NEW YORK – On January 8th, US authorities announced that Takeshi Ebisawa, a leader of the Japanese yakuza criminal underworld, pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal. Ebisawa, along with co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri, had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offenses.
In February 2024, Ebisawa was additionally charged with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material and lethal narcotics from Myanmar, and to purchase military weaponry on behalf of an armed insurgent group. The military weaponry involved in the arms deal included surface-to-air missiles, according to the indictment.
“As he admitted in federal court today, Takeshi Ebisawa brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” said acting US attorney Edward Kim, using another name for Myanmar. “At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma.”
Prosecutors alleged that Ebisawa, 60, moved material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, alongside drugs, from Myanmar. From 2020, Ebisawa boasted to an undercover officer about his access to large quantities of nuclear materials, providing photographs of materials alongside Geiger counters registering radiation.
During a sting operation involving undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.” The US laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the samples was weapons-grade, suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.
One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they had more than 2,000 kg of Thorium-232 and over 100 kg of uranium in the compound U3O8, commonly known as ‘yellowcake.’ The indictment suggested that Ebisawa planned to use the proceeds from the sale of nuclear material to fund weapons purchases for an unnamed ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar.
Ebisawa faces up to 20 years imprisonment for the international trafficking of nuclear materials. Prosecutors described him as a leader of the Yakuza organized crime syndicate, a highly organized, transnational Japanese criminal network involved in large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking.
Sentencing will be determined by the judge at a later date.