A good guy, a plot that clips along.

Obviously, someone's gonna make a movie out of this.

My name is Majene.

I am a special correspondent at Vanity Fair magazine.

On This is the story of how Carlos Gustin escaped from Japan.

It's the spring of 2019.

Carlos Casson, the CEO of Nissan, is under house arrest in Tokyo, Japan.

He's awaiting trial for a variety of financial crimes, including embezzlement, using company resources to fund a lavish lifestyle.

He has apartments in Brazil, Lebanon, Tokyo as well.

In Japan, the House arrest is especially difficult for Gustin, a man who has enjoyed various privileges of which include being able to move around freely.

He is not doing very well.

Since his arrest, Japanese criminal justice system has come under scrutiny.

The conviction range is 99.4% which is meant to be a higher conviction rate than the conviction rate in North Korea.

He's realized that you know, it's entirely possible that I might be forced to stay in Tokyo for possibly all of my natural life.

And then out of the blue, he receives a phone call from Acquaintance, the man we'll call Olly.

Olly calls Ghassan and explains that I actually know a guy whose job is to get people out of sticky situations.

Would you be interested?

Gus in of course, says by all means.

Go ahead.

He is kind of anxiously excited.

This is sort of the only shot he thinks he has for leaving Japan.

Meanwhile, in America, a man named Michael Taylor, the former member of the American Special Forces, is going about his day when he receives a phone call from the same Ali Ali is an old acquaintance of Taylor.

They had met many moons ago in Iraq.

During the war, Taylor had helped Ali briefly.

Onda hadn heard from him and 10 years and was quite surprised to hear from him, adding, Girls, listen, we got a guy, He's close to us.

He's in trouble.

Can you help him out?

You know, it depends.

I need more information.

Ali is being kg.

Andi keeps prodding Taylor for yes, two.

Right now, Ali is unwilling to provide any more information, forcing Taylor to go up on his own to conduct his own research.

Taylor has since left.

The military has entered the private contracting world, which ah, lot of military men do.

You know he gets these phone calls all the time.

All Taylor knows is that the man is Lebanese very well off and is in trouble.

And it turns out that with those criteria, it's actually not too hard to find out that the man in question might be Carlos cussin.

Once Taylor figures this out, he calls Ali.

Buck Taylor ends up meeting with Carol Goossen, Carlos cousin's wife in Beirut in Lebanon.

And this is where Carroll starts explaining to tailor her version of events, which is that her husband has been unjustly persecuted in Japan.

And everything that's happened to him is a kind of a corporate ploy to get him out of a traditional Japanese company that has always been very homogeneous for a very long time.

Carol is also the one hotels Taylor about the Japanese criminal justice system.

Taylor goes away and starts doing his own research on, but he is quits, done by what he sees.

He realizes that, you know, here's an opportunity for me to write a kind of wrong.

Then he calls Ali back and says, Yes, I'll do it, I'll take the job.

So the first thing that Taylor does is to start to assemble a team.

He begins by calling his old Army buddies, and he recruits everyone from experts in airport security I t.

And police.

She's recruiting as a for heist movie.

He has his team now.

He has a deputy.

They're working to figure out what needs to be done.

There's only really two ways out of Japan, by sea or by air.

They decided against the sea option because they would take too long and be because Taylor believes that Dustin is unfit for travel for that length of time, so that leaves them with air travel.

They are unable to fly commercial because Carlos Goossen is in fact a household name and will be recognized, which leaves them with the private jet option.

So Taylor and his men are calling around all the private companies in the world to see if they might be open.

Thio harboring a fugitive on most of them currently you know politely at time, is tell them, tell them.

No.

And then they chance upon a company that has a certain reputation.

A Turkish private company that has been known to work in Venezuela, working around the American sanctions and tailor things, you know, this might be this might be our guy.

They give them a call on the jet company comes back saying, You know, we've done this before.

How can we be of service?

The next piece of the puzzle is How do you smuggle out a grown man who weighs £165?

And it turns out that eventually you get to a box.

What Taylor does is he gets to concert speaker boxes, custom made that would typically fit a concert speaker, and he ensures that both of them are big enough for Carlos gusting to fit into.

On With that, they're ready.

Cool.

So the day of the escape arrives.

