| “ | Roll this mook. | „ |
| ~ Standard Family member battle-cry. |
The Marcone Crime Family simply referred to as The Family is a villain group in City of Heroes and City of Villains. The group is a mafia style crime syndicate who rose to power over rivals as -the- name in drug dealing, smuggling and protection rackets.
Harry and Sebastian Frost
The Family were once part of the illustrious Marcone mafia, the equivalent of royalty in the underworld, their boss was Don, Harry Frost, who formed an alliance between all the major cartels as one unit. Most families folded to Frost's leadership and the ones that maintained independent itineraries still knew better than to challenge his leadership. Frost was killed though in the 1970s during a major raid by the super hero team,The Regulators. The Regulator raid was a critical blow to The Family who had not just lost a leader but a main drug warehouse. Harry Frost had a single son, Sebastian Frost who followed in his father's foot-steps even having lost his father at a young age. Sebastian Frost grew up on the mean streets of Paragon City, working as a hustler and con artist before reclaiming his title as the prince of organized crime. As for recovering assets Sebastian was contacted by a Mysterious Benefactor, who had developed a new drug called, Superdyne. Superdyne, often shortened to "Dyne", was a drug that induced super powers in normal humans, powers such as super-strength, super endurance and for certain high-end versions telekinesis. Dyne is extremely addictive and raises aggression in users, overuse starts to affect brain-functions and addicts in addition to increased powers and aggression may have their skin turn green and most lose their former individuality save for their need for more Dyne. With both the prospect of having the sole source and recipe for Dyne and his family legacy, Sebastian Frost was easily able to rebuild The Family, however Sebastian had much less cosmopolitan views of how The Family should be run. Sebastian completely annihilated any and all competition, making it priority that the Family was -the only- crime syndicate. Other Dons were killed or made to swear fealty to The Family as the one and only mafia organization.
The New Food Chain
With Dyne as it's base product The Family was able to put together enough funding to reopen their weapons smuggling as well, but as prosperous as they were Sebastian Frost was still not immune to do-gooding superheroes and police efforts and quickly went into hiding to prevent from meeting with his father's fate. Some claim that Sebastian himself died years ago and The Family is now run by various lieutenants, however two missions reveal that despite laying low, Sebastian Frost is still alive and kicking though certainly in his autumn years. The Family use the street-gang, the Skulls, as dealers for their Superdyne. Skulls are a group of death worshiping street thugs who don't mind getting their hands dirty and are more than happy to be cut-outs for the Family in more suburban areas for a piece of the profits or in some cases just complimentary stashes of primo-Dyne. While the Family recognizes the Skulls as valuable assets they are willing to bail out occasionally against the Skulls rival gang, the Hellions, the Hellions themselves have higher backing as well, the Warriors leading the Family to attend to matters personally when daily takes start coming up light. It is not uncommon for the Family to move weapons for the likes of Crey Industries either, since the corporation's all too glad to "misplace" shipments of controversial and not wholly government approved weapons, to make a profit. Both The Family and Crey try to keep their dealings quiet since both feel the other would draw too much attention to them. The Family also have a presence in the Rogue Isles, paying taxes to Arachnos to be allowed to operate openly in the, so called, "City of Villains". While they do not need to hide their activities in the Rogue Isles and have an affable history with Lord Recluse, Lord Recluse's desire to pit super-villains against each-other to ensure strength of all those involved also sees the Family's operations in the Rogue Isles as a potentially lethal territory to do business in, prompting those on assignment in the Isles to view it as high risk high reward. To this day the Family still ultimately serve their Mysterious Benefactor, who has many seeded agents in the organization, though this is usually balanced against internal Family loyalties and diplomatic balance between their many allies, yet profit, it-self, is always the bottom-line.
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