[imagesource: Flickr]

Michael Taylor and his son Peter went above and beyond to smuggle the auto executive Carlos Ghosn out of Japan in December 2019.

But it cost the father-and-son team who pulled off “one of the most daring escape acts in business history”, per Bloomberg, just about everything to do so.

Ghosn, the former chairman of the car-making alliance between Nissan Motor Co., Renault SA and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., was arrested in 2018 for alleged financial fraud.

He faced possible prison time in Japan but he turned to Michael and his ex-military, private-security skills and expertise to get him out of the sticky situation.

Micheal is the kind of dude who rescued abducted children and others in trouble as a side hustle to his usual military antics and US government investigations.

Little did Michael know that he would be exchanging his freedom for Ghosn’s on that fateful night on December 29, 2019.

The plan was elaborate and well executed and only Michael could possibly have pulled it off.

As a former US Army Green Beret, he led a team to sneak Ghosn through the Kansai International Airport security in an audio-equipment box, then onto a private jet bound for Istanbul, and then from there, a separate plane that took him safely to Lebanon.

While Ghosn has remained cocooned in the country of his childhood, which doesn’t extradite its citizens, Michael, 62, and his 29-year-old son, Peter, have been battling the Japanese legal system.

In May 2020, Michael and Peter were arrested in Harvard, Massachusetts, with Japan formally requesting their extradition in July. This is the timeline that followed:

2021
February: Taylors lose extradition appeal
March: Transferred to Japan
March 22: Formally charged by Japanese prosecutors
June 14: Taylors plead guilty in court
July: Michael sentenced to two years, Peter sentenced to 20 months

Their term included eight hours of interrogations every day, aggressive prosecutorial tactics, and long stretches in solitary confinement in mouldy cells with irregular showers and no personal phone calls. Micheal wasn’t even allowed to call his ill father, who died during his prison term.

Then in October 2022, they were transferred back to the US, held in LA Metropolitan Detention Center, and both released in November.

The ordeal is far from over for the Taylors though, who are owed money by Ghosn:

Fresh from detention, the senior Taylor is reaching out to his former client, seeking to revisit the financial arrangements for the James Bond-style extraction mission, which he claims Ghosn has partially paid and totaled more than $1.3 million.

On top of that, Michael says he’s seeking roughly $3 million more to cover legal fees spent fighting extradition and navigating Japan’s judicial system—a fair ask, in his view, given the personal price he and his son paid to secure Ghosn’s freedom.

Ghosn apparently promised, while sitting on the big black box used to smuggle him out of Japan, that he would definitely take care of the Taylors and repay them for giving him a new lease on life.

Somehow Micheal seems relatively chilled in this aftermath, and hopes that Ghosn will not break his promise:

He’s hoping to meet him in Beirut soon. How he responds, said Taylor, “will tell me a lot about him as a human being.”

Ghosn, one of the world’s most famous fugitives, has acknowledged that the “human cost has been tremendous” and says he is not the kind of person who goes back on his word, especially when someone has helped him to this extent.

Anyway, this is all now the stuff of a Netflix documentary and inevitable Hollywood film.

Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn is on the streamer now.

[source:bloomberg]