Glass Street Shankers

Brutal gang of thugs based in Kiraly, the capitol of the Imperial province of Naarod. Well funded and organized, a number of smaller groups in the empire trace their loyalties back to the Glass Street Shankers, seeded by members going abroad in a sort of evangelistic or franchise model that has been quite successful. Among them are the Skinks, the Black Hearts, and the Red Fang League; any number of small gangs of toughs regulating the local criminal trades - bookmaking, smuggling, narcotics, prostitution - exist in most large centers of population and the Shankers have been innovators in creating a loose organization across city and national lines.
The Shankers have for decades maintained a headquarters on the eponymous Glass Street, where glassblowers and sheet glass sellers can be found. They are at odds with, and usually doing their best to stay one step ahead of, local guards as well as the Varangian agents of the Autarch.

Structure

Led by a stepbrother and stepsister, the Glass Street Shankers are a much-empowered group over recent years when they have violently put down their competition while forging strong ties to suppliers and distributors in other regions of the Empire and beyond. After the death of the powerful and much-loved King Ossus of Naarod, his feckless and unlikable oldest son Prince Carmichael has been too weak to devote sufficient police and military power in his own capitol, and the Shankers have risen to some real power in that vacuum, controlling the Northeast portion which has actually been renamed to Maye's town after family name of the siblings who run the show, and the name Maye draws as much if not more water in the capitol than the nobles of the province.
A smaller and less public organization, the Skinks, carry out most of their work in the smaller cities of Naarod. The gang is trying to make inroads in the Imperial capitol but it has an enormous amount of competition from specialized local gangs there. It does control most organized crime in the northern Duchies of JKhazig but its influence drops off sharply south of Khazigur itself.

Public Agenda

The Shankers are a serpentine, everpresent underworld organization bridging the space between small time criminals and extraplanar thieves guilds. However their public face is sometimes idealized and even admired, and at the street level they do provide certain criminal services that are highly in demand from the general public including loan sharking, illegal bookmaking, illegal prostitution, and small-time narcotics trade. Where the Yellow Fingers focus more on pure robbery and burglary as well as the fencing of those goods, and the White Chests are smugglers, the Past Lifers are kidnappers and slavers, and the Steel Reciters are Assassins, the Shankers are a more daily presence filling in all the gaps in the vice trades, and in their home nation of Naarod actually provide greater stability through their protection rackets than the relatively ineffective government of King Carmichael can manage in his own Duchies.
As with all mafia-esque criminals, the name of the game is earning, and as long as the money is flowing, the Shankers are perfectly content with simply growing their revenues and keeping the peace. They work to support officials, regimes, and important figures in the community that permit them to thrive, and actively work against those that don't. By definition their activities are illegal, however, operating outside of taxation and guild charter in the Empire and normally running far afoul of local laws of the independent feudal states of the Orbis. They also have much less influence in the Southern Continent - the Pilaani are already pirates, after all - and the societies of the Tozzite peninsula are rife with smaller versions of the Shankers who compete against them and refuse, for the most part, to coalesce into a larger organized structure, perhaps due to the stronger presence of active religious leaders and theocracy in Toz and the more isolated natures of the cities and the people of Baar Zaal and Pantanh.
Interestingly, the Shankers are disproportionately human, with fewer elves, halflings, and dwarves in high ranking roles, though this seems to be more an artifact of their origins and leadership as an actual human family rather than any inherent racism.

Assets

The Shankers are very successful and control a lot of money which they aggressively roll into loan sharking at a standard 25% vig ("Vigorish", interest rate). People they like will get a lower vig, people they don't like or don't trust to pay them back in a timely manner get a higher vig.

Two V's over a green vase; the meaning has been lost to history

Type

Illicit, Gang

Alternative Names

Shankers

Demonym

Shanker