King Con
By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
TIME Asia Magazine
June 2, 2002

Would-be tycoon Genta Ogami claimed he was out to save the world, but disciples who bought his outlandish image are the ones needing to be saved

Last September, a few days after buying a bank in the Philippines, Japanese businessman Genta Ogami arrived at its Manila headquarters and summoned his top executives. Clad as usual in head-to-toe Versace, Ogami informed his newly appointed Japanese officers how the local staff should be introduced to their new boss. "I want you to tell them there is but one messiah, and he is Genta Ogami," he declared, his surgically enhanced face conveying dead seriousness. He turned to Kensuke Inoue, a trusted associate whom he had installed as bank president, saying, "At this point, I want the speech to hit an emotional peak." Ogami then asked, "Do you think you could start to cry?"

Coming from anyone else, the suggestion would have been dismissed as ludicrous. "But this wasn't at all an abnormal request," says Inoue. "This was Ogami. This was business as usual." In reality, there was little that was usual about Ogami and the Asian empire he created by trading on his own hugely hyped public image. Over seven years, Ogami built up a private Tokyo-based company, G.O. Group, that ostensibly sold merchandise like weight-loss tea and electric juicers. In fact, it appears to have existed primarily to feed his ego while bilking investors out of their savings. The company is now bankrupt, and police are investigating Ogami for swindling hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. "The whole business—all of it—was baloney," says Inoue.

It was spectacularly beguiling baloney, breathtaking in scope. An estimated 90,000 individuals in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia became G.O. "members," investing in the firm's schemes based on promises they could double or triple their savings. Until his operation unraveled earlier this year, Ogami, 39, had collected a total of $400 million, according to former G.O. Group executives, which he used to finance a lavish lifestyle, expand overseas and buy the offshore bank in the Philippines. He even financed his own action movie, Blades of the Sun, featuring himself in the starring role playing opposite a Filipina starlet.

To gain investor trust and employee loyalty, Ogami deliberately set about developing his own cult of personality. In daily business meetings, his employees were forced to chant his pithy sayings from what he called "the messiah's creed"; those who balked risked getting the sack. Like a video-age Wizard of Oz, Ogami projected to the public a larger-than-life—and largely fictional—image of himself in reams of expensively produced promotional material. He marketed himself as one-part Jet Li and one-part Mohandas Gandhi, a martial arts expert with a cartoon catchphrase: "I will save the world."

Interviews with former friends and associates as well as an archive of self-promoting videos reveal a man whose self-perception veered comically from reality. Despite declaring physical prowess on a par with Arnold Schwarzenegger, at 1.64 meters tall he had to stand on a box to perform pull-ups. He spoke in a stammer unvanquished by regular practice before a mirror. Raised in a farm-dotted suburb of Fukuoka by a truck-driver dad and homemaker mom, he attended the vocational Fukuoka Manufacturing High School so sporadically that he flunked the 10th grade. What he lacked in stature and accomplishment was offset by chutzpah. Classmates remember him for his confidence and catchy name, which means great god in Japanese. "He was bossy and popular," recalls Norihide Fujise, a former classmate. "Ogami wasn't a stand-out baseball player, for instance, but he talked such a good game that the guys on the team liked to have him around." To protest a disciplinary action by teachers over his skipping school, Ogami showed up in class out of uniform with a cigarette dangling from his lips—a stunt that got him expelled. "Even then he liked a performance," says Fujise.

Ogami started his first business at the age of 19 installing water pipes in Fukuoka. Locals says he won clients by dramatically undercutting rivals' bids, and guarded his customer base by encouraging rumors of his involvement with mobsters and motorcycle gangs. After reportedly running up massive debts he fled to Tokyo, where he launched a number of ventures that fell into a pattern: Ogami collected fees for services and goods that he would later simply stop delivering. In one enterprise, he advertised cheap shopping trips to Hong Kong. In another, he allegedly raked in millions of dollars selling an anti-cellulite cream before he was nabbed by police—and let off with a small fine.

