The Devil Takes Bitcoin is Longlisted for Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

The wild, true story of cyber-era commerce, crime, cold-hard cash, and one of the greatest heists in history.

Even in hell, Bitcoin talks. This modern take on an old Japanese saying still holds true. Cryptocurrency was supposed to do for money what the internet did for information, but it didn’t work out that way. Its virtual existence unleashed real-world chaos — especially in the homeland of its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Tokyo was the centre of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, until that company collapsed with nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin gone missing. It might be the greatest heist in history. If it was a heist.

So what really happened? Here’s the true story of the humble-to-hot commodity, from the former geek website that launched the boom to an inside world of absent-minded CEOs, hucksters, hackers, cybercrooks, drug dealers, corrupt federal agents, evangelical libertarians, and clueless techies. You’ll discover Bitcoin’s connection to the infamous Silk Road, learn why hell has nothing on Japan’s criminal justice system, and get the lowdown on the high cost of betting with the Devil’s dollars. All of this for less than the price of a single bitcoin.

The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before.

Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese in small-town Japan with a set of talents limited to playing guitar and picking fights. With rock stardom off the table, he turns toward the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer merit, loyalty, and brute force — the yakuza.

Saigo, nicknamed Tsunami, quickly realises that even within the organisation, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.

The internal politics of the yakuza are dizzyingly complex, and between the ever-shifting web of alliances and the encroaching hand of the law that pushes them further and further underground, Saigo finds himself in the middle of a defining decades-long battle that will determine the future of the yakuza.

Written with the insight of an expert on Japanese organised crime and the compassion of a longtime friend, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein presents a sprawling biography of a yakuza, through postwar desperation, to bubble-era optimism, to the present. Including a cast of memorable yakuza bosses — Coach, the Buddha, and more — this is a story about the rise and fall of a man, a country, and a dishonest but sometimes honourable way of life on the brink of being lost.

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy — himself.

And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlours are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.

In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

Now a hit HBO Max TV series starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe & Rachel Keller

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, here is a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At the age of nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquillity. What he got was a life of crime … crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shimbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan’s most infamous yakuza boss — and with the threat of death for him and his family — Adelstein decided to step down … momentarily. Then, he fought back.

In Tokyo Vice, Adelstein tells the riveting, often humorous tale of his transformation from an inexperienced cub reporter to a daring investigative journalist with a price on his head. With its vivid, visceral descriptions of crime in Japan and candid exploration of the world of modern-day yakuza that even few Japanese ever see, Tokyo Vice is a fascination, and an education, from first to last.