimony delivered
to the commission by Hawai‘i state senator Duke Kawasaki.
To refute the control board’s information about Resnick’s ties with Tramp
Kawakami and Maui organized crime figure Takeo Yamauchi, Kawasa ki
said the Hawai‘i State Crime Commission knew nothing bad about Resnick
or his friends in the Islands. Kawasaki also assured gaming commissioners
that he was a friend of the Honolulu Police Department and had been
advised that Resnick had not been followed by HPD officers.6
Resnick also received glowing personal references from such notables
as entertainer Wayne Newton and Jerry Tarkanian, at the time the head
coach of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas “Runnin’ Rebels” basket-
ball team.
Walter Wright and I began looking into Resnick and his activities in
Hawai‘i. In June, we broke a story that when Kawasaki testified for Res
nick, his airfare and h otel room at the Aladdin had been “comped” by
Resnick. He had substantial gambling markers outstanding at the Alad-
din and other Vegas casinos when he testified and paid $32,000 in gaming
debts in June.7
56 Chapter 6
Resnick was the source for much of that information, although Kawa-
saki acknowledged some of it, saying he was a regular player in Las Vegas
and had been staying at the Aladdin when he heard about Resnick’s li-
censing problems. He extended his visit to testify for Resnick, he said,
because he believed the casino executive had been unfairly accused of
wrongdoing.
Walter and I pitched and won approval for a trip to Nevada to further
explore stories about Kawasaki and Hawai‘i’s love affair with Las Vegas.
We spent a week in the desert, eventually turning out a three-part se-
ries that covered the massive numbers of Island residents who regularly
junketed to Vegas and the ugly history of violence that was associated with
the junket trade.
Nappy Pulawa and Alvin Kaohu had won the dubious distinction of
getting enrolled in the gaming industry’s black book, a roster of mobsters
who were never allowed to set foot in a Nevada casino.
The timing of our visit landed us in the middle of the period covered by
the Casino film. Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the man whose life formed the
basis for Robert De Niro’s Ace Rothstein character, was a contemporary of
Resnick’s and active in Las Vegas at the time. So, too, was Anthony Spilotro,
the murderous, diminutive Chicago mobster portrayed by Joe Pesci as Nicky
Santoro in the film.
Walter and I noted in one of our stories that federal authorities at the
time were investigating Spilotro’s possible ties to casino company Argent
Corporation and its chief executive, Allen Glick, who was transformed in
the film into Philip Green, played by Kevin Pollack. Argent had just been
fined $100,000 because of cash-skimming operations at two of the com
pany’s Vegas casinos.
At the Aladdin, two executives (not Resnick) were under indictment for
allowing hidden ownership by Detroit mobsters affiliated with Motor City
mafia don Anthony Giacalone.
And the chairman of the Gaming Control Commission when Resnick
got his license was Harry Reid, later to become majority leader of the U.S.
Senate. In Casino, the Gaming Control Commission chairman was named
Harrison Roberts, and the character, played by Dick Smothers, was mod-
eled after Reid.
A Vegas character named Joe Agosto, whom Walter Wright knew per-
sonally from Seattle, was once caught on an FBI wiretap referring to Reid
as “Mr. Clean Face,” and I can remember Walter talking to Resnick about
the commission and “Mr. Clean Face.”
Lefty Rosenthal/Ace Rothstein didn’t get his license from the commis-
sion, but Ash Resnick got his, thanks to Duke Kawasaki and friends.
Vegas 57
The centerpiece of our series was all about Duke Kawasaki and Ash
Resnick.
When we arrived, we had major questions about the markers Kawasaki
had amassed at Vegas casinos and what had become of them. Walter and I
spent five days chasing down the facts. In my memory now, I spent much of
that time in our hotel room listening to Walter work the phone. The man
was a magician on the telephone. I worked closely with Walter on that story
and o thers, sharing a room in Vegas and later an office off the Advertiser city
room. I learned a lot of things from him, mostly the values of patience and
politeness and perseverance, especially on the telephone.
He joked, he rambled, he got people to talk about anything and everything,
and in the process he absolutely wrung them dry of information.
I marveled at the process, and it very nearly drove me crazy. “Why are
you wasting our time on that shit?” I told Walter at one point in our Vegas
stay. “We’re under the gun here. We’ve gotta get this information and
you’re blabbing on the phone with some secretary about her sick kids.”
“You never can tell,” Walter said, as he got ready to make another call.
I quit the room in disgust, and when I came back a half hour later, Wal-
ter was on his way out the door. “I think I’ve got it,” he said. “I’ll be back in
an hour or so.”
When he came back, he had a copy of Duke Kawasaki’s gambling rec
ords, straight out of Central Credit in Las Vegas. We had our story. I have
an idea about where Walter got the numbers, but he never told me for sure.
The records showed that during the period Kawasaki was in Las Vegas,
including the day he testified, his Resnick-approved markers at the Alad-
din increased from $38,000 to $80,000.8
Kawasaki and Resnick insisted that there was no connection between
the debts and the testimony. The senator told us that the experience had
caused him to swear off gambling forever. “I figured that the Good Lord
never intended that I be halfway lucky at gambling,” Kawasaki said.
Walter and I spent two of our nights in Vegas loitering around the Alad-
din until Resnick made time to talk to us. We were finally shown into his
office at 2 a.m.
“How ya doin’, fellas?” he boomed at us as we sat down.
It was the m iddle of the workday for him. He was busy, taking care of
customers, clearing credit requests, and trying to arrange personal wagers
on professional basketball games. He had one of his aides calling around
town to d ifferent casinos and sports books, trying to get the best odds for
him. The aide, who looked like an ex-boxer, was extremely harried because
he couldn’t get the numbers Resnick wanted.
“The fuck you mean, he won’t give it to you?” Resnick bellowed.
58 Chapter 6
“You tell him it’s for me? Awright, awright, call the other guy, all I
need’s half a point. That’s all, half a point.”
A very attractive woman found her way into the office. “Ash,” she said,
“I need your help. I need a physician.”
When she left, Resnick wondered if we were in the market for some
female company. We regretfully declined.
Several times during our meeting, a little man straight out of Damon
Runyon—purple shirt, yellow tie, pointy shoes—burst through the door to
Resnick’s office.
“Ash, Ash, I need my money, Ash,” the man said. “Gimme my money,
Ash.”
“You told me to hold it, I’m holding it,” Resnick roared. “Now get the
fuck outta here and quit bothering me. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
The little guy, who also had the look of an ex-pug, glanced at us as he
backed out of the room, still asking for his money. “He’s a degenerate gam-
bler,” Resnick told us. “We go through this every time he’s in town. Pretty
soon I’m gonna have to give him his money.”
Eventually he did, that very night, pulling open a desk drawer and re-
moving stacks of cash totaling $50,000 for the supplicant.
“Don’t come back crying when it’s gone,” Resnick said.
Then he turned to us. “Now look, you guys, I told you, Duke’s clean, he
don’t owe nothing, how many times I gotta tell you this?”
As Resnick told it, he had personally borrowed $30,000 from another
Aladdin customer to pay the balance that had been outstanding on Kawa-
saki’s account. So, no more marker, no more problem. We tried to point out
that, if anything, Resnick’s solution only worsened the senator’s apparent
conflict of interest. Resnick waved us off. It was Vegas. Things were different
there.
It was an entertaining evening. Walter and I asked ourselves later if
Resnick might not have staged the whole thing to meet our expectations of
a night in the life of Ash Resnick, Casino Manager. We decided no, that
Resnick played his life like it was theater.
Resnick took his show on the road to Hawai‘i once or twice a year, and
he usually called to let us know he was in town. If he didn’t, I would hear
soon enough that Ash was around and give him a call. “How ya doin’, pal?”
he would boom on the phone. “How about dinner?” Or breakfast or lunch
or whatever meal suited him. Meetings with Resnick were always arranged
around food.
One of Resnick’s purposes in visiting Hawai‘i was to check on the prog-
ress of a lawsuit he had filed against the exclusive Waialae Country Club
after he was banned from the club’s premises. The club, which hosts the
Vegas 59
Hawaiian Open golf tournament annually, never said precisely why Resnick
had been banished, but members indicated it was because he was conduct-
ing debt collection sessions there. The lawsuit was eventually dropped, and
Resnick moved his activities to another golf venue where he was more wel-
come, the Honolulu International Country Club.
He summoned Walter and me to meet with him one even ing at the
HICC to discuss a story we were working on about his planned employ-
ment of Norman “Katsu” Yoshino as the Hawai‘i representative of the
Aladdin.
Walter and I had already met with Yoshino at a business he operated, a
secondhand precious metals business on Kalakaua Avenue just outside of
Waikiki.
Yoshino had a history of association with local organized crime figures,
including one-time gambling czar Earl K. H. Kim, but no criminal record to
speak of. He was nervous about talking to us, but did so on the advice of
Resnick. We told him it would be like a dry run for questions Nevada gam-
ing authorities were sure to ask him as part of the licensing process.
When Resnick heard about the kinds of questions we were asking
Yoshino, he called us to the Grill Room of the HICC to straighten us out.
Yoshino was there, and he wasn’t happy. A lot of other people were there—
it was early evening—i ncluding some well-to-do and influential members
of Honolulu society.
Resnick told us Harry Chung, Mayor Fasi’s chief fund-raiser, was sup-
posed to be there to meet friends but couldn’t make it because he had been
in a car accident the night before. Yoshino told us that William Chung,
Harry’s brother and the chairman of the Honolulu Police Commission, was
a business associate of Yoshino’s.
Yoshino would periodically excuse himself from our table and leave the
room. I finally asked Resnick where Yoshino was g oing. “Oh, he’s got Jerry
Kaichi’s wife in the next room. She’s waiting for Jerry. He’s coming to pay
off a marker,” Resnick said.
Kaichi was a well-k nown Honolulu drug dealer, in and out of prison
on a regular basis. I began to understand why Waialae had eighty-sixed
Resnick.
Yoshino, who is the hanai brother (an informal adoption practice rooted
in Hawaiian culture) of former Honolulu mayor and congressional and gu-
bernatorial candidate Mufi Hannemann, told us in our initial interview,
“I’m a gambler. I just never got caught.”
He later changed that statement to “I used to be a gambler” and amended
it again by saying he had never been anything more than a social gambler.
We included all three quotes in our stories about Yoshino.
60 Chapter 6
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Las Vegas later found Yoshino to be
unsuitable for employment as the Aladdin’s casino representative in Hawai‘i.9
The last time I saw Ash Resnick, he was holding court poolside at the
Halekulani Hotel, one of Waikiki’s poshest venues. I got there just in time
to see Larry Mehau and another man I could only see from the back leav-
ing Resnick’s table.
“Who was that with Larry?” I asked Resnick.
He gave me the man’s business card. It was Tom Enomoto, a local real
estate developer and the chief political fund-raiser for Governor John
Waihee.
“What’d they want?” I asked Resnick.
“They didn’t want nothin’. I’m trying to sell the Dunes, and they maybe
got access to Japanese money,” he said.
“But Ash, you don’t even work at the Dunes.”
“I’m just trying to put something together,” he said.
Resnick died in 1989. I wrote an obituary that didn’t do him justice.
I kept turning out Vegas-related stories, some of the best ones about an
intriguing, Indonesian-born, Hawai‘i-based businessman named Sukarman
Sukamto, who made big news in Vegas in 1992.
A legal dispute between the Caesars Palace Hotel-Casino and Nevada
gaming regulators led to the public disclosure in January 1992 that the casino
had written off $4.2 million in gambling debts owed by Sukamto.
The casino didn’t forgive the debts because it believed Sukamto
couldn’t pay them. Instead, the markers w ere written off as an inducement
for Sukamto to repay some of an even larger amount owed and because
Caesars wanted Sukamto to keep coming to Vegas and losing money.
A baby-faced real estate developer and investor, Sukamto owned the
Bank of Honolulu, a nationally chartered, federally insured American fi-
nancial institution that he had purchased with his father-in-law, Atang
Latief. The Caesars Palace legal settlement also revealed that the casino
had written off $2.8 million in gambling debts owed by Latief. It’s not every
day that you find the owners of an American bank losing millions of dol-
lars at Vegas gaming tables.
A year and a half after the markers were written off, sources in Vegas
that I developed while researching the Resnick and yakuza stories told me
that Sukamto’s debts at Caesars had risen again to $3.5 million. He also owed
$3 million at the Mirage Hotel-Casino.10
In a three-year period, Sukamto visited Caesars Palace nearly two
dozen times, and more than $300,000 in room, food, beverage, and enter-
tainment expenses charged by him and his friends were comped—given
free of charge—by Caesars.
Vegas 61
In Honolulu, Sukamto bought Aloha Motors, a defunct car dealership

on the outskirts of Waikiki, then flipped the property over to the state for
more than $130 million and a tidy profit. It is now the site of the Hawai‘i
Convention Center.
Across Kalakaua Avenue from the convention center is a monstrous high-
rise residential condominium developed by Sukamto called the Waikiki
Landmark.
In 1994, I found that Sukamto’s companies and employees were lavish-
ing campaign donations on a select group of Island politicians.11 A total
of $55,525 was given to the campaigns of Mayor Fasi, Lieutenant Gover-
nor Ben Cayetano, city councilwoman (and f uture state senate president)
Donna Mercado Kim, and others. The donors included Sukamto corporate
officials and staffers, including secretaries, Sukamto’s bodyguard, and the
travel agent who booked all of Sukamto’s Vegas forays.
Sukamto’s friend, former Honolulu police lieutenant Manny Rezen-
tes, gave money to the same politicians on the same days as the other
Sukamto donations. Rezentes had left the public payroll and was working
at the time as Caesars Palace marketing representative in Hawai‘i. Even
Caesars had given $2,000 to the Fasi campaign. An executive told me that
the casino bought four $500 Fasi fund-raiser tickets “at the request of a
customer.”
The campaign donations were legal because all the donors said they
gave the money voluntarily. Sukamto said his employees could afford the
donations because they were paid well and received “attractive bonuses.”
Sukamto at the time was u nder investigation by the FBI on suspicion of
attempted bribery of state senate president James Aki in connection with
proposed development of Aki-owned real estate. Sukamto was never
charged, but Aki was later convicted of felony promotion of gambling at
his family property.
During a visit to the federal building around this time, I was about to
enter a courtroom to sit in on a trial when I was grabbed and pushed
against a wall by federal Drug Enforcement Agent Robert Aiu, the husband of
councilwoman Donna Kim.
When I protested and tried to get f ree of him, Aiu pushed harder and
said, “I hear you’re asking questions about my wife and Sukamto.”
One of the court security personnel came over and pulled Aiu away.
I knew Aiu slightly—he was one of the lead agents in the disastrous
guns-for-drugs yakuza trial, and I had talked with him once or twice about
other cases, including the murder of his snitch, Arthur Baker.
I told Aiu I didn’t know what he was talking about and that he had no
right to manhandle a reporter in the federal courthouse. I said that I had
62 Chapter 6
asked no such questions about his wife and Sukamto, and even if I had,
they were both public figures and fair game for reporters’ questions.
When I asked him who told him I was asking those questions, he said,
“Manny Rezentes.” I also knew Rezentes slightly—I had interviewed him
about the Sukamto donations story. Years before, when Rezentes was
still with HPD, he had warned me about talking to Ronnie Ching about
the Arthur Baker murder. He also figured prominently in the 1984 trial of
Ching and three other men accused of murdering city prosecutor Charles
Marsland’s son.
Ching accused Rezentes of complicity in the Marsland murder, some-
thing Rezentes adamantly denied. He was never charged in the case.
When I called Rezentes after my courthouse encounter with Aiu, he
claimed that someone using my name had called him and asked about a
supposed personal relationship between Sukamto and Kim.
When I told him that I made no such call, Rezentes said that, on second
thought, the caller didn’t sound much like me, but he hadn’t made that re-
alization when he told Aiu about the call. To this day, I don’t know who was
impersonating me or why. As far as I know, Kim and Sukamto were never
anything more than acquaintances.
But the incident illustrates the small-town nature of Honolulu.
Sukamto moved to Singapore in the 1990s and legally changed his name
to Sukamto Sia. For continuity’s sake, I will continue to refer to him as
Sukamto. He maintained an extensive business presence in Hawai‘i, in-
cluding his ownership of the Bank of Honolulu, and was a regular visitor
to the Islands as well as to his favorite haunts in Las Vegas.
In October 1998, the high-flying Sukamto crashed to earth. He was ar-
rested in Vegas for writing bad checks to cover massive gambling losses
there: $8.5 million at Caesars and $6 million at the Rio.12 A month later,
Sukamto filed personal bankruptcy papers in federal court in Hawai‘i,
listing more than $300 million in debts and $9 million in assets.
In retrospect, Sukamto would have been much better off if he’d just
flown home to Singapore and stayed there. But he pursued the bankruptcy
action in Hawai‘i, filing extensive details of his business activities and per-
sonal finances.
I began poring over the records and comparing them with other pub-
licly available documents that concerned the Bank of Honolulu and Sukam
to’s business ventures. The outlines of a possible story about fraudulent
misuse of bank assets began to take shape. When I bounced my suspicions
off an FBI agent I knew, I struck a nerve.
The agent told me, off the record, that the bureau was actively investi-
gating Sukamto and asked me to hold off on my story. Sukamto was in
Vegas 63
Singapore but would be arrested the next time he came to town for a
Bankruptcy Court meeting with his creditors. I could have the arrest
story exclusively if I held off u ntil then.
I was by that time working as an investigative reporter for KITV, the local
ABC television affiliate, and the promise of exclusive video of the arrest
of Sukamto by FBI agents was very hard to pass up. I talked the matter
over with Wally Zimmerman, news director at KITV, and we decided to
go along with the FBI.
On the appointed day, I arrived early to scope out the creditors’ meeting
room with chief cameraman Bob Guanzon. The room was in a private of-
fice building in downtown Honolulu, but it was technically part of U.S.
Bankruptcy Court, so no cameras w ere allowed inside. One of the side
doors to the room had a window in it, so Bob was able to unobtrusively set
up outside the window with a view into the room.
Sukamto arrived with his legal team, entering the room through an-
other door. After they were settled in, a door behind us burst open, and a
team of FBI agents brandishing guns rushed out, shouldering me, Bob, and
his camera out of the way to get into the creditors’ meeting.
By the time we recovered, the feds w ere ushering the handcuffed Su-
kamto out of the room. We got only some brief footage of that part of the
arrest.
We were bitterly disappointed by how things worked out. The agents
were apologetic but said we were in the way and had to be moved. I don’t
know if they did it on purpose. But we did get an exclusive beat on the ar-
rest and some footage of it. Nobody else had that.
Sukamto was indicted on 20 counts of wire fraud and bankruptcy fraud,
eventually pleading guilty to two main charges. Additional counts of fraud
and money laundering against his lovely girlfriend, Kelly Randall, and a
brother, Sumitro, were dismissed as part of the plea deal.
The Bank of Honolulu, teetering on the edge of insolvency, was seized
by federal regulators.
While the criminal case was pending, friends of Sukamto, including
Manny Rezentes, put up their residences as collateral for his $1.5 million
bail. Sukamto and Randall moved to a rented mansion in the exclusive
Bel Air enclave of Los Angeles. Sukamto told the court that he needed
specialized treatment there for a thyroid condition while he and Randall
awaited trial.
Before Sukamto was sentenced, some of his friends wrote letters to the
court urging leniency. I got my hands on one of those letters, written on
official letterhead of the University of Hawai‘i by head football coach June
Jones. (Jones was also a good friend of Manny Rezentes.)
64 Chapter 6
In the letter, written to U.S. District Court Judge David Ezra, Jones re-
ferred to Sukamto as “SS” and called him “one of the most wonderful per-
sons I have associated myself with” in Hawai‘i.13 Jones told Ezra he didn’t
think his friend deserved to go to prison.
Sukamto “could be a great asset to the University of Hawai‘i by giving
instructional lectures to our students. I make this suggestion as part of a
rehabilitation sentence, in lieu of custody time,” the letter said. When I
talked to the coach about the letter, he was chagrined to learn that it was a
public record. He declined to discuss its contents, saying it was “a private
letter to the judge.”
Ezra turned aside the recommendations of Jones and other Sukamto
supporters, sentencing him to three years in federal prison. Sukamto was
deported after his release and is forbidden to return to the United States.
In late 2007, Sukamto still owed more than $200 million to his creditors.
Randall owed more than $1 million.14
The pair married in mid-2007 and w ere back to living the high life. The
wedding, I found out, was staged at the plush Hotel De Paris in Monaco
with guests flown in from around the world to celebrate the event. Among
the guests were prominent Waikiki entertainer Danny Kaleikini and Donna
Kim, by then the vice president of the state senate.15
C hapt e r S e v e n
Bishop Estate
When things got slow at work, the Bishop Estate was always a source of
inspiration.
Created under the 1884 will of Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop,
the estate had developed over the next century into the richest and most
influential private institution in the Islands and one of the wealthiest chari-
ties in the world.
The princess had endowed her estate with more than 400,000 acres of
land in the Hawaiian archipelago and required that the assets be adminis-
tered by five trustees for the benefit of the Kamehameha Schools, an educa-
tional institution for children of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
Among the land holdings were large swaths of beachfront property,
including tracts in Waikiki that became some of the most precious real estate
on the planet. By the 1990s, the estate’s investment portfolio was worth bil-
lions of dollars and included a $500 million ownership stake in Goldman
Sachs, the Wall Street investment banking behemoth.
That investment was engineered by a wily and astute trustee of the es-
tate, Matsuo “Matsy” Takabuki, and earned the institution a 400 percent
return when the Goldman shares w ere sold in 2002 for $2.5 billion.
Bishop Estate also had another close connection to Goldman through
the bank’s former chairman, Robert Rubin. When Rubin became U.S. trea
sury secretary in President Bill Clinton’s administration, he placed his per-
sonal Goldman Sachs holdings in a blind trust whose minimum value was
guaranteed, for a fee, by the Bishop Estate. The unusual arrangement brought
both Rubin and the estate plenty of criticism.
65
66 Chapter 7
Rubin’s cabinet position gave him oversight of the Internal Revenue Ser
vice, which the five Bishop Estate trustees assiduously lobbied to protect
both the size of their annual compensation and the institution’s tax-exempt
status. The tax exemption and the trustee pay were regularly questioned by
critics who said the financial activities of the estate and the Hawaiians-
only admissions policy of the Kamehameha Schools violated federal tax
and civil rights laws.
Rubin’s spokesman at Treasury assured me that the secretary would take
no official action involving the estate.
In writing her will, Princess Pauahi and her haole husband, Charles
Reed Bishop, included a clause that eventually made the job of Bishop Es-
tate trustee the juiciest political patronage plum in the state. The will de-
creed that the five trustees would be selected by members of the Hawai‘i
Supreme Court.
Given that the supreme court justices w ere in turn appointed by the gov-
ernor and approved by the state senate, that brief sentence in the will guar-
anteed that many rivers of influence in Hawai‘i—money, land, politics,
justice, and Native Hawaiian rights—converged at the Bishop Estate.
I wrote my first Bishop Estate story in 1984, a time when its financial
activities were largely ignored by the public and the press.1 I found that the
estate, which for decades had been land-rich but cash-poor, was overflowing
with money.
The reason was a change in the state’s laws of land ownership. For gen-
erations, those laws had concentrated control of residential Hawai‘i real
estate in the hands of a few oligarchies. The Bishop Estate was the largest
of them.
Constrained by the terms of the will and by state and federal tax laws,
the estate trustees had rarely sold residential h ouse lots but instead leased
them for 55-year terms. After the legislature passed land ownership reform
laws in the 1960s and ’70s, the land barons w ere forced to give leaseholders
the chance to buy their property outright.
As a result, a tidal wave of dollars engulfed the estate by the early 1980s.
Yearly financial accounts that had to be filed with the state probate court
showed that the trustees collected annual commissions based on a percent-
age of estate income and had become very rich men.
In 1983, the five trustees of the estate collected $238,000 apiece in com-
missions. One of the trustees collecting that money was William S. Richard-
son, the former chief justice of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court, who left the
court in 1982 to take a seat on the Bishop Estate board of trustees. He was
given the job by his colleagues on the supreme court.
Bishop Estate 67
Another trustee was Henry H. Peters, a state legislator who happened

to be the speaker of the state house of representatives. Also serving were
Takabuki and Myron “Pinky” Thompson, businessmen who had been close
advisers to former governor John Burns, as well as Richard “Papa” Lyman,
another former politician who was both a descendant of missionaries and a
Native Hawaiian. Thompson, Peters, and Richardson were also Native Ha-
waiians. A later appointee to the board was Richard “Dickie” Wong, long-
time president of the state senate.
As more and more land sales were recorded, trustee commissions rose
accordingly, to the point that the trustees had an embarrassment of riches.
They decided to refuse to accept some of the commissions—after receiv-
ing an opinion from the IRS that the waivers would not be taxable—and
stopped disclosing their commission income in annual financial reports
filed by the estate in probate court. The trustees simply stopped talking
about their annual pay.
I learned that federal law required that tax returns of charities like the
Bishop Estate be open to the public. Charles Memminger, a competitor at
the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and I each invoked the federal disclosure law
and forced the estate to give us its tax return, which disclosed that in the
1987 fiscal year, trustee commissions had ballooned to $920,000 each. They
also voluntarily waived another $112,000 that they were legally entitled to
collect.
That was the high-water mark of commissions accepted by the trustees.
The following year, each trustee accepted $648,000 and waived another
$906,416. The next year, the commissions were $659,558, and waivers were
$690,000.
In 1989, a friend told me that Hawai‘i Supreme Court Chief Justice
Herman Lum had an interest in a restaurant called the Great Wok of China
that operated in the Bishop Estate–owned Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center
on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki.
Lum rose to chief justice after William Richardson resigned from the
court to become a Bishop Estate trustee. Lum voted to appoint Richardson
to the estate job.
I verified Lum’s investment, which was made through a partnership
called Lumleong Enterprises.2 The partnership invested $210,000 in the res-
taurant and signed a commercial lease with the estate trustees in 1980, after
Lum was appointed to the supreme court. Lum’s wife and son w ere officers
of the restaurant company, and each had put $10,000 into the venture.
I further found that Lumleong Enterprises had a long history of other
dealings with the Bishop Estate. It held two commercial leases of estate
68 Chapter 7
land in Honolulu from the 1960s u ntil 1984–1985, when the partnership
sold the leases for $2.4 million.3
Before and a fter Lum became a supreme court justice, he presided over
Bishop Estate cases. Once on the high court, he participated in the appoint-
ment of estate trustees. When I asked Lum about these apparent conflicts of
interest, he told me in a written statement that the estate had a “unique”
relationship with the supreme court that required the justices to act in a
“private capacity” when selecting trustees. And the estate was so large that
it exerted an inescapable and “pervasive influence” at all levels of Hawai-
ian society, including the supreme court, Lum said.
When Lum was still a circuit court judge in 1972, he ruled in favor of the
Bishop Estate in a lawsuit that challenged the propriety of the state supreme
court’s involvement in the trustee selection process. Lum did not disclose
to the Native Hawaiian plaintiffs in that case, called Kekoa v. Supreme Court,
that he had personal business ties to the estate worth hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars.
Lum was a circuit judge at the time of the Kekoa case but served as a sub-
stitute justice after all members of the high court disqualified themselves
from hearing the m atter. Lum and the substitute panel ruled that the
selection process was permissible because supreme court justices had no
“personal stake or interest in the trustee appointment decision.”
When researching the story, I located Curtis Kekoa Sr., the lead plaintiff
in the 1972 case, who had been a U.S. Air Force colonel at the time of the
decision and later had become a lawyer. He told me he had no idea that
Lum had interests in two large commercial Bishop Estate leases when Lum
ruled in the Kekoa case. He said he thought Lum’s participation in the case
was “inappropriate.”
“I believe that a justice of the supreme court who has an existing or
foreseeable interest in a Bishop Estate business lease or arrangement has a
personal stake or interest in the appointment of a Bishop Estate trustee,”
Kekoa told me. And Lum’s later participation in trustee selections after he
rose to the supreme court was likewise inappropriate, Kekoa said.4 A jus-
tice involved with the estate in a commercial lease could pick a trustee
“who would not be a threat but might be an ally” in later lease negotiations,
Kekoa said.
In fact, when the Great Wok restaurant ran into financial problems in
the mid-1980s, the estate granted a two-year deferral of its lease rent obliga-
tions, a Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center executive told me.
Lum’s entry into the new Bishop Estate commercial deal after he be-
came a supreme court justice was “tantamount to flouting” the state code of
Bishop Estate 69
judicial conduct, which forbade judges from engaging in improprieties or

even the appearance of improprieties, said Kekoa.
Native Hawaiian attorney Mililani Trask told me that Lum had violated
the “personal stake” standard established in the Kekoa case when he par-
ticipated in the 1982 selection of Chief Justice Richardson as a new Bishop
Estate trustee.
The Richardson appointment created a vacancy in the top job at the
supreme court and gave the remaining justices “a chance to become chief
justice and to have not only the additional pecuniary benefit but the added
prestige and political power as well,” said Trask.
In researching the Lum story, I found a recent supreme court decision
in a civil lawsuit filed against the Bishop Estate. In the decision, signed by
Lum, the court reversed a lower court ruling that had found the estate lia-
ble for damages suffered by the plaintiff.
The attorney representing the estate, former state bar association presi-
dent James Ventura, was a $50,000 partner with Lum in the Great Wok of
China.5
The attorney for the losing side in that case said he knew nothing about
the Lum-Ventura connections to the estate. “I can’t believe your facts are
correct,” the lawyer said.
Lum told me that his business ties to Ventura and the estate were not
enough to create an apparent conflict of interest.
The Code of Judicial Conduct required judges to personally decide if
they had a conflict in a case, and if they found no conflict, they could not
disclose the situation to the parties in the case, Lum said. So he had not
disclosed the situation to the plaintiff in the suit.
“The procedure is designed to minimize the chance that an attorney or
party will feel coerced” into agreeing to waive the judge’s potential conflict
of interest, Lum said.
But federal judges operated under almost identical ethical canons and
routinely disclosed potential conflicts to parties in cases they were handling.
“If you make the disclosure properly, you’re not coercing the parties into
agreeing to let you hear the case,” U.S. District Court Judge Harold Fong
told me. “You can never go wrong by disclosing it.”
In his defense, Lum told me that he had previously ruled against the
Bishop Estate in two landmark decisions that upheld the legality of the
state’s land reform laws that forced the estate to begin selling h ouse lots to
residential lessees.
In one of those cases, I found that the estate tried to disqualify Lum,
saying that his personal dealings with the estate raised questions about his
70 Chapter 7
“objectivity and impartiality.” But the court found that because Lum’s estate
deals involved commercial and not residential leases, he was not in a con-
flict of interest.
Lum’s rulings in those cases may have run against the interests of the
estate, but they made the trustees, including Lum’s former colleague and
mentor William Richardson, extremely wealthy men. In the nine years
Richardson served as a trustee, he was paid some $4.5 million in commis-
sions by the estate.
In the aftermath of my stories, and of increasing public outcry over
trustee compensation and the court’s unseemly alliance with the estate,
Herman Lum recused himself from new Bishop Estate cases and from cases
involving Ventura and his law firm. The entire supreme court later disquali-
fied itself from further trustee selections.
In November 1994, the Bishop Estate received unwelcome national at-
tention when CNN network business reporter Casey Wian revealed that
trustees had mixed personal investments with estate money in a troubled
Houston-based energy company called McKenzie Methane. The company
was undergoing bankruptcy reorganization in Houston and was trading
charges of fraud and bad faith behavior with the trustees in court proceed-
ings there.
I found out what I could about the case on the ground in Honolulu and
by phone with lawyers and McKenzie officials in Houston, but I couldn’t
manage to advance the story much beyond what Wian had reported.
I did learn that personal investments had been made not just by estate
trustees but also by employees and officers of the estate and the Kame-
hameha Schools, as well as by high-powered, nationally known businesses
and executives who had partnered with the estate in other ventures.
The specifics were available in bankruptcy court records, but I would
have to go to Houston to look at them. The editors balked. I had already
wrung approval from them to cover a criminal trial scheduled to begin in
early 1995 in Tacoma, Washington, that centered on a $10 million “prime
bank note” investment scam that I had uncovered in Honolulu in 1993
and 1994.
So I proposed continuing on to Houston when my work in Tacoma was
finished. That leg of the trip was very reluctantly approved, so I hit the
ground running when I got to Texas.
When I met with the McKenzie Methane lawyer who had all the rec
ords, he told me that he had recently retrieved the files from storage to
show to a Wall Street Journal reporter who was researching a big story on
the Bishop Estate.
Great. Now I was competing with the Wall Street Journal on the story.
Bishop Estate 71
The records w ere fabulous. Not only were there lengthy transcripts of
sworn testimony delivered by trustees and estate employees but also there
were videotapes of the testimony. A year later, after I had moved to tele
vision, those tapes would have been priceless.
The court documents demonstrated that not only had the trustees mixed
their personal money with estate funds in a disastrous business venture, but
so had other top employees of the estate. They all used financial analysis
commissioned by the estate to make the investments.6
Takabuki, who had led the McKenzie Methane investment decision,
turned out to be not so astute after all. He and his family members invested
$1.5 million in the deal. Three trustees also participated: Pinky Thompson
put in $510,000, Richardson ponied up $210,000, and Henry Peters (a former
state house speaker and still a powerful legislator) invested $220,000.
The remaining trustee, Oswald Stender, wasn’t on the board when the
investment was made. But in deposition testimony Stender delivered in
Texas, he described the personal investments by trustees as inappropriate
“self-dealing.”
Thirteen estate employees, including its asset manager and tax manager,
personally invested sums ranging from $100,000 down to $10,000.
All the investments were made through a series of partnerships orga
nized and administered by the estate’s financial assets m anager, Mitchell
Gilbert, who invested $72,000.
The investment vehicles w ere called the HAK Partnerships, which
stood for the Hawaiian words hu aina koa, Gilbert said in a sworn deposi-
tion. The translation of the Hawaiian phrase, Gilbert said, was “an efferves-
cent production up from the ground.”
In addition, Gilbert used estate stationery to solicit influential “invest-
ment affiliates” of the estate to join in the partnerships with the trustees
and employees.
Some of the affiliates who put in personal money were Dave Thomas,
founder of the Wendy’s chain of fast-food restaurants; former U.S. Treasury
Secretary William Simon; Ted Field, heir to the Chicago-based Marshall
Field department store fortune; and even the estate’s high-powered tax
lawyer and lobbyist, Mark McConaghy, who worked in Washington, D.C.
Gilbert said he wrote the solicitation letters in a personal capacity and
not as an estate employee, acknowledging in his deposition that he should
not have used estate stationery. And he should not have signed them as the
estate’s financial assets manager, he said.
Copies of the letters were cc’d to Takabuki, who apparently raised no
objection but did say under questioning later that Gilbert should not have
sent the solicitations. “It’s not a Bishop Estate investment,” Takabuki said.7
72 Chapter 7
A Bishop Estate Texas lawyer said that the estate could hope to recover
only $20 million of its $85 million investment.
“Disaster . . . is the only word for it,” the lawyer, D. J. Baker, said in court
papers.
Estate lawyers and press representatives stoutly defended the propriety
of the deal but admitted that a new policy had been put in effect that pro-
hibited employees’ personal investments in estate ventures.
Other estate watchers harshly criticized the mixture of personal and
professional interests. And the McKenzie deal would later play a significant
role in the “Broken Trust” essay and subsequent cataclysms that engulfed
the estate.
I continued turning out significant exclusives about the estate and its
far-flung and peculiar investments. One involved trustee Lokelani Lindsey,
whose tyrannical be havior at Kamehameha Schools later sparked a
wholesale revolt against the estate by school employees, teachers, students,
and alumni.
Lindsey, while pulling down $850,000 in annual estate compensation,
had used estate staff to h andle zoning and building permit work for a
small beach home she owned on Windward Oahu.8
Later, I managed to play a background role in a criminal case that sent
Lindsey and her sister to prison. It wasn’t meant to be a background role. I
was just after a story.
I had moved to television when Advertiser reporter Sally Apgar wrote
a lengthy story about Lindsey’s personal finances, mentioning in passing
a significant investment she shared with her sister Marlene.
I knew that Marlene, a hairdresser and real estate agent, was g oing
through personal bankruptcy at the time. When I checked her bankruptcy
filings, I could find no mention of that financial holding.
I hadn’t written the story and didn’t know enough of the background to
write knowledgeably on the issue, so I called an official at bankruptcy court
and alerted him to the contents of Apgar’s story. He was interested and said
he would check into it and try to let me know what he found out. Months
later, I was surprised to learn that the Lindsey sisters had been indicted for
bankruptcy fraud. They had conspired to hide the asset mentioned in Ap-
gar’s story from Marlene’s creditors.
I called my contact at bankruptcy court and said, hey, I thought you were
going to keep me in the loop on this. What happened? He apologized but
said the FBI had taken control of the investigation and left him in the dark,
too. I never had much luck when the FBI got involved in bankruptcy cases.
The Lindsey sisters were each sentenced to six months in prison.
Bishop Estate 73
While still at the Advertiser in 1995, I noticed a cooling of interest by the

editors for Bishop Estate stories. I continued to turn them out, however.
Here’s the lead from one, written in April 1995: “Just past the rural
Virginia town of Gainesville on Highway 29, an hour’s drive from Wash-
ington, D.C., sits a little corner of Hawaii’s mighty Bishop Estate.
“Like some other estate investments spotlighted by The Advertiser this
year, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club has struggled financially.” 9
The story went on to say that the estate had initially guaranteed a $40
million loan to build a championship course on 210 acres of land on the
shores of man-made Lake Manassas.
I found members of the club who complained to me about the estate trust-
ees’ management of the club after they assumed direct control of the project
in 1994. Construction of 100 cottages on half-acre lots was far behind
schedule, as were sales of club memberships, priced at initiation fees of
$50,000 to $70,000. Club members wanted to buy out the remainder of the
loan, pegged then at a value of about $18 million. One complained to me that
members were “totally in the dark about what’s happening and we know
nothing about any purchase options.”
I had heard very similar complaints over the years from Honolulu resi-
dents trying to buy the land under their homes from the estate.
Trustee Henry Peters later came in for very harsh legal criticism be-
cause he simultaneously managed to negotiate for both sides in the golf
course sale talks. Critics wondered why a charity dedicated to the education
of Hawaiian children was building playgrounds for the rich and powerful
5,000 miles from home.
The estate refused all comment on the RTJ investment. We w ere re-
buffed when we asked permission for a photographer to take a picture of
the ornate Pauahi Room inside the clubhouse. They w ouldn’t let us on the
property.
Not long after that story ran, an assistant city editor at the newspaper
took me aside and said that the Advertiser publisher had directed that we
back off the Bishop Estate.
“Readers are tired of them,” I was informed.
I wasn’t told which readers, but I suspected some of them worked across
South Street from the News Building, in the headquarters of the Bishop
Estate.
Gannett Corporation had recently bought the Advertiser and dumped
ownership of the rival Star-Bulletin. Newsroom gossip said that Gannett
officials—k nown to some as Gannettoids and to o thers as Gannettalia—
first delivered the bad news to Star-Bulletin workers, then donned official
74 Chapter 7
Advertiser aloha shirts before crossing the hall to assume control of the
morning paper.
I began thinking about looking for another job.
I finished up a number of pending projects, including a series cowritten
with reporter David Waite about horrible conditions in Hawai‘i prisons
and wholesale criminal activities by prison guards.10
Dave and I found that guards were raping and assaulting inmates when
they w eren’t dealing drugs to them. We found several guards who had
been convicted of criminal offenses and had been allowed to serve their
prison sentences on weekends so that they could continue working as guards
during the week. They just changed uniforms and stepped to the other side
of the bars when Friday night rolled around.
I also worked hard on a story about an organized crime figure who was
doing business locally with the Teamsters Union. After the story was done
and turned in, it languished for more than a month. I was repeatedly told
that newly installed editor Jim Gatti was “looking at it.”
David Waite, a caustically funny man and great reporter, took to refer-
ring to Gatti as “Captain Hazelwood,” a fter the infamously inept seafarer
responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Eventually the story ran,
basically unchanged, and I never could figure out the delay.11
In 1996, editors at the paper began distributing personnel evaluations
that were a hallmark of Gannett management. I was shocked by my report,
prepared by the same assistant city editor who had called me off the Bishop
Estate stories.
I wasn’t productive, I was argumentative, I needed to seriously change
my attitude . . . and so on. The l ittle toady who wrote the report said editors
were under orders to emphasize the negative.
I picked up the phone and asked KITV news director Wally Zimmerman
for a job. “When can you start?” he said.
Two notable events occurred at the Advertiser not long after I left.
One was that the prison guard series won the Gannett chain’s national
award for public service reporting. The editors had to call me back from
KITV to pick up the award with Dave Waite.
The other was the publication, in the rival Star-Bulletin, of the “Broken
Trust” essay, which tore huge holes in the Bishop Estate and eventually led to
the ouster of all five estate trustees.12
The authors drew heavily from my earlier reporting on the estate in
marshalling their damning facts about the estate and its trustees. The essay
was written by four respected and eminent Native Hawaiian professionals
and a university law professor who specialized in trust law. They first of-
fered it to the Advertiser for publication.
Bishop Estate 75
But Jim Gatti dithered and delayed, so the authors took their work
across the hall to the Star-Bulletin, which published it almost immediately.
A cascading series of investigations, public protests, and lawsuits, pro-
voked in large part by “Broken Trust,” then consumed the estate, which
nearly lost its federal tax exemption and had to jettison the five trustees.
I covered some of those events for KITV, where I worked for the next
five and a half years. Two Bishop Estate trustees, Oswald Stender and
Gerard Jervis, filed a civil suit in state court to have a third trustee,
Lokelani Lindsey, removed from the trust. At the same time, Attorney
General Margery Bronster was pursuing an action in probate court to re-
move all five estate trustees from office, alleging wholesale breaches of
fiduciary duty.
While all that was g oing on, I learned some disturbing information
about Jervis. He had been carrying on an affair with an estate lawyer that
was so reckless the couple had been caught having sex in a public restroom
at the Hawai‘i Prince hotel near Waikiki. They were discovered by hotel
security, escorted off the property, and told not to return.
The following day, the w oman, Rene Ojiri-Kitaoka, committed suicide.
Her body was found in a car parked in the garage of her home.
It was a tragedy that also spoke volumes about the quality of the trustees
appointed by Hawai‘i’s high court to direct a multibillion-dollar charitable
institution. Jervis was Ojiri-Kitaoka’s supervisor. She was 39, married, and
working as a lawyer for Kamehameha Investment Corporation, a wholly
owned subsidiary of the Bishop Estate. The affair took place while state
and federal authorities were closely scrutinizing the activities of Jervis and
his colleagues.
After confirming the details of the hotel incident and suicide, I talked
the matter over with my editors at KITV. We had the story to ourselves at
that point and knew that we had to go with it.13
I found Jervis at the Lindsey removal trial. During a morning break, I
pulled him and his lawyer, Ronald Sakamoto, out of the courtroom. In the
hallway outside, I quietly told them what I knew. I said we would be airing
a story on the subject that evening and asked for comment from them.
Jervis looked like he’d been poleaxed. He must have known the roof
was going to fall in on him, but he didn’t seem prepared for it. He and
Sakamoto said they had no immediate comment and hurriedly left the
courthouse. The trial proceeded without them.
Then I had to call Ojiri-Kitaoka’s husband to tell him that we would be
running a story that night. I told him I was sensitive to the pain this would
bring him and his f amily but that publicity on the subject was unavoidable.
He said he had nothing to say.
76 Chapter 7
The following day brought news that Jervis had been hospitalized after
taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He recovered quickly and returned to
his job at the estate. Five months later, he resigned.
Fellow trustee Oswald Stender also stepped down. Lindsey, Henry
Peters, and Dickie Wong were forced from the board by the courts.
Another set of Bishop Estate stories I wrote at KITV concerned business
deals between trustees Peters and Wong and a real estate developer named
Jeff Stone. While simultaneously doing personal condominium deals with
Peters and Wong, Stone was also involved in a large purchase of property
from the estate.
All the parties involved protested that the deals were unrelated and
perfectly legitimate, but their timing and nature caused the state to investi-
gate and ultimately charge Stone, Peters, and Wong with criminal offenses.
The charges were later tossed out of court because of serious procedural
defects in the state’s case.
The stories did not endear me to Stone, Peters, or Wong. Stone had pur-
chased and expanded a huge resort and residential development on Oahu
called Ko Olina, and I later found him doing more real estate deals with Col-
leen Hanabusa, the politically powerful woman who succeeded Richard
Wong as president of the state senate.
Back at the Advertiser, a new batch of editors had taken charge of the
newspaper, and they began trying to recruit me back. Friends at the paper
urged me to consider returning, and eventually I did. I truly enjoyed work-
ing in television, but I’m a long-form prose guy at heart.
Things hadn’t really changed at the morning newspaper.
And they hadn’t changed all that much at the Bishop Estate under a
new batch of trustees installed by the courts. The same attitude of secrecy
and press hostility was still there.
When I asked one of my Bishop Estate sources for an opinion of the new
trustees, the response was “Same stew, different vegetables.”
That about summed up the Advertiser, too.
My second run at the newspaper is dealt with in detail later in these
pages. Let me just say h ere that by 2008, I was no longer an investigative
reporter and had been consigned to what Advertiser management consid-
ered a gulag beat: the state courthouse.
I actually quite enjoyed covering courts, even though the editors un-
accountably cared little for stories originating there. That attitude seemed to
have little to do with who authored the stories or how they w ere written.
They just didn’t think much of court stories.
So I was kicking back in my office one morning when a lawyer named
John Goemans cold-called me.
Bishop Estate 77
I’d known John for a long time and had mixed feelings about him. He
was personally very likeable but a bit off-kilter. He never really had an of-
fice or a thriving law practice and operated instead from Starbucks lounges
and bookstore reading rooms. He frequently pursued civil rights cases
and had long targeted the Bishop Estate, challenging the legality of its tax
exemption and the constitutionality of its admissions policy that favored
children of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
John had been involved in a long-running federal court lawsuit, filed on
behalf of a Caucasian mother and child on the Big Island, that claimed the
admissions policy violated federal civil rights laws. The case lingered in
the courts for four years, eventually rising all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court. In 2007, days before the high court was due to announce whether it
would hear the case, the parties agreed to settle it.
The estate agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of money to the plain-
tiffs, who agreed to drop the case. Terms of the settlement had been a very
closely guarded secret for more than a year. The estate was extremely sen-
sitive to the issue of its admissions policy and certainly did not want to say
or do anything that might encourage new lawsuits about it.
The plaintiffs in the suit were bound by court confidentiality, and leak-
age of the settlement amount might lead to litigation against them by the
estate. No one had breathed a word about it u ntil Goemans called me.
I do not know what prompted him to do this. He was in ill health and
close to penniless, living with relatives on the Mainland.
He was also unhappy about how the settlement money had been dis-
tributed. Goemans originated the idea of the lawsuit and found the plain-
tiffs, but it was litigated by a California lawyer named Eric Grant.
Mostly, though, Goemans expressed outrage that the settlement figure
was never made known to the public. He said the estate was legally obli-
gated to disclose the settlement amount on its open-to-the-public federal
tax return and in the annual financial report that had to be filed with state
probate court.
Goemans told me he wanted to talk about the settlement on the record,
and he knew the potential consequences of such a disclosure.
I said, okay, how much was it?
“Seven million dollars,” he said.
Holy crap, I thought, that’s a hell of a lot of money. I asked Goemans if
he had any paperwork to support what he was saying.
He did, indeed, and he eventually faxed it to me.14
It was a great story, and it brought John Goemans and his former clients
a world of grief. Bishop Estate sued them and Grant for breach of confiden-
tiality, demanding return of $2 million of the settlement.
78 Chapter 7
That case was settled before trial in 2011. Terms of the settlement are
secret. The identities of the two plaintiffs have never been revealed. They
were always identified in court papers as Jane and John Doe, arguing suc-
cessfully that public disclosure of their names would expose them to per-
sonal danger and force them to leave Hawai‘i.
The last time I saw Goemans was in 2008, when he had been flown into
town for meetings with lawyers. He stayed at the YMCA during that trip.
Goemans died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. He was 75 years old.
His contention that the estate was legally obliged to disclose the $7 mil-
lion number in tax returns or probate filings fell on deaf ears. I looked hard
for the number but could never find it. It was apparently consolidated with
larger line items in the tax return and broken up into smaller payments to
various law firms in the more detailed probate papers.
I protested this lack of disclosure to the state attorney general’s office
and to the outside master appointed by the probate court to review the es-
tate’s annual accounts. They ignored me.
Secrecy prevailed.
C hapt e r Eight
Ronnie, Henry, and Royale
In the early 1980s, two big names in Hawai‘i’s underworld started singing.
Ronald Ching and Henry Huihui had a lot to tell. Each was deeply in-
volved in organized crime and organized labor. Both had committed noto-
riously public murders that shook Island society to its foundations. And
both were connected to Larry Mehau.
By the time Ching and Huihui were done testifying, they had provided
at least partial solutions to enduring criminal mysteries. Ching admitted
to four homicides, including the 1970 slaying of state senator Larry Kuriyama
and the murder of the son of city prosecutor Charles Marsland Jr. in 1975.
He also confessed to burying federal informant Arthur Baker alive in
1978 and to fatally shooting another informant, Robert “Bobby” Fukumoto,
in 1980.
The Kuriyama homicide had, in the words of Advertiser reporter Vickie
Ong, “hit the community like a punch in the stomach.”1 The 49-year-old
senator was shot to death in the carport of his home after attending a politi
cal rally with Governor John Burns and other colleagues. The gangland-style
slaying was committed by a gunman using a silenced pistol. Kuriyama’s
wife and four of the couple’s five children were inside the house when he
was shot, and the senator’s 17-year-old son, Stanley, cradled his dying father
in his arms while waiting for medical help.
Well before Ching began talking, two men, including longtime Ching
associate Alexander “Aku” Sakamoto, had been tried but acquitted of kill-
ing Kuriyama.
The 1970 murder, with its syndicate-style overtones, occurred as the vio-
lent struggles for control of the underworld were heating up and bodies were
79
80 Chapter 8
The body of slain Senator Larry Kuriyama lies in state at the Capitol. Governor John Burns
led the line of mourners. Roy Ito, photographer; Honolulu Star-Advertiser Collection;
dropping around the state. The murder focused intense interest on orga
nized crime by law enforcement, news reporters, and political leaders.
Huihui, who had regularly been identified as a syndicate leader but had
never been successfully prosecuted for mob-related crimes, pleaded guilty
to another notorious homicide: the lunch-hour shooting of u nion leader
Josiah Lii in 1977. An official of the Inland Boatmen’s Union with mob ties of
his own, Lii was shot to death in a hallway outside his office in downtown
Honolulu, within sight of the Aloha Tower waterfront landmark. Lii’s wife
and several children were in his office and rushed to his aid when he
was shot.
Huihui, a Fagin-like figure who surrounded himself with a feral band
of acolytes, also admitted to personally murdering one of his followers,
David Riveira, outside a posh private residence in Nuuanu Valley where the
group was staging casino gambling.
Like earlier high-profile syndicate singers who performed in court, Ching
and Huihui hit a lot of sour notes, ultimately raising as many questions as
they answered. Their testimonies, delivered in separate courts and different
cases, were peppered with lies and inconsistencies.
Ronnie, Henry, and Royale 81
Ronnie Ching
Ching’s turn on the public stage began after a 1981 raid by federal agents
and police of his apartment in the Chateau Blue apartment building. Inside
the unit, the raiders found a chunk of C-4 plastic explosive in a box taped
u nder the kitchen sink. Cached inside a safe was $28,000, as well as five
pounds of “Thai stick” marijuana and smaller quantities of heroin and
cocaine.
From Ching’s storage closet down the hall, agents seized semiautomatic
rifles, a small-caliber “pen gun,” a .32-caliber handgun silencer, a state dep-
uty sheriff’s badge, .223-caliber ammunition, and a set of handcuffs.2
The last items intrigued investigators. The apartment building was
three blocks from the Sunday Lounge, where Arthur Baker had been
handcuffed before being dragged away by his kidnappers in late 1978.
And the Chateau Blue was one block away from the Brass Door bar,
where just months earlier, syndicate figure and police informant Robert
“Bobby” Fukumoto had been murdered. Fukumoto’s assailant walked into
the tavern at 12:20 a.m. and fired 10 .223-caliber bullets into the victim with
a semiautomatic r ifle, blowing him off his barstool. The assailant fled on
foot, and witnesses saw him run down Kona Street and into the parking lot
of the Chateau Blue.
Less than a half hour a fter the shooting, Ching called the Honolulu Po-
lice Department with a strange story. He claimed that he had been in his
apartment watching television when there was a knock at his door. Ching
said that when he looked out the peephole, he saw “a man in dark clothing”
who then ran away from the door. Minutes after making the call, Ching
walked to the scene of the Fukumoto murder, where his presence was noted
by police officers.
Honolulu Police Chief Francis Keala and prosecutor Charles Marsland
were present when Ching’s apartment was searched, a highly unusual
occurrence.
Marsland and Keala were neighbors in the Portlock neighborhood of
Honolulu, and the chief had identified the murdered body of Marsland’s
son after it was discovered on a lonely road in rural Waimanalo in 1975.
Ching was a suspect in the murder of the younger Marsland.
At a bail hearing held days after the apartment search, Ching said he
recently had been working as a Teamsters Union driver on the Magnum, P.I.
television series, earning some $1,300 per week. That was good money in
those days, but it covered only a fraction of the $1,000-a-day heroin habit that
Ching said he had at the time.
I learned that before Ching had landed the driver job, he had worked at
Unity House, a labor services organization run by Arthur Rutledge, head of
82 Chapter 8
the Hawai‘i Teamsters Union. While working at Unity House, Ching had
delivered “a veiled threat” to one of Rutledge’s union foes, Richard Tam,
who had recently won control of the Hotel-Restaurant Workers Union local
that Rutledge had also been running.
Tam was working in his office one day when Ching paid him an un-
announced visit. “It wasn’t a social call,” Tam told me.3
“Ching came in, shook hands and said he’s a friend of the Old Man
[Rutledge] and that I should stop leaning on the Old Man,” Tam said.
Tam knew Ching’s reputation and took the visit as a threat. “There was
nothing overt,” Tam said. “But the message was there—a veiled threat that
I better watch out.”
When I interviewed Rutledge immediately after the raid on Ching’s
apartment, he admitted that it had been a violation of federal labor law to
hire Ching at Unity House but said the Magnum job was legal and part of
Rutledge’s efforts to help rehabilitate convicted criminals. And Rutledge
said he had nothing to do with Ching’s visit to Tam.
I was personally amazed that a heroin-addicted syndicate hit man was
working on the set of one of the most popu lar shows on American tele
vision, a program that showcased Hawai‘i to the rest of the world. That was
the beginning of my decades-long fascination with the men and women
who drove vehicles on Hawai‘i film and television sets. I found that liter-
ally dozens of the drivers had long, varied, and sometimes very violent
criminal careers. Drivers regularly shuttled between film sets and prison,
keeping up with their union dues while locked behind bars.
At Ching’s initial detention hearing, the government argued that Ching
was a danger to the community and should be held without bail. HPD of-
ficer Don Carstensen testified that Ching told him the year before that he
had first “made his bones”—committed a murder—when he was 16 years
old.4 Carstensen said Ching was under investigation for other crimes but
declined to elaborate.
At a subsequent hearing, Ching was asked pointed questions about his
knowledge of organized crime in general and the “syndicate hits” of Baker
and Fukumoto in particular. Ching took the Fifth Amendment to those ques-
tions, posed by U.S. Organized Crime Strike Force attorney Daniel Bent.
Ching’s lawyer, David Bettencourt, asked Carstensen during the second
hearing if he was also investigating Larry Mehau. Bent successfully objected,
saying those questions were irrelevant to a bail hearing. Carstensen was
not required to answer.
Bent had been part of a joint federal-local criminal investigation of Mehau
called Operation Firebird that was ultimately closed without charges.
Bent went on to become U.S. attorney for Hawai‘i and l ater testified in a
state court civil case that he believed the Firebird investigation of Mehau
Professional killer Ronald K. Ching. Carl Viti, photographer; Honolulu Star-

