The Laughing Man and "The Monster with 21 Faces"..

[IndividualEleven]

Just to shed some light on GITS:SAC and the amazing story of the Laughing Man. If you are like me, you truly understand just how brilliant the story and dialogue are in the series. But while the anime is based in the future, the true story this anime is based off of is not.

On March 18th, 1984 at 9:00pm, two men wearing mask and armed with weapons (one had a pistol and the other had a rifle) broke into the home of Katsuhisa Ezaki, the president of a company called Glico. They kidnapped Ezaki and inside a warehouse where they kept him, they called the director of the company(Glico) in Takatsuki city and demanded for the ransom 1 billion yen and 100 kilograms of gold bullion. Ezaki managed to escape from the warehouse in Ibaraki city in Osaka prefecture three days later but the extorsion did not stop there. On May 10th, Glico began to receive letters from a person or group calling itself "The Monster with 21 Faces" that they had managed to tamper with their(Glico) candies and had laced them with a potassium cyanide soda. Which in effect forced Glico to pull their products off of the shelf and damn near took the whole company down.

If you would like to know more about this story than reply to this post of research the "Glico-Morinaga case" at wikipedia.com.