U.S. court convicts Japanese mafia leader for conspiring to traffic nuclear material to Iran

A member of Japan's yakuza crime group was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a New York court on Tuesday after being convicted of trafficking nuclear material as well as drugs and weapons.

Takeshi Ebisawa, 61, has been jailed since April 2022 on the drug and weapons charges, along with his Thai co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri, following years of investigations by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

In February 2024, he was also accused of trying to sell military-grade nuclear material, along with narcotics including heroin and methamphetamine, to buy weapons including surface-to-air missiles for armed groups in Myanmar.

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

"After initially offering uranium, Ebisawa proposed to supply the General with 'plutonium' that would be even 'better' and more 'powerful' than uranium for Iran's use," the Justice Department said on Monday.

Takeshi Ebisawa poses with a rocket launcher during a meeting with an informant and two undercover Danish police officers at a warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark February 3, 2021, in a photograph from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) criminal complaint. U.S. Magistrate Judge/Southern District of New York/Handout via REUTERS

Court papers said Ebisawa — who U.S. prosecutors say is a leader of Japan's notorious Yakuza mafia — 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.

In 2024, prosecutors posted photos of the purported nuclear materials allegedly sent by Ebisawa.

Examples of the photographs sent by Takeshi Ebisawa, according to U.S. prosecutors. Justice Department

Prosecutors also allege Ebisawa conspired to sell 500 kilograms of methamphetamine and 500 kilograms of heroin to an undercover agent to be distributed in New York. He also allegedly worked to launder $100,000 in purported narcotics proceeds from the U.S. to Japan.

He pleaded guilty to a total of six charges in January 2025.

"Takeshi Ebisawa has been held accountable for his crimes, including an attempt to sell weapons-grade plutonium to Iran and to flood New York with deadly narcotics," said John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general for national security.