Advertiser Collection; Hawai‘i State Archives.
would have resulted in criminal charges if witnesses hadn’t been fright-

ened into silence. Bent said in that state case that Mehau was “a significant
organized crime figure.” 5
Ching was ordered held without bail at the close of the detention
hearing.
Present in the courtroom that day was Aku Sakamoto, who had been
tried but acquitted in 1975 of state charges that he murdered state senator
Larry Kuriyama in 1970. Ching had been an interested courtroom observer
during Sakamoto’s murder trial.
Ching later admitted to murdering Baker and Fukumoto and being
present at the murder of Kuriyama. He said all three murders were com-
mitted “at the request of others.”
Those guilty pleas came three years after Ching was convicted in the
federal guns and explosives case. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison
and had begun serving that time at Lompoc federal prison in Southern
California when he opened new plea bargain negotiations with law en-
forcement. Records produced u nder the federal Freedom of Information
Act show that Ching spoke with federal agents about his knowledge of
84 Chapter 8
murders and labor corruption, but the discussions were preliminary, and
law enforcement was leery of him.
At one point, an FBI agent working with the U.S. Senate Permanent Sub-
committee on Investigations arranged to speak with Ching about Unity
House, the Hawai‘i labor organization where he had briefly worked for
Teamsters boss Art Rutledge. The content of those talks is classified.6
Ching also indicated to the FBI that he had information to share about
one of his fellow inmates at Lompoc, notorious New Jersey mafia figure
Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano.
One of the entries in the FOIA file said that investigators and prison of-
ficials doubted the extent of Ching’s knowledge of Provenzano’s activities.7
But the two convicts did have a common trait besides lifetime involvement
in violent, bloody crime: both were past members of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Their union experiences were far removed by both geography and levels
of influence. Provenzano was a past vice president of the IBT and was long
suspected of involvement in the disappearance and murder of IBT president
Jimmy Hoffa, still one of the nation’s most infamous unsolved crimes.
Ching was never more than u nion muscle in a remote outpost of the
Teamsters empire, although Hoffa and Hawai‘i Teamsters boss Art Rutledge
knew each other well.
The talks with federal authorities ultimately amounted to nothing. The
FOIA files show that Frank Marine, who replaced Dan Bent as Strike Force
attorney in Hawai‘i, didn’t trust Ching and believed he was playing games
with investigators.
But Ching had also entered into discussions with former police officer
Don Carstensen, by then a full-time member of Chuck Marsland’s staff,
and he eventually was returned to the Islands to begin his work as a wit-
ness for the prosecution.
Ching was born in 1949 in Honolulu, attending Kaimuki High School
until the 10th grade—when he reputedly made his bones as a contract killer.
He told investigators that he had killed as many as 20 people but took
credit in court for just four of them, beginning with the 1970 Kuriyama
homicide. “Larry Kuriyama was shot by another with my aid and support,”
Ching told Honolulu Circuit Judge Robert Won Bae Chang in an August 1,
1984, court hearing. He added that he had “agreed with others” to murder
the senator.
Neither Ching nor prosecutors ever uttered another word about who
else was involved or why Kuriyama was slain.
Ching’s longtime pal, Aku Sakamoto, had earlier been tried but acquit-
ted of killing Kuriyama. The murder was allegedly committed because of a
business dispute between Kuriyama and a Leeward Oahu dairyman

named Alfred Ruis, according to prosecutors in that 1975 trial. Ruis was
separately tried and acquitted of murdering Kuriyama.
In the 1975 proceedings against Sakamoto and Ruis, prosecutor Mau-
rice Sapienza alleged that Ruis had used syndicate figure Harold “Biggie”
Chan to put out a murder contract on Kuriyama. Chan, who was shot to
death in 1972, had run a gambling operation with Ruis, according to trial
evidence in 1975. There was no evidence implicating Kuriyama in illegal
activities.
The Sakamoto and Ruis t rials were typically plagued by shaky prosecu-
tion witnesses. One admitted on the witness stand that he had lied to a
grand jury about the case. Another, who supposedly drove Sakamoto to
and from the murder scene, was unable to identify Sakamoto in court. An-
other witness, Fred Hammond, described himself as a professional killer
and said he had been offered but refused the Kuriyama murder contract.
Years later, I found Fred Hammond working as Teamsters movie driver.
Sakamoto, a shade-tree auto mechanic in Ching’s old Kaimuki neigh-
borhood, took the witness stand in his trial and denied any involvement in
the crime.
No mention was made of Ching in the Sakamoto and Ruis trials. Ching
attended the Sakamoto trial and was sitting in the gallery when the princi-
pal prosecution witness failed to identify the defendant.
Sakamoto could not be retried for the Kuriyama killing due to double
jeopardy protections, but testimony from Ronnie Ching as part of his 1984
plea deal did result in the indictment of Sakamoto in a separate murder
case. Sakamoto was accused of killing airport worker Herman S. C. Kam,
who disappeared in mid-July 1970.
Kam’s body was never recovered, and his f amily managed to have him
legally declared dead seven years a fter he disappeared. Acting on informa-
tion later provided by Ching, authorities excavated a remote beach site in a
futile effort to find his remains. Less than a year after the Kam murder in-
dictment, prosecutors withdrew the murder charge against Sakamoto and
revoked the plea deal they had reached with Ching.
The move was prompted by new evidence from a friend of Ching’s that
undercut Ching’s grand jury testimony about the Kam murder. I wrote at
the time: “The evidence, coupled with Ching’s ongoing reluctance to dis-
close information about some friends and associates and Ching’s growing
dissatisfaction with his role as a prosecution witness, prompted a mutually
agreeable decision among the parties to dissolve Ching’s plea bargain.” 8
Another murder charge brought on the basis of Ching’s testimony,
against parolee Robert Reyes, was also dropped after Ching’s plea deal
86 Chapter 8
collapsed. Reyes was accused of killing Chinatown gambler George Chiu

in 1980.
Other murder cases mounted on the basis of Ronnie Ching’s testimony
ended badly:
• Charges against Cyril Kahale Jr. for allegedly participating with

Ching in the kidnap-murder of drug informant Baker were dis-
missed. Kahale—a close associate of Don Ho and Larry Mehau—
later won a $400,000 judgment against the city.
• Charges against three different men subsequently accused by
Ching of helping in the Baker murder were also dismissed outright
by the prosecutor’s office.
• Three codefendants charged with murdering Robert Fukumoto
pleaded guilty to reduced charges. Two of them, Rudolph Na-o
and Gary Murata, were convicted of hindering prosecution. The
third, Glenn Ii Jr., pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Ching never
testified in the case.
• Three men named by Ching as accomplices in the murder of
Prosecutor Marsland’s son—Eric Naone, Raymond Scanlan, and
Gregory Nee—were acquitted in a jury trial.
The “Chuckers” Marsland murder case was the only Ching-generated

prosecution that ever went to trial. The court proceedings were highly
theatrical: a hit man’s testimony, allegations of police corruption, behind-
the-scenes looks at the seedy and often violent world of nocturnal Waikiki.
The father of the victim, exuding Old Testament rectitude, listened from
the gallery as his deputies tried to prove who had kidnapped and mur-
dered his teenage son nine years earlier.
The trial featured not just long-awaited testimony from Ching but also
a dramatic Perry Mason moment of surprise evidence that badly under-
mined Ching and the prosecution’s entire case.
Charged with Ching was Raymond Scanlan, a former Honolulu police
officer who had left the force after the Marsland murder and shortly before
he was arrested on a heroin trafficking charge. The heroin case generated
the godfather allegations that bedeviled Larry Mehau for years. Scanlan
later worked for Don Ho and had a long career as a Teamster movie driver.
He also worked as a driver and dogsbody for Japanese white-collar crimi-
nal Kaoru Ogawa during Ogawa’s periodic visits to the Islands.
Another defendant in the Marsland case was Eric Naone, a former
Teamsters business agent and Art Rutledge bodyguard who was a regular
hanger-on at Don Ho’s dressing room.
The third defendant, Gregory Nee, was a former Don Ho doorman who
by the time of the trial was working as a lumber salesman in the Pacific
Northwest.
At the time of his murder, the younger Marsland was attending college
and working part-time at a nightspot called Infinity on the grounds of the
Sheraton Waikiki h otel, just up Lewers Street from Don Ho’s Polynesian
Palace showroom.
Naone had befriended the younger Marsland and was interviewed by
police after the murder. Naone told police that he knew Chuckers Marsland
and was “very good friends” with Ching. He was best man at Ching’s
wedding.
He said that he and Ching had gone to the Infinity the night of the mur-
der and talked to Marsland there. Naone said he and Ching left about
3:30 a.m. and walked to the Polynesian Palace, where they spent time with
other “friends”: Larry Mehau and George Perry Jr., a convicted felon and
longtime close associate of Mehau. Also present at Ho’s dressing room was
a young man identified only as “Greg,” Naone told police.9
Naone and Ching left the showroom about 5 a.m. and drove to Naone’s
family home and then to the residence of Ching’s girlfriend in the Kalihi
neighborhood of Honolulu, Naone told police in 1975.
Marsland was shot to death at approximately 6 a.m. Ching said on the
witness stand that he and Naone shot Marsland because they believed he
was talking to police about drug activities in Waikiki.
Ching had “turned on” Marsland with cocaine, and Naone had given
Marsland the same drug “for distribution,” Ching testified.
And Marsland had “dealings” with a pimp and drug dealer named Louis
Matias who was later murdered in prison, Ching said. (When Ching first
started talking plea deals with law enforcement in 1981, he claimed that
Matias and another by-then deceased criminal, Dennis Galarza, had killed
Marsland.)
Ching testified in the trial that the murder was sanctioned by HPD
officer Manny Rezentes—the same officer who had warned me in 1978 that
Ching was a very dangerous man. Rezentes was never charged in the
Marsland case and heatedly denied Ching’s allegations about him. He did
not testify at the trial.
According to Ching, the younger Marsland had talked to Rezentes about
his dealings with Matias. “Manny was concerned . . . with what other law
enforcement . . . he [Marsland] might mention it to,” Ching testified.
Rezentes and Naone agreed that Marsland had to die, according to
Ching. Naone asked Ching to help in the murder and also recruited Greg
Nee to help in the crime, Ching said.
88 Chapter 8
Scanlan provided two weapons used in the homicide, a handgun and

a shotgun, according to Ching.
The prosecution said Marsland believed he was being taken to a meet-
ing with Rezentes when he was picked up on the main drag of Waikiki,
Kalakaua Avenue, by Naone and Ching in a car driven by Nee. The men
drove Marsland to a Windward Oahu location, where he was shot to death,
Ching said.
When Nee stopped the car, Ching said he got out and removed a shot-
gun from the trunk, then told Marsland he had something to show him.
When Marsland left the car, “I told him this was it, he was going. He was
surprised. I guess he was shocked,” Ching testified.
“I shot him twice. After the first round, he took a step back. I shot him
again and he went down,” Ching told the court.10
After Ching and Naone moved the body off the road, Naone shot
Marsland five or six times, according to Ching. The murder weapons had
been issued by the police department to Scanlan, who gave them to Ching
knowing that they would be used in a killing, according to Ching.
“It didn’t concern you that you were asking a person known to you as a
police officer for weapons to kill someone else?” Deputy Prosecutor Michael
McGuigan asked Ching.
“Not this police officer,” Ching answered.
Scanlan’s handgun—used by Naone to shoot Marsland—had earlier
been reported stolen, Ching said. After the murder, the weapon was
thrown into the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor on the edge of Waikiki, Ching told
the jury.
When Marsland’s body was discovered, HPD Chief Francis Keala
himself went to the murder scene to identify the victim. Keala’s son and
Chuckers Marsland were friends and had been classmates at Punahou
School, an elite Oahu private school. President Barack Obama graduated
from Punahou five years after Keala and Marsland.
Some 12 hours after the homicide, friends and supporters of the victim’s
family gathered at the Marsland home in east Honolulu. Among the well-
wishers was Eric Naone.
Naone said he paid his respects at the urging of the younger Marsland’s
girlfriend, who knew the two men w ere friends.
Chief Keala told Naone that he had to speak with the detective investi-
gating the homicide, George Kruse, to tell what he knew about the victim.
That’s when Naone told his story of seeing the victim at the Infinity and
then g oing to the Polynesian Palace to spend time with Ching, Mehau,
Perry, and “Greg.”
Another of the accused, Ray Scanlan, had regular contact with Chuck
Marsland for years after Chuckers was murdered.
Chuck Marsland testified in the murder trial that he met numerous

times with Scanlan and enlisted his help in finding his son’s killers. Many
of the meetings took place at the Punchbowl grave of Chuckers Marsland at
the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the father said. In 1979,
Marsland testified, Scanlan told him that the killers were Naone, Ching,
and Nee.
Scanlan denied u nder oath that he had told Marsland that. He further
denied giving Ching his police-issued handgun in 1975 to use in the mur-
der. Scanlan admitted telling HPD in 1973 that the weapon, a .38-caliber
Smith & Wesson revolver, had apparently been stolen from the glove com-
partment of his car. He said he filed the false police report because he “pan-
icked” about the loss of the gun, which he later found behind the cushions
of the sofa in his home.
By the time Scanlan said he found the gun, in November 1975, return-
ing it to the police would have been a real problem. He had resigned from
the force and was under indictment for heroin trafficking and illegal pos-
session of a firearm. Federal drug agents had found a silencer-equipped
.22-caliber gun in his car following the heroin bust, which occurred, ironi-
cally enough, at Punchbowl Cemetery.
One of Scanlan’s codefendants in that heroin case, Leslie Kent, was a
former local high school football standout associated with mob figures
Henry Huihui and Alema Leota who had worked briefly as a guard in the
Kuikui Plaza case. He initially escaped arrest in the heroin bust with a dis-
play of his broken-field running ability. Kent sprinted hell-for-leather down
the slopes of Punchbowl, covered in thorny cactus plants and kiawe trees.
So Scanlan, stuck with his police handgun, turned for help to his cousin,
police officer Clarence “Rags” Scanlan. Ray Scanlan said he gave the gun to
his cousin “with the understanding that he would turn it in to the police
department.”
Then Rags Scanlan was called to the witness stand for the Perry Mason
moment.
When his cousin later asked him what had become of the weapon, Rags
said he c ouldn’t remember but thought that he had mailed the gun anony-
mously to the police. Some six weeks before the Marsland murder trial
started, Rags Scanlan said, he searched his home for the weapon but didn’t
find it.
Then, on the eve of the trial, he was cleaning his basement and found
the gun in a manila envelope.
When Ray Scanlan’s lawyer, James Koshiba, asked where the gun was
now, Rags Scanlan said, “I’ve got it with me.”11
The witness then pulled the gun, contained in a plastic bag, out of his
jacket.
90 Chapter 8
That pretty much sent the prosecution’s case up in smoke.

The jury began deliberations shortly afterward and returned 13 hours
later to acquit the three defendants of all charges. One juror told me the
production of the handgun in court had a powerful influence on the panel’s
decision to acquit.
Defense lawyers said the big problem in the case was Ching himself.
Much of his testimony was uncorroborated by other evidence, and he had a
long history of lying. He admitted that history under cross-examination in
the trial. “Being truthful is new,” he testified.
He claimed that his conscience caused him to turn state’s evidence.
“Things were bothering me,” he said. “I was having a hard time dealing
with some of the crimes I committed, especially my crimes that were of
violence,” Ching told the jury.
He admitted that during his dealings with police and federal agents, he
“gave them bits of truth and some lies.” But after reaching his plea agree-
ment with Marsland’s office, he said, he had told the truth about the Marsland
murder.
Then Ching was forced to acknowledge that after he signed the plea
bargain, he “gave some false information” about the Kam murder, but later
voluntarily recanted and “gave a true and accurate statement.”
Just before the Marsland murder trial began in state court, federal
prosecutors revealed that Ching had been deceptive in lie detector tests
administered by federal agents.
The prosecutor’s office labeled that disclosure, as well as other revela-
tions about Ching from Honolulu police, as proof that competing law
enforcement agencies had sabotaged Ching’s credibility. The Justice De-
partment and HPD denied those charges, saying they were legally obligated
to release the information.
In mid-1985, Ching was sentenced to life in prison. He died 20 years
later in his cell at Halawa Correctional Facility. Ching suffered from a vari-
ety of medical problems, including hepatitis C, related to his years of drug
abuse.
Peter Carlisle, one of Marsland’s deputies who went on to become chief
prosecutor and later mayor of Honolulu, said that Ching “needed to die
in prison.”
Carlisle said he didn’t know how many murders Ching committed. “We
know he pleaded to four, but he’d given us information on eight to ten.
There’s lots of belief there were a number of other killings he was involved
in,” Carlisle told Advertiser reporter Will Hoover in 2005.
But that information was buried with Ching. Except for the Marsland
case, the reasons for the murders Ching admitted committing were never
made public.
Henry Huihui
On May 9, 1984, syndicate figure Henry Huihui travelled with a posse of
federal agents and police officers to three courts on two islands. At each
stop, Huihui pleaded guilty to a menu of criminal offenses that included
murder, racketeering, extortion, and gambling.
The U.S. Justice Department said Huihui had promised to cooperate
in additional criminal cases, calling the arrangement a “significant break-
through in the federal government’s and local government’s investigation
into organized crime in Hawaii.” Prosecutors said they believed Huihui
would testify about “higher-ups” and “public corruption.”
Those predictions were badly overblown. Huihui testified almost exclu-
sively against underlings in his own organization.
Henry Huihui in state

court. David Yamada,
photographer;
Honolulu Star-
92 Chapter 8
Information he provided did lead to a murder indictment against for-

mer mob boss Nappy Pulawa and a self-described syndicate hit man named
Royale Kamahoahoa. They were accused of killing a Windward Oahu gam-
bling figure, Alexander Chong Kong, whose lifeless, bullet-riddled body
was left in the Olomana Golf Course parking lot in 1974.
Those charges were dropped 10 months later after one of Huihui’s plea
deals, with Prosecutor Marsland, fell apart.
Huihui also gave authorities information about the 1970 murder of an-
other Windward Oahu gambler, Francis Young. Authorities searched for
Young’s remains on the North Shore, near the earlier burial site of Lamont
Nery and Fuzzy Iha, but found nothing. When syndicate snitch Roy Ryder
testified in the first Nery-Iha murder trial, he said that Pulawa and Huihui
had shot Young to death and buried him in a beachside grave near Dilling-
ham Airfield.
Later, Nery and Iha were killed and buried in nearly the same location.
According to Ryder’s first version of that double murder, Pulawa ordered
that the two men be buried in the same place as Young. “Put ‘em where the
pake stay,” Ryder quoted Pulawa as saying. (“Pake,” pronounced PAW-kay,
is a pidgin term for Chinese.)
No trace of Young was ever found, and no one was charged with
k illing him.
Just two months a fter he disappeared, his family petitioned the courts
to have Young declared dead. The court papers said Young had been “forc-
ibly removed” from a Kailua bar called Biggie’s Nut Shell by unknown per-
sons on January 29, 1970.
“The circumstances and habits of said decedent indicate that he died on
January 29, 1970,” the petition said.
Ryder said nothing about Francis Young in the 1978 Nery-Iha retrial,
which was my introduction to Chuck Marsland and the big players in
Hawai‘i’s underworld, including Henry Huihui.
Huihui was a ruggedly good-looking man in those days, given to wear-
ing tinted aviator-style glasses and carefully pressed denim jeans. (I once
described him in a news story as “handsome in a pock-marked sort of
way.”)12
Huihui and his codefendants walked away unscathed from the Nery-
Iha murder charges.
I wrote about his indirect connection to the Benny Madamba murder on
the Big Island later in 1978. I also wrote several stories about him over the
next c ouple of years that dealt with his activities as a union official. Huihui
was a high school dropout who worked in his younger years as an electri-
cian, eventually rising in the ranks of Local 1186 of the International Brother-
hood of Electrical Workers. He grew close to 1186 boss Akito “Blackie”

Fujikawa and was eventually named head of the local’s Apprentice Training
Division.
In 1979, the training division spent $1.2 million to acquire 69 acres of
undeveloped real estate on Oahu’s North Shore, christening the site “Uwila
Ranch.”
I got my hands on a brochure distributed by the union at a 1980 dedica-
tion ceremony at the property that explained uwila, the Hawaiian word for
lightning, had also come to mean electricity. The property was intended
to be used by the training division to “develop a variety of agricultural pro-
grams such as urban gardens” to allow u nion members and retirees “to get
away from the city and learn to grow things,” the brochure said. That didn’t
sound much like electrician training, and a U.S. Labor Department inves-
tigation later found exactly that, forcing Local 1186 to divest itself of the
property.
I turned out other stories about questionable union financial deals, in-
cluding leases of automobiles driven by Huihui and his associates.
I repeatedly heard that Huihui was using union underlings to run gam-
bling and extortion enterprises on Oahu and the Big Island, but I c ouldn’t
fully nail down a story about it.
By then, Huihui was the focus of intense criminal investigations by the
federal government and local law enforcement on Oahu and the Big Island.
A Big Island grand jury first indicted Huihui and various followers on
gambling and extortion charges.
The roof fell in on Huihui in early 1984. A federal grand jury indicted
him and eight associates on a variety of charges, including racketeering,
extortion, and criminal conspiracy.
Two murders were folded into the federal case as evidence of racketeer-
ing, but homicide is customarily not a federal offense, so the defendants
were not specifically accused of the homicides.
Not long after the federal charges were laid, however, Huihui and four
of his followers were charged with the murders in state court.
One of Huihui’s codefendants in the federal case, Michael Patrick Ward,
had cut a deal with investigators and was cooperating with both federal and
state authorities. Huihui had initially pleaded not guilty to all the charges
against him, but Ward’s decision to cooperate led to a change of heart.
That produced Huihui’s island-hopping sequential guilty pleas in May
1984. He admitted to ordering Ward to murder union rival Joe Lii and to
personally shooting underling David Riveira.
Huihui told investigators that he had known Lii since he was a teenager
and had once performed u nion strong-arm work for Lii.
94 Chapter 8
Huihui claimed that he had joined organ ized crime in 1968 after a
nephew, Moses Huihui Jr., was murdered. Huihui said he believed his
nephew was killed in a syndicate “hit,” and he wanted revenge.
He said that he and Joe Lii were once members of Nappy Pulawa’s syn-
dicate group, “The Company,” which had planned in the early 1970s to take
control of organized labor in Hawai‘i. Those plans, which included mur-
dering Teamsters boss Art Rutledge, were never carried out, but he and Lii
continued their involvement in the l abor movement.
Huihui testified that Lii and his henchmen w ere trying to move in on
gambling and extortion rackets run by Huihui’s group and had made
threatening visits to IBEW job sites.
Blackie Fujikawa told Huihui that Lii had to be killed, so Huihui gave
Michael Ward a gun and told him to commit the murder, Huihui told the
FBI and police.
In court, Huihui delivered surprise testimony, saying that Larry Mehau
had advance knowledge of the Lii hit.13 During a visit to the Big Island,
Huihui said, he encountered Mehau outside the Naniloa Surf Hotel in
Hilo.
When the two men shook hands, Huihui testified, Mehau said, “You
gonna take care of Joe?”
Huihui said he told Mehau yes, adding that he was “surprised he [Me-
hau] knew what was happening.”
Mehau then “asked me if it was gonna be done quickly and I said yeah,”
Huihui told the court.
Huihui said when he returned to Oahu the following day, he sum-
moned Ward to a meeting about the planned murder and told him “it had
to be done that day.”
“It was more important now than I ever thought it was,” Huihui told
Deputy Prosecutor Michael McGuigan.
“Why?” McGuigan asked.
“Because of that meeting with Larry,” Huihui said.
Through his lawyer, David Schutter, Mehau denied that such a conver-
sation ever took place. No one corroborated Huihui’s story, and Mehau was
never charged as a result of Huihui’s testimony.
Huihui also told investigators that when he was still with The Company
in 1978, Nappy Pulawa “made comments that Larry Mehau and Prosecut-
ing Attorney Charles Marsland should be hit.” Huihui claimed he and an
unidentified man discussed the possibility of committing one of the mur-
ders when Mehau drove in or out of the state Capitol but took the idea no
further.
Michael Ward shot Joe Lii multiple times outside the victim’s office at
the Inland Boatmen’s Union.
Ward and another Huihui gang member, Jeffrey Kealoha, went to Lii’s
office on Alakea Street during the lunch hour on Friday, May 6, 1977. When
the two men walked repeatedly past Lii’s office, Lii became suspicious and
left his office to confront the pair. He was shot dead in the hallway.
In Huihui’s original statements to law enforcement, he said he told both
Ward and Kealoha to murder Lii, adding that Kealoha later admitted to him
that he abetted Ward in the homicide. But he backed away from directly
implicating Kealoha when he testified at Kealoha’s murder trial.
He claimed that Ward on his own had involved Kealoha and the al-
leged driver of the getaway car, Gilbert Madrid, in the murder. When
confronted on the witness stand with his earlier story about Kealoha,
Huihui testified, “I may have made some wrong statements.” He said he
had been “u nder a lot of stress” when he was first debriefed by federal and
local law enforcement.
“After I thought about it, sitting in jail, I know I made an untrue state-
ment,” Huihui said on the witness stand. Huihui said virtually nothing
incriminating on the witness stand against Madrid.
A state circuit court jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict in
the trial of Kealoha and Madrid. And the case was dropped after Marsland’s
office revoked its plea deal with Huihui.
Kealoha later pleaded guilty to helping murder Huihui gang member
David Riveira.
Huihui also told differing versions of that crime, saying originally that
Riveira was slain because he was a police informant. Later he said Riveira
died because he had assaulted a member of Huihui’s family.
The Riveira killing took place in the garage of an expensive home that
associates in the IBEW had purchased for Huihui. The house, tucked on the
edge of a forest reserve near the back of Nuuanu Valley, was the site of ca-
sino gambling games staged by the Huihui gang.
Riveira’s hands were tied behind his back, and Huihui shot him in the
head with a silenced handgun. Other gang members were then required to
fire bullets into Riveira’s body.
Huihui also told investigators that he paid Kealoha to kill Stanley Ota, a
building contractor who was indicted in the infamous Punchbowl Ceme-
tery heroin case. Ota was murdered while that case was pending. Kealoha
was never charged in state court with the Ota homicide, but he pleaded
guilty in federal court to racketeering offenses that included the Ota
murder.
96 Chapter 8
Apart from his uncorroborated allegations against Mehau, organized

crime kingpin Henry Huihui ended up testifying in court—unsuccessfully
for the most part—against his underlings.
When he was originally debriefed by the FBI and other agencies, Hui-
hui claimed extensive knowledge of police and political corruption, such
as that he had personally paid $50,000 to an official of Governor George
Ariyoshi’s political campaign. The cash was delivered, he said, during a
meeting in the parking lot of a local high school.
Nothing ever came of that allegation.
In January 1985, while still in the m iddle of fulfilling his duties as a
government witness, Huihui wrote a lengthy letter of complaint about his
treatment by law enforcement.
“I would have been better off going to trial,” he said.14 “The relationship
between the federal and the state prosecutor’s offices continues to deterio-
rate. Plus, the professional jealousy that is evident through all your actions
boggles my mind,” Huihui wrote.
He laid the blame for the outcome of the Josiah Lii murder trial on
Marsland’s office. “My testimony at that trial was of no fault to me,” he
wrote.
“A noncompassionate and insensitive prosecutor will always result in the
loss of cooperating witnesses, who from frustration and disgust, refuse to
testify,” the letter continued.
“I feel an urgent need to make a prediction here. My prediction is that
all defendants will go free and only cooperating witnesses will go to jail,”
Huihui wrote.
But he also complimented Marsland for pursuing Larry Mehau.
“Thanks to Mr. Marsland and his efforts to keep things in the right per-
spective, Larry was never off the hook. I am the only person to defy Larry
Mehau and the Pulawa mob,” the letter said. Then he warned that “the lead-
ers of organize[d] crime continue to function and go undetected.”
He signed off the letter by combining the Hawaiian words for thanks
and good-bye with a touch of American vernacular: “Mahalo, Aloha and
Up Yours.”
By the following year, Marsland’s office had revoked its plea deal with
Huihui, stating that he had provided lies and half-truths to investigators.
The U.S. Justice Department was satisfied with Huihui’s performance
and held to its commitment to seek a reduced prison term for him. That
sentence was 22 years behind bars. In state court, prosecutors sought a
life sentence with the possibility of parole. Huihui ultimately served
some 26 years in prison before he was paroled in late 2010. He died in
January 2015.
Royale Kamahoahoa
A final example of the perils of placing a mobster-turned-witness on the stand
in court was provided by Royale Kamahoahoa, the self-described “hit man”
accused by Huihui of murdering gambler Alexander Chong Kong in 1974.
In 1980, while serving a federal prison term for bank robbery, Kamaho-
ahoa signed a sworn declaration that Art Rutledge had agreed to pay him
$10,000 to murder gangland figure (and Rutledge union rival) William “Billy”
Mookini in 1974. Kamahoahoa claimed that Josiah Lii had approached him
about the deal on behalf of Rutledge.
Mookini, the target of the hit, was Kamahoahoa’s cousin and had been
identified by Huihui and others as a local syndicate member. Huihui told
the FBI and police that Pulawa in the 1970s wanted Mookini to murder
Rutledge as part of The Company’s planned takeover of organized labor.
Kamahoahoa, whose glowering, wild-eyed stare certainly gave him the
appearance of a dangerous man, said in the 1980 statement that he shot
Onetime Hawai‘i organ ized crime leader Wilford “Nappy” Pulawa (center) surrounded
by admitted hit man Royale Kamahoahoa (left) and defense attorney William
Worthington (right). Ron Jett, photographer; Honolulu Star-Advertiser Collection;
98 Chapter 8
Mookini in the head and body, firing rounds through the glass front door
of a local eatery, the Beaver Grill.
Kamahoahoa said he was sure he had killed Mookini because he saw
blood fountaining into the air from the victim’s head wound. But Mookini
survived the attack, although it left him with a limp and other serious med-
ical problems.
Kamahoahoa originally denied involvement in the crime when he was
tried on a charge of attempted murder. Kamahoahoa was acquitted in a jury
trial conducted by hapless city prosecutor Maurice Sapienza—the same
man who unsuccessfully prosecuted Aku Sakamoto and Fred Ruis for the
1970 assassination of Senator Larry Kuriyama and who investigated Kukui
Plaza scandal figure Harry Chung after staying in lodgings arranged by
Chung.
By 1980, Sapienza had entered private practice but wasn’t finished with
Kamahoahoa and Mookini. He was the man who travelled to McNeil Is-
land federal penitentiary and took down Kamahoahoa’s latest version of
the crime. Sapienza then used the statement as the basis for a $160 million
lawsuit filed by Mookini against Rutledge. Rutledge scoffed at the suit, call-
ing it an attempt to stir up trouble for him when union leadership elections
were pending.
Well before the case went to trial, Kamahoahoa reversed fields again,
giving a new sworn statement in which he said he had never been hired by
Rutledge and Lii to kill Mookini. That story, he said, was merely a lie meant
to shake down Rutledge for money.
Unfazed by this turn of events, Sapienza and Mookini plowed ahead
with their claims. When the case finally went to trial in 1984, Kamahoahoa
took the stand and angrily denied shooting Mookini for money. He said
the murder-for-hire story was a lie meant to squeeze money from Rutledge
and damage his reputation as a labor leader.
Rutledge’s lawyer told the jury that Kamahoahoa had shot Mookini, but
the reason was jealousy. The two cousins were seeing the same woman, the
lawyer said.
The jury wasted little time in finding for Rutledge.
The following year, based on Huihui’s allegations, Kamahoahoa was
indicted in the Kong murder case and held in jail for 10 months because he
couldn’t post $1 million bail. He was finally released after Huihui’s plea
deal dissolved.
A false arrest lawsuit Kamahoahoa filed went nowhere, but while it was
pending, Kamahoahoa was himself sued in connection with his activities
at a curious Zen Buddhism compound nestled in the heart of the Koolau
mountain range that separates Honolulu from the windward side of Oahu.
Called the Chozen-ji International Zen Dojo, the facility was established
by a former Honolulu high school band teacher named Stanley Tanouye.
Devoting himself to the study of martial arts and the Rinzai form of Zen,
Tanouye abandoned his band instructions and founded the Zen dojo at the
very back of Kalihi Valley.
The facility and Tanouye began to attract a diverse variety of followers
and visitors, including influential political and business leaders, as well as
men of lower repute.
FBI agents following Charles Stevens, a notorious local organized crime
figure, tailed him to the dojo. Another well- k nown criminal, Charles
“Moose” Russell, became a devotee of the dojo, asserting that it had helped
him overcome heart disease.
And Royale Kamahoahoa was also occasionally on the premises at
the dojo.
According to the lawsuit, a well-connected local lawyer had taken a cli-
ent to the dojo for spiritual and physical rehabilitation. The client, injured
in a car accident, said he briefly met Tanouye and then was shown to an-
other room where Kamahoahoa was introduced to him as “an admitted hit
man,” according to the suit.
Kamahoahoa applied overly vigorous physical therapy on the injured
man, he complained in his suit. Kamahoahoa told the man to lie on his
stomach and then “proceeded to step on my feet . . . and on my back,” the
plaintiff said.
“When I told him it hurt too much, to stop, he said, ‘Praise the Lord! Re-
lease the pain from the body’ and he continued to do it,” the plaintiff said.
When asked why he didn’t just leave, he said, “I was just afraid of that
man.”
The suit, in which the plaintiff claimed to have suffered a fractured
lower back, was later settled under undisclosed terms.
C hapt e r N in e
Three Dogs and a Vet
One of the joys of reporting is its unpredictability: you’re never quite sure
what the day will bring or how a story will turn out. Frequently it’s fun,
sometimes it’s funny, and every now and then the joke’s on you.
Three examples come to mind, each of which involved a dog and its
master.
Dog #1
While at KITV in 2000, I was spending time reviewing political finance rec
ords maintained by the state Campaign Spending Commission. The records,
which hold details of the receipts and expenditures of campaigns for local
and statewide political office, were always a reliable generator of stories.
In browsing through reports at the time, I wasn’t looking for anything
in particular but checking for unusual patterns or numbers. The gold-
panning process: watching for glints of treasure amid piles of dross. This
required regular and sometimes lengthy visits to the commission’s office to
pull and examine individual candidate reports.
With the advent of online posting of electronic campaign records, the
work has become less tedious and time-consuming. But back then, much of
the information that I found valuable, including places of employment and
mailing addresses of donors, could only be found in the paper files.
I noticed that an unusual number of employees at a popu lar Chinese
restaurant, Maple Garden, had donated significant sums of money to the
campaigns of local politicians. Pulling out four years’ worth of campaign
reports for multiple officeholders and candidates, I found that Maple
100
Three Dogs and a Vet 101
Garden workers had given more than $25,000 to various Island political
campaigns.
Large gifts had come from Maple Garden President Robert Hsu and his
wife, whose combined donations totaled $7,800 to Mayor Jeremy Harris
and others. That wasn’t terribly surprising. Hsu was the proprietor of a
popu lar restaurant where political fund-raisers were held with some
regularity.
More surprising were $18,000 in donations from Maple Garden workers
who were identified in the reports as waitresses, cooks, and kitchen help-
ers. Waitress Shirley Chew gave the most: $3,500 to the Harris campaign,
$1,400 to Governor Ben Cayetano, $1,000 to Lieutenant Governor (and
later U.S. Senator) Mazie Hirono, and $500 to Kauai County Mayor Mary-
anne Kusaka. A cook, Ding Jong Tong, hedged his political bets, giving
$1,000 each to competing Honolulu mayoral candidates. Kitchen helper
Wen Chang Chen gave $1,000 to one mayoral hopeful. Chen’s address in
the spending records was the same as cook Tong’s, but when I called the
home, the man who answered said he had never heard of Wen Chang
Chen.
A couple of people familiar with the restaurant told me they had heard
it was partly owned by officials of a large and successful engineering
firm, R. M. Towill, that routinely landed no-bid consulting contracts from
city and state government.
Officers and employees of R. M. Towill also donated handsomely to po
litical campaigns, a routine practice in Honolulu’s architecture and engi-
neering community. The practice wasn’t illegal, as long as the donations
were within legal limits, weren’t tied to contract awards, and were volun-
tarily made with personal funds.
It was illegal to make donations in another person’s name, as it was to
pay an employee a bonus on the understanding that the money would be
used to make a political donation. And it was doubly illegal for that em-
ployer to then claim the bonus as a business expense.
I couldn’t find any corporate paperwork that linked Towill to Maple
Garden. Still, I wondered why restaurant workers would give so freely to
political campaigns. It was true that some workers could have gained first-
hand familiarity with candidates at fund-raisers, but the extent and variety
of the donations were striking.
So I took a cameraman to Maple Garden for a lunch hour visit. Leaving
my companion outside, I went into the restaurant and managed to speak
briefly with Shirley Chew. She said she had no time to talk to me, was sur-
prised by the figures I quoted to her, and then claimed that her command
of English was limited.
102 Chapter 9
I told her I would be happy to wait outside for a chance to speak with
her in more detail, but she didn’t respond. I went outside and told my
cameraman what had happened and said we should wait until the restau-
rant closed after lunch to see if Chew might appear outside.
Eventually, she did walk out, and I approached her on the sidewalk
with a microphone. When I began asking her questions, Chew said nothing
but opened the large purse she was clutching to her stomach. A small dog
surged out of the purse at me, snarling and snapping and struggling to get
free of the purse and sink its little canines into me.
The sudden appearance of this belligerent little animal shocked me. It
was like the creature bursting from John Hurt’s chest in Alien. I reared
away from Chew and her pet, which never actually made physical contact
with me. I said something like “Thanks for your time” and quit the field in
total defeat.
I did produce a story on the Maple Garden donations but left out the
Towill angle because I couldn’t confirm it.1
That simple story had a profound effect in later years on Island politics.
Robert Watada, executive director of the Campaign Spending Commis-
sion, used the Maple Garden money as the starting point for a years-long
investigation into what he termed the “pay to play” culture of Island po
litical finance. I take no credit for the results of Watada’s probe, which
branched to a criminal investigation conducted by the Honolulu Police De-
partment and Deputy Prosecutor Randy Lee.
Those probes netted nearly $2 million in fines and some 30 misde-
meanor criminal convictions of officials and employees of top architectural
and engineering firms.
R. M. Towill Chairman Donald Kim and President Russell Figueiroa
entered no-contest pleas to arranging “false name” political contributions
and were each fined $4,000. The charges were later erased after Kim and
Figueiroa satisfactorily completed brief terms of court supervision. Addi-
tional charges against other Towill-connected donors were dismissed as
part of a plea deal with prosecutors.
Watada told Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Rick Daysog that Kim and
Figueiroa were “at the top of the pay-to-play food chain.”2
Daysog, a bulldog on the campaign spending story, reported in 2001
on connections between the Towill company and the Maple Garden restau-
rant. Past company president Richard M. Towill once owned a piece of the
restaurant, and Chairman Kim had been an officer of the Maple Garden
corporation, Daysog found. And he reported “that notations on several of
the Maple Garden checks used for political donations appear to link the
donations to the Towill firm.”3
I worked off and on for decades on stories that examined the nexus
between such campaign donations and the selection of no-bid consultants,
but it was virtually impossible to demonstrate an explicit quid pro quo re-
lationship between the gifts and the contracts.
It was easy to show the quid part of the equation: the money. And the
quo side, the contracts, was usually obvious. But the pro in the middle—an
agreement that donations bought you contracts—was very elusive. The do-
nors invariably said that they admired the politics of the candidates or that
campaign gifts simply improved their chances of getting noticed, but you
had to win the work on your own merits.
One series of stories exposed a variation on the pay-to-play scheme that
could be described as “play then pay.” Under that scheme, contractors se-
lected for government consulting work kicked back a portion of their com-
pensation to the campaign of the official who gave them the work.
Details of those and other stories I produced on this subject are covered
in Chapter 11.
Dog #2
My second dog encounter came years later and also involved a sidewalk
interview.
In 2012, I was working for the online news site Hawaii Reporter. The site’s
owner, publisher, editor, and principal reporter, Malia Zimmerman, had
cultivated a source who claimed that an escort service called Volcano Girls
was being operated out of the Waikiki apartment of University of Hawai‘i
Professor Lawrence “Bill” Boyd.
The Volcano Girls website certainly gave the appearance of a prostitu-
tion business, featuring nude and seminude photos of female escorts who
were available to provide a “girlfriend experience” to interested customers.
But the site was carefully constructed, mentioning no prices or explicit de-
scriptions of the services provided by the “smoking hot” women shown on
the site.
There was no way of connecting the site to Boyd or his apartment, except
a contact telephone number.
When Malia and I reconnoitered Boyd’s Ohua Street condominium
building one day, we managed to get inside and walked down the first floor
hallway to the door of Boyd’s apartment. When we called the Volcano Girls’
contact number, we could hear a phone ringing inside the apartment. We
hung up and the ringing stopped; we called again and the ringing resumed.
We decided the story was a good candidate for some undercover work,
so I made a series of calls to the Volcano Girls’ phone number, presenting
104 Chapter 9
myself as a customer interested in securing the serv ices of one of the es-
corts. I spoke first to a woman and then to a man, arranging an encoun-
ter with “a busty Caucasian” woman who called herself Kendra. I was
instructed to go to the Ohua Street apartment for the meeting.
The man said the price of the meeting was “three” but w ouldn’t be more
specific. Comments on the website said that meant $300. I was told to park
my car in the lot of the nonprofit Waikiki Health Center and walk across
Ohua Street to the apartment building. I was given the number and entry
code for Boyd’s apartment in the building.
Malia loaded me down with two hidden cameras, so I was shooting
undercover video when I knocked on the door of Boyd’s unit. A young
woman opened the door and ushered me down a dark hallway to an equally
dark bedroom. We introduced ourselves as Kendra and Jim, and I asked if
the price was $300. She said the price was whatever had been agreed upon
over the phone.
I nervously told her that I had changed my mind and wanted to cancel
the appointment. By that point, I wasn’t acting. I was extremely nervous
and wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there. I paid her a $50
“cancellation fee” and quickly left.
The undercover video turned out to be very murky and barely usable
but good enough to justify an interview with Boyd.
Malia, our cameraman, and I confronted Boyd the following morning
when he left the apartment building to walk his dog—just as Malia’s im-
peccable source had said he would. The source also insisted that Honolulu
police had made a prostitution bust several years earlier in Boyd’s apart-
ment, and we w ere in the process of running down that police report when
I approached Boyd on the sidewalk.
He was friendly and accommodating, saying he knew nothing about a
prostitution or escort business operating inside his apartment. When I told
him I had been inside his apartment to meet with Kendra and had video-
taped the encounter, he said he was “dumbfounded.”
Boyd speculated that a woman named Lorraine Drake, who occupied a
bedroom in the unit, might be responsible for the Volcano Girls’ activities
there. He said he and his wife were out of the apartment during daylight
hours. I told him that the man who booked my appointment on the phone
sounded just like him, but Boyd adamantly denied speaking to me.
When the interview began, Boyd’s dog was on the ground at his feet,
but as the exchange progressed, he picked up the animal and clutched it to
his chest.
As the questioning grew more uncomfortable for him, he tightened his
grip on the animal and held it higher on his chest. By the time we finished
talking, he was nearly holding the dog directly in front of his face. The
poor creature looked back and forth between Boyd and me and finally
began trying to squirm its way out of Boyd’s embrace.
I felt rather sorry for both dog and man by the time I stopped my
questioning.
We did manage to get a copy of a May 2007 HPD report that related that
an undercover cop had booked a $325 meeting in Boyd’s apartment through
the Volcano Girls’ website. A 38-year-old woman was charged with prosti-
tution after she promised to perform explicit sex acts with the officer, the
report said.
I called Boyd and asked him about the report. He said he knew nothing
about a prostitution arrest at his apartment. “In May of 2007, I think I was
in San Francisco,” Boyd told me.
We produced online video and print versions of the story for the Hawaii
Reporter site,4 and a version of the video story was also broadcast on the lo-
cal Hawaii News Now television station.
We then got our hands on another report, written by the resident
manager of the Ohua Street building about the 2007 prostitution arrest. The
manager said that after the police left, “the owner of unit 1C approached me
and said that the girl [referring to the prostitute] came in to change clothes
and that he didn’t know what was g oing on.” 5
The Volcano Girls stories were a source of great entertainment to morn-
ing radio show hosts Michael W. Perry and Larry Price, who dominated the
AM radio waves during morning drive time and discussed the hidden
camera investigation at great length. Some of my so-called friends were
also vastly amused and took to referring to me as the man who pays women
not to have sex with him.
Dog #3
The final dog tale began with a Japanese wedding business that was being
operated on waterfront property of the Honolulu chapter of Disabled
American Veterans, a national nonprofit advocacy group.
The phenomenon of Japanese couples travelling overseas for wedding
ceremonies began in the mid-1990s and spread rapidly throughout Hawai‘i.
Established churches found themselves doing land office business in
conducting the ceremonies. Some churches hosted so many that it became
a production-line affair. As limousines carrying one happy wedding party
left the premises, more were arriving.
Companies eager to cash in on the business built their own chapels—as
close to the ocean as possible to command the highest prices.
106 Chapter 9
The odd aspect to the business was that virtually all of the ceremonies
eren’t really weddings at all. Most couples had been married in small
w
private ceremonies at home, then travelled to Hawai‘i or Australia for er-
satz ceremonies attended by family members and close friends.
The driving force behind the phenomenon was money. It was actually a
great deal cheaper and simpler to hold a small private wedding in Japan,
followed by an overseas ceremony, than it was to hold a traditional grand
ceremony in Japan.
The couples didn’t acquire wedding licenses in Hawai‘i because they
were already married. The ceremonies were performed in English, and most
churches that hosted the events dispensed with many of the normal reli-
gious aspects of the rites.
That raised interesting tax questions for the churches or nonprofit orga-
nizations like the DAV that were profiting from the business.
I had covered the subject in some detail before while at KITV, and state
tax officials had told me that churches and nonprofit entities had to pay taxes
on income generated by business activities like pretend weddings that were
unrelated to their core activities.
After I returned to the Advertiser in 2002, I found another story in the
making at the DAV property.
The land itself was on a dreary stretch of Nimitz Highway near Honolulu
International Airport. Its one redeeming factor was that it fronted the ocean.
The 11-acre property was owned by the state and leased free of charge to the
DAV for development of a memorial to servicemen and women killed or
disabled while in the armed forces.
A company specializing in Japanese weddings built two private chapels
with windows that overlooked the Pacific and began booking hundreds
of weddings at the venue. When the DAV signed a new contract with a
competing company that offered more money, $300,000 per year, for the
site, a lawsuit was filed that contained lots of interesting details about
the business.
No building permits were obtained before the chapels, three “wedding
pavilions,” and other amenities w ere erected on the site. DAV officials
called that an oversight that was being corrected. The company that paid
for those improvements, La Mariage, Inc., claimed that it had also paid for
a new entry gate and roadway at the property, naming the main thorough-
fare after U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye. Inouye had come to the rescue of the
DAV and a related nonprofit, Keehi Memorial Association, after complaints
were lodged with the state that the weddings were an improper use of the
memorial site.6
And La Mariage claimed that it had donated $140,000 to the two veter-
ans groups and paid another $50,000 directly to officials of the organiza-
tions for construction, landscaping, and other services.
The DAV and the Memorial Association stoutly defended their use of
the property. I knew there were critics but had some trouble finding any-
one willing to go on the record with their complaints.
I finally found one in Roy Wiginton, a DAV vice commander, and needed
to quickly arrange an interview and photograph of him because his avail-
ability was limited.
I called the photo desk, which dispatched staff photographer Rebecca
Breyer to Wiginton’s house. The written assignment given to her described
Wiginton as a disabled vet.
I have observed over the years that many news photographers (as well
as those operating television cameras) march to different drummers than
the rest of us. Rebecca was no exception. She was a sweet, gregarious
woman but a bit on the loopy side. She was crazy about animals and dolls.
At one point, she assembled an elaborate, diorama-like display of dolls and
action figures in a corner of the city room. The figures were meant to depict
various employees of the newspaper. It grew to considerable size, and
many staffers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Eventually an editor
ordered it dismantled.
When Rebecca returned from the Wiginton photo shoot, I asked to see
her pictures. She happily complied, but I was disconcerted to see that every
single one of the many shots she had taken included not just Wiginton but
also his pet dog. Usually the dog was in a position of prominence.
Wiginton, wearing his DAV hat and seated in a wheelchair, had the dog
in the middle of his lap, cradled in his arms or held out in front of him.
“These are great, Rebecca,” I said. “But don’t you have any without
the dog?”
“Why would I?” she answered. “He’s a vet so I had to include the dog.”
It took me a beat or two to process this answer. I eventually explained
that the man was a veteran, not a veterinarian.
She laughed merrily about the mix-up.
“You’re g oing to be telling this story for a long time, aren’t you?” she
asked.
Yes, Rebecca, I am.
C hapt e r T e n
Pay to Play
A good portion of my professional career was spent at the junction of

