The Businessman's Club

It used to be that the club acquired goods through shady ties in the normal world and resold them through the cracks while claiming they were legitimate. Times changed, and now, most of the club's members work as employees at ordinary stores and pass off legitimate goods as stolen to keep up their reputation.

Internal Structure

The typical member of The Businessman's Club works twenty to thirty hours a week at some chain in the Pittsburgh area (usually a bit outside the city itself, to avoid being seen by people who know them), and makes a tidy living purchasing items for the club, which proceeds to resell them to other factions.

Some, including some of the older members of the club, see this as a fall from the days when the club's members worked with gangsters and used their reputation for violence to win disputes with other factions. The truth is, though, that the members work less, and live longer, than they ever did before. The true goal of the club--to provide its members with "the good life" for as little work as possible—is being met, and that's enough to keep most members happy.

The club still has a boss; the current one is Vincent Moretti (who still goes by "Legs"), who brought about the transition to legitimate work thirty years ago. While he hasn't had anyone killed in more than twenty years, most members haven't forgotten that no one who openly opposed legitimization survived his rise to run the club, and any disagreements with his rule tend to be kept quiet. No one is quite certain what will happen, or who will take over once he dies.

The club was first founded as a place for merchants to relax, smoke, and drink, and it still retains some vestiges of that. In particular, it still prohibits women from holding official leadership roles. This hasn't stopped a few from wielding a great deal of power through a husband, but the sexism has also led a few talented women to leave the faction.

Relationships with Others

The club is among the most popular of the factions, in large part because they still throw the best parties in the city. They still have some old rivalries, especially with The Speakeasy and The Coalition of Tradesmen, and people don't tiptoe around disagreeing with them the way they once did.

The faction still hints that it obtains its goods illegally, but by now it's an open secret that it's gone legit. Most people politely avoid pointing this out for two reasons. First, that's a good way to get cut off. Second, as became clear during the recent war, many of the faction's members still know their way around a gun.

Other factions have occasionally pressed the club to adopt the gender neutral policies of almost every other faction in the city, but so far, the club has resisted.

History

The club was founded as an informal meeting for local merchants in the early 1800's—a literal club where they could come to drink, smoke, and negotiate deals with each other behind closed doors. In 1821, under pressure from the Peerage, the club became more formal, and subject to rule by the noble houses. Since membership was the fastest way to be able to sell to those houses, many merchants willingly accepted rule by the Peerage in exchange.

By the end of the 1800's, the club was finding the Peerage's rules more restrictive, and the club's members were among the rebels against the Peerage. The Tripartite Agreement granted them the right to import goods (a price The Coalition of Tradesmen paid for their seat on the Chamber of Lords), and therefore to sell goods directly to the other commoner factions, but also put them in direct competition with the Coalition. Also, the demands of recognition as a true faction meant they needed a formal leader for the first time.

Up to this point, most of the club's members were legitimate businessmen, although no rule prevented them from dealing with criminals, and several members did. The pressure from competition gave the upper hand in the faction to those with fewer scruples, and by 1915, almost all of the faction's dealings in the normal world ran afoul of the law in one way or another. Since few people through the cracks cared, the faction prospered.

By the 1960's, though, ongoing violence had taken its toll on the membership, and legal pressure on their gangster allies had cut deeply into their profits. Legs took over in a violent coup, reorienting the faction drastically to its current form.