The Devils of Durham
Written by: Ripshot
A little thing my dad told me once: One of the big things that makes the criminal lifestyle different from others (aside from the obvious) is that being well-known ain't always a good thing, nor is it especially tied to competence. Want an example? Look no further than the Devils of Durham, a gang in the northeast that makes the news than any other gang put together. And what do these fierce outlaws do that gets them on the screamsheets so often? Well... Not a whole lot, really. Lemme explain, chummer: The Devils of Durham are a corporate "gang", not in the sponsored deniable-asset way that the CMNG and others are, but in the way that they've been made up wholesale by MarsLife Ltd. (an entertainment sub of Ares, of all corps) for the sole purpose of letting rich corpkids take part in a sanitised, corp-friendly simulacrum of last-century ganger culture that their parents won't dissaprove of. They race around cordoned streets in tuner cars, hold wild parties with whatever celebrities they can bribe into attenting, and pose for magazine-covers holding the latest gen Predator V, and... that's been about the length of their 'criminal lifestyle', for the most part.They also take about as much party-drugs as you'd expect bored corpkid playing gang to take, bought from outside the corp. When they inevitably get caught, there's a big deal over the 'scandal' and the person in question gets to spend a couple of weeks at a cushy rehab, while whoever supplied the drugs (and anyone else who bought if they're not rich) gets to spend a couple of decades in jail. One rule for the rich, another rule for the poor, eh omae?I say 'for the most part', because despite the best efforts of MarsLife, the pendejos who join this posergang keep getting it into their heads that because they're pretending to be criminals, they can associate with actual criminals. Sometimes these actual gangers will humor their new 'friends' in exchange for some of their trust-fund (like me, won't lie), and sometimes they drag their new friends into actual criminal stuff, which is just hilarious if you ask me. Some of them are also hiring 'tough guys' like you and me for help with stuff that their hired security won't touch, know what I'm gettin' at?
Word of advice: If you're thinking about taking a job from one of these knuckleheads, do absolutely everything you can through a proxy. They might not be dumb enough to try and fuck you over, but you can bet whatever corps are monitoring their expensive commlinks will think different.
Structure
To absolutely nobody's surprise, the only semblance of rank and initiation these guys have comes from the almighty NuYen: The more cash you're willing to 'invest' in the gang, the higher standing you've get. Sometimes you get broke groupies and bottom-feeders brought in to make the gang look bigger than it is, but they get dropped as soon as they're not needed.
Identifiers
Devils are almost always wearing 'gang chic', clothes from big corps that try to look like something a ganger would wear (at least, what a committee of corpo suits think one would wear) and even come 'pre-distressed' out the factory but cost more than most regular joes would make in a whole-ass year, and everything's just a little overdesigned to hide that corporate-approved schtunk. Even their 'graffiti' is commissioned from big-name artists who feel 'one with the streets' even if they've never left an arcology.I once did a protection gig for one of the higher-ups in the gang - I needed the money bad, don't judge me - and one of 'em gave me a damn Borchardt-A as a bonus because I flatlined some amateurs doing an extraction job. Damn thing was plated in platinum from top to bottom and get this: The trigger-guard had about 40 grand's worth of Orichalcum embedded along the inside, no bullshit, and he just gave it to me. I got a photo of the thing right here <LINK>
Hot DAMN. You telling me you're rolling through the Concrete Forest with a gun worth over fourty thousand bucks?
Fuck no, got the Orichalcum out and sold the gun. Wouldn't catch me dead with a kitschy piece of drek like that, and it didn't fit my hand besides...
Assets
Now these guys and gals are chumps, don't get me wrong, but they're chumps with daddy's super-platinum credstick at their beck and call. They've got a couple of penthouse-suites in Durham and downtown, a fleet of tunercars with minifridges in the back, and even though they're not getting into any real fights soon, they're carrying some of the fanciest guns from Ares Arms that money can buy, and hiring some nasty corpsec to put 'em to use on the very rare occasion that things actually get violent.
History
The Devils of Durham had their setup in the summer of '73, when a human corpkid by the name of Larry 'King Larry' King waltzed into a ganger-owned club with false tusks and a brand new bespoke handgun tucked in his thousand-nuyen sweats, having been allured into the gangsta lifestyle by listening to too much of that gosh darned rap-music. Larry should have died right there, but I guess the audacity of it all, along with the realisation that this was a sheltered idiot with a lot of money, led to him getting accepted to the sound of stifled laughter as the first non-Ork prospect of the gang that owned the joint, the Point-Dogs.
Larry spent about a year hanging out and having his delusions of gangsterhood validated by his new 'pals', who in turn rinsed the kid's trust-fund as much as they could get away with, but all good things come to an end when the Point-Dogs bit off more than they could chew with their new toys and picked a fight with one of the go-gangs, the The Horse Dancers. The Point-Dogs learned their place in the pecking-order as the seasoned bikers mulched all but a handful of 'em, topped off with 'King Larry' getting ventilated right outside his beloved club.
For most people this was just another day in Raleigh, but Larry's dad, a MarsLife exec called Benjamin King, was distraught. His subsequent campaigns to try and curb gang-violence went about as well as you'd expect, but it got him into contact with a bunch of other concerned parents whose kids were either on their way to the same fate or just taking a worrying interest in the ganger lifestyle. They all knew that trying to stop their kids from listening and loving this sort of stuff would only get them more determined to rebel and do something even stupider, but they had to do something. And so they figured: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!
A few concepts were taken to MarsLife's board, who allegedly just humored the grieving Benjamin, but when they smelled the profit that could come from raising the bar in gentrification of gang-culture, they started to write things down and take it seriously. A few calls and donations to interested Ares celebs and music-personalities later, and the Devils of Durham were founded in a corporate boardroom, a place where corpkids could indulge their obsessions with being 'gangsta' without actually interacting with the rabble of actual gangers.
At first.
Like I said up top, this being a fake gang full of rich idiots is a nuyen-pinata for actual gangers, who continue to worm their way into the social-circles of the Devils of Durham despite all the damage-control from MarsLife. We'll see if that leads to anything fun.
Founding Date
2075
Alternative Names
Dunces of Derpham
Demonym
Devils
Location
Trading
Nobody in the Pack would be caught dead associating with the Devils of Durham, but money is blind, and the Devils are happy to pay way above cost for the Pack's lesser narcotics, which the Pack are content in supplying so long as their customers remember what cartels do with snitches should they get caught.
Unfriendly
Not having as much in the way of firepower as other gangs, the Corsairs suffered a spate of thefts and assaults from Devils looking to prove their mettle in a 'real gang war', and the have since been going out of their way to make life miserable for the upstart Devils.
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