Tokyo Joe: The Incredible Life, Betrayal, and Survival of Ken Eto, the Chicago Outfit’s Highest-Ranking Asian-American Mobster
“They took their shot. They muffed it.”
It’s not every day that someone gets shot three times in the head—and walks away. But then again, Ken Eto was never your average mobster.
Known on the streets of Chicago as “Tokyo Joe” and, more insidiously, as “The Jap,” Eto occupied a strange, powerful niche in the Chicago underworld. As the highest-ranking Asian-American ever to work for the Outfit, Chicago’s infamous Italian-American crime syndicate, Eto not only thrived in a system built on nepotism and ethnic cliques—he managed to outwit it.
His life is a case study in contradictions: the son of a Christian preacher, a gambling boss for the mob, a murder target, and eventually, the linchpin in one of the most consequential waves of mafia convictions in US history. All this from a man who stood just five-foot-five and wore tweed jackets from Morry’s.
This is the story of Ken Eto—a tale of survival, betrayal, and one man’s strange redemption through vengeance.
From Stockton to the Streets: A Life on the Margins
Ken Eto was born in Stockton, California, in 1919 to a deeply religious Japanese-American family. His father, Mamoru Eto, a devout Christian, had migrated from Japan and converted during a stint in San Francisco. There, disillusioned by what he described as the “degeneracy” of fellow immigrants, Mamoru resolved to raise his family with rigid piety.
Ken resented it. School did not offer an escape—he dropped out after eighth grade from Virgil Junior High School in Los Angeles. Seeking freedom, he fled to Portland, Oregon, where he lived by his wits—stealing, hustling, and picking up any odd job he could find. By the time he registered for the draft in 1941, Eto was in Seattle, working as a “farm labourer.”
Then came World War II—and with it, Executive Order 9066. Like over 100,000 Japanese Americans, Eto was interned, sent to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. It was there, behind barbed wire, that he honed his gambling skills, playing cards with other internees and studying the psychology of risk and reward. A curfew violation earned him his first formal arrest in 1942.
In 1947, now free, Eto drifted to Chicago and immersed himself in the only world where he had ever felt comfortable: the underworld. He began as a self-employed gambler, briefly worked as a casino dealer in Denver, then returned to Chicago to take over the city’s lucrative bolita racket—a lottery-style game popular in Latin American and Asian communities. By 1949, his operation was bringing in as much as $200,000 a week.
He wasn’t just a successful numbers man. He was paying $3,000 a week in protection money to crooked Chicago police officers, cultivating political connections, and managing the Outfit’s gambling interests among Puerto Rican, Black, and Asian clients. This placed Eto in a unique and powerful position in the North Side crew, overseen by Outfit bosses Joseph “Caesar” DiVarco and Vincent Solano.
The Rise of “Tokyo Joe”: The Outfit’s Crown Jewel
The Outfit valued money above all else, and Eto produced it in spades. According to journalist John “Bulldog” Drummond, Eto “seemed like a mild-mannered guy… but he was a good provider. He produced money, and that’s the name of the game with those guys.”
Yet his rise within a traditionally Italian-American criminal empire was exceptional. Most “outsiders” in the Outfit were white. Eto was not. His ability to draw millions from minority communities gave him rare clout—and also suspicion.
“He was known to be as high-ranking as one could be in the Chicago Outfit, as high-ranking as a non-Sicilian could be,” says Jeremy Margolis, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois from 1973 to 1984. “He was known, he was trusted. He was in the inner circle. And he was the most prolific numbers boss that the Chicago Outfit had.”
The Outfit owned the night in Chicago. There was no force greedier, nor icier in their greed. While their New York brethren favored flashier, public gunfire, the Outfit preferred to deal death quietly — forced disappearances, the fear and dread of the missing’s loved ones confirmed only weeks, months, years later, when an abandoned car in some godforsaken neighborhood finally got popped open. “Trunk music,” as they called it.
“The sole goal of organized crime is to enrich the members. That’s all they care about,” says John J. Binder, author of Al Capone’s Beer Wars. And, while not Italian, Ken Eto was one of its biggest moneymakers. Eto’s lofty position in the Chicago underworld was unusual for an outsider, but the syndicate had always been more farsighted than other crime families in promoting gangsters of other ethnicities.
It was less a mark of tolerance than proof of its ambition. Ever since Capone first employed his squad of “American Boys” — a gang of Midwestern killers who looked more like police officers than Mafia hit men — non-Italians had occupied important positions in the Outfit. But all these men had been white. Ken Eto was not. And he wasn’t some despised underling; he was one of the bosses.
