By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
10-15-25

Before proceeding into the gangster haven of Chicago from the Prohibition era gang boss Al Capone to today’s dope-dealing filth out of Venezuela (Trend de Agua) and the Mexican Sinaloa cartel under the protection of their political patrons of state senator JB Pritzker and his Obama-wannabe black lackey Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson – whew! - I hope you’ll bear with my recollection of an encounter in Japan with actor Robert Stack, the star of the 1950s TV series “The Untouchables”. His most famous role was based on the Prohibition era crime-fighter - the legendary Treasury agent Eliot Ness, who defied the Windy City’s deeply compromised and paid-off political class to aggressively bust Capone and his murderous pals - who were then packed off to a high-security federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. That’s called “the good old days” as compared to the Obama era of political protection for prominent criminals and corrupt politicians.

Way back then my stepfather, who was a Defense Department troubleshooter based in Kobe (yes, the prime beef town and also home-base of Kawasaki Aircraft, the former test-site for the most brilliant Nazi-era warplane designer Richard Vogt) - also served as the chief Japan-and-Korea contact for the Hollywood movie industry. On a Friday evening in summer 1959 following soccer practice at my Catholic school, Mike asked me to catch a speedboat on the following day to board a luxury liner off Awagi Island prior to the cruise liner’s demolition and reduction to scrap metal. Since my soccer team had no game scheduled with our fanatic foes at the Korean and (Protestant) Canadian schools, I agreed get up early to find a fast-boat captain down at the docks.

A Whirlpool Of Crime-Fighting

Churning the water before sunrise, the speed-boat bounced along the calm waters of the Inland Sea, to be steered around the massive Naruto whirlpool, and then it swerved past one of Awaji Island’s then-forested peninsulas (that was long before a super-bridge was erected to connect the isle with the mainland) and there she was - the Ile-de-France - the world’s most beautiful ocean-liner ever - glowing in a golden beam at sunrise. The depressing news then was that after completion of the film shoot, her maritime majesty was to be towed toward its demise by demolition at the Kobe shipyards, reduced by acetylene torches to scrap-metal - a phoenix on fire, never to return to the high seas. I tried to keep the depressing thought at bay.

On reaching shipside, I leaped off the swaying boat and grabbed the steel handles, then climbed up to a rather small doorway, which with a hard push creaked open. Indoors after a few steps it was pitch-black along the hallway. Feeling my way along the inner wall, I saw a glimmer of light leaking from a far door. Thinking that if it’s locked, I’m going to have to swim back to Awaji Island (I had told the boat pilot to go and wait at the island’s harbor and return by mid-afternoon). There was, however, due to the fast current a risk of getting pulled toward and into the whirlpool. After groping futilely my left hand latched onto an unseen handle, which I repeated tried to turn and then shoulder-rammed the stubborn steel door, which unexpectedly flung open. Stepping into a the vast bright room with sunlight through huge glass windows, my slow-to-adjust eyes spotted a lone table in the huge room and then focused on two adults and a pair of children - Americans or maybe Europeans, Caucasians - were eating their breakfast at a small table. I recognized their father immediately.

Robert Stack was waving to me to join his family. Needless to say, back in Los Angeles before to my return to Japan, I had eagerly watched him swinging an axe to bust open barrels of contraband booze, on TV of course, in the popular action series “The Untouchables”. The soft-spoken Stack was the spitting image of the stern incorruptible Treasury Agent and gang-buster Eliot Ness.

I was quietly pleased with this most unexpected honor. As my Japanese mother often put it: “You are as cool as a cucumber no matter what you’re up against.” Taking a seat at the side of the table, I nodded toward the kids, who were eager to hear about children in Japan - after being stuck for the past week aboard this ghost ship during film production. I obliged, urging them to speak slowly since Japanese children are taught English language in school but rarely if ever get a chance to talk with a foreigner. After answering their many questions about such a “different” country as Japan, I turned toward their parents with a warning.

Other than avoiding Kobe, which was/is the headquarters of the 20,000 member Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza gang and nearby Osaka with hordes of “chimpira” punks - wannabee thugs, the rest of Japan is friendly to Americans who are greatly admired for their openness and freedom. The beautiful blond missus ceased chatting with her husband and listened intently, obviously pleased for calming down her super-bored kids. I then proceeded to explain to the boy who was maybe 7 years old then, how to prevent the thin rice-paper on a wire ring from breaking apart when trying to catch a goldfish in a barrel - the very thought of which lit up his eyes with excitement. Also not to eat too many local ice-cream, which lacks sufficient milk and can be contaminated with gut-busting bacteria, whereas everything else is safe to eat.

