is a retired yakuza. The US Treasury department put him on a watch-list in December 2015 and he is still engaged in criminal activity. He is also considered to be bankrolling the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi which split from the 100 year old Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest crime group, on August 27, 2015. He was the founding head of the Goto-gumi, a Fujinomiya-based affiliate of Japan's largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi. Goto, who has been convicted at least nine times, was a prominent yakuza and at one point the most powerful crime boss in Tokyo, even being dubbed the "John Gotti of Japan". Goto was once claimed to have been the largest shareholder in Japan Airlines, but this was disputed by stock exchange filings. He had been barred from entering the United States until 2001 when he got a special visa deal from the FBI for a life-saving liver transplant at a time of pronounced organ scarcity. Career overview According to his autobiography, Goto was born in Ebara, Tokyo, as the youngest of four brothers. After the beginning of the Pacific War, of World War II, he moved to his father's hometown Fujinomiya, Shizuoka at age two when his mother died. He was raised by his grandmother and grew up in poverty. After a period as a street thug in Fujinomiya, his yakuza career officially began in 1972, at age 28, when he joined a tertiary Yamaguchi-affiliate based in Fujinomiya. Goto was rapidly promoted, and in 1985 he formed his own yakuza group, the Goto-gumi, in Fujinomiya as a secondary affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi. He entered the Kobe headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi in its 4th era (1984–1985), and had been in the headquarters until 2008 when he was expelled. FBI scandal In 2001, after dealing with the FBI, he entered the United States to receive a liver transplant, and gave a $100,000 donation to the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Goto got his new liver, from a queue-jumping transplant, in a year when 186 people in the Los Angeles region died waiting for a liver. The Los Angeles hospital provided altogether four Japanese gang figures with liver transplants over a period when several hundred local patients died while awaiting transplants. Goto continued to receive medical care from his world-renowned liver surgeon Dr. Ronald Busuttil in Japan. Busuttil flew to Japan and examined Goto on more than one occasion, said Goto’s Tokyo-based lawyer,