It was October 1946. Twenty-four-year-old Army veteran William L. Bruce was shopping for a lawnmower with his wife and in-laws at the Sears store in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights when he spotted the man who had until recently had made his life a living hell: Tomoya Kawakita, a former guard at the Osaka Camp at Oeyama, Honshu, Japan where Bruce had been held as a POW. He was better known to Bruce and his fellow prisoners of war as “The Meatball,” so nicknamed for his rotund figure- the result of his stealing and eating their rations.

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