King Con

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.