Will Haxby
An English ex-pat soldier of fortune. A conversation between a British and a Cantonese agent was overheard and recorded:
C: In one of our intelligence services, we have the fortune/misfortune of knowing one irrepressibly criminal genius who code-named himself "Jac von Ripper" who hails from FK (says that FK authorities exiled him after leading his 46th prison riot and break-out and that most of civilized Europa would not miss him too much if he ceased to exist. [Please confirm or deny this person's identity and brief us if you confirm]).
P: Ah, him. I suspect the sharks spat him out of the ocean! "Jac von Ripper", aka Will Haxby; born 1956 in an alley in London. Associated himself with London underworld until 1970 when he left in disgust, describing it in his own words as "bein a load o daft bloody fairies". His family used to make pianos; but they fell on hard times and never recovered.
C: AH! A "right, bloody bastard" as your people are so fond of saying.
P: He flirted with CN [Cos Nustr] for a while, and was personally responsible for _both_ South End Lynchings (1971 and 1973), where a total 34 Englishmen were tortured, mutilated and hanged in 1971 and a further 28 in 1973. In that period, he landed in the Cambrian prison system and promptly engineered a series of deadly riots and escapes. CN wouldn't have him back (his methods were too disgusting even for them) and he drifted into Esca by 1978. There he came in contact with Eastern forms of criminal behaviour and gang structures. By 1981 he was practically in control of Chinatown, but was broken by rivals from Hong Kong sent over special.
C: Ah! Chief of those "rivals" was our Chang Hsueh-Liang, ex-Citizen-President. He was at the time a "cultural attache" with the London Canton Embassy.
P: The next decade was spent in and out of maximum security prisons, engineering riots, gang warfare and daring escapes. He was exiled in 1995. Oh for the cleanliness of the drop! He could have met his just desserts with Jack Ketch's compliments in 1969, had they not retired the old Service a few years previous.
C: Hmm. Too bad GwongDung banned Water Torture and the Death of a Thousand Cuts during the Push for Modernization in 1939... Might have to revive these methods temporarily...
P: Europe of any stripe wouldn't miss him a jot if he snuffed it. Politely or otherwise!
C: He leads a rather sinisterly roguish band of Cantonese, Hakka, Nung, Jews, Cossacks, Mongols, Maori, Malays, Dyaks, Masai, and other fierce "tribals" in secret-police-like counter-espionage actions.
P: Sounds right up his alley. Secret-police, eh? Who gave him the fancy toys? He's bad enough with a length of stout rope!
C: His Cantonese-Manchu equivalent ex-Citizen-President Chang Hsueh-Liang gave him _carte blanche_. One of many reasons he has been gently convinced of the need to re-discover his personal connexions to the Tao in solitude in the Shaolin Mountain hermitage.
C: At this time, we have no "polite" (non-lethal) way of controlling Jac's band's more outrageous brigandish and murderous ways.
P: Ah. Oh, yes? Better thou than us, yes? Maybe it loses a little in translation?
C: AiYah! It makes very rude truthful sense even in bad translation ;) Luckily for us Cantonese, we let him loose amongst the Zhuang tribe who have certain dubious, suspect connexions with the peoples of Fujian, Taiwan, Hainan, and Meizhou. The Zhuang are suspected of harboring militant Hunanese sympathies (which makes no logical sense at all as the Hunanese treated their tribal people to genocide and extinction with unabashed, shameless conquerors' sadism and pleasure).
