The Family (City of Heroes)

"Roll this mook."

- Standard Family member battle-cry.

The Marcone Crime Family simply referred to as The Family is a villain group in City of Heroes and City of Villains. The group is a mafia style crime syndicate who rose to power of over rival as the name in drug dealing, smuggling and protection rackets.

The Family were once part of the illustrious Marcone mafia, the equivalent of royalty in the underworld, however when their boss Don Harry Frost who formed an alliance between all the major cartels as one unit. most families folded to Frosts leadership and the ones that maintained independent itineraries still knew better than to challenge his leadership. Frost was killed though in the 1970s during a major raid by the super hero team, Regulators. The Regulator raid was a critical blow to the family who had not just lost a leader by a main drug warehouse. Harry Frost had a one son, Sebastian Frost who followed in his father foot-steps even having lost his father a young age. Sebastian Frost  grew up on the mean streets of Paragon City working as a hustler and con artist before reclaiming his title as the prince of organized crime. As for recovering assets Sebastian was contacted by a Mysterious Benefactor, who had developed a new drug called Superdyne. Superdyne, often shorted to "Dyne" was a drug that induced super powers in normal humans, powers such as super-strength, super endurance and for certain high end versions telekinesis. Dyen is extremely addictive and raises aggression in users, overuse starts to affect brain-functions and addicts in addition to increased powers and aggression lose most of their former individuality save for their need for more Dyne. With the prospect of having the sole source and recipe for Dyne and his family legacy Sebastian Frost was easily able to rebuild the Family, however Sebastian has much less cosmopolitan views of how the Family should be run. Sebastian completely annihilated any and all competition makings it priority that the Family was -the only- crime syndicate. Other Dons were killed or made to swear fealty to the family as the one and only mafia organization.

With Dyne as it's base product The Family was able to put together enough funding to reopen their weapons smuggling as well, but as prosperous as they were Sebastian Frost was still not immune to do-gooding superheroes and police effort and quickly went into hiding to prevent from meeting with his father's fate. Some claim that Sebastian himself died years ago and The Family is now run by various lieutenants, however two missions reveal that despite lying low Sebastian Frost is still alive and kicking though certainly in his autumn years. The Family use the street-gang, the Skulls, as dealers for their Superdyne. Skulls are a group of death worshiping street thugs who don't mind getting their hands dirty and are more than happy to be cut-outs for the Family in more suburban areas for a peace of the profits or in some cases a just complimentary stashes of Dyne. While the Family recognizes the Skulls as valuable assets they are willing to bail out occasionally against the Skulls rival gang, the Hellions, the Hellions themselves have higher backing as well, the Warriors leading the Family to attend to matter personally when daily takes start coming up light. It is not uncommon for the Family to move weapons for the likes of Crey Industries either since the corporation's all to glad "misplace shipments of controversial and not whole government approved weapons", however both the Family and Crey try to keep such dealings quiet since both feel the other would draw too much attention to them.