Article published on December 23rd, 1984 by The Paris News.

HEADLINE: "MAN WITH 21 FACES" BAFFLES 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 least 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 Co., Ltd., a major confection maker, was kidnapped from his bathtub by two masked men who invaded his home Nishinomiya, near Kobe.

The kidnappers demanded ransom of 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 abductors.

In April, the group struck again, setting fire to Ğlico buildings and cars, and demanding 60 million yen ($24,000), which as 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.

Because the gang's moves have come only on weekends, police deployed special weekend patrols in stores, using 50,000 police officers each time.

More than a million people have dialed special numbers set up by police to offer information, but there have been no arrests, and authorities are frustrated, embarrassed - and increasingly close mouthed.

"Obviously, we're not going to tell you what leads we’re following," said one detective. “And we're not answering the abuses in those letters. The only thing is that we must catch these guys -and we will."

At the time, the police were carrying out an investigation that Japanese newspapers agreed not disclose. But the police effort failed and the newspapers reported on Dec. 10 that yet another company, the House Food Industrial Co., had become a target of the extortionists.

The reports said that in November, the "Man With 21 Faces" tried to extort 100 million yen ($400,000) from the Osaka-area firm as the price for not poisoning its products, and sent a package of poisoned curry to its offices to back up the threat.

Company officials notified police who, according to a National Police Agency spokesman, began the secret investigation. The news reports said it nearly netted a suspect during a fake ransom delivery Nov. 14, but the man, driving a stolen auto, eluded officers in a two-mile chase.