Then in answer to Ness/Stack, I mentioned my ambition to attend college in the Midwest, since I had an uncle there who ran a biochemistry company near Hyde Park (Chicago). At that very moment the film director strode out from the well-lit Art Deco dining room to announce that shooting was about to begin again (with a motion-picture camera and not a tommy gun). So after looking at the bare-bones set and taking a quick tour of the grand ship’s interior, at the appointed hour I boarded the launch for the sea journey to home port after a fascinating morning of time-travel back to the bad old days of Al Capone.

Old Chi-town, Today’s Chicago - Booze vs Dope

Nowadays, gangster boss Capone is a vague legend from a long forgotten Prohibition Era. Alphonse was, of course, a highly intelligent gentleman in person although rife with criminal scams and had the personal fairs and good manners to enlist Chicago’s top politicians to quietly support his booze running (out of Canada) in return for hefty cash payoffs from gangland. Thus the Capo was out of reach - untouchable - for policemen and the anti-alcohol suffragette movement. His personal contribution to the art and business of crime was organization, incorporating a slew of demented crooks and pitiless hit men into The Outfit, a crime organization that spread its tentacles to Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City and Miami, enlisting the humble cooperation of big-city politicians in dire need of cash during the wild-and-crazy “flapper era” of the late 1920s and early ’30s - prior to the stock market crash.

One of the major tasks of The Outfit was to keep its members out of jail through bribery of politicians and “knocking off” aka murdering ratty informers and cops eager for promotion. The main commodity - booze by the barrel - came out of Canada, much of it from the Seagram’s distillery of Edward Seagram and Joseph Bronfman (whose Jewish clan remained active in the recording industry and Hollywood). The financial genius of Capone was in exploiting dumber criminals such as the all-Jewish Purple Gang do most of the smuggling and hauling to speakeasy bartenders while his boys with clean hands passed hefty bribes to the politicians and judges in exchange for their silence and courthouse acquittals. Let the good times roll, eh? After all what can a little and snort of cocaine do so wrong for the Windy City? Other than everything.

The lack of cooperation in law enforcement by the local politicians in Chicago (so what else is new in Pritzker-Obama Chicago aka “Chi-town” – which is pronounced “shy town”?) had put the federal government in a bind until some bureaucrat came up with the bright idea: “Hey, we can get those crooks for failing to pay taxes!” Since the cops were in cahoots with gangland, the U.S. Treasury Department put agent Eliot Ness, who was born and raised in Chicago and of Norwegian ancestry – and therefore not a Sicilian or Irish - to take on and take out the Capone operation with his 1,000-man team of federal T-men. With axe in hand, Ness and his team busted and dumped tons of booze into the city sewers after putting gangsters behind bars. Oh, what as waste of good liquor, eh, paisano?

A Penny For Her Secret Thoughts

The big obstacle proved to be tommy-gun wielding thug but instead Chicago courts of law, where nearly all the judges, bailiffs, cops, prison guards and lawyers were “on the take”. One of The Outfit’s most effective defense lawyers was a Jewish immigrant from Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine named Nicholas Pritzker (who worked at a Chicago pharmacy when opium was still a legal salve) and later enrolled at DePaul - a Catholic university - where he earned a law degree. A clever Jewish defense attorney with Catholic connections was the perfect combo to spring cons out of prison terms at Cook County jail. Jack Nicholas Pritzker and his younger brothers Abram and Harry all joined their papa’s law firm, earning renown as Chicago’s most effect defense lawyers for gangsters and illegal bartenders. Abram - a legendary sheepherder name, eh? - bought the Hyatt House in Los Angeles, the evil seed of the Hyatt Hotel chain, the ideal conduit for money-laundering. One of his younger cousins developed the Marmon group of industries, a huge percentage of which was later sold to Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway investment group.

A minor branch of the Pritzkers started by a younger brother Donald relocated to Atherton (near Palo Alto), California, and it was his graft onto the money-tree that gave life to Penny Pritzker who discovered an aspiring black professor named Barack Obama. Her financial support and many unsavory business contacts were key to his presidential bid. On attaining the nation’s highest office, Obama rewarded here with appointment as commerce secretary and also special envoy to Ukraine - got that? On her skirt-tails younger brother J.D. Pritzker ran for high office to become the current Illinois congressman who has been blocking Trump’s dispatch of ICE officers to crime-infested Chicago. Another giveaway crime connection involved her uncle Jay who runs the Pritzker Realty Group out of Orlando, Florida - with its many nefarious connections with South Florida’s Jewish criminal operations formerly linked with the notorious Kennedy-hating mobster Meyer Lansky. It’s all in the “mispocha” aka family, pronounced “mish-poo-kuh” aka the Yid Mob. Remember their boy Jeffrey Epstein in Florida and mob bastion Cleveland?

