‘I can only bow to the will of heaven, but not to the will of these men’ (Eiji Yoshikawa, The Heike Story)¹

In 2019 a Brazilian-born businessman of Lebanese origin fled his home in Tokyo and escaped to Beirut via Turkey – using his French passport.

Surely the ultimate global citizen or ‘Davos Man’, Carlos Ghosn has lived and worked in four continents and is able to speak French, Portuguese, English and Arabic fluently with a smattering of Japanese. A year earlier he had been riding high as chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, the world’s largest automobile group. His life suddenly turned upside down with his surprise arrest and ensnarement within the Japanese criminal justice system in November 2018. Later a fugitive on the run despite bearing one of the country’s most recognised faces, Ghosn escaped Japan with the help of an American private security contractor and his team. In doing so he would pull off a remarkable feat, which not only returned him his liberty but also turned the tables on his accusers.

Ghosn was under house arrest in the city. His home monitored by CCTV cameras, though his extraction team somehow discovered that the footage was not being watched live but only examined a few days later. His bail conditions permitted Ghosn to leave his house to go to specified locations but plain clothes detectives followed him everywhere. However, the team also noticed the police failed to follow Ghosn into hotels. Another exploitable error.

Sunday 29 December 2019 was the day of Ghosn’s escape. It was the sleepiest time possible, the weekend before the start of the New Year’s holiday. Michael Taylor, the leader of the team, flew into Osaka on a chartered jet with another man named George Antoine-Zayek carrying two large black speaker boxes and pretending to be musicians with audio equipment. Upon arrival, they headed to the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo where they met the third member of the team, Peter Taylor (Michael’s son), who played a peripheral role in the escape before leaving Japan separately, via a flight to China.

Michael Taylor was born in Staten Island, New York. He became a US Army elite Green Beret and in the 1980s was dispatched to Lebanon during its civil war. He assisted the Christian militias after the 1982 Israeli invasion and Syrian sponsored assassination of President-Elect Bachir Gemayel. Taylor forged longstanding links with the Christian community, learning Arabic and helping to train their forces. He met his future wife in Lebanon, later marrying her in 1985. Taylor and his wife settled back in the US (in the farming town of Harvard, Massachusetts – not to be confused with the university town). A ‘black-ops’ type who made a career out of arranging complicated and often very risky overseas rescues among other missions. According to a profile onVanity Fair², he has orchestrated nearly two dozen escape operations, charging clients anywhere between $20,000 to $2 million per job.

In 2012, he was sentenced to 24 months in prison for a bribery scheme involving $54 million in US defence department contracts whilst on assignment in Afghanistan. After his release, Taylor was trying to rebuild his security career and his finances. Understandably, he was considered the perfect choice for the Ghosn extraction job by the beleaguered former CEO’s associates in the Middle East who hired him.

Upon receiving a text on his burner phone containing the date, time and location of his rendezvous with Taylor, Ghosn left his Tokyo apartment at around 2:30 pm and went to the nearby Hyatt Hotel where he was allowed to have lunch. Instead of returning home, Ghosn took the lift to room 933 where Taylor and Zayek were waiting for him. To conceal his identity, he was given a surgical facemask (popular in the Far East even before the onset of Covid-19). With his dark hair and complexion, it would not be immediately obvious to onlookers he was a “gaijin” (foreigner).

The three men left the Hyatt by a side entrance and drove to Tokyo’s main railway station, taking the 4:30 pm bullet train to Osaka. From there, they went to the Star Gate Hotel near the city’s Kansai Airport where Michael Taylor had booked a room. Inside, Ghosn climbed into one of the speaker boxes (which had breathing holes drilled into the bottom) and Taylor locked it.

At just after 8:00 pm, minutes before their flight’s scheduled departure time, the team hurried in to Kansai Airport’s private terminal. Taylor had deliberately chosen the airport because its X-ray scanner was too small to fit larger items. As anticipated, the security staff waved the box concealing Ghosn through the terminal and onto the conveyer belt without first checking it. The team’s plane was a Bombardier Global Express private jet with Turkish registration and windows fitted with pleated shades. It left Kansai Airport for Istanbul with Ghosn aboard at 11:10 p.m.

Ghosn knew the first part of the plan had succeeded when the plane took off. He recalled upon subsequent interview withJohn Arlidge³that the sound of the cargo doors closing with him on board was like “the noise of crazy hope”. Once the flight was airborne, Taylor opened the door from the main cabin into the cargo bay and unlocked the box to let Ghosn out.

The pilot took the longer journey to Turkey over Russia to avoid flying across countries that have an extradition treaty with Japan. This is a fairly standard route for a private jet that minimises the number of national overflight permits needed and fees that would have to be paid. The flight path did not arouse suspicion.

The plane landed at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport 5:26 am on the morning of 30 December 2019. A quiet facility handling only military, private, cargo and diplomatic flights since the opening of the new Istanbul Airport in October 2018. Taylor had arranged for a local Turkish aircraft operator named MNG to look the other way at the private air terminal (which is supposed to scan all arrivals) while Ghosn walked across the tarmac and onto a second private plane destined for Beirut. An employee at MNG would later admit to falsifying passenger records, and MNG would in turn later claim that they had been duped by this ‘rogue’ member of staff.

Fortunately for Ghosn, by the time of his arrival in Istanbul the Japanese police had still not realised he had not returned to his house from the Hyatt Hotel. He was able to disembark from the first plane and walk up the steps of the second plane that was waiting for him and tell the flight attendant to“close up and go”⁴. Approximately one hour later at around 6:00 am local time, Ghosn’s plane landed at the VIP Pavilion on the northern edge of Rafic Hariri Airport in Beirut. Ghosn disembarked and got through immigration using his French passport that the Japanese authorities had inexplicably allowed him to keep (in a pouch with a special security seal) despite confiscating his Brazilian and Lebanese passports. Another shockingly lax arrangement.

At 6:10 am Ghosn’s wife Carole was woken up in Beirut by a telephone call from a friend and told of a surprise waiting for her. Later that morning, she saw her husband stepping out of a black Mercedes. Their long separation was over. Another of Ghosn’s high stakes gambles had paid off. If he had been caught, the 65-year-old would almost certainly have been convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail.

Promote Fox a company linked to the Taylors was paid approximately $1 million for their assistance. The entire operation probably cost several millions more, and having forfeited bail Ghosn lost an additional $14 million. As a very wealthy man, this was a price he could easily afford and was very willing to pay in return for his freedom. With the passage of time however it became clear that many of those associated with Ghosn’s dramatic escape would not be so lucky.