A senior member of the group and an affiliated gang member were sentenced to prison for the 1992 slashing of a Japanese director whose film portrayed the yakuza as violent thugs, according to a story in the Japan Times. Goto was not personally implicated in the case.
Goto underwent a successful transplant in July 2001. He received the liver of a young man who died in a traffic accident, Maki said. "Goto is over 60 now, but his liver is young," he said.
Several years after the transplant, in May 2006, Goto was arrested in Japan on suspicion of real estate fraud.
Maki said he and other lawyers worried that their client was not well enough to be interrogated. In addition to his liver problem, Goto was suffering from heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
The lawyers asked that Goto be released immediately, but authorities rejected the request, Maki said. He said the lawyers asked that Goto be given his medication at precise times, but that did not happen either. "Goto lost his appetite, had a terrible headache, scratched his arm until it started to get infected, and he was throwing up," Maki said.
Maki used the interview to vent against Japanese prosecutors, saying he believes they were attempting to exploit his client's poor health to obtain a conviction on what Maki considered groundless charges.
He said Busuttil, along with doctors from Tokyo University Hospital and Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, examined Goto and recommended that he be released for outside medical treatment.
On May 24, 2006, some 16 days after he was arrested, the court temporarily released Goto and he entered the hospital.
Goto was acquitted of the charges in March of this year.
"The UCLA doctor [Busuttil] examined Goto during his detention and again one week after he received his not-guilty ruling," Maki said.
The law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Goto's criminal history includes prison time. But Maki said that his client's last conviction was three decades ago, for assault, and that his previous convictions were as a youth.
Court records in Japan are kept by prosecutors who generally do not share them with anyone not party to a case.
Jake Adelstein, a former reporter at Japan's largest daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, said he received a tip about the circumstances surrounding Goto's liver transplant in 2005. Within days of making inquiries, however, Adelstein was visited by men who told him: "Erase the story or be erased," he said in an interview.
