JAPAN: Red Swindle

Back in 1952, Shigeru Murai, a natty, smooth-talking member of a well-to-do Tokyo merchant family, joined the staff of the Nippon Textile Research Institute, a respected outfit set up by the textile industry to study market research and improve designs. Two years later, Shigeru Murai resigned and opened a new textile sales company just across the street from the institute in the heart of Tokyo's business district. Flashing the institute's name and his career there to get credit, the smiling and ever-courteous Murai bought large quantities of textile and paper supplies for wholesale distribution throughout Japan.

A year ago, unpaid creditors began to complain to police that they had been swindled. Checking, police found that Murai had run up $400,000 in unpaid bills, and had no visible assets. They also found that Murai and 36 of his 40 employees were hard-shell Communists, and that, thanks to the astute Murai's maneuvering, the seemingly respectable Nippon Institute was now Communist-controlled. Last week, confronted with the facts, Murai confessed that the party, hard pressed for funds after General MacArthur drove it underground in 1950, had decided to set up a string of phony companies on credit, sell goods quickly for all the. cash they could get, and funnel the money into the party chest. Their first move in what they called "Operation Truck Corps" was to get control of the Nippon Institute, chiefly through Murai. Then they set up a network of trading firms, all using the institute's reputation to drum up business. So far, police investigators have turned up 100 Communist-run companies operating on the same line as-Murai's outfit. All will be charged with embezzlement, but with card-holding "businessmen" clamming up in every case, police doubt that they can bring the Communist Party itself to court for bagging all the boodle.