politics, money, and government contracts. It was hardly exhilarating work—
analyzing campaign records, wrestling for access to contract files, research-
ing corporate records, interviewing hostile and evasive officials.
Mostly this work resulted in straightforward reporting of who had
gotten contract awards and how much they had paid in campaign dona-
tions. Once in a while, the stories prompted official investigations and
reforms. The state senate cited my stories when it began a two-year series
of hearings on the procurement code that ended with an overhaul of the
system. Senators even unanimously passed a resolution honoring my
reporting.
The resolution said I was “a consistently objective, tenacious and relent-
less researcher” and “a role model for all future journalists in Hawai‘i.”
Several of the signatories later came to think less highly of me.
Pay-to-play stories I wrote also led to criminal investigations, indict-
ments, and even some convictions and prison time. What follows is a repre-
sentative sampling of some of those stories.
Kukui Plaza
The biggest and probably the best example was also the first. The Kukui
Plaza scandal was textbook pay-to-play. Before and a fter receiving a $50
million city redevelopment contract, Oceanside Properties and its presi-
dent, Hal Hansen, helped Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi and his friends in
myriad ways.
108
Pay to Play 109
Although criminal charges against Fasi and fund-raiser Harry C. C.

Chung were ultimately dismissed after Hansen refused to testify in open
court, details of what he told the grand jury u
nder oath and other evidence
amassed against Fasi and Chung were made public during the trial, during
the earlier city council hearings, and through independent research.
The indictment alleged that Fasi, Chung, and Hansen reached a “cor-
rupt agreement” that required Hansen and Oceanside to reward Chung
and Fasi for the Kukui Plaza contract. Some $65,000 in cash, campaign con-
tributions, services, and other gratuities were paid, and much more was
owed, prosecutors charged.
Hansen told the grand jury that he made eight cash payments totaling
some $44,000 to Chung; $2,500 was given to Chung on the day Fasi picked
Ocean side for the Kukui Plaza contract. Hansen gave seven personal
checks totaling $3,050 to two Fasi campaign groups. One check was given
just before the city stopped accepting development proposals for the Kukui
project.
Hansen told the grand jury that the deal was reached during a “facts of
life” meeting he had with Chung at Chung’s 20th-Century Furniture office.
In a very brief appearance on the witness stand during the trial, Hansen
claimed he told special prosecutor Grant Cooper before his grand jury tes-
timony that “I did not feel then and I do not feel now there ever was . . . a
bribe agreement.”
The day the indictment was unsealed, Fasi held a press conference in
which he angrily and adamantly proclaimed his innocence, claiming that
Governor George Ariyoshi and Cooper had targeted him in a political ven-
detta. With characteristic chutzpah, the mayor used the news conference to
say that he would formally open his next gubernatorial campaign at an
upcoming fund-raiser. He also solicited donations to a newly formed legal
defense fund.
There was plenty to the Oceanside-Fasi-Chung relationship that was
not included in the criminal case but fell under the pay-to-play umbrella:
• 20th-Century Furniture received the contract to supply carpeting,

drapes, and other furnishings at Kukui Plaza.
• Another Chung company, Washerette Clinic, owned and main-
tained all the coin-operated washers and dryers in the 908-unit
twin tower building.
• Oceanside picked Chung’s son as insurance agent for Kukui
Plaza.
• At Chung’s request, Oceanside bought thousands of dollars’ worth
of stationery supplies for the Fasi campaign, storing the material
110 Chapter 10
Mayor Fasi, lower right, at a 1976 fund-raiser. His bribery trial codefendant, Harry C. C.
Chung, is at far left, leaning against the concrete pillar. Bob Young, photographer;
Honolulu Star-Advertiser Collection; Hawai‘i State Archives.
at its company office until the campaign ran low. Televisions, add-
ing machines, and calculators were also given to the campaign.
• The company bought a $7,000 movie camera that was used by
Fasi’s office to produce television ads and promotional films.
• Oceanside paid thousands more to air television commercials
during prime-time hours that promoted mayoral programs.
• The company also prepared and published for Fasi a housing pro-
gram that he presented as his own during his 1974 gubernatorial
campaign. The program bore a striking similarity to another hous-
ing development proposal presented to the city four years earlier
by one of Oceanside’s competitors in the Kukui Plaza selection
process.
• Oceanside even paid for carpeting installed at a hostess bar called
Venus Lounge owned by the girlfriend of Matt Esposito, a long-
time Fasi crony and city administration official.
• All the expenses incurred by Oceanside for these activities were
charged by Oceanside to overhead spending for Kukui Plaza and
Pay to Play 111
ere used by the company to determine how much profit it could

w
declare from the project.
• Friends of the mayor and Harry Chung were given preferential
treatment in the purchase of specially priced moderate-income
units at Kukui Plaza. Residents who had been displaced from
their homes by construction of the project were supposed to have
been given first claim on the special units, but many were not.1
$150,000 = $51 Million
The early 1990s w ere taken up by multiple investigations of no-bid consult-
ing contracts awarded by the state to companies that made regular dona-
tions to election campaigns and were manned by officials closely tied to
the Democratic Party power structure of Hawai‘i.
Using the state’s open records law in 1992, I found an “open-ended” no-
bid contract at the airport that lasted 11 years and grew from $150,000 to
$51 million.2
The contract was held by M&E Pacific, an engineering firm whose prin-
cipals included James Kumagai, a former state official and Democratic
Party chairman. Various employees of the company had left government
jobs to work for M&E. Some even went from M&E to the public payroll—
the “revolving door” of consulting work that I found over and over again in
my research.
The contractor was originally tasked with identifying necessary expan-
sion projects at Honolulu International Airport. Then contract amendments
were repeatedly added that gave M&E authority to plan and design the in-
dividual projects, including construction of an overseas terminal, new pas-
senger concourses, and design of fire alarm, electronic security, flight infor-
mation displays, and public address systems. As those work areas were
identified, the contract was again expanded to require M&E to provide nec-
essary “construction management services.”
Not all of the $51 million was retained by M&E; much flowed through
the company to well-connected subcontractors like Data House, Inc., a
company founded by Daniel Arita, the former head of electronic data pro
cessing for state government. I wrote many other stories about no-bid public-
sector work Data House had landed.
The company received three consecutive no-bid jobs worth almost
$500,000 to computerize and automate Governor John Waihee’s office. An
audit found that the consultant contract had been improperly used to
acquire computer equipment for the governor’s office—acquisitions that
112 Chapter 10
should have been put out to bid. Data House president Arita and his wife
donated generously to Waihee’s campaign, and the company also supplied
computer equipment to the campaign.3
This wasn’t an entirely new situation: 10 years earlier, in 1982, I found
the firm illegally occupying state-owned, low-cost waterfront warehouse
space while simultaneously donating to, and working for, Governor George
Ariyoshi’s political campaign.4
Marvin Miura Goes to Prison

Marvin Miura’s career in the public spotlight was short-lived but flamboy-
ant. In 1989, Miura was a politically ambitious man stuck in a low-profile
state job. He headed the Office of Environmental Quality Control (OEQC),
an obscure agency that processed a great deal of paperwork.
He began making waves at the OEQC, expanding the work there into
areas that arguably had environmental significance but were the respon-
sibility of other government agencies. A short man with a big, bristling
mustache, Miura cultivated a swashbuckling image—a sort of buccaneer-
among-bureaucrats who had neither time nor patience for red tape or dith-
ering. While laying the groundwork for a Maui County mayoral campaign,
Miura began livening things up at OEQC, awarding a series of no-bid jobs
to a small group of consultants.
OEQC employees, alarmed by Miura’s activities, complained about him
to the local FBI office but w
ere unhappy about the apparent lack of response
there. One of them tipped me to what was going on. I quickly peppered
OEQC with records requests and found that Miura had awarded $365,000
in work to his cronies. Some $100,000 of the work was illegally divided into
small increments worth less than $4,000. The practice, known as “parceling,”
allowed the direct award of work with minimal competition.5
The largest contract, for a $200,000 study of the need for a hazardous
waste disposal facility in Hawai‘i, was awarded without bid to the same
group of Miura pals, none of whom had any expertise whatsoever in the
field of hazardous waste.6
The cronies included a Democratic Party insider, Ko Hayashi, who was
a longtime political backer of Governor John Waihee, as well as a Univer-
sity of Hawai‘i business professor, Ross Prizzia.
I found political contributions from the OEQC consultants to Miura’s
nascent mayoral campaign and to Waihee’s campaign committee.7
I also found paperwork that led from Miura directly to Waihee.8
After Miura sent a memo to the governor seeking approval to award the
hazardous waste study, the governor received a detailed complaint letter
Pay to Play 113
Marvin Miura. Edwin

Tanji, photographer;
Honolulu Star-
about how Miura was manipulating the hazardous waste contract award.9
The letter was written by a local attorney on behalf of a Mainland firm,
Parametrix, Inc., that had helped Miura get the $200,000 in contract funds
from the legislature and that wanted at least a chance at bidding for the
contract.
“During the past legislative session, we were called on by Marvin
Miura of the OEQC to prepare expert testimony for his use in support of the
study,” the letter, written by lawyer Lloyd Asato, said. “After the session,
Parametrix was interested in being on a list to be considered for the study,”
the letter continued. “Marvin Miura told me this a fternoon that the contract
is let, that he cannot reveal the consultant and that it was a non-bid contract
because the work is highly specialized,” Asato wrote.
The l awyer asked for an investigation. “We request that you look into this
situation, correct any irregularity and open this matter for competition.”
114 Chapter 10
None of that happened. Waihee approved the contract, telling me in an in-

terview later that he approved the need for a study, not the contractor who
would prepare it. He also told me that he knew no details of Miura’s she-
nanigans at OEQC and “would have stopped” them if he had.
Asato’s letter was sent by Waihee’s office to the Health Department,
which oversaw Miura and the OEQC. The Health Department then asked
Miura to respond to Asato. Miura wrote a vaguely worded response that
said state law allowed such a contract to be awarded without competitive
bidding. The response, which said nothing about the request for an investi-
gation, was sent back up the line to the governor’s office and forwarded to
Asato.
Miura acknowledged in an interview that his management style was
“maybe unconventional” but was meant to break up what he called the
“bureaucratic lump” of government. He denied behaving improperly in
the selection of consultants and said the contractors he picked w ere quali-
fied and professional.
“These guys were capable, so I said, ‘Boom, let’s do it,’ ” Miura told me.
But the hazardous waste study, when it was finally produced, was a
toxic disaster. The deputy health director in charge of environmental issues
said in an interview that the report’s findings “appear to be partial, errone-
ous and misleading and they don’t provide much evidence of original re-
search.” A top University of Hawai‘i environmental scientist called the report
“a waste of time.”
When I was finishing up the first of what would be many Miura stories,
I walked from the News Building to OEQC’s office to retrieve additional rec
ords. I couldn’t get through the door because the FBI was conducting a raid.
Miura, Hayashi, and Prizzia w ere later indicted on federal criminal
charges, including fraud, kickbacks, money laundering, and tax evasion.
Miura eventually pleaded guilty to demanding and receiving a $35,000
kickback from Prizzia and Hayashi. They also gave him a $1,800 trip to
Thailand and paid Miura’s son $15,000 for OEQC subcontract work. Hayashi
and Prizzia pleaded guilty and received short prison sentences.
Prizzia, a tenured professor, lost his job at the University of Hawai‘i but
filed a successful grievance when he got out of prison and was restored to
the faculty.
When Miura entered his guilty plea, his lawyer, Michael Weight, told
reporters that his client had been unfairly targeted for conduct “that has
been going on in Hawaii since time immemorial.”10 Weight said purchas-
ing improprieties were widespread in state government. He quoted Frank
Fasi’s famous maxim: “All else being equal, you reward your friends and
punish your enemies.”
Pay to Play 115
What Miura did “was not right,” Weight said, “but if the government is
oing to pursue the likes of Marvin Miura, there are probably a number of
g
other folks in town that had best be concerned.”
Ken Kiyabu Redecorates

My contracting cronyism exposés in the early 1990s reached critical mass
with a series of stories I wrote about numerous minicontracts awarded by
the manager of Aloha Stadium.
Ken Kiyabu was a former legislator and Democratic Party stalwart who
was given the stadium manager job in 1989. His professional background
included work as a real estate agent and tour promoter. After serving in
the legislature from 1975 to 1986, Kiyabu served a two-year stint as deputy
state comptroller in the Department of Accounting and General Services,
Ken Kiyabu. Honolulu

Star-Bulletin photo;
Honolulu Star-
116 Chapter 10
which oversaw most government contracting and purchasing activities, be-

fore transferring to the stadium job.
Aloha Stadium was a massive money pit of a structure that over the
years produced a wealth of stories. The “weathered steel” used in its con-
struction, meant to develop a protective “patina” of rust in the salty winds
above Pearl Harbor, never worked quite as planned and led to tens of mil-
lions of dollars in repairs and legal claims. The stadium design, in which
sections of stands could be rolled on concrete casters into football or base-
ball configurations, was equally defective, and eventually the stadium was
locked into a football oval.
In late 1992, I took a look at stadium purchasing records and quickly
noticed some obvious anomalies. A series of purchase orders for painting,
carpeting, and drapery installation in the stadium executive offices were
all written after the work had been performed. This was the reverse of the
normal process: first you order the work, then it gets performed, then pay-
ment is made.
There was something even more suspicious about the paperwork. All
the purchase orders, which totaled about $50,000, were for amounts under
$4,000. It looked to me like clear-cut parceling, dicing a large job into small
components to avoid putting the work out to competitive bid.11
Jobs under $4,000 were subject to much less formal purchasing rules,
and that’s what happened at Ken Kiyabu’s office. The state comptroller’s
office—where Kiyabu used to work—had issued warnings to state pro-
curement agents that parceling was illegal and could result in fines and
termination.
The single largest purchase order I looked at, for $3,984, was issued to
Jimmy Kitazaki. There was no indication what work Kitazaki provided,
and his business address on the requisition order had been lined out and
replaced with the address of another company involved in the stadium work,
K&A Installers.
I found Kitazaki working at a retail furniture store that was conve
niently within walking distance of my office. When I visited him in person,
he readily said that he and Ken Kiyabu had been personal friends for
25 years, and he had voluntarily, and without pay, helped Kiyabu with his
redecoration project. I asked about the $3,984 invoice, and he said that pay-
ment actually went to K&A for the purchase and installation of new car-
peting at Kiyabu’s office. The carpeting, called Karastani Tanipani, had a
blue metallic threading because Kiyabu was “a blue man,” Kitazaki said.
When I pressed him on why the bill w asn’t sent directly to K&A,
Kitazaki said “something was mentioned about bidding restrictions above
$4,000.”
Pay to Play 117
The president of K&A, Alan Nakatsu, confirmed Kitazaki’s account and

added that two companies that also billed for services at the stadium hadn’t
done any work there at all. They allowed their company names to be used
on invoices to keep each individual bill under $4,000, he explained.12
Kiyabu himself offered several explanations for what had happened. In
late 1991, he said, word reached him that President George H. W. Bush would
be visiting Aloha Stadium. So Kiyabu wanted to spruce up the place in ad-
vance of the visit. He also said that the reason the work was billed in small
increments was because the stadium didn’t have the budget for it, so it was
performed over an extended period of time. The presidential visit was can-
celled and lessened the need for immediate performance, Kiyabu told me.13
He confirmed his friendship with Kitazaki but said Kitazaki worked
without pay. When asked why Kitazaki submitted a $3,984 bill to the state,
Kiyabu said, “I thought he didn’t bill us.” Kiyabu signed Kitazaki’s invoice
on behalf of the stadium.
Kiyabu also said the contractors all performed fine work, and he as-
serted that it probably would have cost the state more if it had gone through
the time-consuming and inefficient process of putting the work out to com-
petitive bid.
As scandals go, this one was minor at best. A relatively small amount of
money was involved when compared with other multimillion-dollar no-
bid jobs I had covered. Nobody had paid to play. But the response to the
Aloha Stadium stories was instantaneous public outrage. Readers called
and wrote in with compliments and calls for more stories. Legislators de-
manded investigations and public hearings. The state announced a review
of Aloha Stadium purchasing.
At the time, I liked to imagine that the sudden public umbrage had actu-
ally been accumulating over time, fed by my earlier stories. Maybe the sta-
dium stories pushed this reservoir of resentment over the spillway.
In reality, though, I suspect there was a simpler explanation: carpets
and drapes. People understood that stuff. A government official who cut
corners to fancy up his office got people riled.
Within three weeks of the first story, the government’s review was com-
pleted, and Ken Kiyabu had resigned.14 The review found “glaring deficien-
cies” in how the stadium handled the refurbishment work. It also found “a
fundamental weakness in the internal control system of the stadium in the
procurement process.”
Governor John Waihee and Attorney General Robert Marks said no fur-
ther action would be taken against Kiyabu. “I agree that he violated the
procurement process,” Waihee said, adding that resignation was “a severe
enough sanction” for Kiyabu.
118 Chapter 10
Kiyabu said he had tried to perform his work as quickly and efficiently
as possible but was thwarted by the state’s “severely limiting” procurement
code.
There had already been attempts to overhaul state procurement prac-
tices, centering on two tricky areas of government contracting: “sole-
source” jobs, which were awarded directly to vendors, and “professional
services” work. The latter involved services like architectural and engi-
neering design that were awarded on criteria beyond simple price, in-
cluding such things as past performance and professional capabilities of
vendors.
Sole-source awards were justified by a variety of arguments. The most
common was that only the selected contractor was qualified for the work—
an argument that was sometimes true but too often accepted at face value.
Another regular but dubious justification was the press of time—“we need
this right away.” A variation on this theme was “we already awarded it;
please approve it retroactively because the contractor has started work.”
Perhaps the most common of all was “we’ve already used this contractor
for similar work.” A close relative of this last argument was “we used this
contractor’s proprietary software so we have to keep using him.”
Unlike sole-source awards, hiring an architect or engineer usually in-
cluded some semblance of competition. Prospective designers had to dem-
onstrate that they w ere professionally qualified, that they had the requisite
manpower, and, ideally, that they had previously completed similar work.
It was the inclusion of these necessarily subjective criteria that opened the
process to manipulation.
A 1990 study commissioned by the state comptroller found that Hawai‘i’s
procurement system was chaotic, antiquated, and prone to abuse. It recom-
mended adoption of a model procurement code developed by the American
Bar Association. Pending that action, the consultant said, the state could still
reduce the amount of no-bid and sole-source contracts it was awarding by
25 percent.
The following year, I found, the state actually increased those awards
by 50 percent.15
A committee of procurement officials from around the state couldn’t
agree on whether adoption of the model code was a good idea. Against that
backdrop came the parceling stories.
On the day Kiyabu resigned, the state senate announced creation of a
special committee to investigate procurement issues and draft a new pro-
curement code.
A reform bill the legislature passed in 1993 was vetoed by Governor
Waihee. Reforms w ere enacted the following year, but I found soon enough
Pay to Play 119
that the new procedures, meant to seal consultant contracts from unfair
influences, were far from watertight.
Airport Games
In 1996, a fter I decamped from the Advertiser to television news, my first
major project at KITV involved a hard look at Honolulu International Air-
port consulting contracts.
I had developed a very good source inside the airport bureaucracy.
Airport officials, my source told me, were skirting provisions of the new
procurement code and awarding consultant jobs to firms with political
connections to the new governor, Ben Cayetano.
As proof, I was given an internal airport document that listed upcoming
consultant jobs. Handwritten notes on the right margin of the list identified
the firms that would be given the contracts. All the notes were written be-
fore the so-called new and evenhanded selection process had even begun,
my source told me.
Some of the contracts had already been awarded by the time my source
gave me the list. The names of the winners corresponded to the hand-
written notes, but that didn’t prove anything.
Without mentioning the handwritten list I had, I started asking for ac-
cess to a large number of airport contract documents before the next job was
awarded.
Some background information about how the new procurement system
was supposed to work is necessary here.
Firms interested in architectural and engineering work had to first be
prequalified by the state. As each new contract award approached, names
of prequalified companies were submitted to small committees of state
personnel, who graded the applicants according to predetermined criteria:
professional achievements, past performance, familiarity with the type of
work involved, that sort of thing.
The names of the best three applicants would then be given to a pro-
curement officer in no particular order. The officer would then select a win-
ner, negotiate the terms of the contract, and award the job. If the negotia-
tions bogged down, they would be cancelled and begun again with another
company on the list of finalists.
The fact that the list of finalists was unranked was supposed to give
procurement officials room to maneuver: the same company wouldn’t
win all the time because there would be an ability to spread the work
around among companies that had already been found best qualified for
the jobs.
120 Chapter 10
But my tipster said the system was being gamed. Screening committees
ere regularly submitting lists of finalists that contained names of compa-
w
nies friendly to the administration. And companies that were owned or
otherwise connected to Dennis Mitsunaga, Governor Cayetano’s personal
friend and political fund-raiser, were landing an inordinate number of jobs,
I was told.
The next contract on my list was a $600,000 job to plan improvements to
the international arrivals terminal. The handwritten list said the job would
go to a company called TM Designers. The list was right.
I started making phone calls to airport officials. My source told me that
the handwriting on the list belonged to Ernest Kurosawa, a mid-level engi-
neering official at the airport. When I reached Kurosawa on the phone, he
said he thought the contract award process was manipulated for political
reasons. But he w ouldn’t agree to an on-camera interview.
TM Designers had been in existence for only eight months, and a vice
president of the company, Roy Iizaki, said the company was controlled by
Dennis Mitsunaga. It was operating out of state-owned airport warehouse
space that it shared with another Mitsunaga-controlled company. And Mit-
sunaga’s main company, Mitsunaga & Associates, was a subcontractor on
the international terminal job.
Mitsunaga refused to talk to me.
I lined up interviews with the head of the airports division, Jerry Mat-
suda, and his boss, Transportation Department Director Kazu Hayashida,
the man who had formally picked TM Designers for the job.16
I told Hayashida I had a list written weeks before the pick that correctly
said he would select TM Designers for the job. “I’m surprised that it was
out,” Hayashida said.
Asked if there were political aspects to the selection of TM Designers,
Hayashida said, “I hope not. It should be more of a professional pick.”
I interviewed Jerry Matsuda on camera and told him that Ernest
Kurosawa said consultant awards were being politically manipulated. “He
did?” Matsuda answered. “I’m not familiar with that.”
I asked Matsuda if he had discussed with Kurosawa the companies that
the administration preferred for consulting jobs. “No, not to my knowledge,”
he said. It was a very lukewarm denial.
I thought I was on my way to a career at 60 Minutes. The men in these
interviews were understandably nervous, but they also looked very shifty,
something difficult to convey in newsprint.
Later in the interview, Matsuda collected himself and said flatly that
there was nothing political about the selection process.
Pay to Play 121
I also interviewed Governor Cayetano, who said, “There is no attempt

to influence the way jobs are given out to consultant firms.” He said Mitsu-
naga was a friend and political supporter who had been raising campaign
money for him for 10 years. But he claimed that Mitsunaga wasn’t getting
much work from the state. “Maybe he hasn’t had luck,” Cayetano said. “If I
were to manipulate the system, the man should be rolling in dough.”
I followed up that first story with another the following day that showed
the governor had personally manipulated the award of another pricey con-
sulting job, for design improvements at one of the airport’s busiest runways.
The contract had gone to another Mitsunaga-connected company, Fujita &
Associates. Mitsunaga was an original founder of that company, and his
own firm was a subcontractor on the runway job. Score sheets prepared by
the screening committee showed that Fujita had finished 10th of the 11 firms
considered.17
But those scores were thrown out after the governor said he wanted the
work to go to a local company. That whittled the list of competitors from 11
to 5 firms. Even then, Fujita finished fourth out of five applicants, according
to the paperwork compiled u nder the new procurement law.
The new law said only the top three qualifiers could be considered for
such a contract. But Hayashida ordered the list of finalists expanded to five
firms. Then he gave the job to Fujita.
Cayetano’s attorney general, Margery Bronster, sat for an interview and
declared the selection process illegal. Limiting the qualified companies to
only local firms was improper, Bronster said. And using a five-company list
of finalists instead of three was legally questionable, she said: “The law is
pretty clear that there is a list of three that is to be sent up to the procurement
officer.”
Hayashida said he picked Fujita because he was familiar with the com
pany and knew it could do the job. He said he knew nothing about connec-
tions between Fujita and Mitsunaga. The governor relied on his earlier
denial that there w ere no political considerations in the selection process.
The following week, the Fujita contract award was cancelled, and
Cayetano said he was ordering an investigation of airport consulting jobs.
And Ernest Kurosawa, who had told me off camera the previous week
that the process was subject to political manipulation, now was denying
that he ever said such a thing. So I interviewed Kurosawa on camera, arm-
ing myself ahead of time with copies of his handwriting that matched the
notes on the secret selection list.18
After he denied saying that contracts
were po liti
cally influenced, I
showed Kurosawa that handwritten list. “Do you recognize this?” I asked.
122 Chapter 10
“Isn’t that your handwriting on the right-hand edge of that?” Kurosawa

was clearly rattled, and the state public relations officer who was present at
the interview didn’t step in to save him. She seemed as interested as I was
in what he would say.
“I think this should be some other subject because I’m here just to clear
the statement that you made,” Kurosawa said.
“Doesn’t this demonstrate that in fact the contractor selection . . . that
contractors are preselected?” I asked.
“Not really,” said Kurosawa.
I pressed on: “When did you write those names down?”
“I don’t know if I did,” he said.
“Isn’t it your handwriting?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, studying the document.
I was in full 60 Minutes mode now. “I brought another sample of your
handwriting; we can compare them if you want.”
He denied that the document showed manipulation of the process.
When I got back to the station and saw the raw footage of the interview, I
realized my dreams of network stardom would have to wait. The longer the
interview went, the higher my voice rose. By the time I produced the hand-
writing exemplar for Kurosawa, I was squeaking like an outraged mouse.
The next day, Cayetano blamed the problems in airport consulting on
mid-level bureaucrats like Kurosawa. High-level officials like Hayashida
would make the selections. “It’s best to have this at a higher level where
you folks, the press, can question people who are accountable, like me,”
Cayetano told me.
That was a truly silly solution, since Hayashida was already the Trans-
portation Department’s chief procurement officer and had final say on
consultant selections. Plus Hayashida was a political appointee of the
governor.
I pointed out that in the first year and a half on the job, Hayashida had
repeatedly given consulting work worth millions of dollars to Mitsunaga-
connected companies. On a $500,000 job at Lihue Airport on Kauai, Hayas-
hida picked Mitsunaga for the work over two other companies that received
higher marks from screeners.
“I’ve known Dennis for a long time. . . . Even before, when his father
was a contractor,” Hayashida said. “He has the necessary experience to do
a lot of things.”
Another Mitsunaga company, M&A, Inc., landed a $1 million job from
Hayashida just weeks after the company was incorporated.19
The following week brought a look at the airport warehouse that sev-
eral Mitsunaga-connected companies were using for their airport work.
Pay to Play 123
The warehouse was leased by the state to Aloha Airlines, and there was
no record in property files of any other tenants there. I found that four
Mitsunaga-connected companies had been operating from that address for
more than a year.
One was Blueline, Inc., a Mitsunaga venture that produced architectural
drawings. Another was Punaluu Builders, a construction company. Mitsu-
naga & Associates called the warehouse its “branch office” in correspon-
dence with the state. TM Designers also used the warehouse as its mailing
address.
The state then cancelled Aloha’s property permit because of the im-
proper subleasing.20
Finally, 10 weeks after the governor announced that an investigation
would be undertaken of the airport consulting contracts, I followed up
with a story that there was no sign of an investigation.21
The attorney general’s office was supposed to be looking into the m atter,
but I learned none of the staff investigators had received such an assignment.
Hayashida said in an interview that no one had questioned him or anyone
else in his department. But he did say that airport personnel like Kurosawa
and Jerry Matsuda were no longer involved in consultant selections.
After Cayetano announced the investigation, Hayashida went ahead and
picked Mitsunaga for the Lihue Airport job—just like Kurosawa’s hand-
written list said he would. “That was already in the process, we didn’t want
to delay the project. The main thing is that they were qualified for the work,”
said Hayashida.
I continued turning out stories about large consulting jobs landed by
Mitsunaga during the Cayetano administration.
At the end of 1997, I produced a story about problems with a reroofing
job at the lovely Korean Studies Center building on the University of
Hawai‘i campus. The construction specifications called for use of Japanese-
made tiles for the job, a cultural gaffe that deeply offended the local Korean
community with bitter memories of Japan’s brutal occupation of their home
country in World War II.
So the contract was withdrawn and rebid in such a way that only a Mitsu-
naga & Associates venture offered to do the work. The owner of a roofing
company that wanted to bid went on camera to complain about the process.22
The report was finished in the m iddle of Christmas holidays, so KITV
decided to hold it for a few days because it wasn’t exactly a festive subject.
Then it was unaccountably aired on Christmas night.
I was out at a party that evening and didn’t know the story had run.
When I got home, my loutish 21-year-old stepson told me that someone
who sounded very angry had called me several times.
124 Chapter 10
“Well, who was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know” was the reply. “He said his name was Ben something . . .
Ben Casanova? Something like that, I think.”
On cue, the phone rang, and it was Governor Ben Cayetano.
He was furious about the story. It was unfair, it was a hit job, it wasn’t
right to run something like that on Christmas . . . he went on at some
length. I told him I didn’t even know the story had run, and there was
really nothing I could do about it that night. We agreed to talk about it the
next day, by which time he had calmed down and withdrawn his objec-
tions to the piece.
I continued turning out stories about Cayetano and Mitsunaga a fter
I returned to the Advertiser in 2002, including a series about no-bid work
given to Punaluu Builders by the state public housing agency. Those stories
provoked federal housing officials to impose a complete overhaul of the
state agency, which had been run by Mitsunaga’s ex-wife.
The coverage made Cayetano so angry that he ordered all officials in his
administration not to talk to me. “From now on, if Jim Dooley requests in-
formation, tell him to put it in writing and process his request as we would
any other,” Cayetano wrote in a memo. “As far as I am concerned, Dooley’s
story on HCDCH [the housing agency] was just another example of his un-
fairness,” the memo continued.23
When I got my hands on the memo, I wanted to write a story about it.
But the Advertiser editors refused. They said they preferred to h andle the
matter quietly by speaking directly to the governor. If that ever happened,
I was never told about it.
At the end of Cayetano’s administration, in 2002, came more stories
about contracting subterfuge at the airport. Several airport officials and a
group of construction contractors had been operating a bid-rigging scheme
to corner the market on airport repair work.
The contractors, in collusion with airport supervisors, submitted phony
and inflated bids for repair work worth less than $25,000. The long-running
scheme bilked taxpayers out of more than $4 million. The contractors
kicked back cash, gifts, and favors to the airport personnel.24
There was no proof that Cayetano or any of his political associates were
aware of what was going on, but contractors who eventually pleaded guilty
to criminal charges in state and federal court said they were regularly re-
quired to make cash payments of as much as $20,000 to a politically con-
nected airport official, Richard Okada, who claimed the money was needed
for “political contributions.”
I looked hard but found scant evidence that the money ever found its
way into Island political campaigns.
Pay to Play 125
Okada was convicted in federal court and sentenced to five years in

prison. His fellow airport supervisor, Dennis Hirokawa, drew a nine-year
sentence. U.S. District Judge David Ezra said Hirokawa treated the airport
like “his own personal piggy bank.”25
Cayetano was succeeded as governor by Republican Linda Lingle,
who, like many of her predecessors, promised to end cronyism in state
contracting.
Lingle even ushered yet another procurement reform law through the
legislature. The new law included requirements that members of consul
tant contract screening committees be “impartial and independent.”
When Lingle signed the bill into law, she said it would “put to rest the
appearance of impropriety in nonbid contracts.”
The ink had barely dried on her signature when a politically connected
company called Community Planning and Engineering, Inc., started land-
ing multimillion-dollar no-bid consulting contracts at the state Department
of Hawaiian Home Lands.
All three members of the department screening committee that picked
Community Planning for its first five DHHL contracts had past connec-
tions to Community Planning. One, Joe Blevins, said he had been recruited
by Community Planning President Joe Pickard to work at DHHL. Another,
Larry Sumida, was recommended for his state job by Community Planning
founder Bernard Kea. A third employee’s connection was more remote: he
had worked for the private company some seven years earlier.26
Blevins and Sumida had come from the private sector and were on their
new state jobs for just a few weeks when they picked Community Planning
as the best qualified firm for a no-bid $984,000 engineering consultant job.
Over the next three weeks, the same screening committee gave Com-
munity Planning four other no-bid jobs worth some $6.2 million.
Based in part on the experience gained from those first five jobs, Com-
munity Planning received six additional DHHL no-bid jobs worth $7.6 mil-
lion over the following six months. The firm received the lion’s share of all
consulting work awarded by DHHL during the Lingle administration.
The company had received no DHHL work during the preceding
10 years. In fact, it had performed only a tiny amount of government work,
preferring to stay in the private sector, where it had extensive experience in
planning residential and commercial real estate developments.
Company President Pickard, who had purchased the firm just months
before it started landing DHHL work, was a politically generous man. He
made campaign donations to Democratic and Republican campaigns alike
but tilted heavily to the GOP side of the ledger. In the previous five years,
Pickard, his relatives, and his companies had donated more than $70,000 to
126 Chapter 10
the campaigns of Lingle; her lieutenant governor, James Aiona; and the Re-
publican Party itself.
Micah Kane, the head of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands,
was a past chairman of the Hawai‘i Republican Party.
In May 2004, after Pickard’s company had received its first three DHHL
consulting jobs, Pickard chaired a golf tournament fund-raiser for the GOP.
He solicited “major sponsors” to donate anywhere from $500 to $5,000. “We
have made progress by reforming the state’s procurement system [and]
bringing fiscal discipline in the way government spends taxpayer’s hard-
earned money,” Pickard said in the solicitation.
Kane and Pickard defended the contract awards, saying political con-
siderations had nothing to do with them, that they w ere based entirely on
merit.
A final note on the pay-to-play issue: when I was working at the online
news site Hawaii Reporter in 2012, Ben Cayetano came out of retirement and
mounted a campaign to become mayor of Honolulu. Opponents used the
state housing agency stories to depict Cayetano as a politician deeply in-
volved in the pay-to-play system.
Luckily for him, my KITV airport stories were unavailable on the Inter-
net and had largely been forgotten.
Cayetano lost the mayoral election.
C hapt e r El e v e n
Pearl Harbor
Two days in college ROTC was my closest brush with military service. So I
had a lot to learn when a source called from Pearl Harbor about contracting
shenanigans at the shipyard.
A Boston-based consulting company called Harbridge House was get-
ting a great deal of work from the Navy, my tipster said. Scuttlebutt had it
that the shipyard deputy commander, Captain Paul A. Peterson, had steered
a half-million-dollar contract to the company while investing in real estate
with Harbridge House personnel.
The real estate angle was easily verified. My office was a five-minute walk
from the state Bureau of Conveyances, an official records repository where
copies of deeds, land sales, and other documents were recorded. I only had
to go back a few years before I found the Peterson paperwork that listed all
the partners in the deal.
I called back my source and read him the names. Nearly all worked for
the consulting company, Harbridge House. One was the recently retired
civilian chief planning officer at Pearl Harbor, Rudolph Krause, who had
since begun work as manager of Harbridge House’s Honolulu office.
I called Peterson for comment. I knew next to nothing about Harbridge
House or the work it was d oing for the Navy, but I wanted to get Peterson
on the record before I started asking questions about the company. Maybe
there was a reasonable explanation for the real estate deal, and I needed to
find that out before committing more time to this. Also, I thought he might
be more likely to talk to me before I started asking around about the con
sultant contract.
127
128 Chapter 11
Peterson readily admitted the investment deal but said he had declared
a conflict of interest and had no involvement in the award or administra-
tion of a $560,000 consulting contract then held by Harbridge House at
Pearl Harbor. He complained that he and his partners had taken a bath on
the condo purchase. “There was a guy selling quick profits, obviously with
the risk involved in quick profits, so we got in on it,” he said.
The investment was made while the condo project was in the develop-
ment stage. By the time it was completed, the real estate market had soured,
and the purchasers couldn’t resell, Peterson told me. “We had expected to
resell that condo under a much shorter period of time. I’m left with a deal,
a holding, long after I had expected to,” he said.
He insisted there was no connection between the investment and the
Harbridge House contract, which involved planning a new computerized
management information system for Pearl Harbor. The contract had been
competitively bid, Peterson said, but Harbridge House was the only com
pany that submitted a bid. As the chief planning officer for the shipyard,
Peterson had written contract specifications that included strict experience
requirements for prospective bidders. Harbridge House had very experienced
personnel, Peterson said. “I cannot bring in Joe Amateur Home Computer
Guy and put him on that,” the captain said.
Sixty companies had expressed interest in bidding, but the only offer
came from Harbridge House, Peterson acknowledged.
“There are some other damn good outfits around but I don’t think they
felt they could meet the requirements that we have in that [contract] for
experience,” said Peterson.1
Peterson’s goose was basically cooked at that point. My original source
and several others that I developed at the shipyard told me the captain’s asser-
tions that he had declared a conflict of interest and kept away from the con-
tract award were disingenuous at best. Even taken at face value, the captain
had engaged in a private business deal that disqualified him from an impor
tant piece of his shipyard responsibilities. And he had written contract speci-
fications that appeared to directly benefit his partners in that private deal.
I needed to get a look at the contract paperwork. So I began what turned
out to be a long and tortuous voyage through the murky seas of the federal
Freedom of Information Act.
Any reporter or researcher familiar with the process will tell you that
FOIA chews up time. And this was 1983—back when FOIA correspondence
was still exchanged the old-fashioned way.
The first batch of documents produced by Pearl Harbor in response to
my earliest FOIAs contained a wealth of eye-opening information about
Pearl Harbor 129
Harbridge House. Library research and a helpful staffer at the Boston Globe
newspaper provided more.
It was one of the oldest management consulting firms in the country,
selling advice to government and industry. From its very beginning in 1950,
Harbridge House enjoyed extremely close ties to the U.S. Navy. Its three
founders were all Navy veterans, and one of them, Paul Ignatius, had served
as secretary of the Navy. All three were graduates of the Harvard Business
School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company’s name was a combina-
tion of Harvard and Cambridge, and its first office, on Harvard Square, was
opened at the start of the Korean War.
The Harbridge House material supplied by Pearl Harbor contained a
good deal of promotional material about the firm’s history and its activities
around the country and internationally. When Harbridge House officials
learned the extent of the Navy’s disclosure to me, they were quite upset.
A company attorney fired off (does anyone remember telexes?) an aggres-
sively worded letter to the publisher of the Advertiser.
The Navy “violated federal law” when it “improperly released trade se-
crets and confidential business information” to me about Harbridge House,
the letter said.2 “Harbridge House directs that no use of this information be
made and that it not be communicated to anyone outside the Honolulu Ad-
vertiser.” The company then said it needed a list of everyone who had seen
the paperwork and “notarized statements” from them that promised the
secrets would not be divulged.
Pushy telexes from important-sounding Washington, D.C., law firms
were not an everyday occurrence at the Advertiser, particularly at the top-
floor office of the publisher.
I had kept my editors in the loop about my activities, but it wasn’t a big
deal at the time and certainly wasn’t anything that had been discussed with
the publisher. So management summoned me to a meeting to discuss what
I was up to.
I explained, and we looked at the Navy records and decided that they
were interesting but did not seem to warrant the company’s response. What
were these guys so touchy about?
By the time that letter was written, Harbridge House had grown to
multinational dimensions, with offices around the globe. It was owned by
Allstate Insurance, which in turn was owned by retailing g iant Sears
Roebuck. There was plenty of horsepower behind the letter.
The attorney claimed that disclosure of the company’s internal infor-
mation would damage its competitive position in the marketplace. I was
fairly early in my research but knew enough to find this assertion puzzling.
130 Chapter 11
Virtually all of the company’s Navy contracts were of the no-bid, sole-
source variety that did not involve competition.
Jeff Portnoy, lawyer for the humble, locally owned Honolulu Advertiser,
wrote a letter back to Harbridge House that essentially told the company to
take its notarized statements and spin on them. Portnoy told the company
that if it had a problem, it was with the Navy, not us.
The editors gave me the green light to continue.
I don’t know if the outcome would have been d ifferent if the newspaper
had been owned by Gannett. But I am certain that receipt of such a letter
would have caused prolonged hand-wringing and second-guessing among
the Gannett editors I have known. Nothing put the Big Fear into them like
the prospect of getting sued. A death threat to a reporter w ouldn’t have
nearly the impact of a threatened lawsuit. In fact, in my case, a death threat
might have sounded like a good idea to some of them. But threaten a law-
suit, and watch the brakes start smoking.
In any event, I pressed ahead with my research. New documents received
under FOIA led to additional requests. I was gradually learning the Navy
and Defense Department procurement lingo and was able to refine later
FOIA requests. I was also developing new sources who helped educate me
about what additional records to ask for.
One anonymous tipster sent me letters postmarked in Washington, D.C.
He or she—I never knew which—was obviously familiar with my FOIA
campaign. “You’re asking the wrong questions,” the writer advised. “Ask
for this. . . .” This was a strange and wonderful new development for me. I
had a new source, 5,000 miles away, and I hadn’t written a word yet.
Another prepublication result of my FOIA work was that the Navy be-
gan an internal audit of Harbridge House’s contracts at Pearl Harbor. The
Naval Investigative Service and the FBI also began nosing around.
All told, I wrote dozens of FOIA letters to a variety of agencies within
the Navy and elsewhere in the Defense Department. All nine of the ship-
yards then in operation around the country received at least one FOIA re-
quest from me. Filing and reviewing all the paperwork I eventually amassed
was a nightmare. I was never a particularly good record keeper. There are
some reporters, and teams of reporters, who are masters at it: computeriz-
ing everything, cross- referencing, creating subfiles, suspense files, the
whole schmear. One reporter I knew maintained magnificent files that doc-
umented his entire professional life: every story he’d ever researched, source
files detailing every person he’d ever met, including people at gas stations
and parties (regardless of their probable value as new sources). He spent so
much time massaging all his data that he hardly ever wrote anything and
had to become an editor.
Pearl Harbor 131
Material began arriving at my office by the boxload. Newly received

records raised new questions that provoked new FOIA requests. Some gov-
ernment offices responded quickly and in detail. Others balked, demand-
ing advance payment of research fees. Others delayed. Some didn’t respond
at all.
Despite months of effort, I could never determine exactly how much
work Harbridge House had received from the Navy and other parts of the
Defense Department. Twice I was sent lists that purported to include all of
the company’s contracts awarded by federal agencies over a five-year period.
The lists held $11 million worth of work, but they were glaringly incom-
plete. The first summary, sent to me by the Navy, didn’t include the Pearl
Harbor consulting contract, in force for three years. Another Harbridge
House contract that I had obtained from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard
was also missing from the list.
The woman who supplied the data to me worked at the Contracting
Assistance and Control Division of the Naval Supply Systems Command.
When I called her to complain about the omissions, she told me that if
contracting agencies didn’t submit the proper Defense Department “350
forms,” the jobs w ouldn’t be entered in the federal database. When I asked
how many other contracts might be missing from the files, she said, “We
don’t know. That’s the bad part of the system.”3
I talked to her boss, the head of the Contracting Assistance and Control
Division, Frank Reich. He told me the system had been tightened up, but
“there is a strong error rate in the data before 1981 or so. Before that, the
people who filled out the forms didn’t pay that much attention to what they
were doing. Since 1981–82, the information tends to be more error-free than
before,” Reich assured me.
But the Pearl Harbor and Long Beach contracts were awarded in 1982, I
pointed out. Why aren’t they on your list? “I don’t know,” he said.
Three months later, the Defense Department sent me another list of Har-
bridge House contracts. Pearl Harbor and Long Beach were still missing.4
A striking fact about all the research I did on Navy consultant contracts
was that the same irregularities and iniquities I had found at the state and
county levels were all present in the federal system. Just on a grander scale.
Cronyism
Auditors who examined the Harbridge House contracts as a result of my
investigation found that Captain Peterson had initially tried to award the
management information system contract directly to the company without
any competitive bidding. When that effort was blocked by procurement
132 Chapter 11
personnel, Peterson wrote contract specs that were so restrictive only Har-
bridge House could meet them. “Placing such restrictions on [contract] so-
licitation is improper,” the auditors found.5
All of that occurred when Peterson was doing personal business with
the consultants.
The commanding officer at Pearl Harbor, Captain Thomas Marnane,
also violated procurement regulations when he approved the sole-source
purchase of a $131,000 training program from Harbridge House. The pro-
gram required top shipyard personnel to spend two weekends at the lux-
ury Kuilima Resort Hotel on Oahu’s North Shore.
The president of Harbridge House, Harry Baker Ellis Jr., and a vice pres-
ident of the company, Michael Farmer, invested in their own Honolulu real
estate deal through Rudy Krause, then the top civilian planner at Pearl
Harbor. While on the Navy payroll, Krause was involved in ordering
$250,000 worth of work from Harbridge House.6
Krause and Farmer later were partners with Peterson in the Kauai real
estate deal. Other Harbridge House personnel were coinvestors in that
deal, along with Robert Gilmore, the head of data processing at the Long
Beach Naval Shipyard, where Harbridge House had a $406,000 sole-source
consulting contract. Farmer was also personal friends with a former com-
mander at Pearl Harbor, John C. McArthur.
One Job Leads to Another

