As much as I complain that American corporations are run by a bunch of crooks, I suppose I’m lucky I don’t live in Japan - where the corporations really are run by crooks.

Japan’s powerful yakuza organised crime syndicates are mounting a widespread and “infectious” assault on the country’s financial markets that may have left hundreds of listed companies riddled with mob connections.

In a surprisingly stark admission of the crisis, the National Police Agency (NPA) says it is locked in a battle for the “economic soul” and international reputation of Japan.

Police investigations suggest the yakuza have become voracious traders and manipulators of listed Japanese stocks, and – via a network of about 1,000 apparently legitimate front companies – occupy hefty positions on the shareholder registers of many companies that may not even be aware of the connection.

The new activities of the nation’s largest crime syndicates, said one veteran expert on the yakuza, has effectively turned the mob into “the biggest private equity firm in Japan”.

This has ‘wrong’ written all over it - the UCLA Medical Center in California earned itself two $100,000 donations from a pair of Japanese gang members, one of whom is the boss of the Goto-gumi, a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate. The twosome received liver transplants somewhere between 2002 and 2004; an estimated 400 liver transplant patients died between those years. I trust you can figure out where this is headed…

A plaque on an entryway to a surgery office in the hospital reads, “In grateful recognition of the Goto Research Fund established through the generosity of Mr. Tadamasa Goto,” the Times reported.

UCLA confirmed the amount of the donation and also acknowledged it received a separate $100,000 donation from another man who the Times said had suspected gang affiliations. He donated in 2002, the year of his transplant. The Times did not name that man because it was unable to reach him or his attorney.

The Times’ original story cited several people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Goto had been barred from entering the United States because of his criminal history but with help from the FBI, he obtained a visa in 2001 in exchange for leads on potentially illegal activity in this country by Japanese criminal gangs, Jim Stern, retired chief of the FBI’s Asian criminal enterprise unit in Washington, told the Times. The FBI did not help Goto arrange his surgery with UCLA.

It’s worth noting that the Goto-gumi are the same gangsters that attacked Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami in 1992. Itami later committed suicide, an act which some believe was due to threats from the yakuza.