Ogami's crowning achievement began in 1995, when he started G.O. Group, registering it as an advertising and marketing company that produced infomercials and catalogs hawking typical shopping-channel fare: $73 leakproof underpants, $125 decorative clocks, $200 electric tweezers. G.O. Group solicited seniors and homemakers to enlist as "members" by promising lush returns if they agreed to finance production of his infomercials. Those "were made not to sell merchandise but to convince members this was a legitimate business," says Takashi Yoshioka, G.O. Group's former head of finance. "The truth is we really only ever had one business, and that was collecting money from members."

As cash flowed in, G.O Group moved into glitzy Tokyo offices with a life-size oil painting of a bare-chested Ogami in the lobby. Members received books and newspapers crammed with his spiritual musings. His glossy catalogs featured photo spreads of him demonstrating "Ogami-style jujitsu." He filmed infomercials starring himself slicing bamboo with a sword and lifting a car while wearing tiny, black briefs. He printed calendars and posters of himself windsurfing or playing piano, with copy declaring him "Japan's coolest guy, surpassing Kimutaku (actor and singer Takuya Kimura) in popularity."

And people believed. With her husband out of work and their daughter approaching college age, Kumiko Otsuka, a 50-year-old homemaker, was paging through the want ads in 1999. A notice from G.O. Group dangled an opportunity to earn big bucks from home. Soon after Otsuka responded, a book arrived. It was beautifully bound in navy silk and explained how G.O. Group's magnanimous, heroic chairman would use his huge profits to save the world. "He seemed admirable to me," says Otsuka. Her husband smelled a scam, but Otsuka invested her family's savings of $125,000 after learning of G.O. Group's miraculous new product, Uniba-G Tea. Made of banaba leaf from the Philippines, Ogami touted the tea as a revolutionary cure for obesity and diabetes. He spared no expense to exploit its marketing potential, hiring Jean-Claude Van Damme to appear in the Uniba-G TV commercial, in which the action star chugs the tea and kickboxes punks. Though the ad aired only a handful of times, the endorsement of Ogami's "close personal friend" received prominent play in the promotional material sent to investors. Another centerpiece of the campaign was a slick mini movie that G.O. Group distributed to tens of thousands of members, depicting Ogami on an urgent mission to find banaba leaves in the Philippine jungle. Ogami regularly halts the hunt to strike kung fu poses in his boxer shorts.

Ogami deified himself not just to investors but to his swelling staff, which at one point totaled roughly 800 people. G.O. Group closely resembled a cult, with staffers beating on a taiko drum and chanting Ogami's 10 commandments at daily meetings. Every Monday, they viewed his weekly video address, in which he stuttered gems like "follow the path of truth" while dressed in a fresh Versace outfit. Employees then had to write reviews of that day's performance. Ogami read these diligently, and had underlings seek out authors of bad reviews for scoldings. Workers were made to sit in rivers in the lotus position and stand in the rain shouting Ogami's commandments. He took the stage on these outings, rambling for hours about the Japanese spirit and the country's honorable role in World War II. "We all shut up and stuck it out because we needed the salary," sighs Toshinori Nakajima, an executive appointed acting president before he quit last fall. "No one actually believed in any of the stuff."

At one time, that was true of Ogami, too. When Inoue, the Philippine bank's erstwhile president, met him in Manila in 1998, Ogami came across as a boyishly enthusiastic entrepreneur who laughed about the persona he played. "He didn't believe the stuff about being a messiah or anything," says Inoue. "It was all just a marketing ploy."

But distinctions between reality and marketing began to blur when Ogami went Hollywood. By 2001, his operations included a subsidiary called G. Cosmos that had gathered 20,000 members in the Philippines and 30,000 in Indonesia, collecting about $1 million in each country. G.O. Group was preparing to launch in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. To spread his name around the region, Ogami began production of his long-nurtured dream: an action movie starring himself.

