Article published on December 15th, 1984 by The Galveston Daily News.
HEADLINE: POISON PLOTTER FRUSTRATE JAPANESE POLICE
KOBE, Japan (AP) - It began with a group of masked kidnappers, brazenly abducting a company president from his bath. It got more attention when the man suddenly reappeared, safe, unharmed and claiming that he had escaped.
Then came the terrifying discovery of cyanide-laced candy on store shelves, and a frantic nationwide investigation by police - as anonymous letters to newspapers mocked and ridiculed their efforts.
The case known in Japan as "The Man with 21 Faces" is a sinister reprise of the 1982 Tylenol affair in the United States in which seven people died from cyanide placed in bottles of the pain-killing drug.
No one is known to have actually been poisoned in Japan, but the motive - extortion - is the same. It also has proved as puzzling for the authorities here as was the Tylenol case, which remains unresolved.
After eight months, and despite special surveillance by a force of 50,000 officers, Japanese police apparently still have no solid leads to the identity of the mysterious "21 Faces" gang which seeks to extort money from large food manufacturing companies.
As far as is known, the criminals have not actually obtained any money from the 27 companies they are reported to have threatened.
That no one has died stems largely from the fact that the plotters attach warning notes to boxes of poisoned candy left on supermarket shelves, mostly in the Western cities of Osaka and Kobe.
The case, however, has enthralled the Japanese public and especially experts on criminal behavior.
"They have attracted the most number of policemen, as much as a fifth of the country's entire police force. They are the first ones to fully utilize the effects of mass media, making a fool out of police for repeated blunders." Hiroaki Iwai, professor of criminology at Toyo University, said in an Interview.
Some theorists say the gang's careful planning and apparent grasp of police operations suggests radical leftists. Others envision ties to the violence-prone Yakuza, or Japanese mafia, and still others speculate that the culprits are disgruntled former employees of the companies.
Police say there are at lease three plotters, and believe the peculiar pseudonym used in the letters comes from "The Man with 20 Faces," a popular magazine series of 30-40 years ago about an elusive thief. The author's pen name, "Edogawa Rampo," was a linguistic play on the name of Edgar Allan Poe.
The gang's letters to news media have alluded to Sherlock Holmes and the idea of sending them appears to have come from Edogawa's own stories.
The case broke last March 18 when Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of Ezaki Glico., Ltd., was a major confection maker, was kidnapped from his bathtub by two masked men who invaded his home in Nishinomiya, near Kobe.
The kidnappers demanded ransom od 1 billion yen ($4.08 million) and 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of gold, but never called with instructions for payment. Three days later, Ezaki turned up safe, saying he had escaped but apparently unable to offer police much information on his abduction.
In April, the group struck again, setting fire to Glico buildings and cars, and demanding 60 million yen ($24,000), which is far as is known was not paid.
In a letter to Osaka's news media, the group offered "clues" to their identity and hints of their next move. Like 10 other letters which were to follow, it ridiculed the police for incompetence.
In May the group claimed to have placed two boxes of cyanide-laced Glico candies in stores and threatened to place more unless the firm paid 120 million yen ($48,000). Supermarkets took the products off shelves, but no poisoned candy was found. In late May, the group hiked its demands to 300 million yen ($1.22 million).
This time Glico agreed to pay, but a scheduled rendezvous fizzled when the extortionists, having used an innocent decoy as a contact man, eluded a police trap by not showing up. In a subsequent letter, they mocked police for having "poorly disguised' the operation.
On June 25, the "Man with 21 Faces" abruptly called off the war on Glico, citing "boredom" with the cat-and-mouse game. The company and the police deny that Glico had made any deal.
After a three-month break, the extortionists were back, with a new target - the big Morinaga and Co. Ltd., confection maker.
This time, the gang showed it was more serious: When Morinaga refused a demand for 100 million yen ($408,000), the group placed 17 packages of poisoned Morinaga' candies in supermarkets on Oct, 7.
Attached to each was a memo, written in the distinctive Osaka dialect, saying “Danger. Contains poison. You'll die if you eat this." Inside were candies laced with a lethal dose of sodium cyanide.
Morinaga products vanished from store shelves and the company cut production by 90 percent, acknowledging a loss of 8 billion yen ($32.6 million) and laying off its 450 part-time workers.
