Kitaki (family)

Winfred Kitaki.

Plum Kitaki.

Wocky Kitaki.

The Kitaki family is a mob family based in Los Angeles that has a fierce rivalry with the Rivales family.

• Winfred "Big Wins" Kitaki - the fourth and current head of the family
• "Little" Plum Kitaki - Winfred's wife and the mother of Wocky

• Wocky Kitaki - son of Winfred and Plum

History

Prior to 2026

Little is known about the Kitaki family prior to 2026, other than being a well known mob family in Los Angeles. In 2026, the head of the family was Winfred "Big Wins" Kitaki, the fourth individual to hold the position.

Pal Meraktis of the Meraktis Clinic ingratiated himself with the family by offering a good deal on "back room surgeries", resulting in a surge of income for the Meraktis Clinic and forcing his rival out of the medical business.

Shooting incident

Wocky Kitaki being shot by the Rivales family.

In January 2026, during a turf war between the Kitaki and Rivales families, an impatient Wocky charged into the fray and was subsequently shot by one of the rival gang members. Wocky was quickly taken to the Meraktis Clinic, but the location of the bullet made it impossible to safely extract without a high chance of killing the young man in the process. Fearing for his life if the family found out the truth, Pal Meraktis and his nurse, Alita Tiala, forged a fake medical report stating that the bullet had been removed and locked the real one in his office safe. Tiala took advantage of knowing that the unaware Wocky would soon die and got close to him, eventually becoming his fiancée in the hopes of marrying into the Kitaki family and inheriting their fortune when he died.

Winfred, seeing what the gangster life had done to his son, decided it was time to go legit and went into the bakery business. This put him at odds with his son, who wanted to uphold the gangster tradition.

People Park altercation

Main article: Turnabout Corner

A few months later, Winfred had all the members of his family go in for a medical checkup, leading to Wocky discovering that Meraktis had not removed the bullet from his heart after all. Furious, Wocky decided he would give the doctor a "taste of his own medicine" and took a pistol and a knife from the family weapons stash. However, Tiala somehow managed to take the gun away from him and went to the Meraktis Clinic, knowing that her plan would be ruined if the family found out she knew about the bullet.

Around this time, the Kitakis were painting a mural of a dragon on the wall of their property. However, their work was disrupted when Meraktis knocked over a bunch of paint cans after a hit-and-run on Phoenix Wright. Plum Kitaki would spend the next few days trying to clean up the mess, throwing a broken wing mirror from the car into the nearby trash can.

Wocky, armed with his knife, confronted Meraktis in People Park. The doctor was pulling a noodle stand at the time, as his car wouldn't start and he needed a way to transport Tiala after struggling with her at his office and seemingly killing her. Wocky threatened the doctor with the weapon while Meraktis tried to explain that Tiala had deceived him. Before he could do so, Wesley Stickler, who had stumbled onto the scene, cried out for them to stop. As Meraktis turned his head to look at Stickler, Tiala shot him in the head from inside the noodle stand the doctor was pulling, desperate to keep her former employer from talking. Wocky and Stickler fled the scene, allowing Tiala to escape unnoticed.

Tiala then went to the Wright Anything Agency and hired rookie defense attorney Apollo Justice in the hopes that he would fail to get Wocky acquitted. Unfortunately for her, she underestimated how far Justice was willing to go to find the truth, and she was eventually found guilty of Meraktis's murder.

Around this time, the Kitakis were under investigation for illegal firearms.

Aftermath

After the trial, Winfred revealed that he had found a doctor who could remove the bullet from Wocky, but he wasn't going to use his dirty money to pay for it. Wocky attempted to blow this off, but they eventually reconciled, with Wocky helping out at the bakery and coming up with a product he called the "O.G. Cracker".

Name

• The surname "Kitaki" (北木) literally means "north tree", but the family is also visually linked to "kitsune", the Japanese word for fox and a common subject of Japanese folklore; Winfred Kitaki has a fox's head on his apron in reference to this, Plum Kitaki has a many-tailed fox on her dress, and Wocky Kitaki has his hair styled to look fox-like.

Development

In the Japanese version of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the Kitaki family is specifically referred to as a Yakuza group.