Two charged in smuggling of ex-Nissan boss
Bay State men accused of sneaking auto exec out of Japan in box
WASHINGTON — A former Green Beret and his son were arrested Wednesday in Harvard on charges they smuggled Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn out of Japan in a box while he awaited trial there on financial misconduct charges.
Michael Taylor, 59, and Peter Taylor, 27, are wanted by Japan on charges they helped Ghosn escape in December after he was released on bail.
The Taylors were arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service in Harvard. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Hassink said Japan plans “as quickly as possible” to submit a formal request to extradite the Taylors.
The escape plot began on Dec. 28, 2019, when Peter Taylor arrived in Japan and met with Ghosn at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo for about an hour, authorities said.
The next day, Michael Taylor flew into Osaka on a chartered jet from Dubai with George-Antoine Zayek, lugging big black boxes.
The elder Taylor previously has been hired by parents to rescue abducted children, gone undercover for the FBI in a sting on a Massachusetts drug gang and worked as a contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last assignment had landed him in a Utah jail for 14 months in a federal contract fraud case that upended Taylor’s family and finances before he agreed to plead guilty to two charges.
Taylor and Zayek, his Lebanese-born colleague, told Japanese airport employees they were musicians carrying audio equipment. Meanwhile, Ghosn, who was out on bail, headed to the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo and met up with Peter Taylor there, authorities said.
The elder Taylor and Zayek joined after a brief stop to rent a separate room near the airport. And soon after their arrival, the group left the Grand Hyatt and split up.
Peter Taylor caught a flight to China, court documents said. The others went back to the luxury hotel near the airport where Taylor and Zayek had booked a room earlier in the day.
They all went in; only two would be seen walking out.
Authorities say Ghosn was inside one of the big black boxes, lugged by the two men to Japan’s Kansai International Airport, authorities said. The boxes passed through a security checkpoint without being checked and were loaded onto a private jet headed for Turkey, the documents say.
At 11:10 p.m., the chartered Bombardier, its windows fitted with pleated shades, lifted off with Ghosn stowed aboard. The flight went first to Turkey, then to Lebanon, where Ghosn has citizenship but which has no extradition treaty with Japan.
Two days later, Ghosn announced publicly he was in Lebanon.
He said he fled because he could not expect a fair trial, was subjected to unfair conditions in detention and was barred from meeting his wife under his bail conditions.