The millionaire smuggled out of Japan in a box: Was Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn a victim or a villain?

It was an escape plot so simple as to be unbelievable: the business mogul who fled a litany of career-ending charges in Japan, escaping by private jet while hidden in a music equipment box. Yet in the intervening five years, Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn’s 2019 getaway has left the world with one question: is he a victim, or a villain?

According to director James Jones (Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes), that’s the burning issue at the centre of Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, a four-part documentary series beginning on Apple TV+ on 25 August. It traces the Lebanese-French-Brazilian impresario’s road from national hero status in France, Japan and beyond to international fugitive, via interviews with Ghosn, the men who helped him escape, and a series of key figures within Nissan and the Japanese justice system.

Ghosn had been riding high at the time of his arrest in October 2018. Spearheading the alliance between French carmakers Renault and Japan’s Nissan and Mitsubishi a decade earlier – saving the companies €3bn (£2.6bn) and earning him the nickname “Le Cost Killer” – Ghosn had presided over this auto-industry behemoth with an authority that seemed unimpeachable.

But while Ghosn had for years denied talk of a merger, saying the corporations could co-work but not blend, his tune appeared to change – to the apparent horror of other Nissan head honchos. Secret efforts to oust him got under way (one internal investigation was named “Kali” after the Hindu god of death and destruction), leading to his arrest at Tokyo’s Haneda airport that October, where he was escorted from the tarmac to the prosecutor’s office and, shortly after, to prison.

“The whole world collapsed for me,” Ghosn, now 69, tells Jones in the documentary. That first arrest kickstarted a now half-decade-long cat-and-mouse game with the Japanese government that has transcended international borders and justice systems. The allegations – which Ghosn calls “so fake, so fabricated, so unfair” – have been shocking from the outset: Ghosn was an international magnate, hailed by Time magazine as one of the most respected business leaders in the world when he was put behind bars on what appeared to be paperwork violation charges. “It was like he’d just been plucked and taken off the face of the earth,” Nick Kostov, a Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of Boundless: The Rise, Fall and Escape of Carlos Ghosn, tells me. “There was nobody in France, or even in Japan, who seemed to know what was going on.”

In Japan, suspects can be held for up to 23 days without charge, and do not have a legal right to a lawyer while they are being questioned; family visits may also be forbidden (the system is often referred to as “hostage justice”). Once that timeframe passes, the suspect can face rearrest for another offence, starting the process anew. If someone is indicted for a crime, the verdict is deemed a foregone conclusion, with defence lawyers more likely to coach their clients on confessions than pleas for innocence.

During his period of “torture” in prison, Ghosn underwent 12 to 14 hours of questioning a day in between solitary confinement. His right-hand man, Greg Kelly – who says he was urged to fly to Japan by Nissan executives under the pretence of an urgent in-person meeting while awaiting spinal surgery in the US – was being subjected to the same.

Ghosn and his lawyers believed he’d be freed in time for Christmas, and set about planning a route back to France, as agreed by Emmanuel Macron’s government, intending to return to Japan for a trial. Instead, less than an hour before he was due to be bailed, Ghosn was rearrested on a breach-of-trust charge – the second in what would be months of pinballing between prison and house arrest. On 6 March, his third appeal for bail was granted – at a price of $9m (£7m), and on the proviso that he remain under 24-hour video surveillance, had no internet access, and could not travel overseas. The following month, he was rearrested for a fourth time.

While making the series, Jones, who in 2019 directed On the President’s Orders, a documentary about the drug wars in the Philippines, had been “convinced by people on the inside that there was a conspiracy to take [Ghosn] down”; that the early charges were “trumped up and his treatment felt disproportionate”. But that apparent heavy-handedness early on meant that investigators “almost stumbled across much more serious allegations of him using company money to pay people and then receiving similar amounts of money back in a very convoluted way”, Jones says, resulting in charges of a “totally different order” – of misusing company assets for personal financial gain.

