Angelina’s Guild
Angelina’s Guild controls Black Hand interests in smuggling, both by sea and by caravan, and the supply of drugs to many of Haven’s noxious opium dens. Auxiliary concerns include the brothel, The Black Whip (DU), on The Street of Silk Veils, and the small but lucrative underground slave trade (a highly illegal business centered around the shop of Adrielle Ilorim in Erinhir). Its headquarters are a posh and seemingly respectable dining establishment in The North Corridor known as Silvante’s owned and operated by the guild.
Angelina has four lieutenants who direct various parts of her operation. The first of these is G. Maximus, the huge, obese, pig-eyed owner of The Black Whip, a house of pleasure on The Street of Silk Veils which caters to those who enjoy any of a variety of strange and bizarre fetishes. Maximus lives at his somewhat disreputable establishment, and controls three cells containing some dozen men. One group consists of the three or four thugs in his employ, another of the uniquely trained staff of the Whip, and the third a group of four men who handle Black Hand involvement in the Haven slave trade - the leader of these men, Angus McFarland, is Adrielle Ilorim’s contact in Erinhir. Maximus himself is as venal and loathsome as the activities he directs, and is well satisfied with his grimy little niche in The Black Hand power structure. There are few things beneath him, and it is rumored that he partakes liberally of the services offered by his establishment.
The head of Angelina’s drug dealing operation, Julian de Carbot, works out of Black Padre’s (AY), the seedy dockside bar, opium den, and whorehouse located in The Commons. Carbot is short and fat (although he does not begin to approach the massive girth of Maximus), but he is also cunning, devious, and ruthless. He directs the movements of some ten men (three cells), and the drugs that they handle. Padre’s serves as one of the principal store places for Black Hand opium before it is sold, along with a rented storage room at Fellini’s boarding house, deep in The Commons, and the back room of Andre de Montville’s spice emporium in The South Docks, where contraband opium is stored in teakwood boxes marked as cinnamon.
Mordred de Laterre, the crippled, wizened, and now retired caravan master who operates a caravanserai in The North Corridor, is another of Angelina’s top lieutenants. From his establishment caravans set out for most of the cities along the great road, and often carry Black Hand contraband among their cargo. Mordred does not have many operatives directly under him, for the success of his business is dependent upon legitimate contacts with area caravan masters, and not upon brute force or strength of numbers. Nonetheless, two or three of his employees at the caravanserai are affiliated with the Hand. Since Mordred needs to coordinate the activities of Black Hand agents in the other great cities who act as his buyers and shippers, he also employs several couriers who are constantly moving in and out of Haven with major caravans carrying letters between Mordred and his agents.
By far the most extensive part of this guild is The South Docks smuggling operation, run by Alfonso Caradallo. Alfonso, along with three other subordinates of slightly greater brawn but vastly inferior wit, directs a small longshoreman’s firm and storage warehouse, known respectively as Longshoremen Inc. and
Caradallo’s Storage. He also supervises the activities of Constantino Maylino, owner of a dockside warehouse, Maylino’s night watchman Rufus, and Lazar Symbocca, owner of Sym’s Storage Company. Under the direction of Caradello, Maylino oversees the buying and storage of illicit cargos for the small fleet of Black Hand smugglers that operates along the river. Unknown to Maylino, cargos smuggled into Haven are stored in Caradello’s warehouse, or at Sym’s Storage.
The final immediate underling of Caradello’s is Conrad Bissell, a small ferret faced man, who is one of the three day-shift assistant customs inspectors employed by the ministry of Ports and Shipping to collect customs duties along The South Docks, under the direction of Inspector Valyri Pipper. Caradello attempts to arrange for Black Hand cargos to be inspected by Bissell who places the proper seals and stamps upon the appropriate items. Nonetheless, there is only a 65% chance that Bissell will be the inspector on duty at any given time; illegal Black Hand cargos, therefore, are usually well concealed, even when Caradello has arranged for Bissell to inspect the smuggler. In exchange for his duplicity, Caradello pays Bissell an annual gratuity, and arranged for Bissell’s sister to receive training and employment as a courtesan from The Black Whip (small government officials, like beggars, cannot afford to be choosers).
The smuggling vessels themselves are owned and controlled by a variety of means and companies. Two long distance haulers, owned by the Tandouray Spice Company, make port but three or four times per year, and are used to smuggle small, easily concealable, and highly valuable items (like packets of rare spice into Haven, or battle magic out). Five smaller ships belong to the Bilotto Leather Company, a large tannery based in The Commons, owned indirectly by Prospero Maggia. Their traffic is mostly restricted to the river trade, carrying hides from the great downriver Ohlfaardt cattle herds, and they generally make port two or three times per month. However, once or twice a year, as occasion demands, large shipments of opium and hashish from the far Kingdom of Jez are brought into the Dorian Delta by the large Tandouray merchantmen, and unloaded onto the smaller Bilotto river craft in relative privacy over a period of several weeks. Concealed within the bundles of leather, small amounts of drugs are easily carried into Haven, thus avoiding costly taxes (although the use and sale of drugs is legal in Haven, drugs are subject to heavy imposts when brought into the city).
Besides smuggling drugs and spices into Haven, two other items that Caradello handles are spidersilk and foreign wines and liquors. Each is in direct competition with a major Haven industry, and as a consequence are imported in defiance of the official monopolies granted to powerful members of the Council of Guilders by the Duke of Haven. The wines and liquors are smuggled into the city aboard Falling Star, a large merchantman owned by Culvarran Ltd., whose chief cargos include olive oil from the equatorial city of Karen Te, and molasses from the western city of Belakor; the wine bottles are carried concealed within the larger kegs of oil or syrup. Two other ocean going ships, owned by the weaving firm of brothers Mazov and Kary Toistol, normally import fine wool from the Clermont sheep flocks, out of the small port town of Clermont, fifty miles east of Haven; every two or three months, however, the vessels rendezvous with yet another Hand affiliated ship, the privately owned Dark of the Moon, and receive a consignment of spidersilk, which can then be concealed within heavy bundles of wool for the short voyage to Haven.
Caradello coordinates the movements of his smuggler captains from Black Padre’s; there, Caradello plans the next shipments and disburses the necessary capital to pay for various out-port cargos. Since only a few of his captains are likely to be in port at the same time, Caradello often gives them letters to be delivered to men not present, or to be placed in Hand maintained “letter boxes” in other ports, instructing those men in current plans; Esteban de Martin, captain of Moon, is the man that Caradello uses most often as a courier.
Angelina meets with her lieutenants intermittently to plan large operations, and to receive progress reports on operations already in motion. Most such meetings take place at Silvante’s, which provides an excellent cover for Angelina. Other than Caradello, Carbot, Maximus, and de Laterre, only Angelina’s headquarters staff (a body guard, a clerk, and two assassins) know the location of Angelina’s headquarters; the only others who know Angelina’s true identity are her fellow Black Hand guild masters.
Common Information
Basics
Type: Guild, Thieves
Parent Organization: The Black Hand
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