In the $5 million feature, set in the Philippines, he plays a character named Genta Ogami who receives a divine calling to find banaba tea. Along the way he tracks down the kidnapped father of the film's love interest, played by Joyce Jimenez, a buxom star of Philippine movies. Ogami, in heavy makeup, dodges bullets and wields samurai swords among a cast of 1,000 to defend the country from the white man. "He did well for a first-timer," insists director Toto Natividad, whose resume lists 45 Philippine action films. But while close-ups make clear the physical training and cosmetic surgery Ogami underwent for the role, he had apparently decided against acting lessons. "His name is Genta Ogami," rumbles the voice-over on the trailer. "Master swordsman, a man with a mission to fight evil in a foreign land."

In real life, Ogami's mission in the Philippines centered on women and money. Associates say he had met two Filipinas working as hostesses in Japanese bars, acquiring one as his second wife (he was divorced from the first) and the other as his mistress. He bought a gated mansion with a pool in Manila's ritzy Ayala Alabang neighborhood, hired eight bodyguards and began looking for ways to do business there. A mutual acquaintance introduced Ogami to Inoue, whom Ogami hired to launch G. Cosmos in 1999. "His next plan was to get his money out of Japan by buying an overseas bank," claims Inoue, "then use it as his own piggy bank." In September 2001, G.O. Group purchased a $13 million thrift bank called Unitrust.

It was a glorious time. "Money was pouring in," says Nakajima, the former acting president of G.O. Group. "He'd made a movie. He'd even bought a bank. His face was on billboards around the Philippines, and his name was becoming known throughout Asia. He must have thought, 'Look what I've accomplished. I am great, after all. I am a star.' Then, things stopped going according to his plans."

Ogami's hilarious bumblings over the following months bring to mind Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers sequel—hilarious, that is, if not for the fact that they torpedoed a bank serving 18,000 poor Filipinos. G.O. Group had raised the cash to buy Unitrust by selling unregistered bonds in Japan. He loaned the proceeds to dummy local owners to make the purchase, says Inoue, in order to sidestep Philippine laws prohibiting majority foreign ownership of banks. Ogami announced his September 2001 takeover by posting his face on billboards around Manila and running a two-page newspaper ad offering jobs at three times the going salaries. He ordered Citibank pamphlets photocopied, its logo replaced with that of the new "Bank of Ogami." He demanded fat personal loans, says Inoue, threw parties on the bank's dime, and had Genta Ogami figurines created as gifts for customers.

Instead of inspiring confidence, his behavior caused a bank run. Startled depositors yanked their accounts, and Philippine staffers—not inclined to swallow the weird, cultish rituals Ogami's officers tried to impose—quit in droves. Unitrust was forced to close its doors this January. With the bank in receivership, thousands of remaining depositors are unable to access their funds. "I'm about to lose hope," says one, whose account held all his earnings from years of labor abroad. Rafael Buenaventura, governor of the Philippines central bank, concedes, "This is a clear case of our weak regulatory environment."

The demise of the Philippine bank got Ogami noticed in Japan. The press and the police began probing his dealings. His last public appearance was at a Tokyo press conference this January, held to announce his movie's imminent arrival in theaters around Asia. Instead, a swarm of journalists sprayed him with questions about the Unitrust bank and the police investigation. Wearing a diaphanous black shirt that showed off his physique, Ogami denied any wrongdoing. With the box office receipts from his surefire blockbuster, he insisted, "I'll pay the money back." The film has yet to be screened in a single theater.

The game was finally ending. Furious investors unleashed a maelstrom of lawsuits against G.O. Group. In March, police raided its Tokyo offices. In April, G.O. Group was forced into bankruptcy. Ogami has yet to be arrested but the investigation continues; the onetime self-promoter now is unavailable for interviews. Associates, including Inoue, claim Ogami still hides a personal net worth of at least $5 million, but the company's known assets—including real estate and Ogami's fleet of cars—have been seized. All that's left at G.O. Group's Tokyo headquarters is a mountain of discarded telephones stacked by the glass doors.

What remains is the mystery of how a character like Ogami managed to inspire trust in so many for so long. Francis Yuseco, the Philippine banker who negotiated the Unitrust deal, marvels, "I really thought he would help our country. But he turned out to be just a con artist." Indeed, that was the one activity at which Genta Ogami—kung fu master, movie star, savior of the world—truly excelled.

With reporting by Nelly Sindayen/Manila and Michiko Toyama/Tokyo