Leader of Japanese crime syndicate pleads guilty to conspiring to traffic nuclear materials to Iran

NEW YORK — The purported leader of a Japan-based crime syndicate pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges alleging that he conspired to traffic uranium and plutonium from Myanmar in the belief that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons.

Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, of Japan, entered the plea in Manhattan federal court to weapons and narcotics trafficking charges that carry a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and the possibility of life behind bars. Sentencing was set for April 9.

Prosecutors say Ebisawa didn’t know he was communicating in 2021 and 2022 with a confidential source for the Drug Enforcement Administration along with the source’s associate, who posed as an Iranian general. Ebisawa was arrested in April 2022 in Manhattan during a DEA sting.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a release that the prosecution demonstrated the DEA's “unparalleled ability to dismantle the world's most dangerous criminal networks.”

She said the investigation “exposed the shocking depths of international organized crime from trafficking nuclear materials to fueling the narcotics trade and arming violent insurgents.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim said Ebisawa admitted at his plea that he “brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma.”

“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," he added.

Court papers said Ebisawa told the DEA's confidential source in 2020 that he had access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wanted to sell. To support his claim, he sent the source photographs depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, claiming they contained thorium and uranium, the papers said.

The nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country, prosecutors said. Ebisawa had proposed that the leader sell uranium through him in order to fund a weapons purchase from the general, court documents allege.

Prosecutors said samples of the alleged nuclear materials were obtained and a U.S. federal lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that the “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade, meaning enough of it would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.

An email seeking comment was sent to Ebisawa’s attorneys.