A job at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Shipyard brought Har-
bridge House to Pearl Harbor. The sole-source contract—to revise and
update training materials related to the shipyard management information
system—was supposed to cost $825,000 and last for a year. It eventually
doubled in cost and duration.
A Navy audit of the Portsmouth contract, obtained under FOIA, said
that the noncompetitive contract award appeared “unjustified, since exten-
sive knowledge of the shipyard’s management information system, the
principal reason cited for the sole source action, was not required for most
tasks ordered under the contract.” More than 80 percent of the tasks, in fact,
“were outside the scope” of the contract, the audit said.7
Some of those tasks required the consulting company to travel around
the country and perform work at other shipyards, including Pearl Harbor.
One, priced at $150,000, called for identification of health hazards at ship-
yards. One of the smaller tasks required Harbridge House to provide pro-
curement training for Portsmouth personnel. The class was to cover “legal
aspects of acquisition . . . to insure that system delays and pitfalls are well-
recognized and avoided.”
Pearl Harbor 133
But the auditors found a problem: that training was already being
provided by another contractor at Portsmouth at half the price charged
by Harbridge House.
Revolving Door
When the top civilian employee at Pearl Harbor, Alfred “Blackie” Wong,
retired a fter 42 years of federal service, he went straight to work for Har-
bridge House.8 Wong was a defense contractor’s dream employee. He was
very good friends with U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye (and had even coin-
vested with Inouye in a couple of business ventures). He was an expert at
lobbying Congress for military construction funds (known as MILCON in
federal parlance). He retained close ties with powerful personages in Wash-
ington, including now-Admiral McArthur, an overseer of the entire naval
shipyard empire.
And Wong knew more than any other man alive about how Pearl Har-
bor worked. The shipyard was the largest single industrial enterprise in the
state, employed thousands of personnel, and wielded enormous economic
and political influence in Hawai‘i.
It was as if Wong never actually retired. His Cadillac sedan with the
“100SP” personalized license plates (they stood for special assistant to
the shipyard commander) still rolled daily though the main gate at Pearl.
His new office was next door to his old one. And the work Wong performed
for his new employer closely resembled his old duties: lobbying Congress
for MILCON.
Like the Portsmouth contract before it, the Pearl Harbor contract con-
tained tasks that appeared to be outside the scope of its stated purpose,
including $99,000 in work assigned to Wong. Among those jobs: “Develop
five-year MILCON project and work on additional funding for $27 million
[in] utilities projects.”
Tucked within Wong’s work orders was another questionable item that
skirted rules controlling the acquisition of computer hardware and soft-
ware: the purchase of a $20,000 “printer plotter.”
When I interviewed Wong, he said he had never heard of a printer plot-
ter and had no idea one had been purchased in his name. He also said he
quit working for Harbridge House after a dispute about money. The com
pany was paying him $200 a day for his work but billing the Navy $600,
he said.
After quitting the company, he stayed in his office at Pearl Harbor,
working for the Pearl Harbor Association on another lobbying task—
protecting and extending cost-of-living pay increases afforded to civilian
federal employees in Hawai‘i.
134 Chapter 11
Parceling
Harbridge House’s Pearl Harbor consultant work was supposed to last a
year and cost $560,000. But the money was used up a fter six months, and
shipyard officials tried to double the price of the job.
Procurement personnel blocked that proposal. The extra work would
have to be put out to bid, they said. So Navy officials simply began ordering
the work in small increments—without telling the procurement watch-
dogs. It was precisely the same parceling maneuver Ken Kiyabu had used
to redecorate his office at Aloha Stadium. Just on a larger stage.
Navy officials “effectively masked the extension of work from the con-
tracting officer’s review . . . after previous attempts to extend the [contract]
ceiling were disapproved,” Navy auditors later found.9
When the ceiling on such small purchases was $10,000, the bills consis-
tently came in at $9,700 to $10,000, according to paperwork I obtained u nder
FOIA.
When the limit was raised to $25,000, the Navy began ordering work
valued at $24,800 to $25,000, the paperwork showed.
Even the less formal purchase orders were supposed to be accomplished
with some attempt at competition—calling other vendors and getting price
quotes over the phone, for instance. But Navy auditors found little to no
evidence of competition. “It appears that aggressive attempts to find new
sources were not made,” the auditors reported.
I found almost $200,000 in parceled purchases in the Harbridge House
contract papers obtained under FOIA from the Navy.
The Harbridge House series of stories was written in eight installments
that took seven months to research and write.
Publication was supposed to start on a Sunday in mid-July. But when
I called the city desk the night before to check on the last-m inute status,
I was told the stories had been held up by the executive editor. It w asn’t
running.
I was already pretty wrought up before I made the call. I always got jit-
tery in the days and hours before the deadline of a major new story. The
longer I worked on something, the more nervous I got before publication.
The guy on the desk didn’t know why the stories had been held. I made
a frantic series of calls to the homes of various editors but couldn’t reach
anyone. Editor-i n-Chief George Chaplin was out of town and unreachable.
But Executive Editor Buck Buchwach lived three blocks away from me,
so I decided to walk over there. My wife at the time, newscaster Leslie
Wilcox, told me not to make a fool of myself, but I needed to know what
was going on.
Pearl Harbor 135
Buchwach’s house was dark, and no one answered the door when I
banged on it like a SWAT officer. Leslie had made the walk with me and
was highly amused by my antics. “Maybe he’s inside, hiding in the dark,”
she said. She was trying to shame me, but it only wound me up more. She
had a real talent for that.
I finally gave up and left a note on his front door.
Buck eventually called me back at home and said something about
problems with the graphics illustrating the series that I didn’t understand.
Maybe I wasn’t in a state to understand. But I think he was just antsy about
running the stories on his watch and wanted to wait until Chaplin re-
turned. The weeklong delay turned out to be fortuitous, though, because I
received a new FOIA release about the Portsmouth part of Harbridge
House’s work that made a valuable addition to the series.
I followed the series with several other stories. The three-star admiral
in charge of the Navy Sea Systems Command had ordered a halt to Har-
bridge House contracts, citing “real or perceived favoritism” in the award
of the work.10 “I do not want the practice of sole source awards to Har-
bridge House, Inc., to continue,” Admiral Earl Fowler said in a memo sent
to all shipyards. He rescinded that directive a month later “following a re-
view of all existing Harbridge House contracts.”
But the second memo “re-emphasized the need to acquire [consultant]
services on a competitive basis unless compelling reasons dictate other
wise,” Fowler’s office told me.
I followed those stories with another about a $2.2 million sole-source
contract Fowler himself had awarded to a consulting firm called Anadac,
Inc. The new company had never received a Navy contract before but had
worked as a subcontractor on Navy no-bid jobs awarded to Harbridge
House. Anadac was founded by a former assistant secretary of the Navy.11
There was one last postscript story written late in the year. I finally figured
out who Robert J. Gilmore was. He was the sole partner in Paul Peterson’s
condo investment partnership whom I hadn’t been able to identify.12
Gilmore was the civilian administrator of a $460,000 no-bid contract awarded
to Harbidge House at the Navy’s Long Beach shipyard.
I kicked myself for not finding that out sooner.
C hapt e r T w e lv e
Huis
In Chinatown, the film noir classic starring Jack Nicholson, there’s an act of
wanton callousness that appalls me every time I see it. Not the famous “my
sister, my daughter” slapping scene. That’s horrifying enough, but the one
that really makes my skin crawl occurs when Nicholson’s character, Jake
Gittes, looks up property records in giant plat books at the Los Angeles
Hall of Records and then cavalierly rips out the page of o wners he’s inter-
ested in.
That’s just disgusting behavior.
I have lugged similar oversized volumes down from the shelves at the
Hawai‘i Bureau of Conveyances to read their sometimes precious contents.
It’s awful to think that someone before me could have torn out a page I
needed.
The availability and integrity of such records helped me author a series
of articles that revealed the existence of secret real estate partnerships,
called huis, which for decades had bought, sold, and developed raw land in
Hawai‘i and made millions of dollars in profits for judges, politicians, mob-
sters, government officials, and ordinary citizens.1
Some of this work was later used by authors George Cooper and Gavan
Daws to produce Land and Power, a penetrating and exhaustive analysis of
the fundamental redistribution of wealth and political influence in post–
World War II Hawai‘i. Talk about bamboo forests, hidden connections, and
a complex array of names and histories: try Land and Power on for size
sometime.2
Reviewing the hui stories now and remembering the work that went
into them brought several striking realizations.
136
Huis 137
One was how naive and fortunate I was when I first began blundering
around in real estate and probate court records. I literally had no idea what
I was doing or where I was going.
Another was how tedious, time-consuming, and unattractive this sort
of work could be. I cumulatively spent weeks of my time in public records
archives and rarely encountered other reporters doing the same sort of
work. The editors I worked for then indulged me, and I worked hard to
reward their confidence in me. (One of them, Thomas Brislin, once memo-
rably likened reporters to family pets. Some are like dogs, he said: you tell
them to fetch something, and they’ll happily chase around until they find
it. Others are like cats, Brislin continued: you let them out the door in the
morning, and eventually they’ll come back to drop something surprising
at your feet. I like to think I fell into the cat category.)
My review of the hui stories also brought a renewed respect for the
power of public documentary records and their singular importance in
lighting the gloomy corners of society.
The author reviews election return printout in the newsroom. Capitol Bureau Chief Jerry
Burris is in the background. Gregory Yamamoto, photographer; Honolulu Advertiser.
138 Chapter 12
The hui research began in early 1980 when I was living in Niu Valley,
one of a string of residential communities tucked into the folds of the Koolau
mountain range on the eastern edge of Oahu. I noticed a great deal of
construction activity coming from the next community along the coast in
Kuliouou Valley. I asked around a bit and found that a new public housing
project was under development in the back of the valley. I was vaguely aware
that this project had been kicking around the Hawai‘i Housing Authority for
quite a while, and now it was under way. There hadn’t been any coverage of
the project, so I thought it might be worth a look.
I visited the Hawai‘i Housing Authority offices, took a look at the files,
and learned that the developer of the project was Kikuo Yanagi. He turned
out to be a stockbroker, not a housing developer, and I was curious about
how he became involved in a multimillion-dollar construction deal with
the state. So I did some standard background research on Yanagi.
I checked our library at the newspaper, the so-called morgue, and pulled
whatever stories had been written about him. I went to Oahu’s circuit
court to look up his name in the indexes of court cases at the clerk’s office.
I reviewed corporate records at the Department of Commerce and Con-
sumer Affairs. And I stopped by the Bureau of Conveyances to research
real estate transactions involving Yanagi. The bureau contains a wealth of
other information beyond title transfers, including state and federal tax
liens, powers of attorney, and mortgage loan recordings. I eventually
wrote a pair of nuts-and-bolts stories about the history and ever-i ncreasing
costs of the Kuliouou Valley project, as well as a sidebar about Kikuo
Yanagi.3
In the course of researching Kikuo Yanagi, I became interested in an-
other man, Wallace Yanagi, an investor in the housing development. Our
newspaper files told me that he was the administrator of Maui Memorial
Hospital—a state job—and real estate records told me he was also heavily
involved in real estate deals around the state, including development of
Manoa Valley Market Place, a small but busy shopping center behind the
Oahu campus of the University of Hawai‘i.
I wondered how a man running a hospital on Maui had the time to do all
this, so I began looking at him in more detail. He certainly wasn’t doing any-
thing wrong, but he was interesting. I was prospecting at this point, panning
the stream, looking for indications of gold. If I didn’t find anything, I’d drop
it and prospect elsewhere.
And it wasn’t like I was devoting my life to this research. I was churn-
ing out plenty of copy on a wide and eclectic range of other subjects during
this period. In the two months before I wrote the Kuliouou Valley stories, I
also wrote about serious problems in the Maui coroner’s office,4 an inter-
Huis 139
national law enforcement conference on the yakuza,5 personal favors per-

formed for local mob boss Charley Stevens by U.S. Marshal Ed Keliikoa
(who resigned after the stories ran),6 Charles Marsland’s decision to enter
the Honolulu prosecutor’s election,7 exiled Philippines President Ferdi-
nand Marcos’ $800,000 Hawai‘i house purchase,8 and a new conjugal visits
program at a state prison.9
While examining Wallace Yanagi’s real estate deals, I found that he had
regularly partnered with a Maui businessman named Masaru “Pundy”
Yokouchi. I recognized Yokouchi’s name but wasn’t sure why. So I went
back to our newspaper’s library and learned that Yokouchi was a Maui real
estate broker and developer who had some very good political connections
with the state administration. He was also the president of a company called
Valley Isle Realty.
Yokouchi’s family ran a Maui bakery, and his nickname came from his
childhood mispronunciation of pao duce, Portuguese sweet bread.
He had been part of the so-called Democratic revolution in state politics
in 1954 and had been a good friend of the late governor, Jack Burns. Yokou-
chi was a political operative for Burns on Maui for a number of years. He
did not make a secret of that—he was widely known to be the political pa-
tronage chairman on Maui under Burns. A giant photo of Jack Burns hung
on one wall in Yokouchi’s Valley Isle Realty office.
So I decided to look a l ittle further into Yanagi and Yokouchi, who also
happened to be partners in the Manoa Valley Market Place on Oahu and
other projects elsewhere in the state.
At the Bureau of Conveyances, I found a land transaction in the Kula
area of Maui that referenced a probate court file in Honolulu.
I have found probate court to be a wonderful source of information.
Probate cases are generated at the death of an individual who owns land or
who dies intestate—without a will. Probate court oversees the administra-
tion and dissolution of estates, and you can find things there that just c an’t
be found anywhere else. It’s a little crass to say, but when p eople die sud-
denly, secrets that they have labored all their lives to keep get revealed in
probate files. There’s no longer any way to hide real estate investments that
you may not have wanted to be publicly known.
I looked at the probate file that was referenced in the Bureau of Convey-
ances and found that it involved the estate of Sajiro Matsui. I vaguely
remembered that name as someone I’d come across in work on organized
crime. His nickname was Sambo, and he’d been murdered several years
earlier.
I pulled the news clippings on Sambo Matsui. He had been the owner of
a vending machine company and had disappeared while shopping at a
140 Chapter 12
market near Diamond Head. He left a basket of groceries at the checkout

register, and his car was in the parking lot with the keys still in it. The day
after Matsui disappeared, organized crime figure Alvin Kaohu showed up
at the market, identified himself as a friend of Matsui’s, and asked ques-
tions about the missing man.10
A year or so later, Matsui’s bones were discovered on the North Shore.
He had been shot in the head. Matsui’s family then filed the probate case,
which listed partial ownership of property in the Kula area of Maui.
The court records revealed that a number of other people held interests
with Matsui in the Kula property. I was puzzled to see that few of the
names of the Kula landowners listed in the probate file appeared in real
estate records filed at the Bureau of Conveyances. I didn’t realize it at the
time, but I had found my first hui.
Three names that turned up in my research of Matsui and his real estate
deals were Yoshikazu “Zuke” Matsui (brother of the dead man), Stanley
“Banjo” Tamura, and James Izumi.
All three, I quickly determined, were, or had been, important public of-
ficials on Maui. Zuke Matsui was the former longtime head of the Maui Plan-
ning Commission and at the time was the deputy director of the Maui De-
partment of Planning. James Izumi was the long-serving head of the Maui
County Personnel Department. Banjo Tamura had been the chief teller for
Maui County until he was stabbed to death in another unsolved organized
crime “hit.”11 Zuke Matsui and James Izumi had also been longtime offi-
cers or directors of Valley Isle Realty with Pundy Yokouchi.
I wondered if there was a chance that the personal financial affairs of
these men had overlapped with their duties in public office. Had they dis-
closed them? Had they declared conflicts of interest? I also learned that
there was a probate file generated after the death of Banjo Tamura, but I
would have to go to Maui to see it. I talked these matters over with my edi-
tors and our Maui-based reporter, Edwin Tanji, and we all decided it would
be a good idea for me to go to the Valley Isle.
The Tamura probate was a jewel box. He had been involved in 12 huis.
After he died, two organized crime figures, Takeo “Maui Take” Yamauchi
and Yujiro “Tani” Matsuoka, had filed l egal claims on portions of the Tamura
estate.12
Yamauchi was familiar to me. He had been one of the local criminal
figures cited by Nevada gaming regulators who tried to deny Ash Resnick
his casino operator’s license in Las Vegas. A year before my trip to Maui,
Yamauchi had been tried but acquitted in federal court of extortion charges
brought by the Organized Crime Strike Force.
Huis 141
In that trial, Yamauchi testified that although he was no longer involved

in illegal gambling, he had once helped run large-scale illicit bookie opera-
tions with Banjo Tamura.
Yamauchi also admitted to FBI agents a past involvement with Tani Mat-
suoka—a coclaimant to assets in the Tamura estate—in illegal gambling
operations.
Tani Matsuoka had been murdered gangland style three years a fter
Tamura was rubbed out. Matsuoka’s late-model Cadillac was abandoned at
the Maui Beach Hotel, and three weeks later his body was found in a sugar-
cane field. He had been shot to death.
After that murder, Yamauchi expressed a fear to FBI agents that “I’m
next.”
I pulled out Matsuoka’s probate file. He had been a member of five
investment huis.
During my Maui trip, Ed Tanji and I arranged an interview with Wallace
Yanagi at Maui Memorial Hospital. His involvement in the Oahu public
housing venture near my house had first started me on the hui hunt.
In analyzing real estate records and probate files, I had come across ref-
erences to what appeared to be another hui called Waipao Joint Venture. It
had purchased and sold land in a then-pristine coastal area of Maui called
Makena. There was a good deal of public controversy under way at the
time about plans to develop this site as a resort condominium called the
Makena Surf. The records I had found indicated that Yanagi was part of
Waipao Joint Venture.
We talked about how it was possible for a hospital administrator to be
involved in so many different business ventures: housing and shopping
center developments on Oahu, real estate deals at Valley Isle Realty, and so
on. He said his outside activities were secondary to his hospital job, where
he averaged 10 hours of work a day. The rest, he said, was mostly processing
paperwork.
He became very uncomfortable when I asked about what involvement
he might have in the Makena Surf property. “I have nothing to do with that”
was his first answer.
When I asked about his involvement in Waipao Joint Venture, he said,
“Why are you asking me all these questions? You guys are going to get me
in trouble. Not all the huis in this state are registered, you know.”13 More
questioning followed. Yanagi reluctantly explained that he was one of six
principals involved in the venture. Five of the six, including Yanagi, actu-
ally headed separate sub-huis of their own. He claimed he couldn’t remem-
ber the names of individual investors. “A lot of small people,” Yanagi said.
142 Chapter 12
All the records were at Valley Isle Realty, he said.

In preparation for a talk with Pundy Yokouchi at Valley Isle, I had spent
a good deal of time poring over county records of real estate developments
the company and its principals had been involved in. I found that over
the previous 20 years, there had always been a Valley Isle Realty official
or employee serving on the Maui Planning Commission or Maui County
Council. During most years, there was a Valley Isle name on both the com-
mission and council.14 I found that Zuke Matsui had apparently committed
ethical violations when he acted on public planning issues without dis-
closing personal financial connections to some of them.15
He denied acting improperly, saying that any official acts he had taken
were ministerial and pro forma. In one case, Matsui handled paperwork
for an application to the Maui Planning Department from the Maui Beach
Hotel for construction of a 449-room addition. Matsui was deputy director
of the department. He was also listed as vice president of Maui Beach H otel
and a director of, and stockholder in, the company. Matsui said he did
nothing more than handle paperwork and was not involved in any way in
the decision to approve the application.
“There was no decision making, no nothing,” he told me.
But Matsui’s boss, Maui Planning Director Toshio Ishikawa, said Matsui’s
job required him to be deeply involved in reviewing the application. If he
had personal conflicts of interest with the applicant, he should have dis-
closed them but did not, Ishikawa said.
Matsui never disclosed his ties to the hotel, and he was ethically re-
quired to do so, the director said.
“I believe department personnel should have enough intelligence and
propriety to be aware of any areas of sensitivity that may affect him per-
sonally or affect the development of projects,” Ishikawa said.16
The same situation applied with the Makena Surf development applica-
tion. Matsui had invested in one of the sub-huis of investors who had sold the
land to the condo developer. He claimed he took no part in reviewing the
development application at the Planning Department.
Ishikawa said Matsui should have been involved and should have dis-
closed his financial ties to the developer. “If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have
been doing his job,” Ishikawa said.
Matsui resigned from the department shortly before I interviewed him.
He went back to work selling real estate at Valley Isle Realty with his pal
Pundy.
I interviewed Yokouchi several times and found him to be an affable,
charming, and cultured man. Over the course of our conversations, he asked
me several times, “Why are you doing this? Who put you up to it?”
Huis 143
He was never satisfied when I told him no one was behind it, that it was
a simple reporter’s curiosity about how things worked.
The way Yokouchi and others told it, the huis were a product of simpler
days, when young men and w omen raised in plantation-era circumstances
pooled together what little money they had to invest for the future.
There was never any thought given to registering the partnerships with
the state. That was an unforeseen complication that arose in later years and
simply wasn’t addressed, they said. The huis filed all necessary forms with
tax authorities and paid all taxes due, said Yokouchi.
As Yokouchi and his friends emerged from plantation housing and took
part in the Democratic Party postwar political revolution in Hawai‘i, Yok-
ouchi said, some gained success in business, others in politics and busi-
ness, and o thers in crime.
It wasn’t a nefarious plot, he said. It just happened. Maui was a small
place, everybody knew everybody else, family and personal connections
were deep and complicated, and why do I have to explain all this to you—
who’s really behind all these questions?
He complained that having Valley Isle personnel serving in public office
was a hindrance, not a help to the company. Every time an issue involving
the company came before them in their official capacities, they had to declare
a conflict of interest and abstain from acting or voting. There were two sales-
people on his staff then serving on the county council, and those abstentions
counted as no votes, he said.
“If I’m so devious and powerful, why wouldn’t I get people appointed
to the council who obviously don’t work for me?” he said.17
Okay, I said, tell me about Waipao Joint Venture. Who are the investors?
There were 86 of them, and some individuals might represent even more
people in sub-sub-huis that he didn’t even know about, Yokouchi told me.
He declined to give me names. Most w ouldn’t mind if their identities were
made public, but some would; he didn’t know for sure and thus c ouldn’t
name anyone. But there was nobody political involved, he insisted.
In the meantime, I had been pressing the state official responsible for
enforcing state business registration laws, Russel Nagata, on the question
of whether huis should formally file paperwork with his department as
limited partnerships. I thought they looked and acted like limited partner-
ships: groups of passive investors who entrusted their money to general
partners who made all the financial decisions for the group. But I wasn’t a
lawyer, and it wasn’t a clear-cut, easy question to answer. There would be
political repercussions whichever way Nagata ruled. Ultimately, Nagata
said he believed that huis of unrelated persons who buy property as an in-
vestment should register with the state.
144 Chapter 12
“There is a gray area in the law about whether family huis are partner-
ships,” Nagata said in an interview. But when hui members w ere not related
to each other by blood, the intent of the law was clear, Nagata said: “They
should register.”
He acknowledged that there were a great many such investment huis
that should be registered but were not. “What this means,” I wrote in a
Sunday front-page story, “is that there are a great many secret landowners
in Hawaii who shouldn’t be secret at all.”18
Nagata later rolled back on his registration opinion in an interview with
the Land and Power authors. Huis that engaged in passive ownership of land
were under no obligation to register, he said. They had to take some action,
“like attempting to rezone the land they owned, before qualifying as a
partnership in the eyes of Hawaii law,” Cooper and Daws quoted Nagata as
saying.19
Nagata said he suggested otherwise to me because of “the adverse pub-
licity” that my stories had generated, Daws and Cooper wrote.
I found another gigantic hui called Landco that met all of Nagata’s crite-
ria for registration . . . and then some. Landco had been formed in the early
1960s and had developed a large Maui residential community called
Pukalani.
Landco was still going strong when I researched and wrote my stories
in 1980. Landco was listed in the Maui telephone directory, but there wasn’t
a whiff of it in business registration records.
The attorney for Landco, former state legislator Meyer Ueoka, said the
business had begun as a joint venture meant to complete a single project,
but it just “kept going.”20
I managed to ferret out the names of politicians, government officials,
bankers, developers, and even a state supreme court justice who were mem-
bers of Landco.
Pundy Yokouchi, of course, was part of the hui. He told me that he
held a one-t hirteenth share of Landco but was actually acting as a trustee
for 10 other p eople he declined to name.
One of the founders and managers of Landco, Donald Tokunaga, told
me that ownership shares had been so fractionalized that he had no idea
how many p eople held a piece of the business. People occasionally told him
they were shareholders, “and it’s a surprise to me,” he said.
I turned out maybe a dozen hui stories and sidebars in the first half of
1980. The coverage concentrated on Maui. The interlocking hui relation-
ships and deals connected Pundy Yokouchi to virtually every significant
political, business, and labor leader in the county. Just the ties between
Yokouchi and longtime Maui Mayor Elmer Cravalho made my head spin.
Huis 145
(There used to be a saying on Maui: Pundy has the land, Elmer has the
water.) Not much real estate got developed on the Valley Isle without the
direct or indirect involvement of both men.
All those early hui stories were preludes to the big one later in the year,
which centered on the hidden ownership history of a beachfront parcel of
property on Kauai called Nukolii. Like the Makena Surf project on Maui,
proposed construction of a resort hotel at the Nukolii site had inflamed
antidevelopment passions on Kauai. Feelings were so high that a referen-
dum vote was scheduled later in the year on whether the project should be
allowed to go forward.
I kept hearing whispers that there was a hidden hui in the Nukolii back-
ground and that Pundy Yokouchi had organized it. One convincing caller
said I should check out a Kauai property purchase by Walter Shimoda,
Yokouchi’s regular attorney, in 1974.
It took me a while to find it because it was recorded in 1977: the deal
was a $1.2 million agreement-of-sale purchase that was signed in 1974 but
wasn’t publicly recorded until 1977. Some 60 acres of shoreline land owned
by the largest corporation in the state, Amfac, Inc., was sold to Walter Shi-
moda. The property was a site commonly known as Nukolii.
A year later, Shimoda resold the land for $5.25 million to a large Main-
land company, Pacific Standard Life Insurance.
I called Shimoda and Yokouchi to ask if this was a hui deal. They
wouldn’t talk to me. I called everybody I could think of to ask the same
question: Amfac, Pacific Standard Life, others I had dealt with in my
months of hui research. Many of the people I spoke to confirmed that
Shimoda was representing a hui. One individual claimed knowledge of the
hui members and encouraged me to keep digging. “You’ll be surprised by
the names,” this source said.
At the same time, I was researching the history of the property to
find an explanation for the $4 million increase in sale price in just over a
year.
Amfac was perhaps the most sophisticated player in the Hawai‘i real
estate market, and I c ouldn’t understand why the company would sell
seemingly prime waterfront property for such a low price. Then I found
that, until recently, the land hadn’t been prime at all—it had been zoned by
the state as agricultural property unavailable for urban development.
But the state Land Use Commission then reclassified the property for re-
sort development. I became very interested in when and why that happened.
Commission files and hearing transcripts showed that Amfac had
sought and received rezoning slightly before the sale to Shimoda was signed
and long before the deal was publicly recorded.
146 Chapter 12
And I knew the name of the Amfac executive, C. Earl Stoner Jr., who
represented the company before the LUC. Stoner was a Maui guy, and I
had seen his name in other Valley Isle real estate deals connected to Pundy
Yokouchi. Stoner testified before the LUC that not only did Amfac still own
the land but also it planned to build a hotel and luxury housing there.
Almost simultaneously, my inquiries about the underlying hui finally
paid off. An impeccable source gave me a list of the 46 Nukolii hui mem-
bers. It included the names of some very important p eople in Hawai‘i, plus
the usual suspects from Maui. And there was a new name: Earl Stoner. My
tipster’s information was very specific: Stoner’s interest was held in trust
for him by a Maui contractor, Daniel P. S. Fong.
When I called Stoner, he had left Amfac and was d oing real estate deals
on Maui. He denied being a member of Shimoda’s hui and said he didn’t
even know such a hui existed.
“I am not a member of Walter Shimoda’s hui. I never was a member of
Walter Shimoda’s hui. I don’t even know that Walter Shimoda has a hui,”
Stoner told me. Others continued to tell me that Stoner was part of the group.
He continued to deny it but then admitted that he knew there was a hui.
“I know there’s a hui, but I’m not in it,” he said the second time I talked
to him.
Finally, I reached Yokouchi and got him to intercede with Stoner for me.
Stoner was travelling on the Mainland when I reached him for our third
interview. “I am involved in the thing through my partner Danny Fong,”
he said.
But he maintained that he didn’t invest until 1975, after he testified at
the LUC about Nukolii in 1974 and after he went into business for himself
in 1975.
He said he knew that the hui had bought the land from Amfac when he
testified before the LUC, but he didn’t know that the group had resold for a
$4 million profit to Pacific Standard.
Because the original purchase was on an agreement-of-sale basis, title
to the land hadn’t formally transferred to the hui, and that was why he told
the commission that Amfac owned the land and intended to develop it. “I
know the thing looks god-awful, but I don’t know what e lse to say,” Stoner
told me.21
He later asserted to Cooper and Daws that I had initially confused him
because I was asking about the Shimoda hui. Once he realized I was talking
about Pundy Yokouchi’s hui, he admitted that he was an investor, according
to Land and Power.22
But it was always clear that we were talking about the Nukolii hui, so
his protestations on that point ring hollow.
Huis 147
Further, despite Stoner’s claims to me that he had only invested after he

left Amfac, he and Yokouchi told Daws and Cooper that Stoner held a share
in the hui when he told the LUC that Amfac owned the land and intended
to develop it.
Other members of the secret Nukolii hui who chopped up a $4 million
profit included:
• The son and daughter of former governor Jack Burns. The son,
James Burns, was a judge on the state intermediate court of
appeals.
• Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Edward Nakamura.
• Hawai‘i District Court Judge Edwin Honda.
• Maui Circuit Judge Kase Higa.
• Pundy Yokouchi and a cohort of his pals, including past and pre
sent Maui County officials Zuke Matsui, Lanny Morisaki, Wallace
Yanagi, and Charles Ota.
• Thomas Yagi, head of the influential ILWU union on Maui and
member of the state Board of Land and Natural Resources.
• University of Hawai‘i Regent Harriet Mizuguchi, wife of state
senate president Norman Mizuguchi.
• Mieko Yoshinaga, wife of Nadao Yoshinaga, longtime chairman
of the Senate Ways and Means Committee and a very powerful
behind-the-scenes force in Democratic Party politics.
• John E. S. Kim, a convicted federal felon who entered a guilty plea
in an income tax evasion case at the same time the Nukolii hui
was organized.23
I singled out Kim and Judge Edwin Honda for special attention in my
Nukolii story.
Kim’s tax case grew from a fraudulent personal land deal he orches-
trated in the late 1960s when he was affiliated with Amfac. A good source
of mine with long ties to Amfac told me that Kim had worked for Amfac’s
chief executive “in the political arena.”
Kim’s Amfac duties included working as an unofficial lobbyist for the
company before government agencies and at the legislature, my source
told me.
Honda, before becoming a judge, had served as director of the state De-
partment of Regulatory Agencies, the agency responsible for enforcing part-
nership registration laws. He held that post when the Nukolii hui was formed.
I asked Honda if the hui should have been registered when he ran
the department. “I was never actually called upon to make any sort of
148 Chapter 12
determination,” Honda told me. When I asked for his opinion now, he said,
“I’ve never confronted that. I would rather not have to say.”
I had rushed to get the Nukolii story in print before the referendum
vote on Kauai. It was published eight days before the vote and caused a big
stink on the island. By a 2–1 margin, voters passed the referendum, which
blocked the resort development.
County Mayor Eduardo Malapit and his administration then held that
the developer—by then Japanese corporate g iant Hasegawa Komuten—
had established vested rights to develop the property and was allowed to
proceed. Opponents in the antidevelopment group Committee to Save
Nukolii sued the county but lost in circuit court. They appealed, and the
Hawai‘i Supreme Court, in a remarkable decision that caught the attention of
land use experts around the country, reversed the lower court ruling and
voided the county’s action.
The developers had plowed ahead with construction after the original
county go-ahead and howled that they had sunk tens of millions of dollars
into the project. The resort condo part of the project was complete, but the
hotel was 70 percent unfinished. All work was halted.
Pro-development forces tried an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which declined to hear the case. The developers and their supporters then
found a novel new tactic: they mounted a successful petition drive that
would place a new referendum for Kauai voters in a special 1984 election.
Hasegawa Komuten footed the bill for the expenses of the balloting and for
much of the prevote, pro-development electioneering. Perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, pro-development votes carried the day by a 52–48 percent margin.
The vote was counted nearly five years after I first noticed those big
trucks rolling in and out of Kuliouou Valley.
Another five years after that, in 1989, a new bamboo shoot that had ten-
drils connecting back to the original Nukolii and pay-to-play forests popped
up in federal bankruptcy court, of all places.
John Kim, the lobbyist-fixer who played an important b ehind-the-scenes
role in the Nukolii development, had played a similar role in the planned
development of a huge waterfront residential and commercial project on
Oahu called Ewa Marina, court records showed.24 The original Ewa Marina
developer, MSM and Associates, Inc., had lent Kim more than $500,000 “for
the purpose of making secret illegal payments to government and other of-
ficials,” a group of MSM stockholders alleged after MSM went bankrupt.
“Kim has stated on a number of occasions that the funds loaned to him
and (to his company, J.K. Enterprises) were utilized for the benefit of MSM
and for that reason he should not be required to repay these obligations,”
the stockholders alleged.
Huis 149
Kim was also a secret stockholder in MSM, with his shares held in
trust for him by his son-in-law, the records showed. He was also paid a
$5,000-a-month salary by the company.
I couldn’t reach Kim for comment, but in a deposition taken in the case,
he said he did little more for the company than make occasional phone
calls “to influential people.”
The bankruptcy records showed that while MSM suffered severe and
chronic cash shortages, officials there spent lavishly to entertain govern-
ment officials and potential business partners. The firm hired the former
director of the city Department of Land Utilization, Tyrone Kusao, who
“acted as principal liaison between MSM and Associates and the city ad-
ministration and City Council in obtaining permits required for the pro
ject,” Kusao said in a court affidavit.
City ordinances banned former officials from performing certain ser
vices within a year of leaving the public payroll. When I called Kusao about
his MSM work, he claimed he worked as an “inside man for the company”
and did not violate the ban.
Kusao also worked as a lobbyist for MSM at the city but never regis-
tered as such. MSM President Walter Tagawa, a retired U.S. Army general,
acted as company lobbyist but never bothered to register that activity with
the city. An MSM internal memo said the duties of Kusao and Tagawa were
“responsible for the political aspects” of zoning and water usage issues.
Tagawa acknowledged to me that MSM spent generously in the politi
cal arena, including campaign donations, despite its severe money prob-
lems. “I guess we were trying to seek support from all of them. Not to buy
their votes, but it’s the traditional way of supporting a political candidate,”
Tagawa said.25
C hapt e r T hirt e e n
Death and Taxes
It’s called the death care industry: processing and disposal of human ca-
davers. Like virtually every other human endeavor, there’s money to be
made if you put your mind to it. Sometimes lots of money.
Three times in my career, I made lengthy visits to the death care indus-
try. The first, in 1980, concerned the primitive coroner’s system on the
Neighbor Islands. The next two, in 1990 and 2007, focused on “pre-need”
funeral plans and brought me into contact with future and former gover-
nors of Hawai‘i.
A coroner is a government official responsible for certifying the death
of an individual. In cases of unattended or violent death, the coroner must
determine the causes, usually through autopsies conducted by qualified
experts.
Problems with this system were particularly acute in Maui County,
which included, besides Maui, the islands of Molokai and Lanai.
“Sometimes I think it’s just not a good idea to die over here,” Kenneth
Ongais, the owner of a Maui mortuary, told me.1
Ongais recounted the story of a man found dead on Molokai whose
remains were kept in cold storage for months before anyone got around
to x-raying him to determine a possible cause of death.
The chairman of the University of Hawai‘i’s pathology department
remembered the case of a man found hanged on Lanai who was buried
before anyone thought to determine the actual cause of death.
The county police chief served as Maui coroner, and police officers were
deputy coroners. When called to an unattended or violent death, the offi-
150
Death and Taxes 151
cers would notify mortuary workers to retrieve the corpse and transport it
to a mortuary embalming room, where an autopsy was performed.
Three mortuaries competed for the pickups, which were supposed to be
performed on a rotating basis. The mortuaries were also supposed to charge
the county a flat fee for the service.
That wasn’t happening. Patrol officers had favorite mortuaries. Some-
times the families of the decedents, not the county, were charged the re-
moval fee, which varied in size, depending on the vendor.
Although there was a state-of-the-art underutilized morgue at the state-
run hospital on Maui, official autopsies were still performed in embalming
rooms by a family physician who had no training as a pathologist and
described his autopsy work as “a hobby.”2 The physician, Dr. Kenneth
Haling, readily acknowledged to me that he “could use some help in the job,
particularly in the pathology end of it.”
I found an autopsy report written by Haling a fter he examined the body
of a young man killed in a fiery car crash. On the autopsy report, Haling
described the condition of the deceased as “well-cooked.”
The Maui police chief–coroner said he didn’t know about the availabil-
ity of the hospital morgue and was unaware of the removal fee anomalies.
There were also several disturbing complaints about the business
practices of one Maui mortuary owner, Joseph Bulgo. He tried to charge the
parents of a young woman who had been violently murdered a “storage fee”
for keeping her partial remains in a freezer for 15 months while police and
prosecutors investigated the homicide. Bulgo said his electricity bill for
the service was $150 per month and he wanted $2,250 from the distraught
parents of the victim.3
After the remains were transferred to Ongais’ mortuary, he said his
expenses for the storage service were $3 a month and he had no intention
of charging family members a dime.
The family of a Colorado tourist who died on a Maui vacation com-
plained to state and county officials that Bulgo tried to overcharge them
more than $1,000 for h andling the remains of the w oman and shipping
them home.
Bulgo and the general m anager of his mortuary, who was a part-time
minister, denied the allegations and were very angry with me when I ques-
tioned them about the dispute. “I give you God’s word that if you print any
of these lies about me I will pursue you to the end of the earth to win a libel
suit,” said the minister.
Bulgo warned me of a different sort of doom. “I will have you disin-
fected,” he said ominously. When I asked what that meant, he answered,
152 Chapter 13
“It’s a mortuary term. It means you’ll be pau” (the Hawaiian word for over
and done with). It was like back-to-back threats from God and the devil.
I quoted both men in the story but heard no more from them.
My forays into the stygian realm of cemeteries and mortuaries involved
millions of dollars held in trust for buyers of pre-need funeral plans.
Under the pre-need system, funeral-burial plan sellers convince cus-
tomers to pay in advance for future services. Most of the money is held in
interest-earning trust accounts. But in Hawai‘i, 30 percent is taken off the
top to pay the sales commissions and administrative expenses of the seller.
It’s like paying the sales commission on a car purchase but waiting decades
for delivery of the vehicle.
The 30 percent rake-off has come u nder harsh criticism in various
quarters of the national death care industry but is still in full force in
Hawai‘i. Two well-regarded organizations, the Funeral Consumers Alli-
ance and the National Funeral Directors Association, have regularly rec-
ommended elimination of the practice and enactment of laws requiring
“100 percent trusting” of pre-need funds.
Thirty-two states had “100 percent trusting” laws. Of the remainder,
only Hawai‘i and Florida allowed the 30 percent rake-off. Alabama law was
silent on the subject.4
“One hundred percent of the monies placed in a prefunded funeral ac-
count should be used for the purpose intended and funeral homes should
not be able to legally use any percentage of that fund until it provides the
at-need service,” John J. Hogan Jr., president of the National Funeral Direc-
tors Association, told me.
Bills to change the Hawai‘i law w ere regularly shot down at the Hawai‘i
legislature, where industry officials and their lobbyists worked hard to
protect the status quo.
The head of the state office that regulated the industry did not speak with
critics before advocating retention of the 30/70 percent trusting system.
Government officials “typically will consult with industry representa-
tives” on proposed legislation, “but it is not standard practice to roundtable
it, to get feedback from everybody ahead of time,” the regulator, Joanne
Uchida, said in an interview.
Then there were the trust funds themselves, which bulged with tens of
millions of dollars of customers’ money and over the course of three de
cades attracted an array of sharp operators and outright scoundrels who
hated to see good money lying fallow.
In the 1980s, all three cemeteries on the Big Island collapsed financially,
and state regulators charged with overseeing them found large deficiencies
in their trust funds.
Death and Taxes 153
One operation had been run by a lawyer with a history of mental illness
ntil he sold out to a pair of itinerant casket salesmen from Florida. One of
u
the pair, Mark Fellman, began selling pre-need funeral plans and some-
how gained access to the company’s trust funds.
Fellman disappeared after helping himself to $385,000. A theft indict-
ment was returned against him in 1986 but was never executed. Plot hold-
ers and pre-need customers who had paid into the trust funds pushed the
company into bankruptcy and sued Fellman, the state, and other parties
for $1 million. Eventually the plaintiffs managed to collect $30,000.5
On Oahu, problems cropped up at a small cemetery operation called
Greenhaven, which in 1990 had foundered in foreclosure and bankruptcy
proceedings. The memorial park was being run by a former lawyer from
the Pacific Northwest, Carl Martin Brandenfels, who said the business rec
ords were in disarray when he arrived on the scene.
Brandenfels had been convicted of federal securities violations in
Seattle and had been accused in bankruptcy court in Honolulu of running
a related company with “incompetence, mismanagement, fraud and/or
dishonesty.”
When I asked him about his history, Brandenfels said, “I’ve done a lot of
things in my life, made a lot of mistakes, but I don’t think it’s fair to bring
up that stuff from my past.” 6
One of the largest cemetery and funeral operations in the state was run
in 1990 by John Henry Felix, a very successful businessman who also dab-
bled in politics.
His competitors at one time accused Felix of improperly removing cash
from trust funds and replacing it with real estate assets. He angrily said the
transactions had been approved by the state and the trust fund’s third-
party trustee. In any event, he said, real estate had been replaced with cash
to allay concerns about the health of the trust funds.7
Felix at the time was a member of the Honolulu City Council, and I dis-
covered that he and fellow councilman Neil Abercrombie, who had previ-
ously served a brief stint as a U.S. congressman, had partnered in a plan to
start a mortuary sciences program at a local college.
I found that Felix had allowed Abercrombie campaign workers to use
phone banks at one of his funeral company’s sales offices, which should
have been reported as an in-k ind campaign contribution but was not.
Abercrombie’s wife also worked for Felix’s company and for his political
campaign, but the nearly $10,000 in income she received was not reported
on financial disclosure forms the c ouple had to file with the city clerk.
Abercrombie acknowledged the oversights and filed amendments to
the forms.8
154 Chapter 13
A mortuary worker slipped me paperwork about a nonprofit company

