The Family
In Brooklyn, “the Family” needs no explanation. The Giovanni Crime family run their crew the old way. They own the social clubs and the funeral trade, take a cut of every sanitation contract and demolition permit, and make sure the docks move only what they are paid to move. Loyalty is enforced with omertà, debts are collected in person, and people who talk tend to disappear. They are one crew among the city’s crime families, and they never forget a slight.
The NYPD
The NYPD is the largest police force in the country: thirty-six thousand officers, most of them honest and overworked. It is also an institution old enough to have its own geology, with layers of favours, promotions and understandings going back generations. In a few precincts, particularly along the Brooklyn waterfront, the layers run deep. Evidence gets transferred, reports get reworded, and a shooting can have a different culprit by morning. The cops who notice learn quickly which questions end careers.
The Special Affairs Division (FBI)
The Special Affairs Division is a federal unit that does not appear on any public organisation chart. It investigates cases that other agencies close too quickly, and its agents prefer to burn what they find rather than study it. For now it is only a phone number and a voice on the line.
The Sinaloa Cartel
The cartel came to Red Hook for the same reason smugglers always have: the docks. Its interests are commercial and its patience is finite. Its reach goes well beyond the street, into freight brokers, customs clerks, lawyers and doctors who keep respectable hours by day and different ones by night. It has noticed that someone else controls the waterfront, and it does not share.
The Latino Kings
The Kings are a Queens street organisation pushing south into Red Hook and Carroll Gardens. They are loyal to their own and unforgiving of anyone who leaves. Their expansion into the neighbourhood is bringing old grudges with it.
The Society of St. Leopold
Nobody in Carroll Gardens has heard of the Society, which suits it. It predates the neighbourhood, the city and the nation. For centuries it has kept records, weighed testimony and waited, and it takes the long view on every question. It rarely acts, and never loudly. When it does, a parish priest may receive a letter with no return address, or a stranger may be seen at the back of a Latin Mass. Whether the Society means salvation or judgement for the people it watches has never been clear, perhaps not even to the Society itself.
Old Brooklyn
Old Brooklyn is not an organisation but a constituency: the parish church, the neighbourhood paper, the tenants’ association, and the old-timers who have watched the blocks change for fifty years. They have seen more than they will say. They are among the few institutions the Family has never managed to buy, and among the few that have not yet realised what they are up against.