Broken Kings (House of Cards Series 0)

Cuarto Paso: La Deuda

Now that Reaper had the ball rolling on his revenge, it seemed that it was time to start the full reckoning. He had Lobito to act as a spy, young Westly being an unknown face to the mafia men still, although after being around Reaper for half a year, his street name was growing in notoriety. And with a relatively unknown spy able to hang around, Reaper was once again gaining insider information. It wasn't the same as when Maya spied for them, her closeness had allowed for many secrets to fall into the Barrio Boys' hands, but Lobito was no slouch either. If he saw an opportunity for a little breaking and entering to gain the advantage, there were no threats or warnings that Reaper could give that would keep the boy's feet where they belonged; out of the range of danger.

So it came to Malcolm's attention that one of the mafia men was starting to lose face and reputation amongst his peers. That was knowledge that wouldn't leak out until the man was beyond all redemption to Logan and his ilk, but West had copied one of the account books and brought Reaper a goldmine of information. Juntez owed a lot of people a fair amount of money. More so than Reaper had previously expected, but nothing that would get him nabbed by the leg breakers just yet. He had played his debts smart for a long while; owing a little to one, borrowing from another to pay off older debts, always just staying on top of the matter so that he owed five or six sharks hard cash, was able to pay off five or six others with favours and work off the rest. The account book that West managed to copy for Reaper but the Red Book though, the main ledger that the bookie for the Mafia used and it had a notation to watch Juntez to make sure he wasn't gonig to run away from his debts. It was a sure sign that the other mafia men were getting tired of Juntez' poor money handling habits. He had enough opportunity to recover his losses and pay it all back, but the man was inherently lazy and preferred to keep playing this debt to pay debt game, thinking that he could somehow come out on top after all.

Reaper was going to do his damned best to make sure that the house of cards Juntez had built himself came crashing down, and hard. The first step was building collateral to gain the ear of some of the sharks Juntez owed. Right now Reaper's rep was good enough that one or two would listen to him if he traded them a job to call in Juntez's debt. But that would only be an irritation to the mafia man. Instead, Reaper, Carlitos, the Barrio Boys and even Maya were all working on getting their fingers into some of the pies of the sharks. Everyone had something to bring to the war plan, be it Maya winning over the working women of the street to put pressure on their pimps, to Carlitos bodily threatening to hunt one Shark down and peel his skin off. This was one of the few times that Malcolm's inherent patience and intelligence was to the Barrio Boys' advantage and not just his own.

To maneuver himself into a position to call in ALL of Juntez' debts, Reaper had to get involved in the ganglife of the Barrio Boys. Three of the Sharks would call in the debt markers the moment Reaper or Carlitos gave them word to, but the others Reaper was going to have to keep trying to hook. The largest debt was owed to the Shark who watched the books for smuggling into and out of Madrid. If Malcolm could gain that man's cooperation, it would deal the most damage to Juntez in the shortest period of time. So Reaper took a look at the Barrio Boys' smuggling side of operations and was able to minutely tweak a few areas to have more cash falling into everyone's hands along the way.

If the Barrio Boys could buy off the Shark, it would become as easy as that to en Juntez's mafia career, but that required finding money to drop a large sum on the Shark's plate. So Reaper bent his concentration to the Barrio Boys' buisness and started to find ways to let the money trickle in. Nothing huge at first, but all of it was adding up. The first step was pinpointing which of the smuggling operations was losing the most to bribes and 'bleed out', where those handeling the merchandise or cash swiped a little off of the top. Once Reaper found that, of all things, the Barrio Boys lost a decent picking off of smuggling prescriptions, he knew he could use some of the practices his own family employed to keep their own shipments from being ripped off. The first step was to tape seal the individual bottles so it would be obvious if someone had emptied out some of the pills. The next step was harder, Reaper having to all but design a distribution system to change up the drop off points. If they could keep the locations fluid, then there would be less need for bribes. It was pure laziness that was costing them so much, because some of the Barrio Boys found it easier to just grease the palms of the corrupt policia than actually put any thought into avoiding the problem all together. It would cost a little of the money he had already built up to make the system fluid and flexible, but after he established a randomly rotating series of drop points, and had nailed down those that were stealing the most, the money started to build up with faster momentum.