Eto was with the North Side crew, a crown jewel of the Outfit’s Chicago holdings, based out of the Rush Street nightlife strip. “He looked after the mob’s gambling interests, particularly,” says legendary reporter John “Bulldog” Drummond, the former resident “mobologist” at CBS-2. Chief among Eto’s illicit enterprises was bolita, a lottery game similar to the longer-established policy racket and hugely popular within Chicago’s growing Latin American community.By the early 1980s, the Outfit was under increased scrutiny from the FBI. Eto’s world began to fray in 1980, when special agent Elaine Smith accidentally knocked on his door during a surveillance operation. Smith was struck by Eto’s quiet charisma and his paradoxical gentleness, and she made him a project. After months of gathering intelligence, the FBI finally raided Eto’s operation at a Holiday Inn in Melrose Park.
Even then, Eto maintained his cool. He didn’t confess. He didn’t panic. He was going to do time. But not for long.
The Setup: A Hit Gone Wrong
By early 1983, the Outfit grew nervous. Eto had been convicted and was due to be sentenced in a few weeks. Solano, DiVarco, and others feared that Eto—facing prison—might turn informant.
On 10 February 1983, Eto received a call. He was to meet Johnny Gattuso and Jasper “Jay” Campise that night, then join Solano for dinner. Eto understood what this meant.
He told his wife Mary Lou to retrieve their pawn slips by the following week. He showed her the life insurance policy. And then, dressed in his finest, he walked into the cold night air, knowing it might be the last time he left his house.
In his black ’76 Torino coupe, Eto drove Campise and Gattuso to a secluded area near the Montclare Theatre. Once parked, Gattuso pulled out a .22 and fired three times into Eto’s head.
Incredibly, all three bullets failed to penetrate his skull. Bleeding heavily, but still conscious, Eto slumped over, mimicking death. Once the hitmen fled, he crawled to a pharmacy on Grand Avenue.
“I’ve been shot,” he told the pharmacist, Morris Robinson. “Call me an ambulance.”
From Marked Man to Star Witness: Operation Sun-Up
The FBI swarmed the hospital where Eto was recovering. He was alive—and ready to talk. In a now-legendary exchange with federal prosecutor Jeremy Margolis, Eto was told: “They didn’t trust you because you’re not like them… You owe them nothing.”
That same night, Eto flipped. He named Gattuso and Campise, and eventually implicated over a dozen mobsters, including corrupt police officers. His cooperation launched “Operation Sun-Up,” one of the most sweeping crackdowns on the Chicago Outfit in decades.
Gattuso and Campise were arrested but never made it to trial. In July 1983, they were both tortured and then murdered for failing to kill Eto and for putting the mob in a vulnerable position with the FBI. The failed attempt on Eto's life was blamed on an insufficient amount of gunpowder in the bullet cartridges. The two would-be assassins had handloaded their own ammunition to reduce their chances of being traced to the murder attempt.
The following images show what agents uncovered from the trunk. It was “trunk music,” mob-style.
Eto, ended up in witness protection under the name “Joe Tanaka,” continued cooperating for years. His evidence helped convict major figures like Joey “The Clown” Lombardo and Joey Aiuppa. Even notorious murders from the 1950s—like that of Santiago “Chavo” Gonzalez—were finally solved with Eto’s testimony.
Ken Eto's Final Years
In retirement, Eto moved to Georgia, then Hawaii, and finally settled in suburban Atlanta. He lived a quiet life, enjoying fishing, fast food, coffee, and time with his grandchildren. He died on 23 January 2004, aged 84.
His death was not reported publicly for over two years. His obituary, under his alias Joe Tanaka, merely described him as a restaurant owner.
But for those who knew his story, Eto’s life was far more than that. His son, Steve Eto, still bears the emotional imprint of a father who lived in the shadows but never fully left them behind.
“My dad was someone you didn’t mess with,” Steve once said. “And I do love him and I do respect him.”
Conclusion: The Man Who Wouldn’t Die
Ken Eto’s life reads like noir fiction—a gangster with a samurai code, a hit that failed against all odds, and a blood-soaked redemption story that helped dismantle one of America’s most powerful crime syndicates.
His tale reminds us that the world of organised crime is not just populated by archetypes in fedoras or cigar-chomping thugs. Sometimes, the most dangerous man in the room is the one you don’t see coming. The one who takes three bullets to the head—and lives to talk.
Sources
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation archives
“Operation Sun-Up” trial documents
Elaine Smith, Memoirs of an FBI Agent
Jeremy Margolis, personal testimony
Chicago Tribune & Chicago Sun-Times archives
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, obituary for “Joe Tanaka”
Oral history interviews with Steve Eto