Penny had discovered Barack Obama at Chicago’s YMCA, the best location for hustling young boys for off-court action. It was the Pritzker/Jewish money that financed the rise of Obama as state official and then the grab for the presidency. In thanks, Barack appointed here Secretary of Commerce, a position that required distancing herself from 221 companies in her investment portfolio. As commerce secretary, Penny made irresistible overtures to Castro Cuba to serve as a tourist destination for American visitors. Based on Barack’s recommendation, Joe Biden appointed Penny as special envoy to promote a business boom in Volodymir Zelensky’s Ukraine. (I am still waiting for my case of Kiev Vodka and a pretty Uke girl to drink it with.)

Hey, JD And Brandon - Where Are The Bodies?

As for her younger brother J.B., the state senator has employed similar courtroom tactics as his Capone-era ancestor to block federal deployments against noxious drug-dealing gangs who proliferate in the Windy City as a base to poison Americans nationwide. The spitting image of space gangster boss Jabba the Hutt, J.B. makes me wonder if this Pritzker has a taste for J&B scotch whiskey, the supplier to England’s royal family. Despite his official obstructionism, brave federal officers have already arrested more than 1,000 criminal Latino illegals in the Chicago area - with countless thousands more yet to be detained. Given the numerous reports of “kamikaze” drivers trying to run over federal officers, Chicago is a zoo of hardened criminals loyal to their bosses.

During my days as a millwright at U.S. Steel Southside and volunteer counselor for delinquent kids in Chinatown and its environs, I have never seen such obedient hit-men in that crime-ridden city. Back in the 1980s, one had to refuse to pay back large loans before a thug was dispatched to collect the money owned to gang bosses. Back then the few Latinos were low-pay law-abiding workers in the steel mills. Despite the obvious, Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Pritzker loyalist, has claimed that the murder rate has been declining - which is quite probable after two decades of inter-gang street wars and dope trade-related hit-jobs. Another factor behind the minor decrease in reported gang-inflicted deaths is a “children of the corn” operations that dump bodies of rival gang members and deadbeats who fail to pay their drug debts into agricultural land purchased by the cartels to hide incriminating evidence. There are at least 350,000 missing persons on the Chicago Police records, many of them black women and girls - presumably innocents raped and killed or street prostitutes who’ve outlived their usefulness to the many gangland bosses and club owners. Children of the Corn Rows, got it? Chicago is murder city arguably far worse nowadays than during Capone’s era. Brandon Johnson has proven himself to be an antisocial liar, whose circle of acquaintances and campaign supporters need to be probed.

The Bad Old Days Were Not So Bad As Now

So my experiences in the Windy City a bit more than four decades ago might have been considered scary and tough back then, but the crime scene has worsened from inter-ethnic tensions and street robberies to today’s murder-by-drugs on the streets and in the discos as victims are put into the trunks of cars for disposal at any number of dump sites. The Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang translates as the “train from Aragua”, the latter being the main prison in Venezuela, which was raided by army troops during a prison break in September 2023. While the local cops claimed total victory, in reality the majority of crime leaders escaped from the siege to presumably migrate to Brazil and then likely to have been smuggled onward to Democrat governed states in the USA to join their emigre cousins. Top dog gang boss Hector Guerrero disappeared into thin air - likely to find protection in Pritzker-Johnson Chicago.

Since that top dog - who owned a zoo and nightclub inside that Venezuelan prison (go ask the Maduro cronies about it) - has never reappeared in Latin America - if I were a modern-day Eliot Ness, the place to look is the luxury yacht harbor in Lake Michigan and the upper floor of the Hyatt Regency Chicago. From their strident objections to ICE personnel entering Chicago, the mayor and senator have something or someone to hide, eh? (If an arrest transpires, I am claiming a juicy part of the reward money, Don). Meanwhile, let’s hope Jabba Da Pritzker takes a fall in Tattooine by the Lake.

Due to the fact that there are nearly 100 Latino illegals’ crime groups in Chicago, there’s neither time nor space here to deal with all the crooks at this moment of sign-off. Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping an eye on shoot-outs as put by old Mrs. O’Leary: “There’s going to be a hot time in Old Town tonight!” Hey, did I just hear the rattling sound of a milk can being kicked over by a dairy cow?