King Con

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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.