Luffy Robbery Gang’ Executive Confesses from Prison: The Identity of the Real Mastermind
From a boy hanging out in Kabukicho to an underworld gangster
Tomonobu Kojima (47). He was a top executive of the “Luffy” wide-area robbery group that shook all of Japan from 2022 to 2023. He speaks in the visiting room of the Tokyo Detention Center.
After leaving the juvenile reformatory, he lived at the home of a woman he met at a club in Sapporo. He hung out with teen gangs and began helping with yakuza rackets. At 19, he committed a theft and experienced life in a juvenile reformatory once again. At 21, he moved to Tokyo, where he also drifted between the homes of women he picked up.
“I was basically a kept man with multiple ‘live-in girlfriends.’ For much of my life, women supported me. Like today’s so-called ‘Toe-Yoko kids,’ I would gather in Kabukicho and go to clubs with the people I met there.”
It didn’t take long for him to become part of a color gang through bad friends’ invitations. During those days, he met Mr. H, a former banker and a leader of a major black-market lending group, and, lured in, he stepped into the underworld.
The work Mr. H assigned to Kojima was something called a “seiriya” (liquidator). It was a kind of fraud involving planned corporate bankruptcies. By falsifying financial statements, he made failing companies appear profitable, fraudulently borrowed cash, and then sold expensive equipment acquired through lease contracts to Chinese theft rings, thereby generating money.
Kojima’s capable performance as a liquidator was highly valued, and Mr. H provided him with a luxury apartment in Nishi-Azabu.
“I never minded studying if it was practical. In the reformatory, I obtained the top-level Kanji Kentei certificate. After becoming a liquidator, I got the Bookkeeping Grade 2 qualification. I also acquired the Microsoft Office Specialist certification. I can even assemble PCs myself. I could do all the fake IDs and forged documents needed for fraud alone. At heart, I’m a lazy man who’s irresponsible with women.
But why did I work so hard at this? It was because, for the first time in my life, I was given a job with real responsibility, and I was happy to see results. Every night, I went drinking in Roppongi with Mr. H, who would spend about 2 million yen each night on me. Producing results in ‘work’ and living a life of extravagance was simply enjoyable.”
However, that life suddenly came to an end, and his life on the run began.
“Mr. H told me, ‘Disappear from Tokyo for about 10 years.’ Because I was on the frontlines of the liquidator work, I had been marked by the police. So I fled to Osaka. I have no grudge against Mr. H. If anything, I’m grateful to him for letting me experience the extraordinary.”
In court, Kojima testified, “Since there were no con artists in the group with high administrative skills, I was valued.” With Mr. H’s guidance, that foundation was established.
After working as a dealer at an underground casino in Osaka and briefly returning to Sapporo, Kojima went back to Tokyo at the age of 29. He became an associate member of the yakuza and was arrested for dealing methamphetamine. After receiving a three-year prison sentence with five years’ suspension, he still couldn’t escape his dissolute lifestyle. Then, through an acquaintance, he was introduced to cryptocurrency investments and ended up with 3 million yen in debt. Told by the lender, “Do telephone fraud work to pay it back,” Kojima, in July 2018, traveled to the Philippines to make big money through special fraud.
The encounter with the revered boss who built up the fraud group
As instructed, I took a taxi from the airport to a hotel in Quezon City, northeast of Manila. The next day, members of the group handed me a fraud manual, telling me, “Memorize this.”
However, I couldn’t generate sales as a “kakeko” (caller), and I wasn’t paid for two months. Although I was given about 8,000 yen a week for living expenses so I could get by, my debt didn’t shrink. I was quickly branded a “useless kakeko,” and for about half a year lived on a monthly salary that didn’t even reach 100,000 yen.
Even in those bleak days, there was one gain.
About a week after my arrival, I first met the “boss,” Watanabe, at a yakiniku restaurant. The group had three teams called “boxes.” What they all had in common was that the boss’s authority was absolute. But at the time, the atmosphere in the boxes was still loose, and the boss was dissatisfied. To unify all members into a single box, the boss moved the base of operations to a commercial building in Pasay City.
So how did defendant Watanabe go about forming the fraud group?
The boss originally worked as a kakeko recruiter and a collector. Around 2017, wanting to establish his own organization, he sent people into a Chinese special fraud group in Ikebukuro to learn their methods. Then he reached out to friends from his hometown in Hokkaido, secured funding from backers, and in August of that year set up a box in Pattaya, Thailand. The group’s forerunner took shape as the entire box relocated from Thailand to the Philippines.
Still, working with friends as members came with its difficulties. He felt the need to turn it into a company-like organization. The boss was someone who liked creating new businesses. At one point, there was even a plan to cheat money by exchanging 1 billion yen in counterfeit bills. As the boss began to notice my clerical and administrative skills, I had more opportunities to support him, and gradually earned his trust.
In December 2018, defendant Kojima assisted in establishing the “K (Kiyoto) box” of defendant Imamura, who would later use the name “Luffy.” In July of the following year, defendant Fujita joined the organization, and the group transformed into a criminal organization that fraudulently extracted nearly 200 million yen a month under a single box.
From the September 5, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY”
Interview and text： Shimei Kurita (non-fiction writer)