Still Ghosn, whose predilection for the finer things included throwing his second wife’s 50th birthday party at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris and purchasing a superyacht, denied every charge vehemently, believing that the “plot” against him had been brewed by “Nissan old boys in collusion with the prosecutor’s office of Tokyo” in order to block a Nissan-Renault merger. Others don’t see Ghosn’s charges of underreporting his income, alleged money laundering and misuse of company assets in quite the same light. “Perhaps in his mind, he was bigger than the companies, and he had saved them from extinction,” says Jones. “And therefore he could play by his own rules.”

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It was perhaps that logic that would allow Ghosn to dare his high-stakes project – fleeing Japan altogether. He had been approached by Michael Taylor, a former US army special forces operative with extensive links to Lebanon, whose wife was a distant relation of Ghosn’s. A man used to plotting escape missions, Taylor, along with his son Peter, offered to make Ghosn his latest rescue. He knew that arrivals via private jet to Osaka had their luggage checked on the way in, but that those leaving did not. His plan required nerves of steel: Ghosn would be smuggled out in a custom-made music equipment box with air holes drilled into its sides. By that point, in late December 2019, Ghosn, who was on bail, “was ready to take the risk ... I didn’t care about the percentage [of success]. I just cared about the opportunity.”

And so the mission was set: the plane would take off from Osaka’s Kansai international airport at 11pm, soon after landing there, leaving as narrow a window for error as possible. The waiting was unbearable; delayed on the tarmac, Ghosn lay enclosed in the darkness for half an hour “thinking, ‘Oh my God, they’ve unravelled the plan. I’m going to die in Japan.’” They landed first in Turkey before boarding another jet to Lebanon, where there is no extradition treaty with Japan – and Ghosn was free.

“One of the genius aspects of the escape was that it was so simple,” Kostov says of its sheer audacity. For Ghosn’s supporters, this act of daring only highlighted his mettle; his detractors, meanwhile, were less impressed, seeing the Hollywood-esque episode as yet another example of the rich evading justice. “One of the most fascinating things about this entire story is Ghosn’s character, because he is a man of extremes. I think he’s got enormous qualities and also big flaws,” says Kostov. One is being incapable of self-reflection: to his mind “he is 100 per cent the victim, he did nothing wrong. He has no regrets ... [but] he did some things that need answers, and so I think he is not blameless in all this. But this is not something which he’s ever talked about, or even thought about.”

Others have more than a few misgivings about how things have played out, namely Taylor. On returning to the US, he was extradited to Japan, along with his son, where they were sentenced to two years and 20 months respectively. Both spent long periods in solitary confinement, one of many attempts the prison made to “break” them; the elder Taylor was ordered to tear tiny pieces of paper for hours at a time until blood blisters mushroomed under his nails, and got frostbite from the unheated facility. While there, he also learnt that his father was dying, but was refused permission to call him on his deathbed.

Relaying this treatment to their lawyers ultimately led to the Japanese authorities allowing the Taylors to serve the end of their sentences in the US, with Peter released late last year, and his father on 1 January. During all this time, neither he nor his son have heard from the man they freed, Michael says – nor did they receive compensation for their efforts. “Do I feel betrayed? Absolutely.”

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The relationship between the Taylors and Ghosn is “not great”, according to Kostov. Does he think they regret ever getting involved? “I think they feel like they saved somebody who was wronged... [but] Peter, spending over a year in jail when he’s in his twenties, and Mike also spending a long time in jail – I don’t know that they are super happy that that happened.”

They have likely served more time than Ghosn ever will. He refuses to go on trial in Japan, and while he has spoken of receiving a “fair trial” in France, the two international arrest warrants the country has issued for him have yet to proceed. In the meantime, Ghosn is suing Nissan for $1bn in damages – a battle he has pledged to “fight to the end”. Kostov has heard murmurs that he may indeed go to France, or is even thinking about running for president of Lebanon; “There’s all these possibilities for the next chapter. I’m not convinced that there will be one, but there might be. And so I think that keeps people interested.”

Whether Ghosn’s multimillion-dollar money moves were criminal remains – in the absence of the courts – for the viewer to decide, Jones says, although he notes: “He has the opportunity to go to France and stand trial, but as of today, he is not doing that. I think until he answers those charges, then he can’t really dismiss the label of villain.”

‘Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn’ premieres on Apple TV+ on 25 August