Carlos Ghosn, the former board chairman of Japanese automotive giant Nissan, escaped house arrest in December of 2019 hidden inside an instrument case. According to recent court filings in the extradition of case of Michael Taylor and Peter Taylor, the Americans who facilitated Ghosn's extraction, half of the money received for this daring operation was paid with Bitcoin.

Michael Taylor is a veteran of the United States Army Special Forces; his son Peter worked with him to facilitate the escape of Ghosn, which involved a late night ride to an executive airport in Osaka. A private jet transported the former Nissan executive to Lebanon, a country where he enjoys citizenship by virtue of his marriage to Carole Nahas, a dazzling Lebanese businesswoman who also happens to be a naturalized American citizen. It is possible that Ms. Nahas arranged for her husband's extraction by contacting Mr. Taylor and his son. The value of the contract was $1.3 million; it included all the expenses and logistics, which also featured a classical music recital at the Tokyo home of Ghosn.

Court records show that $800,000 were transferred by Ghosn into a shell company set up by Peter Taylor's father. As the younger and more savvy member of the two-man extraction team, Peter Taylor handled payment of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin tokens. As is the case with all Bitcoin transactions, this one was traced and identified by searching the distributed ledger of the blockchain, which is designed to be public in the spirit of transparency. Michael Taylor and his son will continue to fight extradition to Japan for similar reasons Ghosn fled: The criminal justice system of that nation is infamously known to stack the cards against defendants, particularly when they are foreigners.

Interestingly enough, now that BTC has been reported to be involved in the Ghosn case, parallels with the Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange platform have been mentioned. Ghosn met with Mark Karpeles, former CEO of Mt. Gox, while the French citizen was defending himself in Japanese court. Karpeles was found guilty of manipulating exchange data for the purpose of hiding financial losses, something that Ghosn is also accused of doing.