formed by Abercrombie and Felix, the Institute for Life Sciences, which
was intended to study aging and death issues, as well as sponsor the mor-
tuary college plan.
Felix’s funeral services company also planned at one time to use the in-
stitute to conduct telephone surveys that would develop “leads” for the sale
of pre-need funeral plans, according to the paperwork. “Leads from this
survey can be ‘sold’ to our Memorial Estate Planning Division,” the paper-
work said. “Leads are the lifeline of a sales person.”
Abercrombie and Felix said the mortuary sciences idea failed, and the
telephone survey plan was never put into effect.9
Abercrombie was voted back to Congress in 1991 and served nine
terms there, then served a single term as Hawai‘i governor before losing
his reelection bid in 2014.
In the mid-2000s, I found myself once again writing about missing
pre-need trust funds.
The death care industry by then had undergone a nationwide consoli-
dation, with large operators gobbling up smaller mom-and-pop companies
around the country. One of those carnivores, a Canadian-based com
pany called the Loewen Group, had amassed ownership of a large num-
ber of mortuaries and cemeteries in Hawai‘i before eventually filing for
bankruptcy.
A Texas couple, John Dooley (no relation) and Katheryn Hoover, along
with a California associate, Richard Bricka, decided in 2002 to enter the
death care industry in a big way by acquiring the Loewen Group’s Hawai‘i
assets from bankruptcy court.
The partners had a problem, though. The company they formed, Right-
Star, had no money. But Dooley and his associates had a plan: they would
finance their purchase by using the $60 million held in trust for Loewen’s
40,000 Hawai‘i customers.10
As later detailed in court suits, a criminal prosecution, and other pro-
ceedings, RightStar set out to find a lender willing to front them $30 mil-
lion to buy the Loewen assets, then use the trust funds to pay back the
loan.
RightStar claimed to have “discovered a secret: the trusts were over-
funded by $30 million,” a hearing panel of the National Association of Se-
curities Dealers later determined. “RightStar believed that once it con-
cluded the acquisition, the trust could provide the surplus trust funds to
RightStar, which could then use those funds to pay for the acquisition.”11 It
was a dubious plan at best, but Dooley found a securities dealer, Lance C.
Newby, who bought into it. Newby was working in the Hawai‘i office of
Death and Taxes 155
Raymond James Financial Services, Inc., and he pitched the idea to his
bosses.
They refused to approve it, but Newby went ahead and issued a $30
million loan commitment letter without the knowledge of his bosses, the
NASD later ruled when it stripped Newby of his securities license. When
Raymond James found out about the letter, they disavowed it and Newby
was “permitted to resign,” according to the NASD.
Newby then assisted RightStar in securing financial backing from a Las
Vegas “hard money lender,” Vestin Group Inc., that offered high-interest-
rate loans for high-risk ventures customarily secured by real estate.
Newby was subsequently banned for life from the securities industry
and moved to Costa Rica. He filed personal bankruptcy papers in Florida
that listed $23.8 million in liabilities, the largest of which was a $22 million
debt claimed by the state of Hawai‘i for his RightStar activities. Newby de-
nied owing that money and denied any RightStar wrongdoing.
After using Vestin funds to buy various cemetery, mortuary, and funeral
businesses in Hawai‘i, the RightStar principals set about obtaining licenses
to operate the businesses from regulators at the state Department of Com-
merce and Consumer Affairs.
RightStar hired former governor John Waihee, an attorney in private
practice, to assist them. He was later retained as one of four trustees re-
sponsible for oversight of the RightStar trust funds. According to court
records, the trustees were paid an “inception fee” of $200,000 plus monthly
compensation of $5,000 to $10,000.
It didn’t take long for RightStar to unravel. Vestin filed a mortgage fore-
closure suit against RightStar in 2004, touching off a tornado of lawsuits
and investigations that raged for 10 years.
State Attorney General Mark Bennett (later the private attorney for po-
lice detective Ken Kamakana) likewise sued RightStar, its principals, and
trustees for fraud.
Waihee and his fellow trustees steadfastly claimed that they did no
wrong and in fact tried repeatedly to alert regulators to problems inside
the company. Bennett alleged that they had illegally helped to divert $30
million from funeral and burial trust funds.
In April 2012, Waihee and his fellow trustees agreed to pay $1.3 million
to settle the claims against them, but admitted no wrongdoing.
Deputy Attorney General C. Bryan Fitzgerald, who helped pursue the
state cases for a decade, said, “I guess you could say all of this is ending
with a whimper instead of a bang.” But he noted that the company, which
had emerged from court-supervised receivership, had been taken over by a
new owner, and all customer contracts had been honored.
156 Chapter 13
The local attorney for Vestin, Paul Alston, claimed that the company
“lost north of $30 million” in the RightStar debacle. “We w
ere taken advan-
tage of by a group of con artists and we paid a high price,” he said.
RightStar founder John Dooley was the only person prosecuted in
the aftermath of RightStar’s collapse. He eventually pleaded no contest to
charges of stealing $50,000 and served a five-year probation sentence. In
2014, Dooley and Hoover agreed to settlement terms with the state in the
final remaining piece of RightStar litigation.
Taxing Situations
Computer-assisted reporting (known in the journalism biz as CAR) involves
accessing and analyzing large amounts of electronic data and turning it into
news stories. I tried my hand at it many times over the years, usually with
less than satisfactory results. The keys to success, I learned, w ere obtaining
the data in usable form and getting help from technical experts who knew
what they were doing.
My first attempt at CAR was by far the most successful. In 1992, I wanted
to take a long, hard look at the state Tax Department, with emphasis on tax
delinquencies.
To that end, I asked the state for electronic records of delinquent tax-
payers. At the time, the state was in the throes of one of its periodic budget
crunches, so I knew that stories about uncollected taxes would guarantee
high readership. The problem was getting the information and under-
standing it. State law, I found, said that tax delinquencies w ere public rec
ords, so I cited those statutes when I first approached the department about
accessing the records. No one had asked before, so there was a great deal of
back-and-forth about what was public and what was not, what form the
records should take, how I could access them, and so forth.
Officials eventually said they would give me access to a hard-copy,
computer-generated list of delinquencies that was, as I recall, nearly a foot
thick.
Following advice from experts at Investigative Reporters and Editors
(IRE), a great nonprofit supporter of journalism that hosted conferences
and seminars around the country about the nuts and bolts of reporting, I
asked the tax authorities for an electronic copy of this list, stored in govern-
ment mainframe computers on what were known as nine-track magnetic
tapes.
The Advertiser had a mainframe computer of its own, so I simulta
neously sought in-house help on accessing our own hardware to read and
analyze the government data.
Death and Taxes 157
One of the things the IRE experts had warned about CAR work was
what they called the “holy shit” moment: that instant when you finally
have all the data, hardware, and software synchronized and your com-
puter spits out its results. If those results cause you to shout, “Holy shit!
What a great story!” you have probably done something wrong, the geeks
warned.
I had one of those moments. Tax delinquencies, the computer told me,
totaled $100 million. And that number could easily double if it included
unpaid penalties and interest. Accounts that had been written off as uncol-
lectible would further inflate the total. That amounted to 10 percent of the
state budget at a time when spending was frozen.
In backtracking and double-checking the data, we could find no flaws
in our methodology, but officials from the Tax Department had bad news.
Their own data were corrupt: lists of delinquent taxpayers were replete
with errors and duplications. As a result, the department couldn’t release
the lists for public consumption because that would mean falsely identify-
ing some individuals and business as tax deadbeats.
Generally speaking, the total numbers were correct, but there were dev
ils in the details.
Tax Director Richard Kahle said, “My personal preference is you pub-
lish the list. But you know and I know that the list is not clean enough to
publish. For that, I apologize, but it is a resource allocation problem. We
do not have the resources to clean up the list as opposed to collecting the
delinquencies.”12
I was able to identify some of the largest delinquents, verify the amounts
owed, and write a story about them.
I was also able to report that the governor, John Waihee, had been iden-
tified by tax collectors as a delinquent. Waihee and his wife had failed to
pay general excise taxes on rental income generated by an apartment they
owned.
I checked with the governor’s press secretary, Carolyn Tanaka, who
blamed the m atter on an “oversight” by the first couple’s accountant.
The Waihees had properly obtained a tax license for the rental business
income, but the accountant forgot to pay the tax bill. No one would say how
much was owed, but it w asn’t a big chunk of money. The excise tax was
4 percent, so even if the Waihees had been able to rent their apartment for
$1,000 a month, the annual tax owed would have been $480.
Then I found another oversight: the Waihees had failed to disclose their
rental income on personal financial disclosure forms filed with the state
Ethics Commission. Waihee filed an amendment to his form after I ques-
tioned Tanaka about it. “Thank you for keeping us honest,” she said.
158 Chapter 13
The disclosure rules only required filers to reveal a range of income re-
ceived rather than a specific amount. The amendment filed by Waihee said
the apartment rental generated between $1,000 and $10,000 per year, so taxes
owed would have run from $40 to $400.
The total delinquencies w ere just a small part of the stories I turned out
that year about the Tax Department.
During the course of the research, I found that a company that called
itself Regal Travel had amassed a huge tax delinquency that the state later
wrote off as uncollectible. I was confused because I knew there was a large
and apparently quite successful company of the same name that was still in
business and had transportation services contracts in force with the state.
That led to Part 2 of the series on the Tax Department. Here’s the top of
that story:
“After a company calling itself Regal Travel built up some $221,000 in
delinquent state taxes in 1995, it was shut down and a new company called
Regal Travel, Inc. appeared in its place.
“The new Regal Travel was very similar to the old: same owner, same of-
fices, same phone numbers, same activities. But there was one very impor
tant difference: the old Regal Travel owed the taxes; the new one did not.
“The state Tax Department halted all efforts to collect those delinquent
taxes in July 1990, two months after Regal Travel, Inc. [the new company]
landed a state contract to arrange travel for the University of Hawaii athletic
department. Regal Travel, Inc. was paid $850,000 u nder that contract last
year.”13
A sidebar reported that Tax Director Kahle had ordered an investiga-
tion into the Regal Travel tax arrearages. “I must say, and admit to some
embarrassment, that you found a relationship between two corporations
that we did not.”14
Regal Travel owner Raymond Miyashiro referred questions about the
matter to his attorney, who said he was unfamiliar with the business histo-
ries of the two Regal Travel companies but said the tax delinquencies had
not necessarily flowed from one company to the other.
Miyashiro owned another company, Trans Hawaiian Services, which
had rented buses to the political campaign of Governor Waihee and parked
its bus fleet on valuable vacant property owned by the state.15
The following year, the state collected $300,000 from Miyashiro to settle
the delinquency. The 1994 resolution was accelerated, oddly enough, by
Mayor Frank Fasi, then embarked on his fourth, and final, unsuccessful
campaign for the governor’s office. The mayor hosted a morning radio show
and regularly used it to harpoon the state administration for its handling
of tax delinquencies. Kahle told me that his office was swamped with calls
Death and Taxes 159
and letters from Fasi listeners every time the mayor railed on the Regal
Travel issue. Kahle pointedly announced that the settlement had been
finalized just before the October primary election.16
At about this same time, the mayor was using his radio show to call me
a “whore” and a “journalistic prostitute” a fter I helped cover the prosecu-
tion of a city official in a minor pay-to-play kickback case. The name-calling
became so commonplace that I finally wrote a response that was published
in the opinion section of the newspaper. “I think he’s being a bit harsh,” I
wrote of Fasi. “I could live with ‘stooge,’ I suppose, or maybe even ‘bimbo.’
But I draw the line at ‘whore.’ ”17
I noted that the mayor had made bales of political hay from other pay-
to-play scandals I had uncovered in the state administration but never
mentioned where those stories came from. “Frank’s been taking advantage
of me for years and I never charged him a dime,” I wrote.
Part 3 of the series concerned the contents of a wonderful whistle-blower
lawsuit filed against the Tax Department by a longtime employee who was
shunned as a pariah after she reported widespread questionable activities
by her colleagues.18
Among the revelations of the lawsuit:
• A high-ranking official of the department had been improperly

granting tax clearances to “raunchy” hostess bars so that they
could stay open for business. The official, Lawrence Nakano, said
when I first interviewed him about the allegation that it had only
happened once as a favor to a bar owner who “promised me that
the amount [owed] would be cleared up.” Nakano later admitted
granting more clearances to other bars but said he didn’t know
how many. He acknowledged that he had no authority to grant
the certificates. Nakano was allowed to transfer to another state
department after his activities became known.
• An auditor who investigated the tax clearance issue later deter-
mined that 63 bars had received clearances when they did not
deserve them. The auditor said he initially began to review all
liquor-dispenser tax clearances but found the task “boring” and
performed “random checks” of liquor dispensers that had received
tax clearances.
• The same auditor turned up evidence that department personnel
had been illegally and arbitrarily waiving penalty and interest
payments owed by tax delinquents. The auditor said he dropped
that investigation because “it was real difficult questioning fellow
employees about wrongdoing.”
160 Chapter 13
• A department employee was running an illegal sports betting

operation from his office desk. The man’s supervisor admitted
in court papers that he had admonished the worker about this be
havior and advised him to operate his bookmaking business from
the departmental men’s room. The employee, who was later pro-
moted, denied taking bets at work but did claim to have helped his
supervisor place a few wagers with an outside party.
• The worker who filed the whistle-blower lawsuit said she did so
only after her supervisors failed to act when she reported work-
place shenanigans to them. She was then treated as a “rat” and an
“informer” and was denied promotions she had earned, the suit
alleged. The state later paid the whistle-blower an undisclosed
sum to s ettle her claims.
The tax series also dealt with the sorry state of computerization in the
department, a subject that rose again and again in later years. Kahle admit-
ted that new computer systems the department installed to track different
sources of revenue— income, excise, tobacco, h otel, and other taxes—
couldn’t “talk” to each other, forcing personnel to perform calculations and
reconciliations by hand.19
Computerized audits and examinations had increased, but Kahle couldn’t
say how much money audits produced annually for the state. The depart-
ment was badly short of h uman auditors because the pay was too low for
experienced professionals, forcing the department to hire “kids out of college
and train them,” said Kahle. As soon as those workers completed journeyman-
level training and gained expertise, they departed for the private sector,
said Kahle’s audit division chief, Richard Chiogioji.20
The department rarely resorted to hardened collection techniques used
by the Internal Revenue Service, like seizure of assets or real estate foreclo-
sure, and tax crimes were almost never prosecuted because nearly all were
misdemeanor offenses, Kahle said.
Leo Ohai
Any discussion of death and taxes in Hawai‘i must include the story of Leo
Ohai, a remarkable commercial fisherman who regularly survived brushes
with death at sea and spent decades on land holding government debt col-
lectors at bay.
Here’s the start of a Leo Ohai profile I wrote in 2007: “Benjamin Frank-
lin said the only certainties in life are death and taxes—but he never met
Leo Ohai.”21
Death and Taxes 161
The part-Hawaiian Ohai was going strong at 82 when I met him, skip-
pering a commercial fishing boat and spending his downtime pursuing a
20-year dream of building a specially designed, state-of-the-art vessel that
could perform a variety of fishing: longlining, netfishing, trapfishing, and
akule (a tropical ocean fish) or lobster fishing.
Advertiser news archives and Ohai’s son Nephi told the stories of his
adventures at sea.
While skin-diving off Kona on the Big Island in 1963, Ohai suffered a
case of the bends and needed life-saving treatment at the U.S. Navy’s re-
compression chamber at Pearl Harbor.
Ohai could pilot an aircraft and decided to fly himself back to Oahu. He
kept losing consciousness during the two-hour flight, and the 24-year-old
woman who accompanied him, Virginia King, wasn’t a pilot.
King kept reviving him. “He’d check the instruments and get us straight-
ened out, then we’d be all right for a bit before he began blacking out again,”
King told reporters. “It was like that the whole time.”
The landing, King said, “wasn’t the smoothest but it was good enough
for us.”
Ohai had pioneered the use of aircraft for fish-spotting in the 1950s,
logging thousands of hours of flight time when his fishing business was
based on Kauai.
Fishing boat skippers from California tried to lure Ohai to the docks at
San Pedro, but he decided to stay at home, Nephi Ohai told me.
In 1967, Ohai’s plane crashed and sank in Molokai’s channel. Ohai es-
caped the wreck and floated in a life vest for 20 hours, carried by tides and
currents halfway to Oahu, then halfway to Lanai. He finally bodysurfed
ashore, naked and barefoot, to a remote Molokai headland and then had to
walk another six hours to find help.
The next year, Ohai landed his malfunctioning Piper aircraft on the
Ala Wai golf course near Waikiki beach, coasting to a stop on the 12th
green.
Ohai survived a shark attack off Molokai in 1981. His right hand, “hang-
ing by strings,” was surgically reattached by doctors at the Queen’s Medical
Center, Nephi said. “He’s got some numbness because of nerve damage, but
basically it’s OK.”
Onshore, Ohai’s attempts at boatbuilding brought him a world of diffi-
culties. His family company borrowed $560,000 in 1982 from a state loan
program meant to help revitalize the local fishing industry. The program
made a second loan of $166,000 in 1986 to the Ohais.
When the state closed the boat loan program not long after that, the
Ohais’ long crusade to build their boat and repay the state loans was just
162 Chapter 13
beginning. Waves of tax liens from federal, state, and local government
were filed against them.
The state threatened foreclosure on the boat loans and dunned the
family for unpaid wharfage and related waterfront debts. Still they carried
on, eventually filing a suit against the state that alleged delays in loan dis-
bursements caused construction costs to spiral upward. By 2002, the state
said the Ohais owed $1.24 million in unpaid principal and interest.22
The Ohais lost that suit in 2007 when a state judge ruled that the debts,
since grown to $1.6 million, had to be repaid. But the Ohais filed new legal
claims against the state that were still pending as of this writing. Settle-
ment talks w ere said to be nearing fruition.
The Ohais’ legal fight with the state stretched over 14 years, beating the
RightStar litigation by a good 24 months.
Ted Hong, an attorney who represented the Ohais free of charge in
some of their legal travails, said, “The Ohais are great fishermen, but there’s
room for improvement as businessmen.”23
C hapt e r F ourt e e n
Teamsters
The long, sorry history of organized crime and the International Brother-
hood of Teamsters u nion stretches back decades, with unionized mobsters
repeatedly committing vicious crimes, including murder, arson, drug traf-
ficking, assault, and much more.
That’s just in Hawai‘i.
On the national stage, the picture is even uglier. The story of the unholy
partnership between Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and the mob has been
chronicled in detail through congressional hearings and criminal prosecu-
tions, as well as in groundbreaking investigative works by Walter Sheridan,
Wallace Turner, Dan Moldea, Steven Brill, Gus Russo, and many o thers.
The mob-Teamsters ties did not die with the disappearance and death
of Hoffa in 1975.
So thorough and durable has been the syndicate’s hold on the Teamsters
that the U.S. Justice Department forced the union in 1989 to accept continu-
ous, close oversight of its activities through what is called the Independent
Review Board, a body created by the U.S. District Court in New York.
As of this writing, the IRB and its oversight are still in place, despite
periodic attempts by the Teamsters to dissolve them. The IRB enforces a
permanent court injunction that forbids Teamsters from “racketeering ac-
tivities” and knowing associations with members or associates of the five
New York Mafia families “or any other criminal group.”1
After cata
loguing ties between local or ganized crime and Hawai‘i
Teamsters in the “production unit” of the u nion that supplies drivers to
film, television, and commercial productions in the Islands, I tried a couple
of times to see if the IRB had any interest in looking into the matter.
163
164 Chapter 14
It did not. An IRB investigator told me privately that the organization

largely limited itself to Mafia associations, and I had to agree that there did
not appear to be any of those in Hawai‘i. But members of the local syndicate
had been turning up as Hawai‘i Teamsters Union production unit drivers
ever since union patriarch Arthur Rutledge founded the unit in the 1960s.
Eric Naone and Hershey Entin

My interest in the Teamsters began in 1978, when production unit driver
Tramp Kawakami was identified by Honolulu and Nevada law enforce-
ment authorities as a Hawai‘i organized crime figure.
Then came the first Ronnie Ching stories in the early 1980s: a heroin-
addicted professional killer was working as a Teamsters driver on the Mag-
num, P.I. television series.
I spent a lot of time researching the production unit in those years. I
found that the roster of drivers included men like Ray Scanlan and Eric
Naone, two organized crime figures with felony records who had hung out
in Don Ho’s dressing room and w ere acquitted in the Chuckers Marsland
murder trial.
Naone first made news in 1975, when he worked briefly as a business
agent–bodyguard for Art Rutledge. In a federal court hearing that con-
cerned a dispute over the election of Teamsters officers, Rutledge testified
that organ ized crime was trying to muscle its way into the u nion. Two
business agents had quit after telling Rutledge “they’d like to live instead of
die,” Rutledge testified.
The agents had been told “by certain powerful people . . . that the
boys are taking over,” Rutledge said in the hearing, which was covered
by Advertiser labor reporter Charles Turner.2
Rutledge didn’t say more, but then Eric Naone took the stand and indi-
cated that the takeover was being directed by syndicate figure Alema Leota.
Naone said that former Teamsters organizer Josiah Lii had invoked Leota’s
name during a conversation with Naone.3
Lii and Leota were syndicate associates of Nappy Pulawa in the early
1970s, when the mob had designs on taking direct control of the Teamsters.
According to mobster-turned-witness Henry Huihui, they discussed, but
never followed through on, plans to murder Rutledge. Huihui later pleaded
guilty to ordering the murder of Lii.
As for Eric Naone, his stint as a Teamsters business agent was brief.
Within a few months of his federal court testimony for Rutledge, Naone
had been questioned by police about the Chuckers Marsland murder and
then was involved in a bizarre and inept kidnap-for-ransom case in Los
Angeles.4
Teamsters 165
Naone and another man, Hershey Entin, were arrested following the
gunpoint abduction of a former Las Vegas showgirl and Playboy centerfold,
Corinne Heffron, from her Bel Air home. Two masked men took cash and a
handgun from her well-to-do husband, Robert Heffron, tied him up, and
demanded a $300,000 ransom payment from him before fleeing with the
woman locked in the trunk of their car. But Robert Heffron quickly freed
himself and called the police, giving them the license number of the get-
away car. Within minutes, a patrol car stopped the vehicle and freed Corinne
Heffron from the trunk.
Art Rutledge told Chuck Turner of the Advertiser that he was “shocked”
by the news of Naone’s Los Angeles escapade. Then he said Naone had been
only a temporary Teamsters hire, working for the u nion for just three months.
Investigative reporter Gene Hunter of the Advertiser produced a story
several days later that revealed that both Hershey Entin and Eric Naone
were frequently seen backstage at Don Ho’s show.5
Entin had been in Hawai‘i for five years, working as an unpaid gofer for
Don Ho and as a bookkeeper for Larry Mehau’s security guard company,
and then Mehau fired him for undisclosed reasons, Hunter reported.
Ho expressed amazement at Entin’s arrest. “He’s been a good boy all his
life,” Ho told Hunter. “It’s a shock to me. It’s inconceivable to me for the guy
to do something like that.”
Hunter’s story said Entin had recently left Hawai‘i for California, tell-
ing friends that he had inherited $1 million from his grandfather’s estate.
Charges against Entin were ultimately dismissed. Naone was convicted of
robbery and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
While the California charges were pending, Naone was arrested in
Hawai‘i for another peculiar crime. After purchasing gun ammunition and
holsters at a retail store, Naone was charged with being a felon in posses-
sion of ammunition. He told authorities that he was doing a favor for a
friend. The ammo and holsters were supposed to be sent to the Philippines
for a high-ranking general in that country’s military, Naone claimed.6
Federal prosecutors mocked that story as “preposterous,” and Naone
was convicted and sentenced to 18 months behind bars.7
Naone and Entin ended up as Teamsters movie drivers. Naone worked
for years in the Hawai‘i production unit, and Entin drove vehicles in
Southern California and elsewhere on the Mainland as a member of the
Hollywood-based Local 399.
The Million-Dollar Movie Fund

After establishing the production unit in the 1960s and populating it with a
rogue’s gallery of felons and head-breakers, Art Rutledge began assessing
166 Chapter 14
its members extra dues and funneling that money into accounts controlled
by Unity House. The crafty Rutledge had created Unity House in the 1950s
as a buffer to protect assets of the Teamsters and the hotel-restaurant work-
ers union locals from outside predations by government agencies, as well
as higher-ups in his own unions.
Rutledge wisely invested Unity House funds in Waikiki real estate, where
the assets regularly redoubled in value. He explained more than once that
the independent setup of Unity House protected its assets from raids by
national union officials who looked for excuses to place the Hawai‘i locals
into trusteeship as a means of getting their hands on all that cash.
The nature of Unity House also protected it from oversight by federal
agencies. An investigation of Unity House mounted by the U.S. General Ac-
counting Office for a U.S. Senate committee concluded that Unity House
was immune from the oversight and reporting requirements imposed on
unions by the U.S. Department of Labor. The U.S. Justice Department and
Hawai‘i Department of Labor investigated Unity House and Rutledge on
multiple occasions, including probes begun in the late 1970s that focused
on whether the extra dues assessed on production unit drivers were a
form of illegal kickbacks extracted from film and television producers as a
cost of d
oing business in the Islands.
In 1981, I found that Rutledge had established a nonprofit called the
Hawai‘i Pacific Cinema Development Foundation and that he intended
to finance it with $1 million amassed over the years from production unit
drivers.8
The leadership of the foundation made for interesting reading. Rutledge
was president. Tramp Kawakami—the local organized crime figure who
had worked in the production unit for years, driving on such shows as the
original Hawaii Five-0—was sergeant-at-arms of the foundation. Serving
as vice president was Ed Brennan, the Republican Party National Com-
mittee member from Hawai‘i. And the foundation secretary was Linda
Lingle, then a member of the Maui County Council. In 1998, Lingle became
the first woman governor of Hawai‘i and the first Republican to hold that
office since 1962.
Lingle, who had worked briefly for the Teamsters before going into
politics, hastily told me that she was in the process of resigning from the
foundation board because of her workload in county office. The resignation
paperwork hadn’t been finalized, she said. Lingle also said she didn’t know
Kawakami and was unaware of his reputation in law enforcement.9
Kawakami wouldn’t talk to me, and Brennan was unreachable.
Rutledge said he was aware of, but gave no credence to, Kawakami’s rep-
utation. He said he doubted if Kawakami had ever spent any time in jail and
Teamsters 167
was on the foundation board because of his knowledge of film and television
productions. Rutledge claimed that he had stopped accepting “voluntary
contributions” from production unit drivers a year earlier after the “special
fund” where the money was held at Unity House reached $1 million.10
The foundation intended to use the money to foster development of “film
and video arts,” including, Rutledge said, construction of a “first-class” pro-
duction studio on Oahu. He told me that the site of the women’s state prison
on the windward side of the island would make an ideal location for the
studio if the state would make the land available. Some 20 or 30 acres could
be spared because the state no longer needed all that land, Rutledge said.
“Good girls do what bad girls used to do,” said Rutledge.
The idea never took root. Unity House and the foundation would later
put their production unit money to some extremely dubious uses.
More information about production unit finances emerged in subsequent
years after friction between Los Angeles—and Hawai‘i-based Teamsters
flared up on movie and television productions in the Islands. Problems
began brewing after Leo Reed, a former Hawai‘i football star, police officer,
and Art Rutledge protégé, was elected head of Teamsters Local 399 in Los
Angeles. In the late 1980s, Reed began asserting contractual authority over
Teamsters who drove equipment shipped to Hawai‘i for use on shoots in
Hawai‘i.
A master contract signed by Hollywood studios and producers with
Local 399 gave Reed control over who drove Hollywood-owned equipment
in western states, including Hawai‘i, but the agreement had been loosely
enforced before Reed came into power. Animosity between the two groups
of drivers began roiling the atmosphere on production sets, even shutting
down shows for brief periods.
Then a group of Hawai‘i-based production unit drivers who had aligned
themselves with Reed complained to the FBI and to me about Rutledge’s
management of the unit.
Among the complainants was Ray Scanlan, convicted heroin trafficker
and accused but acquitted killer.11 Scanlan and others said Rutledge had
been assessing production unit drivers between 3 and 15 percent of their
gross pay for decades, but they had nothing to show for it. The only time the
tithing stopped was during an FBI criminal investigation of the practice in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the assessments resumed when the fed-
eral agents went away, the drivers said. Scanlan said he and other drivers
had lied to the FBI but now wanted to tell the truth.
“We stood up and said, ‘We like to pay,’ ” Scanlan told me. “But that
wasn’t true. The truth is, we don’t want to pay the money, but if you don’t
pay, you don’t work.”
168 Chapter 14
Rutledge scoffed at the dissidents, calling them “childish” and saying the
production unit funds were intact and still earning interest in the Cinema
Development Foundation account. “You can rest assured that whatever
assets we’ve got, we still have,” Rutledge said in one of his typically Delphic
quotes.
Production unit drivers were still being assessed 3 percent of their pay,
but the money was g oing to Teamsters coffers and not the foundation,
he said.
Tony Rutledge, Art’s son and heir apparent in union affairs, said the
cinema development fund was untouched and, with interest, had grown to
$1.7 million.
The war of words increased. Art Rutledge called Leo Reed “a local boy
gone nutty with power” who was scheming to take over the Hawai‘i Team-
sters local.12 Reed and his brothers were involved in “a nefarious plot . . . to
establish themselves as the czars of the movie production business in
Hawai‘i,” Rutledge said in an interview.
Reed fired back by phone from Hollywood. “This is 1989, not 1932. The
Old Man, his problem is he’s been around too long, a decade too long,”
Reed said.
Rutledge required film and television producers to hire many more
drivers than
were necessary and insisted on personal control of who
worked and who didn’t, Reed said. “I’ll tell you something: if the Old Man
would only ease up and treat those producers right, just have the necessary
drivers, in my opinion, there would be 10 times more shows produced in
Hawai‘i,” said Reed.
His brother Leroy, a 399 member who regularly worked in Hawai‘i,
agreed. When the movie Uncommon Valor was filmed on Kauai, producers
had to hire 75 drivers, he said.13 “I did Beverly Hills Cop II [filmed in Los
Angeles], the most drivers I had was 32, but only 25 full-time. Seventy-five
drivers, that’s ridiculous,” Reed said.
Tom Selleck, star and coproducer of the im mensely pop ular Mag-
num, P.I. television series, tactfully agreed with the Reeds. He said the show
had to hire twice as many drivers in Hawai‘i as it did in Los Angeles. “Hir-
ing and firing is also very difficult,” Selleck said.
“Unions here practically insist on placing whoever they want on the
payroll. I’m a union member and I believe in seniority, but I also believe in
hiring on the basis of ability,” he said.14
Rutledge said the number and names of drivers hired were determined
by contract language and by his “powers as a negotiator.”
The Los Angeles and Hawai‘i drivers continued to butt heads on pro-
duction sets, threatening each other and distressing cast and crew mem-
bers. Ray Scanlan warned that there was a real possibility of physical vio
Teamsters 169
lence but said the pro-Reed drivers didn’t want anyone to get hurt. “We are
not contemplating violence. We don’t want it. All we want is to clean house
and invite other production companies to come to Hawai‘i and work with a
clean union,” he said.
Tony Rutledge told me that he believed Larry Mehau was providing back-
ground assistance to the pro-Reed, anti-Rutledge drivers. He claimed that
Mehau had supported a Rutledge opponent in a recent union election and
had two “good friends” who were allied with the Reeds. Those friends were
Ray Scanlan and Cyril Kahale, Rutledge said. Kahale was a Teamster with
Reed’s 399 local.15
Mehau had no comment, but an associate of his said that while Mehau
was friendly with men on both sides of the dispute, he had not involved
himself in it. Leo Reed acknowledged knowing Mehau but said he had no
role in the jurisdictional fight. Art Rutledge added his own cryptic point of
view: “I know Larry, he’s on a friendly basis with everyone. I’ve known
him for years. He has, up until now, respected my jurisdiction, and I respect
his, whatever it may be.”
On the set of the Jake and the Fat Man television series, problems boiled
over after Hawai‘i drivers didn’t appear for work because they had been
called to a “special meeting” by Art Rutledge.16
Leroy Reed, the transportation coordinator on the show, told me a few
days later that he had used “guys off the street, friends of mine” to fill in for
the absent Hawai‘i drivers. That brought an infuriated Art Rutledge to the
set, where he saw the nonunion drivers.
“Art came over there and saw them and he went crazy,” Reed said.
“He says, ‘You get those guys out of here,’ screaming,” Reed recounted.
“Then he goes screaming to the producers and the producers said,
‘Please, Leroy, get rid of them so Art won’t go nuts,” Reed continued.
Rutledge was “running around the parking lot and trying to get his
guys, the drivers, all stirred up,” Reed said, so he got rid of the “off-t he-
street” drivers. Things calmed down after that, but, Reed said, “We still
got the intimidation, daily intimidation. Those other guys look at you, you
hear bad things are coming up, you better watch yourself.”
The problems became so acute that union higher-ups called Rutledge
and Leo Reed to a sit-down in Scottsdale, Arizona. Although both men said
after that meeting that they had buried the hatchet and resolved their dif-
ferences, problems continued to simmer.17
Hostilities were reopened on the set of a television production called
Island Son being filmed on Oahu.18
Another of Rutledge’s sons, Arthur Jr., was driving on the show but was
fired after a dispute with the Los Angeles–based transportation coordina-
tor. Rutledge Jr. had asked for a day off to attend to personal business, but
170 Chapter 14
the coordinator refused. When Rutledge didn’t appear for work that day, he
was fired. That brought Tony Rutledge to the set. He told the Hawai‘i 996
drivers to walk off the jobsite.
But some of the drivers were part of the anti-Rutledge, pro-Reed faction
inside the Hawai‘i local, and they refused to walk.
One, a hulking man named Masa Niko, gave his account of what hap-
pened next. “I told him I’m not g oing to walk because I have a job to do.
Tony questioned me about which side I was on and I said no side, I was
hired to do a job and that’s what I’m going to do,” said Niko.
“He told everybody to get in their trucks and leave. People started to
leave but the police stopped them,” Niko continued.
That brought Art Rutledge and Leroy Reed to the set. The two men con-
ferred briefly, and peace was eventually restored. Tony Rutledge later blamed
the show’s producer for the problems. Art Rutledge blamed “the asshole in
charge of the drivers.”
Reynold Kamekona, a 996 driver on the show and member of the
pro-Reed group, blamed Art Rutledge. “It’s a power thing. The Old Man
wants to run everything his way, for his family and friends, and the hell
with everybody else,” Kamekona told me. “If you complain, you’re out of
a job.”
Arson, Murder, and More

Four violent events that made major news in the 1990s and early 2000s
featured direct or indirect involvement of production unit drivers.
The first occurred in 1991 when Teamsters George Cambra and Jo-
seph “Joe Boy” Tavares torched movie production trucks owned by com-
petitors of George Cambra Movie Production Trucks, Inc. Tavares was
the half-brother of professional murderer and Teamster driver Ronald
Ching. The fires forced two companies out of business and left Cambra
as the major vehicle supplier to the film and telev ision industries in
Hawai‘i.
The second was the 1992 murder of David Walden, an executive of Star
Suites, Inc., a Missouri firm that had begun shipping its own production
vehicles to Hawai‘i to compete with Cambra’s company.
The third was the daylight murder of two men at a Windward Oahu
public golf course. A third man was shot in the face but survived. The
violence was part of an underworld struggle to control illegal gambling
operations.
The fourth was the horrifying murder of a two-year-child, Cyrus B
elt,
tossed from a freeway overpass into oncoming traffic below.
Teamsters 171
Cambra and Tavares

On different nights in 1991, intentionally set fires engulfed and destroyed
expensive movie production vehicles owned by two Hawai‘i firms, Auto
Mastics, Inc., and Mokulua Consultants, Inc.
The crimes were unsolved for years and might have always remained
so. But in 1992, David Walden was murdered at Pier 24 on the Honolulu
waterfront, an event that sent tremors of anxiety through the local and na-
tional film industries and provoked closer attention to the truck fires. Eight
years after the truck fires, federal authorities brought an arson conspiracy
case against Cambra and Tavares.
The arson case was buttressed when another Local 996 production unit
driver, Reynold Kamekona, agreed to testify as a prosecution witness against
Tavares and Cambra. Kamekona—the same man I had interviewed on the
set of Island Son—said he had helped Tavares torch the trucks, using a mix-
ture of diesel fuel and gasoline provided by Cambra.
Kamekona’s cooperation was part of an unusual two- pronged deal
reached with the U.S. Attorney’s office. In return for his testimony, Kame-
kona would not be charged, and federal authorities would also lighten the
prospective sentence then looming over Kamekona’s brother, Harlan “Bruce”
Kamekona.19
Bruce Kamekona, also a Teamster movie driver, had been caught by the
feds in a large-scale drug-trafficking case that involved shipment of pound
quantities of “ice” from Hawai‘i to Guam.
The feds were also pressuring Cambra, Tavares, and the Kamekona bro
thers to tell what they knew about the Walden murder. Cambra and Tavares
each claimed that the other man was responsible for the slaying but pro-
vided unconvincing and insufficient details to support their allegations.
Bruce and Reynold Kamekona knew a great deal about the murder but
said they did not know who had actually committed it. They told investiga-
tors that Cambra had been at odds with Walden over the movie trucks
Walden’s company had brought to Hawai‘i and initially leased to Cambra.
They described shouting matches they witnessed between Cambra and
Walden and said Cambra had been physically threatening Walden in the
days before the murder.
They knew that on the morning of the killing, Walden was due to arrive
at Pier 24 on the Honolulu waterfront with at least one of his vehicles that
had been used for a production being filmed on Maui. The Kamekona
brot hers and Tavares were supposed to meet Walden at the dock and take
possession of the Walden vehicle that was to be used on another shoot on
Oahu, Bruce Kamekona told authorities.20
172 Chapter 14
Bruce said he told Cambra about the meeting with Walden the day
before it was scheduled to occur. On the morning of the murder, Bruce
said, his brother Reynold was supposed to call him when the equipment
arrived, and Bruce would then drive to the dock to help move it. When
Reynold did call, he was in a “hysterical” state and said that Walden had
been shot, Bruce told investigators.
Bruce then drove from the windward side of Oahu to the dock, he said.
On the way, he said, he saw fellow movie driver Jon “Sudee” Dahl driving
in the opposite direction on Old Pali Road, a secondary road paralleling the
main Pali Highway that linked the Honolulu and windward sides of Oahu.
Witnesses at the murder scene said that two helmeted men astride a
motorcycle had driven up to Walden at the dock. The passenger on the ve-
hicle, whom they could not identify, had shot Walden to death, they said.
The driver of the motorcycle was also unidentified.
Dahl, Cambra, and many other Teamsters interviewed by police and
federal agents all denied involvement in, or knowledge of, the homicide.
A month after the murder, Cambra was involved in a violent encoun-
ter with fellow Teamster Eric Naone that left Cambra badly beaten and
with a bloody hole in one of his hands.21 The beating occurred at a meeting
of Teamster movie drivers, including Cambra, Tavares, Bruce Kamekona,
Naone, Blaine Kaakimaka, and Stan Mataele.22
The meeting was held at a Kewalo Basin business that supplied ice to
fishing and pleasure boats berthed in the adjacent harbor. Cambra told fed-
eral investigators that the other Teamsters at the meeting, led by Tavares,
were trying to force him to transfer ownership of a movie truck to them. That
claim was the basis for an extortion charge added by the U.S. Attorney’s of-
fice to the arson indictment of Tavares.23
Bruce Kamekona, Eric Naone, and Tavares, however, told d ifferent sto-
ries about the ice house violence.
In papers filed in the arson-extortion case, Tavares and his attorneys
said Naone told HPD Major Louis Souza after the beating that Naone called
the meeting because “Cambra was spreading rumors that Naone and his
associates had murdered Walden.”24
Tavares said the beating occurred after “Cambra admitted to solicit-
ing the murder of Walden.” The Tavares court papers also asserted that
Cambra initially told HPD Detective Joseph Ryan “his beating was re-
lated to the Walden murder and that it was done by the Walden murder-
ers.” Cambra also told Ryan that he believed there was an “80 percent
chance” that he would be murdered for “saying anything like this,” ac-
cording to a partial transcript of the Ryan-Cambra interview attached to
the court filing.
Teamsters 173
Bruce Kamekona told a third, slightly different version of the beating.

In a 1998 debriefing with federal agents and police after his arrest in the
meth-trafficking case, Kamekona said the ice house meeting was called be-
cause Cambra was “telling everyone they would get hurt” if they contin-
ued using Star Suites equipment.
“During this meeting, Cambra told Naone that the old man, in refer-
ence to Larry Mehau, had told Cambra that he had to do what he had to do
in reference to controlling the movie industry,” Kamekona told investiga-
tors.25 “Naone told Cambra that he should not drop names.”
There was no corroborating testimony from anyone else about Cambra’s
allegations concerning Mehau.
Cambra was beaten by Naone, suffering a broken jaw. He was also
stabbed through the hand with a fishing spear.
Cambra said nothing about the Walden murder when he testified at the
arson-extortion trial of Tavares. After reaching a plea deal with the govern-
ment, Cambra took the witness stand and said the ice h ouse assault oc-
curred because Tavares was trying to force Cambra to transfer ownership
of movie vehicles to Tavares. The federal court jury that heard the case in
1999 acquitted Tavares of the beating-related charges but convicted him of
arson conspiracy.
While Tavares and Cambra were awaiting sentencing in that case, a fed-
eral grand jury met to hear evidence in the Walden murder investigation.
Various drivers from the production unit were called to testify. I cov-
ered the event with a KITV cameraman outside the federal courthouse, but
none of the drivers had anything substantive to say when they completed
their testimony.26
Driver Sudee Dahl was accompanied by attorney Stacy Moniz, but nei-
ther man would talk about the grand jury session. Moniz was a well-k nown
Honolulu lawyer who had helped represent Larry Mehau in the “godfather
of organized crime” lawsuit Mehau had filed against Rick Reed, an aide in
the Honolulu prosecuting attorney’s office.
Moniz had also successfully defended former Hawai‘i prison guard
and current Teamsters production unit driver Blaine Kaakimaka from a
murder conspiracy charge in the Eric Kamanu slaying.
Moniz was a longtime board member of the Hawai‘i Pacific Cinema
Development Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Art Rutledge that con-
trolled a million-dollar treasure chest of fees collected from movie drivers.
When Moniz appeared with Dahl and other d rivers called to testify
before the grand jury, he was in serious legal difficulties of his own. Under
indictment for federal tax offenses, Moniz had initially agreed to plead
guilty in that case but then changed his mind and withdrew the plea.
174 Chapter 14
Larry Mehau and Stacy Moniz, center, meet with attorney David Schutter. Richard Ambo,
photographer; Honolulu Star-Advertiser Collection; Hawai‘i State Archives.
To defend himself, Moniz then argued in court papers that authorities

had illegally seized records from his office as part of a long-running inves-
tigation into his personal ties to organized crime. The office records had
been removed from Moniz’s law office without a search warrant by a for-
mer law partner and an off-duty HPD officer who was married to a secre-
tary in the office. Moniz argued that the seizure was illegally orchestrated
by investigators bent on proving his ties to the mob.
In one pretrial hearing, HPD Detective Ken Kamakana testified that
Moniz was not a mobster but had clients, friends, and associates who were
organized crime members,27 including Teamster movie drivers Kaaki-
maka, Bruce Perry, and Lyle Yasuhara. Kaakimaka was a Moniz business
associate and legal client, Kamakana said on the stand, before the presid-
ing judge, Alan Kay, stopped the detective from saying more.
Bruce Perry was the son of longtime Larry Mehau close associate George
Perry Jr. Bruce was a former longshoreman who had occasionally worked
as a movie driver. The younger Perry had been tried twice in an assault
case that left a fellow stevedore, Quentin “Rocky” Tahara, blinded in one
eye. Both trials ended in hung juries, but Tahara later won a million-dollar
judgment against Perry in civil court.
Teamsters 175
Yasuhara, the son of a former HPD officer, had been arrested the previ-
ous year in a gambling case on the Big Island. That prosecution was later
dismissed because of a faulty search warrant. At the time of the Moniz
trial, Yasuhara was a Teamster driver on the Hawai‘i version of the Bay-
watch television series.
Moniz later filed more documents in his criminal case that were in-
tended to buttress his illegal search argument but also portrayed him in a
far from flattering light. Moniz obtained sworn affidavits from police offi-
cers who said they had attended law enforcement conferences in which
Moniz’s name appeared in Hawai‘i organized crime “link charts” that de-
picted the hierarchy of the local mob.28
One affidavit, from a recently retired HPD officer, Wayne Chun-Fat, said
Moniz had been identified as an organized crime figure in a 1995 briefing
conducted by HPD’s Criminal Intelligence Unit, where Kamakana w orked.29
Chun-Fat said Moniz was connected in a link chart to Blaine Kaakimaka
and George Perry Jr., both of whom were identified as mob members in the
1995 briefing, according to Chun- Fat’s affidavit. “During this briefing,
Moniz was described as a lawyer and associate of Kaakimaka and Perry,”
Chun-Fat’s affidavit said. “Moniz was presented as being as much of an
organ ized crime figure as Perry and Kaakimaka.”
Another affidavit, from Kauai Police Department Officer Jerald Kim,
said Moniz had been “targeted, profiled, put under surveillance, photo-
graphed and criminally investigated” by the HPD CIU from 1993 through
at least 1998.
In a 1996 statewide criminal intelligence conference that Kim attended,
Moniz was again linked to Perry and Kaakimaka, as well as to the 1994
murder of David Walden and to Teamster truck driver and owner George
Cambra, Kim said in his affidavit.
In the end, Moniz’s self-i nflicted besmirching failed to sway the court,
and he was convicted of federal tax crimes. Judge Kay sentenced him to
27 months in prison for “pervasive attempts to obstruct justice.” Facing
disbarment proceedings, Moniz surrendered his license to practice law.
The grand jury’s investigation of the Walden murder was closed, and no
one was charged in the case. Honolulu police later mounted a cold case in-
vestigation of the homicide, conducting DNA testing of a cigarette butt re-
covered from the murder scene. But the only DNA found belonged to the
victim.
On the 20th anniversary of the killing, Walden’s daughter, Angela
Whitford, convinced Honolulu police and Hawai‘i news outlets to publicize
the unsolved case and seek public assistance in solving it.
The murder case is still open.
176 Chapter 14
Murder at the Pali

The Pali Golf Course at midday in January 2004 was a very pleasant place to
spend an afternoon. Built in the 1950s at the windward base of the magisterial
Koolau mountain range, the course was owned by the city and attracted a
mixture of tourists and local residents who appreciated the cheap greens fees
and overlooked threadbare conditions on some greens and fairways. The
views were spectacular: in one direction, the azure waters of Kaneohe and
Kailua Bays glittered in the sunlight; in the other, the deeply fissured perpen-
dicular mountain walls were robed in green and crowned with clouds.
The surrounding countryside was undeveloped and bucolic. Visitors
usually heard birdcalls and occasional shouts of “Fore!” in the background.
But on January 4, a fusillade of gunfire echoed around the course a fter two
underworld factions warring for control of illegal gambling protection
money rendezvoused in the Pali parking lot.
The meeting was supposed to be a peaceful one where differences
could be discussed and perhaps resolved. The various parties had first en-
countered each other that morning at the funeral of a mutual acquaintance
and arranged to meet again at the golf course.
Shortly after the two groups met, men from one faction—Rodney Joseph
Jr., Ethan “Malu” Motta, and Kevin “Pancho” Gonsalves—took out hand-
guns and began shooting.
Two of their rivals w ere killed, and a third, although shot in the face by
Motta with a .22-caliber gun, survived.
One of the victims, Lepo Utu Taliese, was fatally injured but survived
long enough to run through the parking lot and clubhouse as more gunfire
rang out around him. One .380-caliber round pierced the window of the
golf course pro shop.
Taliese stumbled past the 18th green and down the fairway, eventually
collapsing in the rough as shocked golfers and maintenance workers looked
on, then rushed to attend him. In a dying declaration, Taliese said Motta and
Joseph had killed him.
Motta and Joseph were arrested before nightfall. Motta was detained at
the airport, waiting for a flight back to his home in Hilo on the Big Island.
Joseph self-surrendered to police.
Other reporters were covering the main story, with Peter Boylan of the
Advertiser quickly detailing background information about events that led
up to the killings and arrests.
I knew a bit about Rodney Joseph and his family’s long history of con-
nections to local organized crime. I was struck by the similarity of the kill-
ings to the old days of open mob warfare and suggested a sidebar story to
that effect.
Teamsters 177
I got the go-ahead, wrote the piece, and turned it in.

