Yamaguchi-Gumi Run Like Any Other Large Business : Crime: With 30,000 employees, diverse investments and monthly meetings, the Japanese gang is a $10-billion-a-year syndicate--and growing.

The Yamaguchi-gumi bosses operate like board members of any other large enterprise, gathering at the head office regularly to discuss strategies and profits.

Their business is crime. They run what may be the world’s most organized underworld syndicate.

“If you were to look at the Yamaguchi-gumi as a company, it would be one of the biggest in the nation, with 30,000 employees and branches all over the country,” said Yukio Yamanouchi, its chief lawyer. “When their boss gives an order, it is obeyed.”

Yamaguchi-gumi operations reach from gambling and extortion to real estate and stock speculation. Legal and illegal business brings in up to $10 billion a year.

As the huge syndicate enters a sixth year of unprecedented expansion, its outlook appears as bright as the diamond-shaped logo displayed above the entrance to nearly all its 800 branches.

Police say that the Yamaguchi-gumi, founded in 1915 by Harukichi Yamaguchi, has grown from about 6,000 members in 1985 to 26,000, adding nearly 4,000 members in 1990 alone. Gumi means gang in Japanese.

Yamanouchi, who was arrested on suspicion of attempted extortion in late February, put the membership closer to 30,000, or one-third of the police estimate of all gang members in Japan.

Atop the pyramid-style hierarchy is Yoshinori Watanabe, 50, who Yamanouchi said grew up on a farm and joined a gang in Tokyo as a young man.

Below Watanabe is an “executive committee” of the top 12 underbosses.

They meet on the fifth day of each month at gang headquarters in Kobe, a west coast port city near Tokyo.

Afterward, they are joined for a strategy meeting by most of the 92 “direct bosses,” each the chief of a sub-gang. Four of those gangs have more than 3,000 members.

“Usually, about 70% of all the bosses attend the meetings,” Yamanouchi said in an interview. “If they can’t make it in person, they make sure a personal representative does.”

Each of the top 104 bosses pays a monthly membership fee of $8,000 into a kitty to cover the syndicate’s operating expenses, a gang source said. Watanabe does not have to contribute.

That amounts to $9.6 million a year, which the source said goes for funeral gifts, parties, succession ceremonies and the cost of waging turf wars with rival gangs. He said the cost of the wars nearly doubled in three years.

The Yamaguchi-gumi expansion was achieved through a series of such wars aimed at either absorbing or destroying smaller gangs.

Gangland violence has increased since Watanabe became the syndicate’s fifth boss two years ago, including wars on the southern island of Okinawa; in Osaka, a Yamaguchi-gumi stronghold, and in Sapporo on Japan’s northern frontier.

Boldness also has marked the syndicate’s business activities.

A gang affiliated with the No. 2 boss bought enough shares last summer to become the second-largest stockholder in one of Japan’s best-known textile companies.

Yamanouchi said the company, Kurabo Industries, recently bought back the shares, valued at $157 million. He would not say how much profit the gang made.

Tokyo police formed a special unit in February to deal with possible expansion of the Yamaguchi-gumi in the capital, a relatively weak area for the syndicate until now.

Expansion in Tokyo is “inevitable,” Yamanouchi said.