Taylor and his associate, George Diaconu, old friend, who is also a colleague, flies from Dubai to Japan specifically to a soccer airport.

The private terminal there does not have a scanner that is big enough for the cargo boxes to fit through.

And, of course, this was part of Taylor's plan.

When they arrived in Osaka, they take the two cargo boxes and load them onto a van.

The van takes Taylor anxiety to a nearby hotel, where they drop off the boxes, change clothes and head for a train heading for Tokyo.

So on the train to Tokyo, Taylor's phone begins.

An unexpected software update on his first thought is I wonder if the NSC knows.

I bet they're onto me, and this is obviously a huge problem, because without his phone, he has no way of keeping in communication with the rest of this team.

So, meanwhile, Carlos Cussin leaves his Toki apartment wearing a surgical mask and a took and hits for the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

And the police weren't suspicious because the Grand hired is one of the few places where Goosen, who remains under house arrest, is allowed to go once guts and arrived at the hotel.

He follows instructions that have been given to him days prior, which is to go upstairs to a room where Taylor and I, a car waiting for him Gus and changes into new clothes, and the three men leave the Hyatt heading for the train station to return to Osaka once they get to the hotel in Osaka.

This is where Guston climbs into one of the two boxes, and the now two men return to the airport.

Taylor very deliberately arrives with only 20 minutes to spare, and as a result, they are whisked through security and customs.

The boxes air not x rayed because, as Taylor presently suspected, they don't have scanners big enough to fit those boxes through.

So once they get onto the plane, Taylor goes back to the luggage hold.

He cracks to open the box that Dustin is in.

He takes, Ah, towel.

That is, um, lying nearby on pops it open on whispers to Gus, um, that I will be back for you once its wheels up at 11.

30 the flight leaves.

It takes off from Osaka and flies through Chinese and Russian air space, which is a specific asked that Taylor submitted knowing that there is no extradition treaty between China and Russia and Japan.

So soon after the flight takes off, Taylor goes back to the luggage, rolled to check on Goosen, and he sees that Gustin has already let himself out of the box and is sitting cross legged atop the box, creating year to year.

The rest of the flight is uneventful.

Taylor sits guard while Gus in sleeps and needs and drifts back into sleep again.

Andi.

Eventually they land in Istanbul.

Guston makes a connecting flight to Beirut, where his family awaits.

Um, there are no thank you's and no goodbyes.

Taylor is more interested in getting the job done, so the plan is a success.

Guston is no longer in Japan and safely at home in Lebanon.

The news of Gustines escape brakes on Lebanon.

Pretty immediately, Michael Taylor's name gets out quite quickly as well.

Japan, on the other hand, does not hear about this news until the following Tuesday.

The reason is that the the CCTV cameras in front of his house is not a live feed, and it is only checked once a week.

And, of course, this was part of Taylor's plan.

Once Japan learned that Gustin has escaped the issue a warrant for his arrest the Interpol gets involved as well, so Taylor leaves oh, for a while in Lebanon.

But eventually he does fly back to New England to rural Massachusetts in early spring, months later, and mid May.

Taylor is sound asleep and is sure gonna wake by his 27 year old son, Peter.

U.

S marshals are at the front door to arrest both of them.

And so it transpires that Peter Taylor had, in fact, being involved in Carlos Gustines Escape.

It had been Peter who had rented the hotel room at the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo.

Unbeknownst to tailor, the Tokyo prosecutor's office had submitted a request for extradition of both Michael Taylor and to some Peter Taylor.

And in the whole time that Michael Taylor and Peter Taylor had been laying low, this extradition request has been making its way through all the various channels.

Taylor is unsuspecting.

These shocked to his core that he is being arrested on American soil by U.

S.

Authorities on a crime that may or may not have been committed in Japan.

He quickly assembles him and his lawyers a dream team of defenders.

But the chances even to them it doesn't look great for various reasons.

One being that the Japanese legal system does make it quite difficult for people to post bail, but also because of the nature of Michael Taylor's alleged crime in the end, after the greatest gave the mastermind Michael Taylor, it turns out, didn't even receive a dime.

This obviously surprised me.

Andi.

I asked him, Why did you do it?

He told me.

Depressive labor, which is a special Forces motto.

Meaning he was liberating the oppressed.