Here it is:
To old-time law enforcement officers here, the story of Tuesday’s bloody

mayhem at the Pali golf course sounded eerily like headlines from the
heyday of Honolulu organized crime turf wars in the late 1960s and early
1970s involving control of illegal gambling games.
And the family name of one man arrested by police in the Pali case,
Rodney Joseph Jr., brought back a lot of memories for retired cops and
prosecutors who worked cases 30 years ago.
Rodney Joseph Jr.’s father first made the news here in the early 1970s
when he and his brother Terrance “Tony” Joseph were arrested for alleg-
edly beating a Honolulu police officer.
The brothers hired an up-and-coming Honolulu defense lawyer, David
Schutter, who argued that the altercation was really a contest between a
martial arts instructor (the police officer) and his pupil (Rodney Joseph Sr.).
The pupil won, argued Schutter. The Joseph brothers were acquitted. Schutter
went on to great success in the local defense bar, representing some of the
biggest names in the local criminal syndicate.
Another brother of Rodney Sr. and Tony Joseph, Jeffrey, is now serving
time in federal prison for drug offenses.
Rodney Joseph Sr. and brother Tony married sisters Vanessa and Ale-
tha “None” Orso. Their mother, Leimomi Catherine “Momi” Kau, worked
in a laundry in Chinatown that was known as a gathering place for syndi-
cate figures in the 60s and early 70s.
Local syndicate lieutenant Francis Burke was shot to death in the
street near the laundry entrance one October afternoon in 1970. He died in
the gutter with a five-dollar bill clutched in his hand. Across the street
was an illegal gambling operation run by Walter “Hotcha” Hong.
Originally arrested for murder in the Burke case was John Freeman
“John John” Orso, a cousin of the Orso sisters, whose life was the stuff
of pulp fiction. He had been a decorated war hero, a conscientious ob-
jector, a heroin addict, and a burglar. Charges against Orso in the Burke
murder were later dropped. He successfully sued the city for false
arrest.
None Joseph, Rodney Jr.’s auntie, later married Honolulu organized
crime boss Charles Stevens. Their daughter married convicted organized
crime hit man Wallace “Ditto” Rodrigues, called the “most dangerous man
in Hawai‘i” by prosecutors in 1999. Rodrigues is now serving a 100-year
prison term for multiple homicide and manslaughter convictions.
Another auntie of Rodney Jr., Marion Orso, married one-time local
organ ized crime figure Charles “Moose” Russell, who told the Advertiser in
1996 that he continued to be friends with criminal figures but had been a
legitimate businessman since being released from prison in 1982.
Rodney Joseph Jr. was convicted here in 1989 of burglary and terroris-
tic threatening charges with his cousin Jonnaven Monalim and another
man. An amateur boxer, Monalim was later convicted of assaulting a
178 Chapter 14
minor in Makaha in 1998 while serving probation for the earlier felony
charges. The 1998 case stirred considerable controversy after a circuit
court judge, over the strenuous objections of the city prosecutor’s office,
delayed the start of Monalim’s 10-year prison term so he could spend time
with his newborn child.
Like his father and his cousin, Rodney Joseph Jr. is accomplished in
the martial arts. He was a heavyweight kickboxer and has been active in
Leeward Coast boxing circles.
His great-uncle, Carl “Bobo” Olson, was a world-class boxer, at one time
holding the middleweight championship.
The story never ran. Editor Mark Platte didn’t like it, so it was consigned
to the “Splatte File.” As the case against the three Pali shooters later unfolded
in federal court, the story turned out to be unwittingly prescient in several
ways.
The Stevens family tree was a unifying theme in the prosecution’s case
against the killers. I didn’t know when I wrote the story that Ethan Motta,
a codefendant in the Pali case, was a cousin of Rodney Joseph Jr. and was
considered a part of the Charley Stevens family. Various witnesses testified
in the ensuing trial that Motta became involved in the gambling business
because he intended to rebuild the criminal organization once run by his
“uncle” Charley Stevens.
And Jonnaven Monalim, another Joseph cousin, turned out to be an FBI
informant who delivered crucial testimony for the prosecution in the Pali
murder trial.
Nearly a month after I wrote my story, the rival Honolulu Star-Bulletin
published one by reporter Sally Apgar that covered many of the familial con-
nections that ran through the murder case.30 It was a fine story that centered
on Charley Stevens and included an overview of the history of modern-day
Hawai‘i organized crime.
But Apgar also missed Motta’s ties to the Stevens and Joseph families.
And she made no mention at all of Jonnaven Monalim.
I had given Monalim considerable publicity in March 2004—two months
after the Pali shootings but years before his involvement in the case became
public—when I found him in business with an influential state law en-
forcement officer, Hawai‘i Sheriff John Souza.31
A former Honolulu police officer, Souza was engaged to (and would later
marry) then state senate president and f uture U.S. congresswoman Colleen
Hanabusa.
Monalim had purchased real estate from Souza (which the sheriff had
earlier bought from Hanabusa’s family) and was making monthly payments
to Souza when the story was published.
Teamsters 179
Organ ized crime figure

Charley Stevens.
Honolulu Star-
Souza said the sale occurred well before he took the sheriff’s job. He
told me he knew Monalim’s reputation but was motivated to sell what
he called a “dead dog of a property.”
“I would never have done that after I took office,” Souza told me. “I
know who this guy is and what his reputation is. When I dealt with this
guy, he looked totally clean. He was preaching that had had done his time
and learned his lesson.”
The only problem with that position, my story disclosed, was that FBI
agents and police had executed a search warrant at Monalim’s house less
than a week earlier. That search turned out to be the start of Monalim’s c areer
as a government informant, which ended when he took the witness stand in
the Pali murder trial.
Souza resigned as sheriff because of what he called the “bad appear-
ance” of the Monalim deal and because he said he didn’t want his personal
business activities to detract from Hanabusa’s political future.
The Souza-Hanabusa-Monalim-Pali connections illustrate the organic
nature of reporting in the Islands. One family of bamboo trees—Jonnaven
180 Chapter 14
Monalim, Rodney Joseph, and Ethan Motta—stands alone but is connected

to a myriad of other bamboo stands.
Off in one direction are John Souza and Colleen Hanabusa. In another
is real estate developer Jeff Stone, a strong political backer of Hanabusa and
business associate of John Souza. Over yonder is the Bishop Estate with
strong subterranean connections to Stone. Then there is the Teamsters
bamboo patch, with a root system solidly tied to the Pali murders.
The second prosecution witness to testify in the federal court racketeer-
ing trial was George Cambra Jr., son of the convicted arsonist and movie
truck owner. Cambra Jr. was a member in his own right of the Teamsters
movie driving clan.
Cambra Jr. told the jury that he was working at his family’s truck yard the
afternoon of the Pali murders when his friend Rodney Joseph paid a visit.
Joseph gave Cambra three handguns and asked him to destroy them. If
Cambra was surprised or disturbed by this request, he said nothing about
it on the witness stand. He told the jury he broke up the weapons into “bird
seed”–sized pieces and threw them into a stream.32
Ammunition given to Cambra was discarded into a storm grate. Police
later recovered the bullets but found no trace of the guns.
The trial was a fascinating affair, featuring an appearance by a well-
known New York criminal defense attorney, Charles Carnesi, who took
time off from representing John Gotti Jr., son of the notorious Gambino
crime family boss, to represent Motta, the would-be successor to Hawai‘i
mob boss Charley Stevens.33
Motta’s exact kinship to Stevens was mysterious. Motta’s mother in-
sisted that there was no blood relationship. Stevens’ obituary, written by
his family after Stevens died in federal prison, listed Motta as the hanai
son of Stevens—the informal adoption practice common in Hawaiian
society. Motta called Stevens his u ncle and said Rodney Joseph—Stevens’
nephew—was his cousin.34
Motta was a college graduate and had been the president of the student
body while attending the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo on the Big Island.
Soft-spoken and articulate, Motta presented himself during the trial as
a hardworking, dedicated family man who was bemused by the authori-
ties’ efforts to portray him as a murderous mobster.
On the witness stand, Motta said he worked as a f amily therapist, dab-
bled in politics, and was a business entrepreneur. He said that before he
was arrested, he was trying to find financial backers for a device he had
invented called “Baby Cry No More,” which simulated a mother’s heart-
beat to calm restive infants.35
Teamsters 181
An acquaintance and fellow inventor, Raymond Gomes, called Motta

on the Big Island and asked him to help mediate a dispute between rival
criminal groups that were protecting illegal gambling games, Motta testi-
fied. No explanation was given in the trial as to why Motta would be able to
provide such a service.
Gomes invoked the Fifth Amendment when called to testify.
Motta said when he went with Joseph to the golf course parking lot
meeting, his cousin gave him a handgun and told him to “be careful.” He
became alarmed when one of the men they met, Taliese, started shouting,
and a truck carrying “a bunch of guys” approached.
He pulled his gun and shot one of victims, Tinoimalo Sao, because he
was frightened for his life, Motta told the jury. “I fired twice. I didn’t know
at the time that I had hit anyone,” Motta said.
“I never intended to shoot anybody. I was scared,” he said.
The final witness in the trial was Jonnaven Monalim, who had worn a
hidden FBI microphone to a meeting with Motta several months after the
murders. Monalim said he agreed to wear the wire a fter the 2004 raid of his
house by police and FBI agents. He cooperated because authorities said they
had evidence tying him to drug trafficking and money laundering.
Motta was f ree on $1 million bail, and the meeting with Monalim took
place at a fund-raiser organ ized on the Big Island by Motta’s f amily and
friends to help pay for his legal expenses. Big Island Mayor William
“Billy” Kenoi, a rising star in the Hawai‘i Democratic Party, spoke at the
fund-raiser.36
Monalim testified that Motta told him he “had a mission in mind, to
take over [illegal gambling] completely.”37
According to Monalim, Motta said the murders were a “blood on the
table” statement to underworld rivals. Motta bragged that he had “a judge
in his pocket” and planned to win the criminal case when it was initially
scheduled to be prosecuted in state court.
Motta said that “if he gets through this [murder case], he’s gonna be big-
ger than his uncle,” Monalim said. (The case was ultimately transferred to
federal court, and there was never any evidence presented to support Mot-
ta’s “judge in his pocket” claim.)
The parallels between Motta and Charley Stevens were striking. The
racketeering prosecution of Stevens 20 years earlier had been the last major
organized crime case mounted by federal authorities in Hawai‘i.
Stevens pleaded guilty to drug-and gun-trafficking offenses and also
admitted that he had earlier bribed a state judge to overturn a double mur-
der conviction. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
182 Chapter 14
Motta and Joseph were convicted in a jury trial and are now serving
life-without-parole sentences in federal prison. Codefendant Kevin Gon-
salves pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 ½ years behind bars.
Drugs, Guns, Cash, and a Cop

In 2005, production unit drivers were travelling to and from federal prison
with regularity.38 Brothers Randolph and Audwin Aiwohi were busted in
May in a big federal drug-trafficking and firearms case.
“Randy” Aiwohi was held without bail pending trial a fter the U.S. At-
torney’s office called him a “danger to the community.”39 Aiwohi said in
court papers that he had been making $10,000 a month as a movie driver
earlier in the year.
The search of a Big Island ranch owned by Audwin Aiwohi yielded
$240,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine, $192,523 in cash, 17 firearms,
and nearly 900 rounds of ammunition, according to court records. The
raid was part of a federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force
investigation in Honolulu, according to papers filed in the case by Steven
Marceleno, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.40
A stolen, loaded handgun was found beside Randy Aiwohi’s bed, As-
sistant U.S. Attorney Chris Thomas said in court. The raid was the result
of an “eight-month investigation” that included use of federal wiretaps,
Thomas said.
Audwin Aiwohi was also ordered held without bail by U.S. Magistrate
Judge Kevin Chang.
The Aiwohi brothers eventually pleaded guilty to federal drug charges.
Randolph got a five-year prison term and Audwin 10 years.41
Audwin Aiwohi and three other Teamsters movie drivers had previ-
ously been charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the 1989 slaying
of Windward Oahu bodybuilder Eric Kamanu. Those charges were later
dismissed because of statute of limitation problems. One of the original
defendants in the Kamanu murder conspiracy case, movie driver John
Joseph “Joe” Griffiths, later pleaded guilty to “recklessly causing the death”
of Kamanu. Griffiths also pleaded guilty to federal drug-trafficking of-
fenses and was sentenced to a 10-year prison term.42
Griffiths kept his Teamsters Union membership dues current while he
was in prison, Mel Kahele, head of Teamsters Local 996, told me in 2005.43
Kahele acknowledged that men with serious criminal records had been in
the production unit for decades. He said the union was cleaning itself up,
but it was a slow process.
I found that almost half of all 71 d rivers then on the production unit
membership list had criminal records. “I don’t know what the reason is,”
Teamsters 183
Kahele told me. “I think it must be the money. D rivers make so much
money and the work is not that hard.” 44
I found that other Hawai‘i-based movie drivers, Douglas “Hollywood”
Farias and Douglas Paahao, had recently begun federal prison terms for
drug crimes. Another, Stan Mataele, was about to begin an eight-month
federal sentence for a drug offense.45
None of the charges were tied to the work the men performed on movie
and television productions, although Farias claimed that some of the
$66,200 in cash seized from him by federal agents was actually money
earned from the sale of T-shirts on movie sets. Farias pleaded guilty in the
case and was sentenced to 10 years behind bars.
Paahao drew a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to trafficking in
crystal methamphetamine.
Although he lived in Hawai‘i, Paahao was a member of Teamsters Union
Local 399 in Los Angeles and drove trucks and other vehicles shipped to
Hawai‘i by movie and television productions that shoot on location here.
All Hawai‘i drivers at one time were members of Local 399, but the head
of that union local, Leo Reed, had transferred jurisdiction of the Hawai‘i
drivers to another Southern California local and eventually to Local 996.
“I don’t want to have nothing to do with Hawai‘i [Teamsters] no more,”
Reed said in a 2002 interview. “There are some good drivers in Hawai‘i.
They’re great Teamsters and it’s a shame they have to suffer . . . because of
a few individuals.”
Mataele, also a member of Local 399, was Leo Reed’s in-law. While
awaiting trial in his drug case, Mataele was twice allowed to travel to the
Mainland to drive trucks for Local 399 on two major Hollywood produc-
tions, Friday Night Lights and National Treasure, that were shot in Texas and
on the East Coast, respectively, according to court papers.
While some Teamster movie drivers were heading off to prison in mid-
2005, others
were returning to Hawai‘i after completing lengthy stays
behind bars for felony offenses.
Driver Harlan Bruce Kamekona was in a halfway house following his
release from prison for a 1997 drug-trafficking conviction.
Driver Joseph “Joe Boy” Tavares—the half-brother of hit man Ronald
Ching—was in a halfway house in San Francisco, following his release
from federal prison for the 1998 arson conviction. Tavares was originally
sentenced to 15 years in prison, but federal authorities later agreed to cut
that sentence in half for undisclosed reasons.
George Cambra, who was convicted of criminal conspiracy in the same
case, was released from federal prison in 2004. His lawyer, Brook Hart,
called Cambra “a reformed man.”
184 Chapter 14
I also found that a Honolulu police officer, William Duarte, was work-
ing days as a production unit driver and nights as a cop. Duarte had been
fired from the force after committing two on-duty crimes but had been re-
hired after successfully grieving the termination.46 He had spent time in
federal prison after he was convicted of helping to cover up the beating of a
prisoner in the police cellblock. He was also convicted of assaulting a man
during a traffic stop.
After his return to the force, Duarte’s police wages were garnished to
pay down a $32,000 civil judgment incurred after he and two other men
assaulted a customer in the House of Blues nightclub in Las Vegas. Duarte’s
codefendants in that case were another Honolulu police officer and a fellow
production unit driver.47
I checked with the Teamsters Independent Review Board in New York
City to ask if they had any interest in Teamsters or organ ized crime ac-
tivities in the Islands. An official there declined comment but did say that
the IRB had brought charges against Teamsters members for illegal ac-
tivities connected to movie and television productions in Orlando, Miami,
and Chicago.
Death and Ice

The last time I had seen Teamster movie driver Lilo Asiata was outside the
federal grand jury investigating the murder of David Walden.
Now Asiata was in the news again, explaining that he had been asleep
in his apartment when a crazed meth addict got hold of Asiata’s 23-month-old
grandson, Cyrus B elt, and threw the toddler from a freeway overpass into
midday traffic 30 feet below.
Asiata was not implicated in the horrific crime, except perhaps as a
neglectful caregiver who should have been keeping a closer eye on the
little boy.
One thing was clear, however: Asiata’s Iolani Avenue apartment on the
slopes of Punchbowl was ground zero for ice addicts. Nancy Chanco,
Asiata’s daughter and the mother of Cyrus, w asn’t home when her son was
murdered. She was smoking ice at a downtown gambling den and would
spend the rest of the day shoplifting at Ala Moana Center.48
Her boyfriend and fellow ice addict, Shane Mizusawa, had been with
Cyrus earlier in the day. The boy had been found by an off-duty police
officer sitting in the middle of Iolani Avenue while Mizusawa unloaded his
car nearby.
Mizusawa told the officer that Cyrus had briefly wandered away. Mizu-
sawa angrily berated a neighbor, Matthew Higa, who had watched but
done nothing when the toddler walked into the busy thoroughfare. The
Teamsters 185
officer gave Cyrus back to Mizusawa. Matthew Higa was the man who
later tossed l ittle Cyrus from the overpass.
Mizusawa, Chanco, and Higa had smoked ice together in the past,
sometimes with Higa’s meth-addicted father, Shelton Higa.49 In fact, Mizu-
sawa and Chanco had recommended their apartment building as a place
for the Higas to live. The Higas moved into an upstairs apartment above
the unit occupied by Chanco, Mizusawa, Asiata, and Cyrus.
The child’s biological father, David Belt, was in prison for drug offenses.
The boy’s u ncle, Teamster movie driver Philip Asiata, had a terrible drug
addiction problem.50
Chanco had been investigated previously by child welfare authorities.
A state worker was scheduled to check on the welfare of the little boy, but
he died before that visit occurred.
Witnesses saw Higa throw Cyrus off a pedestrian overpass and then
watched him saunter back toward Punchbowl, where he was sitting beside
a bush and smoking a cigarette when he was arrested by police.
Higa had a history of psychiatric problems. He told police that a woman
had given him a bag containing the little boy and told him to throw it off
the bridge.
Prosecutor Peter Carlisle said in his final argument that Cyrus “lived in
a world of ice,” surrounded by adults addicted to the drug. The supervision
of the toddler was deplorable, Carlisle said, but Higa alone was guilty of
murder. Higa “killed that small child” because he was high on ice, the
prosecutor said.51
At the funeral for Cyrus, the presiding minister turned out to be an
ex-convict named Claudio Borge Jr. I had written a story about Borge more
than 20 years earlier that quoted federal prosecutors as saying he was a
“major organized crime figure” who had trafficked in narcotics and admit-
ted participating in three grisly mob murders.52
After serving time for drug crimes (the murder claims w ere never
proved), Borge became a spiritual leader whose work included ministering
to prison inmates.
Sex, Drugs, and Lost

On the same day in 2010, two Teamster drivers who had worked on the hit
ABC television series Lost appeared in different courts to answer new crimi-
nal charges against them.
Reynold Kamekona, who witnessed the Walden murder at Pier 24, was
arrested after soliciting an undercover police officer for oral sex. A bag of
crystal meth was discovered in his pocket. Kamekona pleaded guilty and
186 Chapter 14
was sentenced to five years of probation. The crimes were appended to a

criminal record that included felony convictions for auto theft and criminal
property damage.53
Two hours a fter Kamekona entered his plea, Philip Asiata—son of Lilo,
brother of Nancy Chanco, and u ncle of Cyrus B
elt—was in another court
for new drug offenses.
Asiata’s record listed more than 125 arrests and 52 convictions. A psy-
chiatric expert who had examined Asiata said he was unfit for trial because
of “polysubstance abuse” and an organic brain injury suffered in a 1995
accident. Dr. Martin Blinder said Asiata told him that “before the accident I
was a heroin addict and used crack but I don’t do drugs any more. I’m a
Teamster.” 54
Blinder reported that Asiata began drinking heavily after “his driver’s
license was recently taken from him because of purported deficits in his
driving ability.”
Asiata was in the Teamsters production unit and driving vehicles on
Lost when he lost his license. Asiata was referred for evaluation to the state-
run psychiatric facility, Hawai‘i State Hospital. He was eventually pro-
nounced fit for trial, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a new five-year
term of probation.
Two More Violent Deaths

Bruce Kamekona—brother of Reynold, past production unit driver, and
convicted meth trafficker—killed himself a fter attacking a former girlfriend
with a gun and a knife at a Windward Oahu bowling alley in 2010. The
woman was critically injured but survived several stab wounds. Kamekona
succumbed to self-inflicted stab wounds.
Two years a fter Kamekona died, Aaron Torres, a Teamsters production
unit official working on the new Hawaii Five-0 television series, died in a
violent struggle with police at his home.55 Torres was in a cocaine-induced
delirium when he died, according to the Honolulu medical examiner. He
was asphyxiated by police trying to subdue him. He had a minor criminal
record, and the autopsy of his body showed a “history of cocaine abuse.”
Torres was working as a Teamsters captain on the Hawaii Five-0 produc-
tion, overseeing the drivers and vehicles used to move people and equip-
ment on the show.
Property owned by Torres and his family had been used by George
Cambra Movie Production Trucks, Inc., as a vehicle storage site until city
inspectors cited the family for violating agricultural zoning restrictions on
the property.
Teamsters 187
Torres’ family won a $1.4 million judgment against the police following
the killing, according to a 2014 television report.56
George Cambra Jr. also worked on the Hawaii Five-0 show in 2011 but
was sidelined by serious drug problems and criminal charges.57 Cambra
forged checks and stole money from the family company, admitting that he
used the cash to buy drugs.
George Cambra Sr. told authorities that his son’s drug problems were so
acute that the younger man believed his dogs were talking to him and that
he heard voices emanating up to him from the ground. Cambra Jr. signed a
plea agreement and was sentenced to probation.58
He continued to work as a Teamsters movie driver on Hawaii Five-0, even
after he violated the terms of probation on multiple occasions. In October
2013, Cambra stopped meeting his probation officer altogether. An arrest
warrant was issued under the state’s strict HOPE probation program but
went unserved for four months. HOPE—the acronym stands for Hawai‘i’s
Opportunity for Probation with Enforcement—promises immediate arrest
and punishment for probation violations. But Cambra was at large, and his
drug use continued.
Finally, in February 2014, police stopped Cambra when he was riding a
bicycle at night without a light. He gave them a false name, then admitted
his identity, and told the officers a HOPE warrant was out for his arrest.
A search of his backpack turned up two ice pipes and a small quantity of
methamphetamine.
Cambra was charged with new drug offenses—promotion of a danger-
ous drug and possession of drug paraphernalia. In a new plea deal with
prosecutors, Cambra pleaded guilty in both criminal cases and was sen-
tenced to another HOPE five-year probation term.59
C hapt e r F ift e e n
Larry Mehau
Thirty years a fter Larry Ehukai Mehau was first alleged to be the godfather
of organized crime in Hawai‘i, the FBI and Honolulu police officers were
still identifying him as a mobster.
Through all those years, Mehau was never charged with a crime and
remained a friend and political backer of the most powerful people in
Hawai‘i, with U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye and two governors at the top of
the list.
It’s an amazing story and an abiding mystery. Is he or isn’t he? I don’t
know the answer. I do know that sworn testimony from numerous Hono-
lulu police officers naming Mehau as a mobster was suppressed by the
Honolulu Advertiser after the newspaper became part of the Gannett news
conglomerate.
I wrote my first investigative Mehau story in 1979, when I found that his
security guard company, Hawai‘i Protective Association, had hired 12 spe-
cial deputies to beef up its forces at a Hawaiian-rights demonstration at
Hilo Airport on the Big Island of Hawai‘i.1
Among the group were Cyril Kahale Jr. and two other convicted felons,
Gabriel Aio and George Perry Jr., who were close Mehau associates and
who would figure in other stories I would write in later years.
State officials said only one of the special guards had the requisite
training and licensing to provide security at such a highly charged, po-
tentially violent event. And the exception, former Honolulu police officer
Francis Borges, had been fired from HPD for using excessive force against
civilians.
188
Larry Mehau 189
Larry Mehau.
Gregory Yamamoto,
photographer;
Honolulu Star-
A Big Island police official said officers there didn’t know who the spe-
cial guards were. The Hilo cops had concerns about the security detail be-
cause they had the look of “street fighters,” Deputy Chief Martin Kaaua
told me.
“It was kind of a hairy deal for us,” Kaaua said. The police identified the
men by checking their h otel registrations.
Mehau himself was a former HPD officer who maintained close ties to
the department throughout his life. While on the force, Mehau made a
name for himself as a no-nonsense cop who specialized in vice busts, par-
ticularly gambling offenses, and was an accomplished martial arts expert.
And he made important friends while working as a cop, including Dan
Inouye and future governors John Burns and George Ariyoshi.
Mehau once testified in court that he had worked on Burns’ political
campaigns, describing his activities as “just helping.” Police officials had
ordered officers “not to be involved in politics,” Mehau said, but he and his
friends did it anyway. They “used to do a lot of background things, tear
190 Chapter 15
down old buildings, make signs, things like that. That’s when we were on
the vice squad, we did a lot of that,” he said.
Mehau and Inouye first met when Inouye was a deputy prosecutor and
Mehau was a vice officer. Mehau said he worked on Inouye’s first political
campaign after Inouye “came to the vice office and told us he wanted to
enter politics and we helped him.”
Mehau was born in Hilo on December 10, 1929.
He attended grammar school on the Big Island, then high school at
Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu, where a fellow student was Don Ho.
Mehau graduated in 1948 and attended the University of Hawai‘i for
two years without graduating. He moved back to the Big Island and was
hired as an officer with the police department there.
In early 1953, Mehau moved back to Oahu and applied for a job as an
officer at HPD. On his employment application, Mehau said he had been
raised on his father’s ranch and had worked as a salesman, rancher, and
police officer.2
Asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, Mehau said yes—for a
“traffic accident” that resulted in a suspended sentence. Asked why he
wanted to work for the Honolulu police, Mehau said he had always planned
to make his home in Honolulu.
Then, prophetically, Mehau wrote: “Having formally being [sic] em-
ployed by the Hawaii Police department, thought it wise and profitable to
apply for appointment into this one.”
The grammar may have been fractured, but the planning and foresight
of the young man were impeccable.
The precise nature of Mehau’s earliest work as an HPD officer is un-
known, but like other recruits who are unknown to the underworld—and
to other officers—he was asked to perform undercover work.
In May 1954, HPD Assistant Chief Arthur Tarbell wrote a report on
Mehau’s first-year probationary period.3
“The subject officer has been assigned exclusively to undercover and
investigative work since his entry into the Department,” he wrote.
“His background as a uniformed police officer in foot and motor patrol
assignments with the Hilo Police Department had early reflected here an
established knowledge, ability and self-confidence,” the memo continued.
“The subject officer is intelligent and reflects a healthy curiosity and
thirst for further police knowledge which has already made him of more
than average value in his service with this Department.
“He presents a fine appearance and stands out among his fellow officers
in strength, prowess and physical conditioning,” the memo continued.
“Most important of all, the subject officer’s character and integrity have
been rather severely tested and found wholesome. By nature of certain of
Larry Mehau 191
his investigative assignments, some personnel of the Department, having

apparent cause for concern, have sought to intimidate, reflect upon and ul-
timately dissuade him from an honest performance of his assignments,”
Tarbell wrote.
“In this process, he has endured jibes and innuendo threatening un-
popularity and desertion by fellow officers in times of distress. The loyalty
of this officer, therefore, has been made quite apparent and has been dem-
onstrated at no little cost to his personal feelings. His acceptance among
the rank and file and superiors, nevertheless, has become manifest, espe-
cially among those officers who respect efficient performance of duty in
keeping with instructions issued by superiors,” Tarbell wrote.
“The subject officer is highly recommended for retention in service,”
the memo concluded.
By 1954, Mehau was assigned to HPD’s Vice Division and also began
making a name for himself as a martial arts expert.
In a 1957 demonstration staged for a national police chiefs’ convention
held at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Sergeant Mehau broke single bricks in
half with bare-handed karate chops. He then moved on to double-stacked
bricks, but they crumbled instead of breaking cleanly. Mehau, described in
an Advertiser news story as “a determined man,” kept whacking new pairs
of bricks until “stomachs began turning” in the audience.
Arthur Tarbell, who hosted the event and had since been promoted to
deputy chief, finally had to stop Mehau. The sergeant then suspended him-
self between two chairs as three other officers placed a 300-pound rock on
his stomach and bashed it with a nine-pound sledgehammer.
“Sergeant Mehau didn’t even grunt,” the story said.4
Mehau also made news as an amateur sumo wrestler, winning a Hawai‘i
championship in 1957 and later winning five of six tournaments in Japan.
In 1958, Mehau’s work in vice landed him in public trouble. He was sus-
pended for 10 days and demoted to patrolman for using what police officials
termed “irregular but not illegal procedures.” It was called the “sweetening
case” because vice officers were paying informants cash to come up with tips
about illegal activities. The money came from a police evidence fund and was
used to “induce informants to bring cases in,” a police investigation found.5
The practice was known as “sweetening the bird,” and Mehau told
superiors that he had come up with the idea in 1954, according to police
records.
Eleven other officers in the gambling detail were involved, but only
Mehau was both suspended and demoted.
Mehau had a “close association with a man who has an extensive crimi-
nal record” and was taking the man with him on vice raids, news accounts
said at the time.
192 Chapter 15
Tarbell announced the personnel action against Mehau but described

him as an “outstanding” vice officer. “His principal faults were indiscre-
tion and poor judgment developing from his zealous efforts to achieve new
heights in vice arrests,” Tarbell said.6
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported at the time that in a year as head of
the morals squad, Mehau “made 224 arrests, charged 199 persons and
brought in $11,134 in revenue from bond and bail money.” And in 11 months
as gambling squad sergeant, Mehau “raided 485 gambling games, ar-
rested 4,126 persons and brought in $62,933.90 in revenue,” the newspaper
reported.
If those numbers are accurate, Mehau was averaging one and a half
raids every single day of those 11 months. Even if the numbers are inflated,
Honolulu was plainly a wide-open town back in those days.
It turned out that Mehau’s demotion never actually took place. Tarbell
said later that the plan was to demote him for six months and then restore
him to his sergeant’s rank, but such a move was impossible under civil ser
vice rules. So the demotion was cancelled.7
Mehau’s informant in the sweetening case was a known police charac-
ter named Antone N. Texeira. Mehau acknowledged taking Texeira along
with him during vice raids—a violation of police procedures—and admit-
ted that during one raid of a cockfight, Texeira got “carried away” and
personally placed one of the gamblers u nder arrest. “He was cautioned
often about staying clear of any action that might take place,” Mehau said
of Texeira.8
While the sweetening case was u nder investigation by police, Texeira
was arrested on a charge of forcing an 18-year-old woman into prostitu-
tion. HPD Assistant Chief Leon Straus said that when Texeira was ar-
rested, he bragged to the arresting officers that he was “a big-t ime gam-
bling operator.” 9
The procuring charge against Texeira was later dropped for lack of
evidence.
While at HPD, Mehau also worked in what was called the Metro Squad,
which Advertiser columnist Eddie Sherman said was a “special trou ble-
shooting unit” of the department. Metro Squad members wore street clothes,
drove unmarked cars, and “looked for trouble,” Sherman wrote, adding that
he rode with the officers on almost a weekly basis for years and became good
friends with Mehau.
Among Mehau’s other duties on the force, Sherman wrote, was pro-
viding personal security to VIPs and visiting dignitaries. Marlon Brando
prowled around Honolulu with Mehau, as did another actor, Robert Con-
rad, star of the television series Hawaiian Eye. Dignitaries protected by
Larry Mehau 193
Mehau included President Dwight Eisenhower, Vice President Richard

Nixon, the kings of Nepal and Thailand, German Chancellor Konrad Ade-
nauer, and President Sukarno of Indonesia.
In 1962, Mehau was awarded a lease to ranch land in the spectacular
Kamuela area on the slopes of the Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island. The
lease came from the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, a state agency
that holds former Hawaiian crown land in trust for native Hawaiians.
Mehau said in a memo to Chief Dan Liu—routed first to Deputy Chief
Tarbell—that he “had been at the head of the list of applicants [for Big Is-
land pastoral land] for many years and was informed February 19, 1962
that three lots would be available.”10
He said he planned to move to the Big Island in about a year, giving him
enough time to “complete whatever is needed before a family could move
onto the lot.”
Then Mehau made an odd request. He was working in vice but asked to
be transferred to another post.
“The undersigned has always enjoyed the work of the viceman but feels
that for the department’s good he should be transferred out,” Mehau wrote.
“This would not give anyone an opening to comment on the possibilities
the undersigned would have while spending his last year with the Vice
Division,” he said.11
Mehau’s meaning was obviously clear to his superiors, who assigned
him in June 1962 to be the sergeant in charge of the HPD canine unit.
That assignment did not stop Sergeant Mehau from continuing to
associate with underworld characters, police records show. In a February 19,
1963, memo, Assistant Chief Dewey Mookini wrote that on a visit the
previous day to the police pistol range, where police dogs w ere trained, he
discovered Mehau with gambler Walter W. C. “Hotcha” Hong. (Hong was
later the lead defendant in the ill-fated 1971 federal crackdown on illegal
Hawai‘i gambling.)
Mookini reported that Hong’s personal dog was being trained by HPD
personnel: “I asked ‘Hotcha’ if his dog is being trained regularly, and he
said, well, off-and-on.”
“Having a known gambler with his dog at the Pistol Range where our
Canine Corps and instructors are being trained is not the proper thing,”
Mookini said.
“This is a violation of the instructions issued to him [Mehau] sometime
ago in not allowing gamblers there to be trained because the Department
does not wish to be criticized by people,” Mookini wrote.12
Mehau was then transferred out of the canine unit and assigned to the
Traffic Accident Investigation Bureau.
194 Chapter 15
He resigned from HPD April 15, 1964, collecting disability benefits be-

cause of a service-related injury.
Mehau’s friend Hotcha Hong was no run-of-the-mill gambler. By the
time of the dog-training incident, he already had a lengthy arrest record for
gambling offenses. One of the earliest stories in news files about Hong, in
1950, said he had been charged with running an illegal casino on Nuuanu
Avenue in downtown Honolulu.
The charge was dismissed, on a motion by prosecutor Kazuo Oyama,
after Wong’s defense lawyer argued that the search warrant used by police
in the raid of Hong’s game was defective. When Hong was arrested again
on gambling promotion charges the following year, his new defense
lawyer, former prosecutor Kazuo Oyama, successfully disputed the legal-
ity of the new search warrant.
When syndicate warfare in Honolulu erupted in paroxysms of violence
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mehau was splitting time between his
Big Island ranch and building his Honolulu-based security guard company
into a major statewide business force.
Mehau first invested in Hawai‘i Protective Association after it was
founded by former HPD officers Thomas and Gerald Freeman; later, he took
a controlling interest in the firm.
Mehau was also making a name for himself in politics and government.
In 1970, Governor John Burns, a close Mehau friend who also happened to
be a former HPD officer, appointed Mehau to the state Board of Land and
Natural Resources, an influential agency that oversaw a vast empire of
state property that included parks and recreation facilities, forest reserves,
beaches, shorelines, and prime commercial areas that were leased to pri-
vate individuals and companies.
In 1973, Hawai‘i Protective Association landed its first major govern-
ment contract, a $1.4 million, one-year job to provide security at airports
around the state. The work previously had been performed by off-duty po-
lice officers.
The HPA bid for the airport contract was slightly lower than competing
offers from national firms Wackenhut Corp. and Burns Security.
The next time the contract was put out to bid, Burns won the job but im-
mediately found itself under intense scrutiny from state officials, who al-
leged that the company was not meeting specifications of the contract and
threatened to cancel it. Burns officials cried foul, and eventually the Fed-
eral Aviation Administration had to step in, ordering the state to back off
and allow Burns time to become operational.
HPA won back the airport work in 1977. The contract had grown to a
two-year deal, and HPA was paid $1.7 million per year.
Larry Mehau 195
Then, in 1979, HPA was the sole bidder for the new, $10 million, four-year
contract. Officials of both Wackenhut and Burns told me they didn’t bother
to bid because they felt the contract specifications had been written in such
a way as to exclude bids from anyone but HPA, the incumbent contractor.13
Gerry Freeman, by then the head of another local security guard firm,
disputed that contention, saying anyone could have competed fairly for the
contract. But Freeman acknowledged that he hadn’t bid for the work and
still held a minority interest in HPA.
HPA was also the sole bidder for security work at the state’s Aloha Sta-
dium facility.
George Ariyoshi, then in his first full term as governor, was forced to
publicly defend the HPA contracts, saying that his personal and political
friendship with Mehau played no role in the contract awards. “There has
been a great deal of talk of my friendship with the man who has the airport
security contract,” Ariyoshi said at a news conference. “But I want to make
one thing clear, no one buys my friendship. I do what I believe is right for
the state and its people.”
The contract was awarded fair and square, he continued. “I don’t want
anyone to believe there was anything shady because there wasn’t.”14
Mehau had been Ariyoshi’s state campaign coordinator when he was
elected lieutenant governor in 1972. When Governor Burns died in office in
1975, Ariyoshi became governor and then won his first full term in the of-
fice in 1976.
By 1978, the godfather allegations about Mehau were in full throat.
They were first made in February 1977 by a local television reporter,
Scott Shirai, who charged that an unnamed member of a state board was
connected to a heroin sale that had been busted by federal agents and
police at the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.15 “Sev-
eral meetings were held between this state board member with those ar-
rested in the bust, sometimes at the apartment of a well-k nown Waikiki
entertainer,” Shirai alleged.
That was a plain reference to Don Ho and was strikingly similar to tes-
timony delivered several years earlier in a federal court trial by syndicate
member Roy Ryder, who said he had attended a meeting of mob members
in Ho’s apartment.
Ho later said that, while some mobsters were “friends of mine from be-
fore” and his door was “always open to them,” he had no involvement in
criminal activities.
In addition to alluding to Ho, Shirai’s report also made clear references
to George Ariyoshi and to newly resigned Honolulu police officer Ray-
mond Scanlan, one of the men arrested and later convicted in the heroin
196 Chapter 15
case. “One of those arrested worked for this entertainer and was also di-
rected to act as a bodyguard for a candidate for statewide office in last
year’s election,” Shirai’s story said.
Scanlan had done part-time work for Ho and provided personal secu-
rity for Ariyoshi. After he was arrested in the heroin case, Scanlan went to
work for Don Ho’s television show.
I would write more stories in later years about Scanlan after he got out
of prison and went to work in the Teamsters Union production unit, which
provided drivers for film and television productions in the Islands.
And I also covered the trial of Scanlan and o thers accused of participat-
ing in the murder of city prosecutor Charles Marsland’s son. Scanlan and
his codefendants were acquitted in that trial, which was based almost en-
tirely on the testimony of killer Ronald Ching, another man who frequented
Ho’s dressing room and who also worked with Scanlan and numerous other
convicted felons in the Teamsters production unit.
Larry Mehau, above, and

Charles Marsland,
below, attended an
opening-day ceremony
of state legislature.
Ken Sakamoto,
photographer;
Honolulu Star-
Larry Mehau 197
Following the “godfather” newscast in February 1977, a little-k nown

Maui publication called the Valley Isle alleged that Mehau was the god-
father of Hawai‘i’s underworld. Several news organizations— not the
Advertiser—repeated the allegations, as did a member of the state legisla-
ture, Kinau Boyd Kamali’i.
The Advertiser published a story about the controversy only a fter
Mehau filed a $51 million libel suit. I was deeply involved in covering the
Kukui Plaza scandal, and the godfather story was assigned to Walter
Wright.16
KHON and Shirai eventually settled the suit with a $42,500 payment to
Mehau.17
The complaint against Kamali’i and other news organizations, except
United Press International, was dismissed. UPI eventually settled, report-
edly for $35,000.18
Mehau defended himself by asserting that he was following the
Hawaiian principle of kokua when he occasionally helped friends with
favors or helped to mediate disputes. Kokua is closely related to aloha—
the spirit of generosity and openness that permeates Hawaiian culture. To
kokua means to help someone in need without any expectation of reward or
compensation.
Mehau said that, at the request of local law enforcement, he had kokua’d
by resolving disagreements between factions of organized crime that threat-
ened to become dangerously violent. He knew police, he knew crooks, so he
tried to kokua.
Mehau pal and sometime employee Herbert Naone once said that com-
plete strangers would occasionally seek Mehau’s kokua with personal prob-
lems like overhanging tree branches in their backyards.
Mehau became the subject of a lengthy criminal investigation, called
Operation Firebird, that was conducted by HPD and the U.S. Drug Enforce-
ment Administration. A separate investigation of Mehau by the IRS, called
Operation Koko, was also undertaken.
While those probes were underway, I turned out the Hilo airport
guards story in May 1979.19
That story was followed two weeks l ater by another about close Mehau
associate George Perry, one of the special Hilo guards and a Don Ho pal,
who was a principal in a company that was making more than $6,000 a
month in illegal “sandwich lease” deals on state waterfront property.20
The company, GRG Enterprises, held the master lease on the property,
at Kewalo Basin near Aloha Tower, and had subleased to a variety of other
companies at substantially higher prices than what GRG was paying the
198 Chapter 15
state. Terms of the master lease required GRG to obtain advance approval
of such subleases, but it hadn’t done so.
A partner with Perry in GRG was another Mehau friend, former Detroit
Lions football player Rockne Freitas, who would later become a high-ranking
official of the University of Hawai‘i and of Bishop Estate and Kamehameha
Schools.
State officials told me they w
ere investigating the situation and contem-
plating legal action against GRG.
That never happened.
Two decades later, in July 1999, Advertiser Capitol Bureau Chief Kevin
Dayton reported that the state had decided to write off $541,000 in back
rent owed to the state by GRG.21 The decision was made a fter Freitas told
the state that if GRG was required to pay the money, it would declare
bankruptcy. The company’s only asset was the leasehold waterfront prop-
erty, which the state owned. And the state also decided to waive another
undetermined amount of environmental cleanup costs that GRG was obli-
gated to pay because underground fuel storage tanks had leaked and con-
taminated the site.
In mid-1979, I was tipped about the Arthur Baker kidnapping-murder
case. I wrote the Baker disappearance story without mentioning Ronald
Ching—I had nothing on the record to tie him to it.22
Six years later, the story came back to life when Arthur Baker’s bones
were exhumed from the sands of Makaha.
When the Firebird and Koko investigations were quietly closed with no
charges in 1980, I wrote the story: “If anything, the investigations may have
served to broaden the mystique which has built up around the physically-
imposing Mehau.”23
“Investigators found Mehau to have established a remarkable network
of personal ties with rich and powerful figures of high and low repute
throughout Hawaii and the Pacific Basin,” I reported.
One of the law enforcement officials who oversaw the criminal investi-
gations, U.S. Organized Crime Strike Force attorney Daniel Bent, later testi-
fied that Mehau was “a significant organized crime figure with substantial
influence in state government.” Bent also said under oath that he believed
the Firebird investigation would have resulted in a criminal indictment of
Mehau if witnesses had not been frightened for their lives.
Bent’s sworn deposition testimony was delivered in preparation for the
1992 state court trial of an invasion of privacy lawsuit filed by Mehau
against Rick Reed, one of the original disseminators of the godfather alle-
gation through the Valley Isle newspaper on Maui back in 1977.
Larry Mehau 199
Reed had become a public relations assistant to Honolulu prosecutor

Charles Marsland, and in 1985 Reed once again leveled the godfather
charges, publicly releasing many investigative records compiled during
Firebird by the DEA. That brought the lawsuit, which was repeatedly de-
layed but finally went to trial in 1992.
Bent’s testimony was not heard by the jury in the Mehau v. Reed trial.
Circuit Judge Wilfred Watanabe ruled that it depended on information not
disseminated by Reed.
The trial jury voted to dismiss the complaint against Reed, but Watanabe
overturned the jury’s decision and ordered a new trial. The jury’s verdict
came despite a “great weight of credible evidence” to the contrary, Watanabe
ruled.
Reed and Mehau settled the case a fter Reed issued a tepid apology for
invading Mehau’s privacy. But Reed refused to recant the godfather charge.
I found myself writing another obituary of the godfather controversy in
the aftermath of the trial. “There was no ‘smoking gun’ in the trial to con-
firm, as federal agents alleged in a 1977 Firebird memo: ‘Larry Ehukai Me-
hau is considered the single most important figure in the organized crime
hierarchy in the state of Hawaii,’ ” my story said.24
While the jury did not hear Bent’s testimony, it did hear from former
HPD Chief Francis Keala and prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro, who testified
that they knew of no evidence to support the godfather charge.
John Y. Y. Lee, head of the Honolulu DEA office during the Firebird
probe, testified in another deposition that his agents followed Mehau every-
where he went and sought information about his business dealings and
associates around the globe.
At one point, Lee noted, DEA agents followed Mehau to a meeting in
Los Angeles with Marcus Lipsky, a one-time Chicago syndicate figure who
had settled on the West Coast to pursue investments and philanthropy.
Among Lipsky’s business interests was a management deal with Don Ho,
so it was hardly surprising that Mehau would have the occasional sit-down
with Lipsky.
The DEA agents also tracked Mehau to a major Democratic Party fund-
raiser in Los Angeles. Given Mehau’s warm ties to U.S. senators Daniel
Inouye and Daniel Akaka, as well as a multitude of other politicians, the
fund-raiser appearance was hardly sinister or even surprising.
“He did meet with Marcus Lipsky [and we] put him at a thousand-
dollar-a-plate dinner for a National Democratic Convention,” Lee testified.
“That’s it. Couldn’t see anything with dope or anything else. He knew a lot
of people. He knew governors and he knew law enforcement p eople from
200 Chapter 15
rank and file up. This guy knows everybody. I think we all agree to that. He
knows good guys and he knows bad guys,” the agent testified.
But the investigators c ouldn’t make a criminal case against Mehau, Lee
said. “We did put him together with ex-felons and Marcus Lipsky in L.A.,
but we couldn’t tie anything into Larry Mehau, his associations with these
people, whether he was involved in criminal activities. If we had that infor-
mation, I assure you Mr. Mehau would be b ehind bars today,” Lee said.25
IRS agents conducted what’s known as a “net worth” investigation of
Mehau—a painstaking examination of his personal and business financial
records to assess whether his expenditures were within his income.
What they found was kokua in action. Mehau frequently didn’t pay for
anything. Friends or acquaintances who saw the chance to show him a
little kokua would pick up the tab for him. Maybe they w ere reciprocating a
previous kindness; maybe they were just acting out of the goodness of their
hearts. Whatever it was, it didn’t fit within the construct of an IRS net worth
investigation.
The trial had its lighter moments. Reed, who was not an attorney but
represented himself in the case, at one point was exploring Mehau’s wide-
spread connections in politics and entertainment.
In my recap of the trial, I wrote that Mehau “was well-k nown for pro-
ducing annual opening day entertainment for the state Senate at [Senate
President Richard] Wong’s request. With Mehau standing in the wings,
stars such as Don Ho, Al Harrington and o thers would show up to give the
session a musical kickoff.
“Mehau said at the trial the entertainers didn’t like getting up that early,
but didn’t know how to say no to Wong.
“There were jokes that the entertainers didn’t know how to say no to
Mehau.
“During the trial, Reed asked Mehau about those legislative parties.
Reed related the story of ventriloquist Freddie Morris causing his wooden
dummy ‘Moku’ to say that he didn’t want to entertain the senators but ‘he’d
rather do what Mehau asked than end up a part of [Governor] George Ari-
yoshi’s desk.’
“Mehau didn’t remember the line, but said, ‘That’s pretty good.’ ”
One of Mehau’s main attorneys in the trial, Stacy Moniz, later lost his
license to practice law after he was convicted of federal tax crimes. Dur-
ing that tax case, Moniz himself filed evidence showing that Honolulu
police considered Moniz to be a member of organized crime affiliated with
Mehau associate George Perry and Teamster Union movie driver Blaine
Kaakimaka.
Larry Mehau 201
While the Reed trial was underway, I finally managed to turn out a
story that was originally written six years earlier but wasn’t published at
the personal request of HPD Chief Douglas Gibb.
In 1985, while reviewing new business filings, I came across a new part-
nership formed by several of Mehau’s close associates and a c ouple of
law enforcement agents who were close to Marsland. Called Circle Six, the
partnership was formed by ex-HPD officer Herbert Naone Jr., who went to
work for Hawai‘i Protective Association after he left the police force be-
cause of his involvement in the 1975 armed robbery of an illegal gambling
game on Kauai.
Circle Six was formed as a cattle-ranching venture on Central Oahu prop-
erty owned by Amfac, Inc., a very large business conglomerate involved in
agriculture, real estate development, hotel operations, and retailing. HPA
had a contract to provide security services for Amfac, and Mehau was a
personal friend of Amfac chief executive Henry Walker, who made the
property available to the Circle Six partners.
Besides Naone, other partners included two of the Hilo airport special
deputies: convicted felon and longtime close Mehau associate Gabriel “Gabe”
Aio and Theodore “Joe” Hackbarth, a Carpenter’s Union aide who at the
time was facing a felony assault charge in a union-related beating of a build-
ing contractor. (The charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor.)
HPD Criminal Intelligence Unit officer Arthur Nishida and former HPD
officer Frank Perreira, who was then working as an investigator in Marsland’s
office, were also among the partners.
So I had a story demonstrating that Nishida and Perreira, while investi-
gating organized crime for police and prosecutors, were in business with
convicted criminals.
But Gibb told me and Advertiser editors that Nishida’s participation
in Circle Six was “viewed as an excellent intelligence operation” that had
brought the police “closer to Mehau than ever before.” He asked us to with-
hold publication of the story. If the story ran, he said, HPD would have no
choice but to tell Nishida to pull out of the business. I argued that such
publicity might in fact push Nishida further into the confidence of Mehau
and company, and I argued to my editors that we had a story in hand and
ought to run with it.
I lost. We didn’t publish.
Six years later, Nishida and Perreira testified as character witnesses for
Mehau in the Reed libel trial. Nishida said he believed Marsland’s office
had unfairly targeted Mehau for investigation. Perreira testified that he did
not believe the godfather allegations about Mehau.
202 Chapter 15
I wrote a story revealing their past personal business ties to Mehau,

