On February 10, 1983, FBI Special Agent Elaine Corbitt Smith received a call in the middle of the night. On the other end was her boss explaining that Ken Eto, a high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit, had been shot three times in the head while sitting in his 1976 Ford Torino in a deserted parking lot on the Northwest side. The poorly packed bullets ricocheted off his skull, and the sixty-four-year-old Eto survived the assassination attempt. As he recovered in his hospital bed, he said he was ready to talk, but only to Smith.
Eto, a.k.a. Tokyo Joe, had been running Asian gambling operations for the Mob for decades by the time Smith, new to the force, received the case in 1980.
Once she was handed the twenty-year-old file—often derided as an “old dog case”—she spent countless hours scrutinizing this “gambler [and] associate of well-known hoodlums,” according to documents filed with the FBI. Smith spared nothing to get to the bottom of Eto’s involvement in the machinations of Chicago’s organized crime scene.
“I wasn’t just in the stacks; I was out on the street,” Smith said in a recent interview. “I was surveilling him. I was talking to many of his supposed associates. I did all this research, and then, when it broke, I was ready.”
At the time of the shooting, Eto was awaiting a sentencing after being convicted of a numbers scheme. Paranoid that Eto would snitch, the Outfit sent two mobsters to finish him off, guaranteeing Eto’s silence. The failed assassination attempt left Eto with few choices. He was a marked man, and the Mob would never walk away from unfinished business.
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“Good afternoon. Thank you so much for agreeing to chat,” I said when I first spoke with the Smiths about this story. “Are you OK with me recording this conversation?”
As I posed this question to Elaine and Tom (AHS ’67), her husband of 57 years, I wondered how often they had asked questions and pressed “record” during their careers. I was, after all, talking to two expert interrogators.
“Sure,” said Elaine, who was sharing the line with Tom. “It would be a pleasure.”
I reached them at their home in Carmel, a tony suburb of Indianapolis, many miles and lifetimes from their middle-class Northwest Chicago upbringings.
The Schurz High School sweethearts each batted away offers from other colleges before choosing Illinois. After graduating in 1967, they married, and Tom became a physical education teacher and Elaine an elementary-school reading instructor.
The clean-cut Mr. and Mrs. Smith were on an unassuming trajectory until Tom decided to join the FBI. Besides taking on a career consorting with the nation’s criminal underbelly, Tom found the job required longer hours and more frequent moves.
Initially, the FBI lifestyle threw a wrench into Elaine and Tom’s once-predictable family life as two teachers and parents to a young daughter. However, circumstances changed for Smith when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died, and women were accepted as agents; Smith saw an opportunity to leave teaching and build her own career in law enforcement.
With two FBI agents working long hours and unpredictable schedules, Tom’s mother stepped in to help care for their young daughter.
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By the time Smith received Eto’s phone call, she had been an agent for three years. While the FBI had opened the door for women in the 1970s, not many had yet walked through. Smith was still one of only a few females on the force, and she grappled with feeling like an outsider among her male peers.
She recognized that feeling in Eto, too. The Chicago Outfit, after all, was still the same largely Italian American Mob that rose to infamy in the 1920s with boss Al Capone.
While Eto had been navigating the Windy City organized crime scene since arriving shortly after World War II, as an Asian American he knew that some of the Mob would never fully accept him.
And this wasn’t the first time he had felt that way. As a child of Japanese immigrants growing up in California, he experienced an increasing distance between him and his father, whose Christian faith began to feel oppressive. Eto left home at thirteen, was picked up in Idaho, and placed in an internment camp during World War II. There, he acquired the gambling and hustling skills that readied him for his future in Chicago.
Eto was content to shield the Mob from Smith until the attempt on his life. He knew immediately that he wanted to cooperate with the FBI—and specifically with Smith.
“They had their chance, and now I’ve gone to the other side,” he told Smith. “I’m now property of the FBI.”
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Eto provided information to the agency, including the names and roles of eighty-five active members or associates of the Mob. Smith referred to the list as “the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of how the Syndicate worked in Chicago.” Eto testified against some of them, supplying enough damning information to send fifteen mobsters to prison.
The tradeoff, however, was steep.
He left behind friends and family and assumed a new identity; his whereabouts were known only to Smith and the Witness Protection Program.
Over the years, Eto, now named Joe Tanaka, lived in obscurity in several locations in the U.S. while Smith took on additional cases, finishing her career at the FBI as part of a special team of agents researching the money that funded the 9/11 hijackers.
Smith and Eto remained close until he died in 2004 at 84. His family invited Smith to speak at his memorial service in California by the ocean, where they scattered his ashes.
“Few people realize or recognize the determination and bravery it takes a man to turn his back on his wife, home, friends, way of life, and the city in which he lived and worked for forty years,” Smith said in her speech. “It is a rare person who can sustain a pledge he made; that he would testify against former friends and associates each and every time he was asked—whether it was one year or seventeen years later.”
In the end, Smith’s gender, which set her apart in the early days, made her the only person Eto could rely on to protect him as he turned against the Mob.
“He told me that the only people he had trusted were women—never any men,” Smith said as she was remarking on Eto’s complicated legacy. “He said I touched a soft spot in his heart.”
Ultimately, this unlikely duo of outsiders—on opposite sides of the law—found a way to take the Mob down from the inside.