Naone, Aio, and the o thers.26
The Circle Six arrangement demonstrated both Mehau’s ability to kokua
and his far-flung network of connections throughout Island society.
He testified at trial that he personally worked out the deal with Henry
Walker of Amfac. By subleasing 3,000 acres of its agricultural land to Circle
Six for ranching purposes, Amfac saved some $200,000 in annual property
taxes, Mehau said.
It also brought several of Mehau’s close, felonious associates into business
with two police officers who were investigating organized crime. Those two
officers later testified on Mehau’s behalf in court.
In 1989, another tantalizing tidbit about Mehau and his mob connec-
tions came to light with the announcement that he was part of a group that
planned to start a new interisland air cargo business called Hawai‘i Pacific
Air, Inc. I read Advertiser reporter Kit Smith’s article about the venture with
interest. He reported that Mehau’s partners in the deal were local tour com
pany owner Robert Iwamoto Jr. and a “Las Vegas investor” named Alvin
Baron.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Alvin Baron?
Baron had once been the assets manager of the scandal-ridden Teamsters
Union Central States Pension Fund and had served time in federal prison for
helping to loot that fund. In his fine book The Teamsters, author Steven Brill
described Baron as “a notoriously uncouth mobster” who had served for
years as a protégé to infamous Chicago “Outfit” figure Allen Dorfman.27
Baron replaced Dorfman at the Teamsters pension fund after Dorfman,
a close associate of Jimmy Hoffa, was sent to prison for a separate kickback
conviction. (In the film Casino, the “Andy Stone” character played by actor
Alan King was based on Dorfman.)
Dorfman was a regular visitor to Hawai‘i, usually timing his trips to
coincide with the Hawaiian Open golf tournament. He was regularly sur-
veilled by police and FBI agents during those visits, and the watchers saw
Dorfman socialize with a wide variety of local residents, often at Matteo’s
restaurant on Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki.
The Hawai‘i jaunts stopped after Dorfman was gunned down in a mob
hit outside Chicago in 1983. The murder occurred shortly after Dorfman,
Chicago mafia capo Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, and Teamsters
International President Roy Williams had been convicted of the attempted
bribery of U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada.
In a 2011 book about the Chicago mafia, The Last Dance, former Chicago
police officer James Jack said Dorfman and Lombardo were such close
friends that they used to take golfing vacations together to Hawai‘i.28
Larry Mehau 203
I talked to Kit Smith about his story, and we worked together on a

follow-up article. I found a very good source who said that Mehau had
been “a friend or at least an acquaintance” of Baron’s for several years.
Two businessmen who had met Baron during a recent visit to Hawai‘i
told Kit that Baron more than once had mentioned his past ties to the
Central States Pension Fund but said nothing about his criminal past.
The attorney for Hawai‘i Pacific Air, Tom Foley, gulped when I told him
about Baron’s background, saying, “That’s news to me.” He wondered if
it might cause the venture licensing problems with federal transportation
authorities.
Mehau as usual wasn’t talking, but I did manage to speak briefly with
Baron in a phone call to Las Vegas. After I explained who I was and what I
was calling about, he said, “I don’t talk to reporters” and hung up. He was
pretty couth about it, though.29
The air cargo business never got off the ground and was dissolved a few
years later.
A year after the Alvin Baron story, Advertiser reporter Andy Yamaguchi
and I found Mehau and Iwamoto—the other partner in Hawai‘i Pacific
Air—involved in a tangled real estate deal on the Big Island that had infu-
riated state official William Paty.30 It seemed that a large piece of prime
oceanfront property on the Kona coast that the state wanted to acquire for
a beach park had been sold three times in two weeks, with the price in-
creasing by leaps and bounds in each transaction.
The first sale, to Iwamoto, had a price tag of $17 million. Iwamoto
“flipped” the land on the same day to a Japanese-owned company called
Tenzan Corp. for $23 million.
Tenzan Corp. turned around and sold the property 12 days later to another
Japanese-owned company, Blue Point Land Development, for $30 million.
Larry Mehau was chairman of the board of directors of Blue Point. A
Japanese national named Chiyoko Isayama was the president of both Blue
Point and Tenzan. The companies shared the same business address, a
home on Kahala Avenue in Honolulu owned by Isayama.
The attorney who represented the original seller was Tom Foley, the
same lawyer who had handled legal matters for Mehau, Iwamoto, and
Baron in Pacific Air Cargo.
Foley told me that he had disclosed his Iwamoto conflict to the seller,
who waived it and told him to proceed. I also found that a lawyer in Foley’s
firm had represented Tenzan Corp. in another real estate matter, but Foley
said he was unaware of that.
Foley said there was a lot of demand for the land, and the various sales
were arm’s-length and legitimate.
204 Chapter 15
That’s not how Bill Paty, chairman of the state Department of Land and
Natural Resources, saw it. He accused the parties of colluding with each
other to drive up the price the state would eventually have to pay for the
property.
“It would appear [that there] was collusion,” Paty told me. “It’s land spec-
ulation at the expense of the people.”
Ironically, Mehau had once served on the board of directors of Paty’s
department. Paty went on at some length about the bad smell wafting up
from the land deals.
“It looks like an in-house arrangement of some sort to pump up the
price. It’s got to be some kind of nefarious-t ype scheme,” he said. “I’m real
unhappy about it and I think the people of the state of Hawai‘i ought to
be unhappy, too.”
Paty and the state refused to negotiate a purchase of the property from
Blue Point, choosing instead to file condemnation proceedings in court.
At the close of that case, the state agreed to pay $23 million for the land:
the middle-ground price paid by Tenzan to Iwamoto but $7 million short of
Blue Point’s price.
That resolution preserved the $6-million-in-one-day profit of Mehau’s
in-state business associate, Iwamoto, but washed away the paper profits of
the Japanese investors.
Patricia Tummons, founder and editor of Environment Hawai‘i, a highly
regarded publication headquartered on the Big Island, later reported that
documents filed in the condemnation case showed how the Foley-Iwamoto-
Mehau connections worked.31
Foley was representing the original property owner in sales talks with
the state when Iwamoto, also a client, heard about the purchase opportu-
nity. Iwamoto knew that Mehau was showing Big Island properties to Japa
nese investor Isayama, Tummons reported.
So Iwamoto assembled a deal, offering to buy the land for $17 million
and sell it for $23 million. Both offers were accepted and booked on the
same day, but nobody told the state, which had been on the verge of offer-
ing $17.1 million for the property—$100,000 more than Iwamoto paid, Tum-
mons said.
Mehau described himself as a facilitator who introduced Iwamoto to
Isayama.
“I just wanted to help,” Mehau said in a deposition, Tummons reported.
Isayama told Mehau that she wanted to build him an oceanfront house
on the property, but he assured her that wasn’t necessary, Tummons
reported.
Kokua.
Larry Mehau 205
While the condemnation case was being litigated, Foley became the tar-
get of an unrelated criminal case. Already convicted once of drunk driv-
ing, Foley was charged with the same offense in 1990.
That case was dismissed in 1993, but two years later, Foley did it again.
His BMW smashed into another car at midnight on a Honolulu street. The
driver of the other vehicle was killed, and his wife was seriously injured.
Foley’s blood-alcohol level was triple the legal limit. He was convicted
of negligent homicide and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Foley served several years of that term before Governor Ben Cayetano
granted him a full p ardon in 2000. Cayetano said Foley had been a model
prisoner, had accepted full responsibility for his crime, and worked very
hard to help the family of the man he killed.
While Foley’s legal problems melted away in the new millennium, new
legal actions were being undertaken in federal court that would result
in prison terms for other associates of Larry Mehau and a revival of the
organ ized crime allegations that had swirled around him for the previous
three decades.
One case, a police detective’s whistle-blower lawsuit filed against HPD,
eventually yielded thousands of pages of records about organized crime in
Hawai‘i and the Honolulu Police Department’s connections to the mob.
Much of the material was originally sealed from public view, but the
Advertiser, at my urging, sought access to the records. Over four long years,
the secret records were gradually opened to the public in federal court.
The first batch was unsealed in 2003 but was heavily redacted at the
insistence of HPD, which claimed the material contained confidential de-
tails of ongoing investigations and other law enforcement matters.
More disclosures followed as the Honolulu Advertiser and its attor-
neys, led by Jeffrey Portnoy, disputed and disproved those claims to
confidentiality.
Still, the department and attorneys for the city fought on, even after the
lawsuit, brought by Detective Kenneth Kamakana, was settled with a $650,000
payment to the officer and his lawyers.
The final secrets that the department had fought so long and so hard to
keep were disgorged in 2006 after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled in favor of the Advertiser.
They centered on Larry Mehau and his associates, George Perry Jr. and
Gabriel Aio, who were repeatedly identified as suspected organized crime
figures by officers in HPD’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit.
The material also revealed that some CIU officers, including the captain
in charge of the unit, Milton Olmos, had alarmingly close ties to Mehau’s
associates. Other officers and FBI agents were so distrustful of the CIU that
206 Chapter 15
they believed ongoing organized crime investigations had been compro-

mised by leaks from the unit.
The records were contained in a lawsuit filed by Kamakana against Po-
lice Chief Lee Donohue, Olmos, and HPD after Kamakana was forced out
of the CIU and investigated by HPD’s Internal Affairs office.
Included in the unsealed records were sworn depositions from CIU of-
ficers Alexander Ahlo, Llewellyn Kaeo, Tenari Maafala, Wesley Wong, and
Kamakana himself that said Mehau and Perry had been identified as orga
nized crime figures.32
The records also showed that Olmos was a personal friend of Perry.
“I’ve known him for many years, [he’s] been my friend before I became
a police officer,” Olmos testified about Perry. Olmos said he knew of no evi-
dence that Perry was an organized crime figure.
Olmos was asked by Kamakana’s lawyer, Mark Bennett, if he had
“ever seen any intelligence indicating that [Perry is] an organ ized crime
figure.”
Olmos replied, “Allegations.” But he said none of the allegations caused
him any concerns about having Perry as a friend.
I interviewed Olmos, who told me that Perry had “always been a fair
person with me and I’ve never had any problems with him.”
The police “haven’t had any kind of confirmed documentation” linking
Perry to organized crime, Olmos said.
“It’s like Larry Mehau,” Olmos continued. “He’s been regarded as orga
nized crime, [the] godfather, and we’ve had a lot of investigations into those
types of allegations and we’ve never come up with anything to directly tie
him into any type of organized crime.”33
Donohue and Olmos denied any wrongdoing in the Kamakana civil suit
and were dismissed as defendants shortly before the city settled the case in
2003.
“We were investigated by Internal Affairs, the FBI and the prosecutor’s
office and not one investigation found us guilty of any type of wrongdo-
ing,” Olmos said.
Donohue said of the Kamakana case: “It just seems like it never ends, it
never goes away.”
Donohue and Olmos went to work for a private security guard firm (not
Hawai‘i Protective Association) after retiring from HPD.
The release of the Kamakana case files about Mehau came not long after
the FBI publicly identified Mehau as a “long-time Hawai‘i organized crime
figure.” The information was contained in the records of a criminal investi-
gation that snared Mehau’s friend and colleague Herbert Naone Jr. in a pub-
lic corruption case.
Larry Mehau 207
Mehau refused to talk to me about the Kamakana or Naone allegations.

His daughter, Dana Mehau-Vericella, noted that her father was “never
charged with anything.” Perry did not respond to requests for comment.
Copies of the Kamakana case allegations w ere given to Perry by private
attorney Eric Seitz, representing Perry’s son Bruce, whose name also ap-
peared in the Kamakana case records.
“I didn’t hear back from them,” Seitz said after he had given the paper-
work to the Perrys. “They don’t want to say anything.”
Seitz said the allegations made in the Kamakana case records are “just
rumor and innuendo. I suggest to you that these are not the [type of] facts
that stories are made of.”
Another close associate of Mehau and Perry who was repeatedly identi-
fied in the Kamakana case files as an organized crime figure, Gabe Aio,
also declined comment. Aio was supplied copies of the allegations against
him in the Kamakana files, but his attorney, Reginald Minn, said Aio
“prefers not to comment.”
Aio was a central figure in several events that led to Kamakana’s ouster
from CIU and the filing of the whistle-blower lawsuit.
Records in the case disclosed that CIU officer Alexander “Charley Boy”
Ahlo shocked the local law enforcement community when he unexpect-
edly brought Aio and convicted mob killer Henderson “Henny Boy” Ahlo
(half-brother of Alex Ahlo) to a statewide police intelligence conference at a
Waikiki hotel.
At the time, Aio was the target of a joint FBI-HPD undercover investiga-
tion of illegal gambling operations in Chinatown. Henderson Ahlo was on
parole for the 1977 gangland murder of gambling figure Benjamin Mad-
ama on the Big Island.
Several officers attending the conference quickly left the hospitality
suite when Detective Ahlo and his two guests arrived, according to case
files.
Former CIU captain Harry Auld said he was “appalled” by the appear-
ance of Gabe Aio at the conference.34 Auld said of Aio: “Without a doubt he
was an organized crime figure.”
Aio at the time “had a legitimate job” as head of security at the Matson
shipping container yard, Auld said, “but he was definitely an organized
crime figure going back to his youthful days and his association with
Mr. Larry Mehau on the Big Island and his control, not promotion, but con-
trol of gambling games in the downtown Honolulu area.”
Officer Ahlo said he brought Aio to the conference at the request of a
Maui police executive, an assertion that was later denied by the Maui offi-
cial, according to the records.
208 Chapter 15
Ahlo later apologized for his action and was “counseled” by Olmos
about it.
After Aio was indicted in the gambling case, fliers advertising a “Golf
for Gabe” legal fund-raiser for Aio were distributed around HPD, accord-
ing to the court files.
Detective Ahlo told FBI agent Dan Kelly that he “did not believe any
current members of HPD would go to this tournament, but he expected
retired members to attend,” Kelly reported.
“Detective Ahlo acknowledged that he has golfed in the past with
Aio . . . [and] advised that there was also a luau fundraiser being planned
to raise money for the Aio defense fund,” Kelly reported.35
In the Chinatown case, police officer Earl Koanui pretended to be a
corrupt detective and collected “protection” money from gambling figures
like Aio. The investigation was code-named “Ikapono” and was jointly con-
ducted by the FBI and officers from HPD’s narcotics-vice unit.
Officials involved in the investigation had attempted to exclude the CIU
from the case because of concerns about the loyalty of some officers there,
according to the Kamakana files.
“There were some CIU officers who we felt we could not trust,” HPD
officer Gerrit Kurihara testified.
Koanui, the HPD officer who masqueraded as a corrupt cop, worried
that if CIU officers knew about his role in the case, the investigation might
be compromised and his life would be endangered, according to deposi-
tion testimony from Kurihara.
“Did Earl ever indicate to you that because of the CIU officers’ relation-
ships with some of the targets, he had concerns for his safety?” Kurihara
was asked by Mark Bennett. “Oh yes, sir,” Kurihara said.
“In general it was decided early on that we will not inform CIU and
we requested our command not to inform CIU of what Ikapono was de-
signed to do,” Kurihara testified.36 Shortly before a scheduled meeting
between Aio and Koanui, agents and police officers who had arranged
to secretly videotape the meeting were alarmed to see a car with five
CIU officers arrive on the scene. The car was driven by Lee Donohue Jr.,
the son of the chief, and the passengers included Alexander Ahlo and
Olmos.
The watching videotape team, concealed in a van outside a bar part-
owned by Aio, hurriedly called Koanui and told him to delay his arrival at
the meeting.
They then videotaped the CIU officers, who were met on the sidewalk
by Aio associate Steve Crouch. One or two of the officers “embraced”
Crouch, and there were “handshakes, back-slapping kind of thing” before
Larry Mehau 209
all the men went into the bar, Kurihara said. The officers stayed inside for a
half hour and then left.
The Koanui meeting then took place without incident, said Kurihara.
One of the CIU officers told Kurihara the next day that the meeting
was one of several visits the five officers had made to “various places” the
previous evening because they were “using up excess overtime,” the Kama
kana documents show.
Asked to explain, Kurihara said, “If you don’t use what [overtime]
you’re allocated this year, then next year you get less.”
After Aio, Crouch, and numerous other defendants were indicted in the
Chinatown gambling case, CIU officers including Olmos and Ahlo met
with and secretly tape-recorded one of the defendants, Mari Rose Tangi,
despite express notification from the FBI that meeting Tangi without her
lawyer present would be improper.
Olmos and Ahlo later testified that they met with Tangi because she
had asked for the meeting and they w ere worried about possible threats to
the life of Koanui. Before the meeting, some of the officers involved also
expressed concern that the meeting might be a “setup” arranged by the FBI,
the records show.
Kamakana had his own explanation of the CIU-Tangi interview, accord-
ing to the unsealed court records.
“The actual purpose in meeting with Tangi was a particularly corrupt
one—to try to develop ‘evidence’ that Earl Koanui was a dirty cop,” Ka-
makana argued.
That evidence would benefit “Ahlo’s friend, organized crime figure and
indicted defendant Gabrel Aio, who was associated with George Perry, an
organized crime figure who was Olmos’ friend,” Kamakana said in the
suit.37
When Kamakana found out about the Tangi meeting, he told FBI agent
Kelly about it, who in turn notified the U.S. Attorney’s office, according to
the records.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Florence Nakakuni, the prosecutor in charge of
the Chinatown case, asked the CIU for an explanation and for a copy of the
tape. She was originally denied a copy and then was given an edited ver-
sion. Kamakana obtained an unedited version, which he gave to Kelly.
Kelly later testified that some prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office
wanted to pursue criminal obstruction of justice charges against the CIU
officers involved, but others did not.
“My understanding is that it was not a unanimous decision, but the
decision was that criminal offenses or criminal charges would not be pur-
sued in the m atter,” Kelly said in a sworn deposition.
210 Chapter 15
Kamakana also removed from CIU the records of a long-running inves-

tigation of waterfront racketeering, called the “Harbor Rats” case, and
delivered them to agent Kelly.
Shortly a fter that, he was transferred out of CIU and placed under crim-
inal and administrative investigations by Internal Affairs at HPD. The city
prosecutor’s office declined to accept the criminal case, according to the
Kamakana files. The Harbor Rats case included an investigation of narcot-
ics trafficking, according to court files.
Kamakana testified under oath that George Perry and his son Bruce
were known to be friendly with two Hawai‘i Kai brothers who were targets
of the drug-trafficking probe. Kamakana and another CIU officer, Melvin
Nakapaahu, both testified that they were reluctant to notify Olmos about
developments in the Harbor Rats case because of his friendship with George
Perry.
The Hawai‘i Kai suspects in the case were never charged because they
stopped talking to undercover officers and informants for unexplained
reasons, according to the files.
Another man identified as a Mainland drug supplier in the Harbor Rats
case, Jacob Sanchez, was convicted of methamphetamine trafficking in
2000, according to court records. An affiliate of the Hells Angels motor-
cycle gang, Sanchez was sentenced to 14 years in prison and died b ehind
bars in California in 2002.
Bruce Perry was a member of a group of Honolulu stevedores known as
the “Perry Boys” that was investigated by the FBI and HPD in the mid-
1990s, according to court records contained in civil and criminal cases filed
against Bruce Perry.
The younger Perry was tried twice on a charge of felony assault of fel-
low stevedore Quentin “Rocky” Tahara in 1994 at the Matson container
yard on Sand Island. Both cases ended in mistrials after juries could not
agree on verdicts. Tahara, who suffered a fractured skull and was blinded
in one eye during the affray with Perry, won a $2.3 million civil judgment
against Perry.
Eric Seitz, attorney for Bruce Perry, said allegations made against his
client in the assault case and in the Kamakana files were “absurd.”
Within weeks of turning over the Tangi tape and Harbor Rats files to
Kelly, Kamakana was transferred out of CIU, the first officer to ever be
involuntarily transferred out of the unit for a nondisciplinary reason, accord-
ing to testimony in the case.
Kamakana secretly tape-recorded a meeting with Olmos, then the act-
ing captain in charge of CIU, when he was notified of the transfer. Olmos
said the move had nothing to do with the quality of Kamakana’s work but
Larry Mehau 211
said CIU was “moving in a direction where we’re gonna need people that
are faithful to myself and the chief.”
Kamakana was reassigned to HPD’s auto theft detail, described by wit-
nesses in the case as a demeaning, “entry-level” job for a seasoned detec-
tive. He alleged in his lawsuit that the transfer and the Internal Affairs in-
vestigations of him were illegal retaliation prompted by his whistle-blowing
activities.
Kamakana was represented in the case by two attorneys who later occu-
pied important legal positions in state and city government: Mark Bennett,
who became Hawai‘i attorney general, and Carrie Okinaga, appointed
corporation counsel for the city and county of Honolulu.
Federal Magistrate Judge Leslie Kobayashi conducted a painstaking re-
view of the records and eventually ruled that the vast bulk of them should
be thrown open. Allegations in the case, Kobayashi ruled, “raise issues
about the conduct of state and federal law enforcement officials, and there-
fore, the court concludes that the testimony and documents concerning the
matter are of significant public concern.”
In upholding Kobayashi’s rulings, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Ap-
peals lauded Kobayashi’s “decision to carefully review every document”
and said the government arguments for secrecy were “somewhat tepid and
general.”
Honolulu Advertiser attorney Jeffrey Portnoy said HPD fought for years
to keep the Kamakana records sealed, not because they contained legiti-
mate law enforcement secrets, but because the information in them was
“embarrassing” to the department. The attitude continued a long pattern of
secrecy at HPD, Portnoy said.
“It’s clear that over the past decade or more HPD has gone to extra
ordinary lengths to keep from the public all information the department
considers embarrassing or that will cast it in anything other than a favorable
light,” said Portnoy, then the president of the Hawai‘i Bar Association.
Editors of the Advertiser refused to publish the stories I wrote that were
based on the unsealed Kamakana revelations about Mehau and Perry.
Marsha McFadden, the managing editor of the newspaper, repeatedly said
that the stories c ouldn’t be printed because the allegations about Mehau
and others w ere “not proven.”
I argued unsuccessfully that the information was based on sworn testi-
mony from police officers that we spent countless thousands of dollars to
obtain.38
I suggested repeatedly that we consult with attorney Portnoy, a nation-
ally recognized expert on First Amendment issues and libel laws, about her
concerns over legal issues raised by the records. She refused, saying there
212 Chapter 15
was no reason to seek legal advice on the matter.39 Mark Platte, by then
risen to editor-in-chief of the newspaper, wouldn’t talk to me about the
stories.
Mehau Timeline
1929 Born, Hilo, Hawai‘i.
1945–1948 Kamehameha Schools, Honolulu.
1948–1950 University of Hawai‘i, Hilo.
1951–1952 Hawai‘i County police officer.
1953–1964 Honolulu police officer.
1964–present Rancher, security guard company owner.
1970 Appointed to state Board of Land and Natural Resources
by Governor John Burns.
1973 Hawai‘i Protective Association awarded statewide airports
security guard contract.
1974 Reappointed to land board by Governor George Ariyoshi.
1975 Charles “Chuckers” Marsland murdered by Ronald Ching.
Eric Naone tells police he was at Don Ho’s dressing room
with Ching, Larry Mehau, and George Perry Jr. at the time
of the murder.
1975 Hawai‘i Protective Association loses airports contract.
State intercedes for HPA. Federal Aviation Administration
overrules intercession.
1977 Television reporter Scott Shirai airs “godfather of orga
nized crime” allegation. Valley Isle News on Maui repeats
and expands on the allegations. Mehau sues.
1977 U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration memo says Mehau
“is considered the single most important figure in the
organized crime hierarchy within the state of Hawai‘i.”
1978 Joint DEA, IRS, and Honolulu Police investigation of
Mehau code-named “Operation Firebird” begins.
1978 Mehau ex-employee and DEA informant Arthur Baker is
kidnapped and murdered by Ronald Ching.
1978 HPA submits sole bid for five-year airports contract. Some
competitors say contract specifications favored HPA.
1978 Mehau arranges VIP airport treatment for his friend,
Japanese racketeer Kaoru Ogawa.
1979 Hawai‘i Protective Association hires George Perry, Cyril
Kahale, and others as “special deputies.”
Larry Mehau 213
1979 George Perry, Rockne Freitas sandwich lease deals on state

waterfront property.
1979 Police investigate Don Ho rape charge. Reporters Walter
Wright and James Dooley meet with Ho and Mehau.
1980 Operation Firebird closed with no charges filed.
1981 Police and federal agents raid Ronnie Ching’s apartment,
seize guns, explosives, drugs, and cash.
1982 Japanese racketeer Kaoru Ogawa says Mehau is his friend,
admits he once identified Mehau as “godfather” in Tokyo
magazine.
1984 Ching admits murders of Senator Larry Kuriyama (1970),
Charles Marsland Jr. (1975), Arthur Baker (1978), Robert
Fukumoto (1980).
1984 Mehau and Cyril Kahale accuse prosecutor Charles
Marsland of vendetta. Kahale files and later wins false
arrest suit.
1984 Mobster Henry Huihui testifies Mehau had advance
knowledge of 1977 Joe Lii syndicate slaying.
1985 Charles Marsland aide Rick Reed releases details of
Operation Firebird investigation. Mehau sues.
1989 Mehau partners with Chicago and Las Vegas mobster
Alvin Baron in Hawai‘i cargo airline venture.
1989 State official William Paty accuses Mehau of involvement
in “nefarious” land scheme.
1992 Mehau v. Reed trial. Former U.S. Attorney Dan Bent calls
Mehau “a significant organized crime figure with substan-
tial influence in state government.” Police chief, prosecutor
defend Mehau.
1992 Mehau v. Reed jury verdict in favor of Reed is set aside by
trial judge. Case later dismissed after Reed apologizes for
invading Mehau privacy.
1999 Mehau attorney Stacy Moniz files police affidavits in court
that identify Moniz and George Perry Jr. as organized
crime figures. Moniz convicted of tax crimes, surrenders
law license.
2000 Detective Kenneth Kamakana files whistle-blower lawsuit,
calls Mehau and associates George Perry Jr., Gabriel Aio
organized crime figures. Papers filed under seal.
2002 Honolulu Advertiser intercedes in Kamakana case, seeking
public access to records.
214 Chapter 15
2002–2006 Kamakana case records gradually unsealed. Mehau, Perry

records kept confidential.
2006 FBI affidavit names Mehau and associate Herbert Naone
as “longtime organized crime figures.”
2006 Final Kamakana case records unsealed. Police detectives
identify Mehau and Perry as organized crime figures.
Criminal Intelligence Unit chief admits friendship with
Perry, defends Perry and Mehau.
2006 Honolulu Advertiser editors suppress Kamakana case
records concerning Mehau and Perry.
C hapt e r S ixt e e n
End of the Line
The death spiral of the newspaper business in Honolulu followed a pattern

played out across the country.
The decline first struck a fternoon newspapers, which withered away as
readers turned to television stations for evening news. Locally owned pub-
lications were consolidated or killed off outright.
The surviving publications were still cash cows, earning solid financial
returns that attracted carnivorous conglomerates like Gannett looking first
to cash in and then to cash out.
In Honolulu, Gannett Co., Inc., first bought the a fternoon Star-Bulletin
from its local owners in 1971. Dwindling subscriptions and advertising
revenues at the Star-Bulletin were shored up by a joint operating agreement
with the morning Advertiser.
Under this arrangement, the two newspapers shared printing facilities
and advertising sales personnel but retained separate and competitive re-
porting and editorial staffs. Similar JOAs were reached in other cities around
the country under the aegis of the Newspaper Preservation Act, a federal law
enacted in 1970 that waived the antitrust nature of the deals in the interest of
preserving independent editorial voices in metropolitan centers.1
The Gannett managers could do little to stave off the continuing mal-
aise at the Star-Bulletin, so they struck a new deal in 1992, agreeing to buy
the Advertiser from its local owners and sell the Star-Bulletin to a little-k nown
and lightly regarded chain, Liberty Newspapers, based in Arkansas.
Liberty’s chief executive, Rupert Phillips, was a frequent partner in
newspaper deals with Gannett, usually buying and sometimes selling. Oc-
casionally he shut down the publications after buying them from Gannett.
215
216 Chapter 16
In September 1999, Phillips announced that he would close the Star-

Bulletin the following month, prompting a community uproar. Loud public
protests were staged, and lawsuits were filed. Just weeks before the sched-
uled shutdown, a federal judge enjoined Phillips from closing the news-
paper. Phillips was forced to offer the publication for sale, and in 2001, Cana-
dian newspaper publisher David Black stepped forward and bought the
Star-Bulletin.
The joint operating agreement was dissolved, and Black moved the news-
paper to new headquarters.
Simultaneously, the Internet was revolutionizing society and ravaging
the finances of newspapers around the world, including those in the m iddle
of the Pacific Ocean. Classified and display advertising linage shriveled as
websites like Craigslist offered free distribution of, and access to, want ads,
used-car listings, and real estate deals. Print subscriptions plummeted, so
publishers fatefully decided that the only way to keep customers and at-
tract new ones was to offer their news stories on websites of their own, free
of charge.
It was a bad business model. Subscribers kept cancelling. Why pay for
something when it was available online at no charge? Advertisers cut back
again. Why buy ad space when the customers had disappeared?
Owners, desperate to maintain executive salaries and stockholder divi-
dends, began cutting expenses. Employees were fired or laid off or squeezed
into early retirement. “More with less” became the industry mantra. Report-
ers who survived the cutbacks w ere tasked with additional duties: shoot-
ing video, posting stories online, feeding twitter accounts.
The number and quality of newspaper stories plummeted. Some major
newspapers ceased publication on a daily basis.
More subscribers cancelled. Why keep paying for a clearly inferior
product?
Start-up news websites proliferated.
The dinosaurs w ere dying.
By 2010, the Gannett overseers decided that their Hawai‘i plantation was
just about barren, so they cashed out by selling to David Black, the Cana-
dian newspaper minimogul who had purchased the Star-Bulletin nine years
earlier and owned string of mostly weekly newspapers and free shopping
guides, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. Although the Advertiser was
much healthier financially and still turning a profit, its assets were sold to
Black and subsumed into his newspaper, which was renamed the Honolulu
Star-Advertiser.
Employees of the Advertiser were interviewed for jobs at the Star-
Advertiser, and a great many w ere hired. I spent a good deal of time in my
End of the Line 217
employment interview speaking ill of the editors of the Advertiser. One of

them, Marsha McFadden, had already signed on as the new city editor of the
Star-Advertiser. What did I know?
The Star-Advertiser bosses never called back.
When the Advertiser shuttered its doors and the Star-Advertiser declined
to hire me, I took several months off to lick my wounds, take stock, and
begin writing this book.
But money was tight, and I missed the daily joys and aggravations of
the news business. I took a job at an online news site, Hawai‘i Reporter, oper-
ated by gadfly local journalist Malia Zimmerman.
Malia’s politics were demonstrably right-of-center, but she assured me
that what she wanted from me was no-holds-barred, politics-be-damned,
investigative reporting. She was true to her word, and that’s what she got.
It was a blast while it lasted.
We covered stories that were largely ignored by the traditional media:
human trafficking of immigrant farm laborers from Southeast Asia, sex
trafficking of underage girls, bountiful contracting preferences afforded by
the federal government to Native Hawaiian-owned businesses.
We shot undercover video of an illegal lottery business operated in
Chinatown. I shot more hidden-camera video when I posed as a customer
for the “Volcano Girls” escort business operated from the apartment of a
University of Hawai‘i professor. We raised pointed questions about the ef-
fectiveness of Project HOPE, a nationally touted criminal probation program
created by a Hawai‘i state judge.
After a two-year run, the grant money Malia had found to finance my
salary dried up, and I eased my way into retirement. Malia soldiered on.
In researching this book, I have spent countless hours in the archives of
Honolulu newspaper stories maintained by the Hawai‘i State Library.
It can be a maddening, time-consuming process. Finding stories on spe-
cific subjects or individuals that were published before 2000 is a hit-and-
miss affair because the library indexes are so thinly organized. (Post-2000
stories are much more accessible because they are contained in a computer-
generated database or available online.)
To locate older news items about, say, organized crime, a researcher
must first consult bound volumes that hold listings of stories published by
the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin in specific years. Each volume covers only a
one-or two-year period, so there are numerous books to consult.
Stories specifically about organized crime are probably listed in these
books, but o thers that touch the subject tangentially are probably excluded.
Specific story citations in the indexes list the headline, date of publi-
cation, and page of the newspaper the story appeared on. The researcher
218 Chapter 16
must then retrieve a roll of microfilm for that date from a large bank of stor-
age cabinets, thread the film into a reader, and wind it to the appropriate
page. Each microfilm roll contains two weeks’ worth of newspapers, so
there can be a lot of winding and rewinding involved. Sometimes the
microfilm image is blurry or distorted. The reading machines are cranky and
balky. Sometimes the printer function on the reader is broken or otherwise
malfunctioning. Sometimes all the readers are in use.
I have described this very clunky process in some detail to make a
point. There is a much better archive of Honolulu newspaper stories in ex-
istence, but as of this writing it is unavailable to the public and even to re-
porters currently on staff at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
The collection is what used to be called “the morgue” or “the library” by
employees of the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin: a collection of tens of thousands
of microfiche cards painstakingly assembled over decades by librarians who
worked for the two newspapers.
The cards are organized alphabetically in two sections: one covers indi-
viduals, and the other covers general subjects. The individual cards contain
photocopies of all stories written about specific people. The subject cards
carry all stories written about generic subjects.
The collection is a one-of-a-kind, richly detailed history of Hawai‘i and
its people from 1950 to approximately 2000.
It was jettisoned by the o wners of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser when that
newspaper was born in 2010.
The hybrid newspaper retained the staff of the old Star-Bulletin and hired
some new personnel from the Advertiser but discarded other assets of the
morning paper, including many employees and the irreplaceable morgue.
This archive contained all the past work of not just the Advertiser but
also the Star-Bulletin. Out it went. The past didn’t matter. History was dead.
The state library took ownership of the microfiche collection but found
that the records were in such jumbled disarray that they could not be made
available to the public until extensive review, analysis, and cataloguing
were undertaken.
That process has taken years and is still incomplete.
A similar fate befell the huge photographic library of the two newspa-
pers. The surviving Star-Advertiser electronically scanned copies of a large
number of the photographs and kept them for its own use, then dumped
the badly jumbled collection on the office of the state archives.
They have been stored in the basement of the archives: 559 banker’s
boxes full of photographic prints and countless more cartons of negatives.
Archivists, like library personnel, have undertaken a time-consuming
preservation of this glorious resource, sorting and cataloguing the huge
End of the Line 219
number of photographs that represent a priceless pictorial history of

modern-day Hawai‘i.
In my visits to the state library’s microfilm room, I have occasionally en-
countered Star-Advertiser reporters searching for copies of old stories that
their own newspaper could have kept for them but callously tossed aside.
Hawai‘i academic and newspaper historian Helen Geracimos Chapin
called newspapers “the memory of a community.”2
The shrinkage of statewide newspapers, coupled with the disappear-
ance of the morgue, has forced a collective amnesia on the state. Memories
and records of people and events have been erased altogether or at least
rendered all but inaccessible.
For those of us who lived through it, the demise of newspapers was a
wrenching, agonizing process.
Those reporters lucky and talented enough to have survived so far still
face foreboding questions about the future.
Posting, tweeting, and shooting video are the new imperatives, eating
into that most perishable of commodities in the news business: time.
The Internet is a fabulous creation that saves journalists a great deal of the
time they used to spend on research. But time saved on research must then
be devoted to meeting the constant demands of ravenous websites.
Start-up online news sites struggle to attract revenue while offering in-
decently low wages and minimal job security.
The work will always be the same: find good stories and share them.
Landing a gig that gives you time to do that and pays enough money to feed
the kids is the hard part.
H. L. Mencken, the curmudgeonly columnist and satirist who wrote
scathingly and incisively about American culture in the first half of the 20th
century, famously called journalism “the life of kings.”
Those words will always be true, but the kingdoms are in decay.
Notes
Chapter 1: “A Culture of Corruption”

1. People Magazine, Don Ho profile, July 2, 1979. http://w ww.people.com/people/article
/0,,20074030,00.html.
2. FBI Special Agent Timothy Beam, wiretap application affidavit, Misc. No-04–00199,
U.S. District Court, District of Hawai‘i.
3. Federal civil case 00–00729, Kenneth Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu et al., U.S.
District Court, District of Hawai‘i.
4. Walter Wright, “Honolulu Memories Return Only as Nightmares,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, July 16, 1979.
5. Ibid.
6. Dave Donnelly, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 3, 1981.
7. FBI Special Agent Timothy Beam, wiretap application affidavit, Misc. No-04–00199,
U.S. District Court, District of Hawaii.
8. “FBI Ties Security Chief to Organ ized Crime,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 26, 2006.
9. “Schutter Says Ching Confession Part of Vendetta against Mehau,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, July 31, 1984.
10. FBI memo, May 5, 1979.
11. “Broken Trust,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 9, 1997.
12. Ibid.
Chapter 2: Kukui Plaza
1. “Kukui Developers Get Parking Revenues,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 25, 1976.
2. “Documents Show Devens Did Kukui Plaza Work,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 8,
1976.
3. “Aoki Ordered to Answer Charges,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 20, 1985.
4. “Kukui Insurer Is Son of Fasi Treasurer,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 5, 1976.
5. “Sapienza Lived Free in Oceanside Project,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 7, 1976.
221
222 Notes to Pages 21–43
Chapter 3: Organized Crime
1. Author and Gerald Kato, “Loomis and Chung Accused of Lying as Kukui Trial
Opens,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 9, 1977.
2. “Syndicate Thrived on Gambling—and Numerous Murders,” Honolulu Advertiser,
August 7, 1988.
3. Hawai‘i Crime Commission, “Organ ized Crime in Hawaii,” August 1978, 13.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 14.
6. Author, “Gambling Bill Dies Again,” Hawai‘i Reporter, April 29, 2011.
7. Gene Hunter, “$100,000 Cost Nets $140 in Fines,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 18, 1974.
8. Ibid.
9. Author, “The Case of the Missing Bouncer,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 18, 1979.
10. Gene Hunter, “Syndicate Silences Open Mouths,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 20, 1970.
11. Author, “Taking Bull by the Horns, Leota Eyes Governorship,” Honolulu Advertiser,
February 18, 1978.
12. Hawai‘i Crime Commission, “Organ ized Crime in Hawaii,” August 1978, 4.
Chapter 4: Yakuza
1. “Complex Tale of ‘Yakuza’ Puzzled Out by Isle Police,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 8,
1978.
2. “Takagi Has Syndicate Escort,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 9, 1978.
3. http://w ww.youtube.com/watch?v=TF6tjuXH_ 5Y, “DocJon Talks about the Yakuza.”
4. “Double Murder Case Still Unsolved,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 20, 1978.
5. “Japanese Tourist Special—Hotel with Love for Sale,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 21,
1978.
6. Ibid.
7. “ ‘Floating’ Prostitution in Oahu’s Finest Areas,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 9,
1979.
8. “Ring Promoter Ringed by Yakuza,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 20, 1979.
9. Charles Turner, “Furlough Is Justified, Says Corrections Chief,” Honolulu Advertiser,
July 2, 1973.
10. James Dooley and Robert Bone, “Lee Gets the Maximum—Plus,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, December 17, 1980.
11. “Secret Videotape Turns Out to Be ‘Who’s Who’ of Organ ized Crime,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, December 15, 1980.
12. “Fishing Scheme Called Front for Smuggling,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 30, 1981.
13. Kim Murakawa, “Man, 53, Guilty in Drug Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 12,
1997.
14. U.S. Attorneys’ Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 04.
15. “Rubber Tip Leads Customs to Finger Yakuza,” Honolulu Advertiser, September 28,
1988.
16. “And Now the ‘Sokaiya,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser, January 10, 1982.
17. “Japan Crime Figure in Bank Suit,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 15, 1982.
18. “Ogawa’s Business Feeling Heat,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 15, 1982.
19. “Informant Paid by U.S., Yakuza Associates,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 14, 1986.
20. “Two Japanese Crime Figures Held without Bail,” Honolulu Advertiser, September 11,
1985.
21. “Yakuza Witness Was Arrested in Extortion Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 23,
1985.
22. Ibid.
Notes to Pages 43–67 223
23. “Last Yakuza Not Convicted; Jurors Criticize Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 3, 1986.
24. Ibid.
25. “Acquitted Yakuza Figure Is Dying of Cancer,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 23, 1986.
Chapter 5: Yakuza, Inc.
1. “New Turtle Bay Owner Booted in Visa Fraud Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 5,
1988.
2. “Golf Course Developer Seen Departing Soon,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 28, 1989.
3. “Real Estate Business an Easy Crime Target,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 23, 1988.
4. “Yakuza Close to Top Japanese Leaders,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 23, 1988.
5. Ibid.
6. “Yakuza Gang Has Hawaii Connections,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 24, 1988.
7. “Ken Mizuno Called Foe of Yakuza,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 19, 1982.
8. “Yakuza Close to Top Japanese Leaders,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 23, 1988.
9. Ibid.
10. “Yasuda Blows $100 Million on Vegas Hotel,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 20, 1989.
11. “Money Issues Take a Backseat to Cars for Yasuda Pal,” Honolulu Advertiser,
August 21, 1989.
12. Ibid.
13. “Owed $6 Million, Bad Debt Collectors Shop for Picassos,” Honolulu Advertiser,
December 10, 1989.
Chapter 6: Vegas
1. FBI records concerning Ash Resnick released u nder the Freedom of Information Act
are available online at http://vault.f bi.gov/irving-resnick/.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. UPI, “Ariyoshi and Fasi Help a Gambler,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 26, 1978.
5. Gerald Kato, “Vegas Gambler Backed at Probe by Ariyoshi, Fasi,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, May 26, 1978.
6. Ibid.
7. Walter Wright and James Dooley, “Duke Reportedly Pays Off $32,000 in IOUs to
Vegas,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 8, 1978.
8. Walter Wright and James Dooley, “Kawasaki’s Casino Debts Doubled,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, September 26, 1978.
9. “Vegas Casino’s Rep No Longer on the Payroll,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 20, 1979.
10. “Sukamto Again Loses Big at Casinos in ’93,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 24, 1994.
11. “Sukamto Staff Aids Campaigns,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1994.
12. Gary Thompson, “Asian Whale Arrested on Bad Check Charges,” Las Vegas Sun,
October 23, 1998.
13. “Jones Asks Judge to Be Lenient with Sia,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 21, 2002.
14. “Hawaii Bankruptcies Still Active Years Later,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 19,
2007.
15. Ibid.
Chapter 7: Bishop Estate
1. “Billions of Dollars Make Big Estates Big Business,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 6, 1984.
2. “Justice Lum Has Ties to Bishop Estate,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 22, 1989.
3. “How a Justice and a Huge Land Trust Became Associated,” Honolulu Advertiser,
March 22, 1989.
4. “Justice Lum Has Ties to Bishop Estate,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 22, 1989.
5. “Lawyer Also an Investor with Lum,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 22, 1989.
6. “Bishop Trustees Rode Along on Texas Deal,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 26,
1995.
7. Ibid.
8. “Bishop Estate Staff Did Zoning Work for Trustee,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 5,
1995.
9. “Estate’s Uneasy Link to Posh Golf Club; Bishop Investment in Virginia Enclave
Raises Questions,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 30, 1995.
10. David Waite and James Dooley, “Hard Time at Halawa,” Honolulu Advertiser,
September 6–10, 1995.
11. “Purge of Union-Mob Ties Looks at Local Labor Leader,” Honolulu Advertiser,
February 9, 1996.
12. “Broken Trust,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 9, 1997.
13. “Jervis Investigation,” KITV4News, March 11, 1999.
14. “Kamehameha Schools Settled Lawsuit for $7 Million,” Honolulu Advertiser, February
8, 2008.
Chapter 8: Ronnie, Henry, and Royale

1. Vickie Ong, “How State Senator Was Slain,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 8, 1989.
2. “Arsenal Seized with Felon’s Arrest,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 3, 1981.
3. “Tam: Was ‘Threatened’ by Ching,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 5, 1981.
4. “Arsenal Seized with Felon’s Arrest,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 3, 1981.
5. “Witnesses Afraid to Implicate Mehau, Bent Says,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 9.
1992.
6. FBI memo, December 11, 1981, “Ronald Kainalu Ching Information Concerning
Unity House.”
7. Ibid.
8. “Friend’s Evidence Undid Ching,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 9, 1985.
9. Lee Catterall, “Hitman Ching Expands on Dealings with Police,” Honolulu Star-
Bulletin, June 6, 1985.
10. “Ching Links 2 Lawmen with Slaying,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 4, 1985.
11. “Marsland Trial Drama: Missing Gun Produced,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 13,
1985.
12. “Underworld Saga of Huihui,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 19, 1984.
13. “Huihui Says Mehau Knew of Lii Fate,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 5, 1984.
14. Letter dated January 1, 1985, copies sent to federal and county law enforcement
agencies and defense attorney David Bettencourt.
Chapter 9: Three Dogs and a Vet

1. “Maple Garden Donate,” KITV4 News, September 26, 2000.
2. Rick Daysog, “Prosecutor Lauds Fines for Towill Executives,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
June 5, 2004.
3. R ick Daysog, “Donors from Firm Fed Harris $319,000,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
October 12, 2003.
4. Jim Dooley and Malia Zimmerman, “University of Hawaii Professor Tied to X-Rated
Escort Service,” Hawaii Reporter, January 25, 2012.
5. Jim Dooley and Malia Zimmerman, “Prostitution Bust at University of Hawaii Pro-
fessor’s Apartment,” Hawai‘i Reporter, January 27, 2012.
6. “Lucrative Weddings at War Memorial,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 26, 2005.
Chapter 10: Pay to Play
1. “Key Kukui Word: Favor,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 19, 1976.
2. “$150,000 No-Bid Grows to $51 Million,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 6, 1992.
3. “Non-Bid Contracts,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 23, 1992.
4. “A ‘Special’ Lease,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 14, 1982.
5. “FBI Raids State Environmental Agency,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 14, 1990.
6. “How Miura Awarded a Big Contract,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 16, 1990.
7. “Miura Political Gifts Came from Recipients of No-Bid Contracts,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, August 18, 1990.
8. “Miura Invoked Prominent Names,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 14, 1993.
9. “Mainland Firm Says It Never Got a Chance to Bid,” Honolulu Advertiser, August 18,
1990.
10. “Miura Singled Out, Attorney Says,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 4, 1993.
11. “No Competitive Bidding Used in Office Spruce-Up,” Honolulu Advertiser, November
29, 1992.
12. Ibid.
13. “Kiyabu Says Parceling Was Cheaper,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 4, 1992.
14. “Kiyabu Quits Job,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 13, 1992.
15. “Non-Bid Contracts,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 23, 1992.
16. “Airport Contracts Part 1,” KITV4 News, May 1, 1996.
17. “DOT Contracts Part 2,” KITV4 News, May 2, 1996.
20. “Airport Sublease,” KITV4 News, May 16, 1996.
21. “DOT Investigation Follow,” KITV4 News, July 19, 1996.
22. “UH/Korean Building,” KITV4 News, December 25, 1997.
23. Memo July 9, 1992, Gov. Ben Cayetano to Chief of Staff Sam Callejo, “Subject: Jim
Dooley.”
24. “State Probes Airport’s Construction Contracts,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 2, 2002.
25. Gordon K. K. Pang, “3 More Get Prison for Airport Bid-Rigging,” Honolulu Advertiser,
October 5, 2007.
26. “Hawaii Firm Got $7.3 Million in Nonbid Work,” Honolulu Advertiser, September 2,
2007.
Chapter 11: Pearl Harbor
1. “The Harbridge Connection, Part 2,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 17, 1983.
2. April 29, 1983, letter to Thurston Twigg-Smith from Joseph Petrillo.
4. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
10. “Navy Drew Line on Harbridge House,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 16, 1983.
11. “Anadac Got Navy Sole-Source Contract,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 31, 1983.

12. “Condo Interest Involves 2nd Navy-Harbridge Link,” Honolulu Advertiser, Novem-
ber 6, 1983.
Chapter 12: Huis
1. Honolulu Advertiser and Journalism Department, University of Hawai‘i, “James
Dooley as Detective of Documents: The Hui Connection,” 1982.
2. George Cooper and Gavan Daws, Land and Power in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1985).
3. “Delays Boost ‘Gap Group’ Housing Cost” and “Who’s the Man behind Project at
Kuliouou?” Honolulu Advertiser, April 20, 1980.
4. “Maui—Maybe Death Should Take a Holiday,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 2, 1980.
5. “Yakuza Subject of Top Law Meet Here,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 29, 1980.
6. “Release Breaks Given to Inmate by U.S. Marshal,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 22,
1980.
7. “Marsland Roars into Prosecutor’s Race,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 12, 1980.
8. “Marcos Friend Pays $800,000 in Cash toward Purchase of Estate Here,” Honolulu
Advertiser, April 19, 1980.
9. “Conjugal Visits at Halawa Jail,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 27, 1980.
10. “Maui Gamblers ‘Involved’ in Land Investment,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 15, 1980.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. “Unregistered Huis Keep Landowners Secret,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 15, 1980.
14. “Maui Realty Firm’s Door Leads to Key Posts,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 12, 1980.
15. “Questions Arise about Maui Hotel,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 8, 1980.
16. Ibid.
17. “Maui Realty Firm’s Door Leads to Key Posts,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 12, 1980.
18. “Unregistered Huis Keep Landowners Secret,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 15, 1980.
19. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power, 349–350.
20. “Tidy Profits in Maui Land Developments,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 15, 1980.
21. “Peeling Away Layers of Nukoli Purchase,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 26, 1980.
22. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power, 351.
23. “Peeling Away Layers of Nukolii Purchase,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 26, 1980.
24. “Ewa Developer Went Broke in Style,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 15, 1989.
25. Ibid.
Chapter 13: Death and Taxes

1. “Maui—Maybe Death Should Take a Holiday,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 10, 1980.
2. “Refashion Med Examiner System,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 11, 1980.
3. “Bulgo’s Prices Subject of Tourist Complaint; State, County Checking,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, February 10, 1980.
4. “Funeral Trusts Take 30 Percent off the Top,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 20, 2007.
5. “Big Island Burial Businesses Went Under during the 1980’s,” Honolulu Advertiser,
July 23, 1990.
6. “Greenhaven: Peaceful Repose?” Honolulu Advertiser, July 23, 1990.
7. “Pre-Need Funeral Plan Sales Fill Coffers, Fuel Controversy,” Honolulu Advertiser,
July 22, 1990.
8. “Abercrombie Revises Campaign Report to Add Services, Cash from Felix Firms,”
Honolulu Advertiser, July 22, 1980.
9. Ibid.
10. “Problems Stem from Plan to Redirect Trust Funds,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 10,
2007.
11. Department of Enforcement v. Lance C. Newby, National Association of Securities Deal-
ers Disciplinary Proceeding C01030019, April 8, 2004.
12. “As State Slashes Away at Budget, Millions in Taxes Go Uncollected,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, March 7, 1993.
13. “Travel Firm Folds; Hefty Tax Debt Goes Uncollected,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 8,
1993.
14. “State Tax Chief Says Department Is Looking into Regal Travel Case,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, March 8, 1993.
15. “Regal Owner Also Heads Tour Bus Operation,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 8, 1993.
16. “Firm’s Tax Debt Gets 300,000 Fix,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 30, 1994.
17. “What the Mayor Left Unsaid,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 17, 1994.
18. “Improper Tax Clearance Issued to Many ‘Hostess Bars,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser,
March 9, 1993.
19. “Department’s Computer in Itself ‘Taxing,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser, March 7, 1993.
20. “Tax Audits on Rise, Reviews Add $23 Million,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 7, 1993.
21. “Ohai Family Patriarch Knows about Surviving,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 24, 2005.
22. “Boat Loan Project a 23-Year Bust,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 24, 2005.
23. Ibid.
Chapter 14: Teamsters
1. Consent decree, USA v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters et al., U.S. District Court,
Southern District of New York, March 14, 1989.
2. Charles Turner, “Syndicate Here to Blame, Says Teamster Boss,” Honolulu Advertiser,
May 30, 1975.
3. Ibid.
4. Charles Turner, “Ex-Isle Union Aide Kidnapping Suspect,” Honolulu Advertiser,
September 3, 1975.
5. Gene Hunter, “Kidnapping Suspect Heir to $1 Million?” Honolulu Advertiser, Sep-
tember 8, 1975.
6. “Naone: Bought Bullets for Philippines General,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 19,
1976.
7. “Naone Gets 18 Months for Ammunition Violation,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November
23, 1976.
8. “HPD: Movie Fund Aide Involved with Syndicate,” Honolulu Advertiser, November
20, 1981.
9. Ibid.
10. “$1 Million Rutledge Fund to Aid Films Here,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 20,
1981.
11. “Group Fights ‘Voluntary’ Teamster Fee,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 8, 1989.
12. “Teamster Feud May Hurt Isle Film Industry,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 7, 1989.
13. “Shoot in Hawaii, Hire Lots of Drivers,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 7, 1989.
14. Ibid.
15. “Mehau Is Playing a Role in Teamster Turf Battle, Tony Rutledge Believes,” Honolulu
Advertiser, May 10, 1989.
16. “Teamster Discord Visible on Fat Man Set,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 7, 1989.
17. “Teamsters Settle Feud over Film, TV Production Drivers,” Honolulu Advertiser,
May 11, 1989.
18. “More Teamster Trouble Erupts during Filming of TV Series,” Honolulu Advertiser,

August 11, 1989.
19. “Kamekona Sentence,” KITV4 News, February 22, 2000.
20. FBI memo, June 16, 1998, 5–8.
21. Rod Ohira, “Movie Supply Executive’s Jaw Broken in Beating,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
May 20, 1994.
22. “Teamsters/Walden,” KITV4 News, August 6, 1999.
23. Joe Tavares legal memo filed April 23, 1999, in federal criminal case #99–0078
(USA v. Tavares).
24. Ibid.
25. FBI memo, June 16, 1998.
26. “Teamsters/Moniz,” KITV4 News, August 7, 1999.
27. “Moniz/Organ ized Crime,” KITV4 News, November 29, 1999.
28. Motion to reconsider filed November 19, 1999, in federal criminal case 96–240
(USA v. Stacy Moniz).
29. Ibid.
30. Sally Apgar, “Alleged Shooter Has Roots in Old Isle Underworld,” Honolulu Star-
Bulletin, February 9, 2004.
31. “Sheriff Admits Dealings with Two Felons ‘Look Bad,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser, March
3, 2004.
32. “Murder Guns Got Melted Down, Trial Witness Says,” Honolulu Advertiser, February
5, 2009.
33. “Gotti Lawyer on Murder Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 29, 2009.
34. “Pali Suspect Sought Control of Gambling,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 7, 2009.
35. “Hawaii Murder Defendant Says He’s Entrepreneur, Not Mobster,” Honolulu Adver-
tiser, March 11, 2009.
36. “Gotti Lawyer on Murder Case,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 29, 2009.
37. “Pali Suspect Sought Control of Gambling,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 7, 2009.
38. All information in this section was contained in a story that was spiked by Mark
Platte on May 20, 2005. “There is no reader interest in a story like this,” Platte said.
39. Federal criminal case 05–026, USA v. Aiwohi et al.
40. Ibid.
41. Federal criminal cases 05–206 (USA v. Aiwohi, Audwin, et al.) and 06–525 (USA v. Aiwohi,
Randolph) in Hawaii District Court.
42. Debra Barayuga, “Bodybuilder’s 1989 Slaying Brings 10-Year Term,” Honolulu Star-
Bulletin, November 26, 2002.
43. 2005 author interview of Mel Kahele.
44. Ibid.
45. Federal criminal cases 03–200 (USA v. Farias); 04–171 (USA v. Paahao); 01–184 (USA v.
Mataele).
46. Federal criminal case 99–257 (USA v. Duarte et al.); State criminal case 1PC98–0-1277
(State of Hawaii v. Duarte).
47. Wood & Tait Inc. v. William Duarte, Case # 1SP03–1-00026.
48. State criminal case 08–1-132, State of Hawaii v. Matthew Higa.
49. Ibid.
50. “Driver for ‘Lost’ Pleads Guilty,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 4, 2010.
51. State criminal case 08–1-132, State of Hawaii v. Matthew Higa.
52. “Borge, Called Key Crime Figure, Gets 20 Years in Drug Trafficking,” Honolulu Ad-
vertiser, April 30, 2005.
53. “Driver for ‘Lost’ Pleads Guilty,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 4, 2010.
54. Ibid.
55. “Hawaii Five-0 Teamsters Official Killed by Police,” Hawai‘i Reporter, May 14, 2012.
56. Tim Sakahara, “1.4 Million Settlement Reached in Honolulu Police Custody Death,”
Hawaiinewsnow.com, May 7, 2014.
57. “Hawaii Movie, TV Drivers Have a Long History of Drugs and Violence,” Hawai‘i
Reporter, May 14, 2012.
58. State criminal case 1PC10–1-1389, State of Hawaii v. George Cambra Jr.
59. State criminal case 1PC14–1-221, State of Hawaii v. George Cambra Jr.
Chapter 15: Larry Mehau
1. “Very Special Deputies: 3 Felons, an Ex-Cop,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 6, 1979.
2. Honolulu Police Department employment application, May 16, 1953.
3. One Year Probationary Report, May 21, 1954, written by Asst. Chief Arthur Tarbell.
4. “Police Take to the Air in Waikiki Aikido Show,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 3,
1957.
5. Honolulu Police Department memo, February 25, 1969, summarizing “sweetening
case” investigation conducted June–August 1958 by Asst. Chief Leon Strauss.
6. “Two Officers Suspended in Vice Probe,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 9, 1958.
7. “Vice Squadsman’s Demotion Cancelled,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 18, 1958.
8. Dan Katz, “Police Study Informer Role in Vice Raids,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
August 12, 1958.
9. “Procuring Charge Filed against Police Informer,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Septem-
ber 24, 1958.
10. Mehau memo to HPD Chief Dan Liu, April 30, 1962.
11. Ibid.
12. Personnel memo, February 19, 1963, HPD Asst. Chief Dewey Mookini.
13. “Airport Contract Bidding Unfair, Losing Firm Says,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 9,
1979.
14. Gregg Kakesako, “Airport Security Pact Defended by Ariyoshi,” Honolulu Star-
Bulletin, May 12, 1979.
15. Scott Shirai, KHON Television, February 2, 1979.
16. Walter Wright, “Mehau Sues for $51 Million, Denies He’s Crime ‘Godfather,’ ” Honolulu
Advertiser, June 24, 1977.
17. Ken Kobayashi, “KHON Agrees to Pay Mehau, Kealoha in Defamation Suit,” Honolulu
Advertiser, July 12, 1978.
18. “After 13 Years, Mehau Settled His UPI Lawsuit,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 10, 1990.
19. “Very Special Deputies: 3 Felons, an Ex-Cop,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 6, 1979.
20. “Public Land Subleased without OK,” Honolulu Advertiser, May 18, 1979.
21. Kevin Dayton, “Freitas Property Deal Questioned,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 4, 1999.
22. “The Case of the Missing Bouncer,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 18, 1979.
23. “Mehau—No Black Marks in Two Probes,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 5, 1980.
24. “Mehau Is a Man of Vast Connections,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 9, 1992.
25. Deposition of John Y. Y. Lee, January 3, 1992.
26. “Ex-O fficer Who Testified for Mehau Was in Ranch Hui,” Honolulu Advertiser,
December 15, 1991.
27. Steven Brill, The Teamsters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 36.
28. James Jack and Eldon Ham, The Last Dance (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011), 263.
29. James Dooley and Kit Smith, “Ex-Convict in on Mehau Airline Venture,” Honolulu
Advertiser, November 5, 1989.
30. Andy Yamaguchi and James Dooley, “Paty Terms Triple-Sale of Parcel at Kona
‘Nefarious-Type Scheme,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser, October 10, 1990.
31. Patricia Tummons, “Anatomy of a Speculation: The Many Flips of Mahai’ula,” Envi-

ronment Hawai’i, April 1995.
32. Federal civil case # 00–00729, Kenneth Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu et al.,
Hawaii District Court. Ahlo deposition, 144–146; Kaeo deposition, 24–25; Maafala deposi-
tion, 89–92; Wong deposition, 14; Kamakana sworn declaration.
33. Ibid., Olmos deposition, 360–361.
34. Ibid., Auld deposition, 81–85.
35. FBI Special Agent Daniel Kelly, 302 reports, 2.
36. Federal civil case # 00–00729, Kenneth Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu et al.,
Hawaii District Court. Kurihara deposition, 41–45.
37. Ibid., Kamakana sworn declaration, September 5, 2002.
38. Memo, author to Marsha McFadden, October 3, 2006.
39. Notes of October 10, 2006, meeting with Marsha McFadden.
Chapter 16: End of the Line

1. In some localities, including Honolulu, joint operations between competing news-
papers were undertaken before enactment of the Newspaper Preservation Act. The federal law
was shepherded through the U.S. Senate by Senator Dan Inouye, and Congressman Spark
Matsunaga of Hawai‘i sponsored companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
2. Helen Geracimos Chapin, Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawai‘i (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996).
Index
Abercrombie, Neil, 153–154, 226n. 8 Baker, Arthur: and Cyril Kahale Jr., 6;
Adelstein, Jake, 44 disappearance/murder, 28, 30–31, 79, 198,
Agosto, Joe, 56 213; informant, 30; and Larry Mehau, 6,
Ahlo, Alexander, 206–209, 230n. 32 28, 212; and Manny Rezentes, 30, 62; and
Ahlo, Henderson, 25–26, 207 Robert Aiu, 30, 61
Aio, Gabriel “Gabe,” 188, 201–202, 207–209, Baron, Alvin, 202–203, 213
230 Belt, Cyrus, 184–185
Aiu, Robert, 30, 43, 61–62 Bennett, Mark, 155, 206, 208, 211
Aiwohi, Audwin, 182, 228n. 41 Bent, Daniel, 82, 198
Aiwohi, Randolph, 182, 228n. 41 Bettencourt, David, 82, 224n. 14
Akaka, Daniel, 199 Bishop, Bernice Pauahi, 65
Aladdin Hotel-Casino, 51, 54–60 Bishop Estate/Kamehameha Schools:
Ali, Muhammad, 54 Broken Trust essay, 10, 72, 74–75, 221n. 11,
Aloha Stadium, 115–117 224n. 12; Goldman Sachs, 65; and
Alston, Paul, 156 Herman Lum, 67–70, 223n. 2, 224nn. 4–5;
Ambo, Richard, 174 and Lokelani Lindsey, 72, 75, 76; history,
Amfac, Inc., 145–147, 201–202 65; McKenzie Methane investment,
Aoki, Ralph, 17, 221n. 3 70–72, 224nn. 6–7; and Robert Rubin,
Apgar, Sally, 72, 178, 228n. 30 65–66; trustee commissions, 67
Arashiro, George “Fat George,” 27 Black, David, 216
Ariyoshi, George: and Irving “Ash” Blevins, Joe, 125
Resnick, 55, 223nn. 4–5; and Henry Borge, Claudio, 185, 228n. 52
Huihui, 96, 322; Kukui Plaza case, 19, 109, Borges, Francis, 188
165; and Larry Mehau, 8, 28, 189, 195, 200, Boyd, Lawrence, 103–105
212, 229n. 14; and son Todd, 43 Brandenfels, Carl Martin, 153
Asato, Lloyd, 113–114 Breiner, Myles, 6
Asiata, Lilo, 184–186 Breyer, Rebecca, 107
Asiata, Philip, 185–186 Brill, Steven, 163, 202, 229n. 27
Auld, Harry, 207, 230n. 34 Brislin, Thomas, 137
Avilla, Richard “Chico,” 20, 21 Broken Trust, 10, 72, 74–75, 221nn. 11–12
Azabu Corp., 46, 49 Bronster, Margery, 75, 121
231
232 Index
Buchwach, Buck, 22, 134–135 consultant contracts: at Hawaiian Home

Bulgo, Joseph, 151, 226n. 3 Lands, 125–126; at Honolulu International
Bureau of Conveyances, 127, 136, 138–140 Airport, 119–122; at Pearl Harbor, 128,
Burke, Francis, 27, 177 130, 132; selection process, 118
Burns, John, 67, 79–80, 189, 194 contract parceling, 112, 116, 134, 22n. 13
Burris, Jerry, 15, 137 Cooper, George, 136, 144, 146–147, 226n. 2
Cooper, Grant, 19, 21, 109
Caesars Palace Hotel-Casino, 54, 60–62 coroner, Maui County, 150–151
Cambra, George: arson case, 170–171, 183; Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU), 2, 175,
Walden murder, 171–173, 175 201, 205, 208, 214
Cambra, George Jr., 180, 187, 229nn. 58–59
Campaign Spending Commission, 100, Dahl, Jon “Sudee,” 172, 173
102 Dashefsky, Howard, 26
Carlisle, Peter, 90, 185 Data House, Inc., 111, 112
Carnesi, Charles, 33, 82, 84 Daws, Gavan, 136, 144, 146–147, 226n. 2
Carstensen, Donald, 33, 82, 84 Daysog, Rick, 102, 224n. 2
Cayetano, Ben: airport consultant Dayton, Kevin, 198, 229n. 21
contracts, 119–122, 225nn. 16–21; Deems, John “Haole John,” 34–35
campaign donations, 101; complaint Department of Hawaiian Home Lands,
from, 124, 225n. 23; 2012 election 125–126, 193
campaign, 188–189; and Sukarman Devens, Paul, 17, 221n. 2
Sukamto, 61; and Thomas Foley, 205 Disabled American Veterans (DAV),
Chan, Harold “Biggie,” 85 105–107
Chanco, Nancy, 184–186 Donohue, Lee, 206
Chapin, Helen Geracimos, 219, 230n. 2 Donohue, Lee Jr., 208
Chaplin, George, 22, 134–135 Dooley, Edmund, 11–12
Chew, Shirley, 101–102 Dooley, John, 154, 156
Ching, Ronald Kainalu “Ronnie”: and Dorfman, Allen, 202
Alexander “Aku” Sakamoto, 129–130; Duarte, William, 184, 228n. 46
Arthur Baker murder, 6, 30–31, 86, 212;
Charles Marsland III murder, 6–7, 62, 79, Enomoto, Thomas, 60
86–88, 90, 212, 221n. 9, 224nn. 8–10; guns Entin, Hershey, 164–165
and drugs case, 79, 82–83, 213; and Joseph Ezra, David, 64, 125
“Joe Boy” Tavares, 170; Larry Kuriyama
murder, 84–85; and Manny Rezentes, Fanene, Penrod “Tommy,” 26
87–88; Robert Fukumoto murder, 86; Farias, Doug “Hollywood,” 183, 228n. 45
Teamsters Union, 7, 84, 164, 174, 224nn. Farmer, Michael, 132
3, 6–7 Fasi, Frank: campaign donation, 61; Kukui
Chong Kong, Alexander, 92 Plaza, 11, 15–19, 21, 26, 29, 33, 108–110;
Chozen-ji International Zen Dojo, 99 and Irving “Ash” Resnick, 55, 59, 223nn.
Chun-Fat, Wayne, 175 4–5; reward friends, punish enemies, 114;
Chung, Gary, 17 radio show, 158–159, 221n. 4
Chung, Harry C.C.: bribery trial, 19; and FBI: and Charles Stevens, 99; and Don Ho,
Maurice Sapienza, 18–19; Kukui Plaza, 8; and Henry Huihui, 94, 96, 97; and
15, 109–111 Herbert Naone, 5, 6; Ikapono
Chung, Yobo, 22, 27 investigation, 207–209; and Irving “Ash”
Circle Six, 201–202 Resnick, 54, 223n. 1; and James Aki, 61;
Club International, 24–25 and Jonnaven Monalim, 178–179, 181; and
Community Planning and Engineering, Larry Mehau, 1, 2, 206, 214, 221nn. 2, 7–8,
125 228nn. 20, 25, 230n. 35; and Marvin
computer-assisted reporting, 156–157 Miura, 112, 114, 225n. 5; and Ronald
Index 233
Ching, 84, 224nn. 6–7; and Sukarman Harbor Rats investigation, 210
Sukamto, 62–63; Teamsters, 167 Harbridge House: audits, 131–132, 134; FOIA
Felix, John Henry, 153–154, 226n. 8 research, 130–131; company history, 129
Fellezs, Sherwin “Sharkey,” 20, 21 Harris, Jeremy, 101, 224n. 3
Figueiroa, Russell, 102 Hart, Brook, 183
Fitzgerald, C. Bryan, 155 Hasegawa Komuten, 148
Foley, Thomas, 203–205 Hawai’i Five-0, 55, 156, 186, 187
Fong, Danny P.S., 146 Hawai’i Crime Commission, 22, 24, 29, 55,
Fong, Harold, 69 222n. 3
Fowler, Earl, 135 Hawai’i Pacific Cinema Development
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 128 Foundation, 166, 168, 173
Freitas, Rockne, 198, 213 Hawai’i Protective Association, 6, 28, 40,
Fujikawa, Akito “Blackie,” 93, 94 188, 194, 201, 212
Fukumoto, Robert, 79, 81, 83, 86, 213 Hawai’i Reporter, 103–104, 224nn. 4–5
Funeral Consumers Alliance, 152–154 Hawai’i State Archives, 218
funeral plans, pre-need, 229–230, 226n. 7 Hawai’i State Library, 217–218
Furukawa, Wallace, 34–35 Hayashi, Ko, 112, 114
Hayashida, Kazu, 120–123
Galarza, Dennis, 87 Heffron, Corinne and Robert, 165
gambling, illegal: and Henry Huihui, 80, Higa, Charles, 40, 41–42
91–95, 141; Ikapono investigation, 208; Higa, Matthew, 184–185, 228nn. 48–49
Maui, 176; and Larry Mehau, 192, 194; Higa, Shelton, 185
organized crime control of, 22–27, 222n. Hirokawa, Dennis, 125
2; Pali murder case, 176, 180–181, 228nn. Ho, Don: death of, 1, 8–9; and Eric Naone, 7,
34, 37 87, 165, 212; FBI file, 8; and Irving “Ash”
Gannett Co., Inc., 9–10, 73–74, 130, 188, Resnick, 55; and Larry Mehau, 1–2, 5, 8,
215–216 87, 190, 195; and Marcus Lipsky, 38–39,
Gatti, Jim, 74–75 199; and Ofati “Al Ofati” Malepeai, 29, 39;
Gibb, Douglas, 201 rape allegation, 2–5
Gilbert, Mitchell, 71 Hoffa, James R. “Jimmy,” 84, 163
Gilmore, Robert, 132, 135 Honda, Edwin, 147–148
godfather of organized crime, 188, 195, Hong, Ted, 162
197–199, 212, 213, 229n. 16 Hong, Walter “Hotcha,” 24, 177, 193, 194
Goemans, John, 76–78 Honolulu Advertiser: archived stories,
Goldman Sachs, 65 217–218; Broken Trust essay, 10; death of
Gonsalves, Kevin “Pancho,” 176, 182 Don Ho, 1–2, 8–9; godfather allegation,
Gotti, John, 180, 228n. 33 197; joint operating agreement, 12,
Grant, Eric, 77 215–216; police records lawsuit, 1–2, 205,
Great Wok of China, 67 211–212; purchase by Gannett, 9; sale by
Greenhaven Cemetery, 153, 226n. 6 Gannett, 216
GRG Enterprises, 197–198 Honolulu International Country Club, 59
Griffin, John, 26 Honolulu Police Department: coverage of,
Griffiths, John “Joe,” 182 12–13; and Larry Mehau, 1–2, 205–206, 211
Guanzon, Bob, 63 Honolulu Star-Bulletin: archived stories,
217–218; Broken Trust essay, 10, 74–75,
Haling, Kenneth, 151 221n. 11, 224n. 12; joint operating
Hammond, Fred, 85 agreement, 12, 215–216, 230n. 1
Hanabusa, Colleen, 76, 178–180 Hoover, Katheryn, 154, 156
Handa, Clarence “Japan,” 32 Hoover, Will, 90
Hannemann, Mufi, 59 Hotel Tsuru, 36–37
Hansen, Hal, 11, 15, 19, 108–109 Hsu, Robert, 101
234 Index
Huihui, Henry: guilty pleas, 91, 224n. 12; Kamali’i, Kinau Boyd, 197
Kong murder, 92; Madamba murder, 25; Kamanu, Eric, 173, 182
Mehau allegations, 94, 96, 213, 224n. 13; Kamekona, Harlan “Bruce,” 171–173, 183,
Nery-Iha murders, 26–28; Lii murder, 80, 186, 228n. 19
93–95; Ota murder, 95; Riveira murder, Kamekona, Reynold, 170, 171, 185–186
94; union career, 92–93; Young murder, 92 Kane, Micah, 126
huis: definition of, 136, 143–144, 226nn. 13, Kaneshiro, Keith, 199
18; discovery of, 136, 139–140; Landco, Kang, Joseph “Chocolate Joe,” 24
144; Nukolii, 145–147; Waipao joint Kaohu, Alvin, 25, 26, 56, 140
venture, 141, 143 Kaplan, David, 46
Hunter, Gene, 22, 24–25, 29, 34, 165 Kato, Gerald, 21, 222n. 1, 223n. 5
Kawaguchi, Katsuhiro, 45
Ichiwa-kai, 42–43, 47–48 Kawakami, Masato “Tramp,” 55, 164,
Iha, Dennis “Fuzzy,” 26–27, 92 166
Ii, Glenn Jr., 86 Kawasaki, Duke, 55–58, 223n. 8
Iizaki, Roy, 120 Keala, Francis, 81, 88, 199
Inada, Wataru “Jackson,” 36, 38 Kealoha, Jeffrey, 95
Inagawa-kai, 52–53 Keir, Gerry, 15, 22
Independent Review Board, 163, 185 Kekoa, Curtis Sr., 68–69
Inouye, Daniel, U.S. Senator, 106, 133, Keliikoa, Ed, 139
189–190 Keller, Mike, 36
Internal Revenue Service, 10, 66, 67, 197 Kelly, Dan, 208, 209, 210, 230n. 35
International Brotherhood of Electrical Kent, Leslie, 89
Workers, 92–93, 94 Key, Francis Scott, 20, 21
Investigative Reporters and Editors, 156–157 Kim, Donald, 102
Ito, Roy, 9, 33, 80 Kim, Donna Mercado, 61–62, 64
Ito, Toyohiko, 43, 44 Kim, Earl K.H., 59
Iwamoto, Robert Jr., 202–204 Kim, Jerald, 175
Kim, John E.S., 147, 148–149
Jervis, Gerard, 75–76, 224n. 13 Kim, John Sayin “Seni,” 24
Jett, Ron, 97 Kitazaki, Jimmy, 116–117
jiage-ya, 45 KITV: airport contracts, 119–123, 225nn.
joint operating agreement, 12, 215–216 15–22; campaign spending, 100, 224n. 1;
Jones, June, 63–64 employment, 10, 74; Gerard Jervis story,
Joseph, Rodney Jr., 176–178, 182 75–76, 224n. 13; Sukamto arrest, 63;
Joseph, Rodney Sr., 177 Teamsters stories, 228nn. 19, 22, 26–27
Joseph, Terrance “Tony,” 177 Kiyabu, Ken, 115–118, 225nn. 13–14
Koanui, Earl, 208–209
Kaakimaka, Blaine, 172, 173, 175, 200 Kobayashi, Kusuo, 46
Kaapu, Kekoa, 20 Kobayashi, Leslie, 201
Kahale, Cyril Jr., 4, 5–7, 86, 169, 188, 212, 213 Koga, David, 1, 2
Kahele, Mel, 182–183 kokua, 197, 200, 202, 204
Kahle, Richard, 157, 158–160 Koshiba, James, 89
Kam, Herman S.C., 85 Kruse, George, 88
Kamahoahoa, Royale, 92, 97–99 Kukui Plaza: city council investigation,
Kamakana, Kenneth: internal affairs 17–18, 20; concessions, 15, 17; description,
investigation, 210; Harbor Rats 17; origin of story, 11, 14–15; pay-to-play,
investigation, 210; Stacy Moniz 108–111; state investigation, 19
investigation, 174–175; whistleblower Kumagai, James, 111
lawsuit, 205–207, 209, 211, 213–214, Kurihara, Gerrit, 208–209, 230n. 36
221n. 3, 230nn. 32–37 Kuriyama, Larry, 79–80, 83–85, 213
Index 235
Kurosawa, Ernest, 120–123 Matsuda, Jerry, 120, 123

Kusao, Tyrone, 149 Matsui, Sajiro “Sambo,” 139–140
Matsui, Yoshikazu “Zuke,” 140, 142, 147
Land and Power, 136, 144, 146, 226nn. 2, 19, 22 Matsumoto, Kizo, 49
Landco, 144 Matsuoka, Yujiro “Tani,” 140, 141
Las Vegas, 23, 26, 54, 56, 60, 202, 223nn. 5–7, Matsuzaki, Maurice “Mutt,” 40
9, 12 Maui Beach Hotel, 141, 142
Latief, Atang, 60 McArthur, John C., 132, 133
Lee, John Chang Ho, 38–39, 222n. 10 McCarthy, Nancy Dooley, 12
Lee, John Y.Y., 199–200 McConaghy, Mark, 71
Lee, Randy, 102 McFadden, Marsha, 7, 211, 217, 230nn. 38–39
Lendt, Kenneth, 25 Mehau, Larry: business career, 194–195,
Leota, Alema: biography, 28–29; 202–205; and Don Ho, 1–5, 7, 8, 87, 190, 195,
gubernatorial campaign, 28, 29–30; and 213; godfather allegation, 195–197, 199, 201,
Ofati “Al Ofati” Malepeai, 39; Teamsters, 206, 221n. 9, 224n. 5; and Henry Huihui,
164, 222n. 11; underworld boss, 25–26 94, 96, 224n. 13; kokua, 197, 200, 202; police
Leota, Reid, 28–29 career, 190–194; timeline, 212–214; Walden
Liberty Newspapers, 215–216 murder allegation, 173, 228n. 25
Lii, Josiah, 80, 94–95, 97–98, 164, 213, Mehau-Vericella, Dana, 207
224n. 13 Memminger, Charles, 67
Lindsey, Lokelani, 72, 75–76 Mencken, H.L., 219
Lingle, Linda, 125–126, 166 Mertyris, Stamatios, 11, 14–16, 18
Lipsky, Marcus, 38–39, 199–200 Miller, Allan, 16
Liston, Sonny, 54 Minn, Reginald, 207
Liu, Dan, 193, 229n. 10 Mitsunaga, Dennis, 120–124
Loewen Group, 154 Miura, Marvin, 112–115, 225nn. 6–8, 10
Lombardo, Joseph “Joey the Clown,” 202 Miyashiro, Raymond, 158
Loomis, James, 15, 21–22, 222n. 1 Miyashiro, Sukeji “Skippy,” 38
Lum, Herman, 67–70, 223n. 2, 224nn. 4–5 Mizuno, Ken, 46–47, 223n. 7
Lyman, Richard “Papa,” 67 Mokulua Consultants, Inc., 171
Moldea, Dan, 163
Maafala, Tenari, 206, 230n. 32 Monalim, Jonnaven, 177–180, 181
Madamba, Benjamin “Benny,” 24, 25–26 Moniz, Stacy, 173–175, 213, 228nn. 26–28
Madrid, Gilbert, 95 Mookini, Dewey, 193, 229n. 12
Magnum, P.I., 81, 82, 168 Mookini, William “Billy,” 97–98
Makena Surf, 141–142 Morishita, Yasumichi “Viper,” 49, 51, 53
Malapit, Eduardo, 148 Morris, Freddie, 200
Malepeai, Ofati, “Al Ofati,” 29, 39 Motta, Ethan “Malu,” 176, 178, 180–182
M&E Pacific, 111 MSM and Associates, Inc., 148–149
Maple Garden Restaurant, 100–102, 224n. 1
Marchetti, Joseph, 52–53 Nagata, Russel, 143–144
Marine, Frank, 84 Nakakuni, Florence, 209
Marnane, Thomas, 132 Nakamura, Edward, 147
Marsand, Charles Jr.: deputy prosecutor, Na-o, Rudolph, 86
26; election campaign, 139, 226n. 7; and Naone, Eric: “Chuckers” Marsland murder,
Larry Mehau, 6, 196, 213; murder of son, 7, 86–88, 212; Heffron kidnapping, 165;
6, 213; plot to murder, 94; obituary, 8–9; Teamsters, 164, 172–173; Walden murder,
and Ronald Ching, 81, 84, 89 172–173
Marsland, Charles III “Chuckers,” 6, 86–89, Naone, Herbert Jr., 5, 197, 201, 214
212, 213, 224n. 11 National Association of Securities Dealers,
Mataele, Stan, 172, 183, 228n. 45 154–155
236 Index
Nee, Gregory, 86, 87 Platte, Mark, 1, 2, 7–8, 178, 212, 228n. 38

Nery, Lamont “Monte,” 26–27, 92 Polynesian Palace, 2–3, 87, 88
Newby, Lance, 154–155, 227n. 11 Portnoy, Jeffrey, 130, 205, 211
Newspaper Preservation Act, 12, 215, Price, Larry, 105
230n. 1 Prizzia, Ross, 112, 114
Niko, Masa, 170 Probate Court, 66, 67, 77–78, 139
Nishida, Arthur, 201 Provenzano, Anthony “Tony Pro,” 84
Nozaki, Takehiko, 38–39 Pulawa, Wilford “Nappy”: Chong Kong
Nukolii, 145–148 murder, 92; federal tax trial, 20, 27, 34;
Francis Young murder, 92; Nery-Iha
Obama, Barack, 88 murder, 20–21, 26–28; Las Vegas “black
Oceanside Properties, Inc., 11, 15, 18, book,” 56; and Royale Kamahoahoa, 97;
108–111 “The Company,” 94
Office of Environmental Quality Control,
112–114, 225n. 5 Radcliffe, John, 23
Ogawa, Kaoru, 40–41, 86, 212, 213, 222n. 18 Randall, Kelly, 63–64
Ohai, Leo, 160–162 Raymond James Financial Services, 155
Ohai, Nephi, 161 Reed, Leo, 167, 168, 169, 183
Ojiri-Kitaoka, Rene, 75 Reed, Leroy, 169
Okada, Richard, 124–125 Reed, Rick, 173, 198, 213
Okinaga, Carrie, 211 Regal Travel, 158–159, 227nn. 14–15
Olmos, Milton, 205–206, 208–210, 230n. 33 Reid, Harry, 56
Olomana Golf Course, 46, 92 Resnick, Irving “Ash”: Aladdin licensing,
Olson, Carl “Bobo,” 178 54–55, 223nn. 4–6; debt collections,
Ong, Vickie, 79, 224n. 1 58–59, 223nn. 7–8; Duke Kawasaki
Ongais, Kenneth, 150, 151 markers, 55–58; FBI files, 223nn. 1–3; and
Operation Firebird, 82, 197–199, 212, 213 Larry Mehau, 60
Operation Koko, 197, 198 Rezentes, Manuel “Manny”: Arthur Baker
organized crime: and Alema Leota, 29; case, 30–31; and Ronald Ching, 87–88;
history, 22–24, 29; Japan, 32, 44, 49; mafia, and Sukarman Sukamto, 61, 62, 63
38–39, 54, 163–164, 202; and Wallace Richardson, William, 66–67, 69, 70–71
Furukawa, 34–35 RightStar, 154–156
Orii, Leo, 46 Riveira, David, 80, 83, 95
Ota, Charles, 220 R.M. Towill, 101–102, 224n. 2
Otake, Harry, 26–27 Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, 73
Oyama, Kazuo, 194 Rodenhurst, James, 6
Rodrigues, Wallace “Ditto,” 177
Paahao, Douglas, 183 Rubin, Robert, 65–66
Pali golf course, 176 Ruby, Jack, 39
Parametrix, Inc., 113 Ruis, Alfred, 129
Paty, William, 203–204, 213, 229n. 30 Russell, Charles “Moose,” 99, 177
Perreira, Frank, 201 Russo, Gus, 163
Perry, Bruce, 7, 87, 174, 188, 197 Rutledge, Anthony “Tony,” 168–170, 227n. 15
Perry, George Jr.: and Don Ho, 9, 87, 212; Rutledge, Arthur: and Eric Naone, 86, 164,
GRG lease, 197–198, 213; organized crime 165; and Leo Reed, 168–170, 227n. 15;
allegation, 175, 200, 205, 209, 213; special movie fund, 166–168, 173, 227n. 10; plot to
deputy, 188, 212 murder, 94; and Ronald Ching, 81–82, 84;
Perry, Michael W., 105 Unity House, 166; and William Mookini,
Peters, Henry, 67, 71, 73, 76 97–98
Peterson, Paul, 127–128, 131–132 Rutledge, Arthur Jr., 169–170
Pickard, Joseph, 125–126 Ryder, Roy, 26–28, 92, 195
Index 237
Sakamoto, Alexander “Aku,” 79, 83, 84–85 Tavares, Joseph “Joe Boy,” 170, 171–173, 183,
Sakamoto, Ken, 196 228n. 23
Sanchez, Jacob, 210 Teamsters Union: and Alvin Baron, 202;
Sao, Tinoimalo, 181 David Walden murder, 170–173; and
Sapienza, Maurice, 18–19, 85, 98, 221n. 5 Linda Lingle, 166; movie drivers, 7–8,
Sasaki, Hiro (Tsuneo Soranaka), 42–44 55, 81, 85, 165, 167–170, 182–184, 186–187,
Scanlan, Clarence “Rags,” 89 227nn. 11–17, 228n. 22; organized crime,
Scanlan, Raymond: “Chuckers” Marsland 74, 84, 94, 163–164, 175, 227nn. 1–3,
murder case, 7, 86, 88–90; and Don Ho, 228n. 26, 229n. 27
195–196; and Kaoru Ogawa, 40; Texeira, Antone, 192
Teamsters, 167–169 Thompson, Myron “Pinky,” 67, 71
Schutter, David, 7, 94, 174, 177, 221n. 9 Tokunaga, Donald, 144
Seitz, Eric, 207, 210 Torres, Aaron, 186–187
Selleck, Tom, 168 Tourine, Charles “The Blade,” 54
Sheridan, Walter, 163 Towill, Richard M., 102
Sherman, Eddie, 192 Trans Hawaiian Services, 158
Shibata, Naoji, 44, 48 Trask, Mililani, 69
Shimizu, Kuwashi, 37 Tsurumaki, Tomonori, 51–54
Shimoda, Walter, 145–146 Tummons, Patricia, 204, 230n. 31
Shinno, Eleanor, 16 Turner, Wallace, 163
Shirai, Scott, 195–196
Smith, Kit, 202–203, 229n. 29 Uchida, Joanne, 152
sokaiya, 40, 222n. 16 Ueoka, Meyer, 144
sole source contracting, 118, 132, 135, United Press International, 11, 55, 197, 231
226n. 11 Unity House, 81–82, 84, 166–167, 224n. 6
Souza, John, 178–180 Utamaro, 36, 37
Souza, Louis, 172
splatte file, 8, 178 Valley Isle, 197, 198, 212
Star Suites, Inc., 170, 173 Valley Isle Realty, 139–142
Stender, Oswald, 71, 75–76 Ventura, James, 69, 70
Stevens, Charles, 99, 139, 177–181 Vestin Group, 155–156
Stone, Jeff, 76, 180 Viti, Carl, 83
Stoner, C. Earl, 146–147 Volcano Girls, 103–105
Sukamto, Sukarman (Sia, Sukamto), 60–64,
223nn. 10–11, 13 Waialae Country Club, 32, 46, 58–59
Sumiyoshi-rengo, 34, 42, 46 Waihee, John: Data House, 111–112;
Sunday Lounge, 6, 28, 31, 81 personal finances, 157, 158; and Ken
Kiyabu, 117, 118; and Marvin Miura, 112,
Tahara, Quentin “Rocky,” 174, 210 114; RightStar, 155; and Tom Enomoto, 60
Takabuki, Matsuo “Matsy,” 65, 67, 71 Waipao Joint Venture, 141, 143
Takagi, Takeshi, 32–34, 37, 38, 222n. 2 Waite, David, 74, 224n. 10
Takenaka, Masahisa, 43 Walden, David, 170, 171–173, 175, 228n. 22
Takumi, Masaru, 47–50 Walker, Henry, 201–202
Taliese, Lepo Utu, 176 Ward, Michael Patrick, 93–95
Tamura, Stanley “Banjo,” 140, 141 Watada, Robert, 102
Tanaka, Caroline, 157 Watanabe, Kitaro, 46, 49
Tangi, Mari Rose, 209, 210 Watanabe, Wilfred, 199
Tanji, Edwin, 113, 140 Weight, Michael, 114–115
Tanouye, Stanley, 99 Whitford, Angela, 175
Taoka, Kazuo, 42 Whitten, Les, 14
Tarbell, Arthur, 190–193, 229n. 3 Wian, Casey, 70
238 Index
Wiginton, Roy, 107 Yamamoto, Hiroshi, 42

Wilson, Robert “Bobby,” 26 Yamanouchi, Yukio, 43, 44, 47–51
Wong, Alfred “Blackie,” 133 Yamauchi, Takeo, 55, 140–141
Wong, Richard “Dickie,” 67, 76 Yanagi, Kikuo, 138
Wong, Wesley, 206 Yanagi, Wallace, 138–139, 141, 147
Wright, Walter: and Don Ho, 2–5, 213, Yasuda, Ginji, 51, 52–53, 223n. 10
221n. 4; and Irving “Ash” Resnick, 55–57, Yasuhara, Lyle, 174–175
59, 223nn. 7–8; and Larry Mehau, 197, Yokouchi, Masaru “Pundy,” 139–140,
229n. 16; Seattle, 22, 56 142–144, 145–147
Yonekura, Takatsugu, 37
yakuza: in finance, 40–41, 49; in golf course Yoshino, Norman “Katsu,” 59–60
industry, 46–47; in Hawaii, 33, 35–36, Young, Bob, 110
42–44; in Japan, 42, 44, 45, 48–50; in Young, Francis, 92
sports and entertainment, 37–38, 46–47
Yamada, David, 91 Zbin, Joseph, 16
Yamaguchi, Andy, 203, 229n. 30 Zimmerman, Malia, 103–104, 217, 224n. 4,
Yamaguchi-gumi, 42–44, 45, 47–49 225n. 5
Yamamoto, Gregory, 7, 137, 189 Zimmerman, Wally, 63, 74
About the Author
Raised in San Francisco and the Bay Area, James Dooley worked as
a United Press International reporter in Honolulu in 1973 and a year
later joined the staff of the Honolulu Advertiser, where he was an inves-
tigative reporter for nearly two decades. After five years at Honolulu’s
KITV News, Dooley returned to the Advertiser in 2002 and moved to
online reporting at Hawaiireporter.com in 2010. He retired in 2012.
Production Notes for Dooley | Sunny Skies, Shady Characters
Cover design by Mardee Melton
Composition by Westchester Publishing Services, with display type
in Palatino LT Std Bold and text type in Palatino LT Std Roman
Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc.
Printed on 55 lb. House White Hi-Bulk D37, 360 ppi.

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Sunny Skies,

University of Hawai‘i Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Dooley, James (Investigative reporter), author.

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

Don Ho died on a Saturday.

department’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU).3 The Advertiser spent

Those two deaths, and the morning newspaper’s treatment of them,

A Greek bearing gifts called me in 1976.

When city hall reporter Douglas Carlson jumped to tele­vi­sion news in

An unusual group of “security guards” was hired to protect cooperating

“Or­ga­n ized criminals rely on terroristic threatening and vio­lence to

have successively moved into positions of authority in the local underworld

I studied Hunter’s archived stories of past crimes and criminal ­trials,

Alema Leota, who ran

Rezentes warned me about asking too many questions about Ronnie

Yakuza gang member

Organized crime figure

A Honolulu boxing promoter who was in business with Shimizu and

Four Japa­nese nationals carry­ing pounds of heroin concealed in duty-­

In January 1985, Ichiwa-­kai assassins had murdered the new Yamaguchi-­

Mizuno was ­later convicted of perpetrating a massive fraud in the sales of

A precondition of my interview with Takumi had been that I could not

On February 24, 1991, three years ­after my trip to Japan, attorney Yama-

My final foray into things yakuza was an interview with Tomonori

In Honolulu, Sukamto bought Aloha Motors, a defunct car dealership

Another trustee was Henry H. Peters, a state legislator who happened

judicial conduct, which forbade judges from engaging in improprieties or

While still at the Advertiser in 1995, I noticed a cooling of interest by the

Ronnie, Henry, and Royale

Professional killer Ronald K. Ching. Carl Viti, photographer; Honolulu Star-­

would have resulted in criminal charges if witnesses hadn’t been fright-

business dispute between Kuriyama and a Leeward Oahu dairyman

collapsed. Reyes was accused of killing Chinatown gambler George Chiu

• Charges against Cyril Kahale Jr. for allegedly participating with

The “Chuckers” Marsland murder case was the only Ching-­generated

Scanlan provided two weapons used in the hom­i­cide, a handgun and

Chuck Marsland testified in the murder trial that he met numerous

That pretty much sent the prosecution’s case up in smoke.

Henry Huihui in state

Information he provided did lead to a murder indictment against for-

hood of Electrical Workers. He grew close to 1186 boss Akito “Blackie”

Apart from his uncorroborated allegations against Mehau, or­ga­nized

Three Dogs and a Vet

A good portion of my professional ­career was spent at the junction of

Although criminal charges against Fasi and fund-­raiser Harry C. C.

• 20th-­Century Furniture received the contract to supply carpeting,

­ ere used by the com­pany to determine how much profit it could

Marvin Miura Goes to Prison

Marvin Miura. Edwin

None of that happened. Waihee approved the contract, telling me in an in-

Ken Kiyabu Redecorates

Ken Kiyabu. Honolulu

which oversaw most government contracting and purchasing activities, be-

The president of K&A, Alan Nakatsu, confirmed Kitazaki’s account and

I also interviewed Governor Cayetano, who said, “There is no attempt

“Isn’t that your handwriting on the right-­hand edge of that?” Kurosawa

“Well, who was it?” I asked.

Okada was convicted in federal court and sentenced to five years in

Material began arriving at my office by the boxload. Newly received

One Job Leads to Another

national law enforcement conference on the yakuza,5 personal favors per-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper

When city hall reporter Douglas Carlson jumped to television news in

“Organ ized criminals rely on terroristic threatening and violence to

I studied Hunter’s archived stories of past crimes and criminal trials,

Four Japanese nationals carrying pounds of heroin concealed in duty-

In January 1985, Ichiwa-kai assassins had murdered the new Yamaguchi-

Mizuno was later convicted of perpetrating a massive fraud in the sales of

On February 24, 1991, three years after my trip to Japan, attorney Yama-

Professional killer Ronald K. Ching. Carl Viti, photographer; Honolulu Star-

The “Chuckers” Marsland murder case was the only Ching-generated

Scanlan provided two weapons used in the homicide, a handgun and

Apart from his uncorroborated allegations against Mehau, organized

A good portion of my professional career was spent at the junction of

Although criminal charges against Fasi and fund-raiser Harry C. C.

• 20th-Century Furniture received the contract to supply carpeting,

ere used by the company to determine how much profit it could

“Isn’t that your handwriting on the right-hand edge of that?” Kurosawa

All the records were at Valley Isle Realty, he said.

Further, despite Stoner’s claims to me that he had only invested after he

A mortuary worker slipped me paperwork about a nonprofit company

• A high-ranking official of the department had been improperly

• A department employee was running an illegal sports betting

It did not. An IRB investigator told me privately that the organization

The Million-Dollar Movie Fund

Bruce Kamekona told a third, slightly different version of the beating.

I got the go-ahead, wrote the piece, and turned it in.

To old-time law enforcement officers here, the story of Tuesday’s bloody

Organ ized crime figure

Monalim, Rodney Joseph, and Ethan Motta—stands alone but is connected

was sentenced to five years of probation. The crimes were appended to a

Following the “godfather” newscast in February 1977, a little-k nown

they believed ongoing organized crime investigations had been compro-

Kamakana also removed from CIU the records of a long-running inves-

2002–2006 Kamakana case records gradually unsealed. Mehau, Perry

In September 1999, Phillips announced that he would close the Star-

Chapter 1: “A Culture of Corruption”

Chapter 8: Ronnie, Henry, and Royale

Chapter 9: Three Dogs and a Vet

11. “Anadac Got Navy Sole-Source Contract,” Honolulu Advertiser, October 31, 1983.

Chapter 13: Death and Taxes

18. “More Teamster Trouble Erupts during Filming of TV Series,” Honolulu Advertiser,

31. Patricia Tummons, “Anatomy of a Speculation: The Many Flips of Mahai’ula,” Envi-

Chapter 16: End of the Line