Baroque Works

Baroque Works operated as a shadow syndicate built by the Warlord Crocodile for one ambition: to wreck the Arabasta Kingdom from within, take it over, and through it dig up the ancient weapon Pluton. Across several years it ran espionage, sabotage, and assassination, steadily pushing the desert nation toward open rebellion. Most of its rank and file were hired bounty hunters and mercenaries fed the lie that they were forging an ideal new country, while its top tier hid genuinely lethal fighters and spies.

At its peak the network counted well over two thousand people, reaching from the early Grand Line all the way back into the East Blue. Crocodile enforced obsessive secrecy: nearly everyone carried a codename, contact between ranks was restricted, and his own identity as the boss stayed the deepest secret of all, with anyone who threatened to expose him marked for death. Because of their part in the saga, the syndicate stands as the central villain force of the Arabasta storyline.

Day to day, the bulk of the membership chased funds, mainly through bounty hunting, while operatives planted inside Arabasta carried out direct sabotage. They smuggled and scattered Dance Powder to fake droughts, trashed parched towns, and spread rumors to stoke unrest, framing King Cobra and his loyalists wherever they could to grease the path toward civil war. Leadership rested on Crocodile under the alias Mr. 0, with Nico Robin as his right hand, titled Miss All Sunday.

Beneath them sat roughly two dozen agents paired into male-female teams. Men held numbered names, with lower numbers ranking higher, while women carried holiday and weekday names. The teams split into the deadly Officer Agents, Mr. 1 through Mr. 5, most of them Devil Fruit users, and the lesser Frontier Agents, Mr. 6 through Mr. 12, who oversaw fundraising. Below the agents toiled two hundred Billions and eighteen hundred Millions, the disposable foot soldiers, plus oddities like the message-carrying Unluckies and the execution lake of Bananawani. The whole scheme, Operation Utopia, nearly succeeded before Vivi, the Straw Hats, and a Marine unit under Smoker broke it apart, after which the group was exposed and dismantled and most members were jailed.

The leadership tier carried staggering firepower. Crocodile, master of the Suna Suna no Mi and a New World veteran, was the first to beat Luffy outright in single combat and did so more than once. Nico Robin, the field commander, could spy on and kill from a distance with the Hana Hana no Mi and was among the last people able to read Poneglyphs, putting the syndicate uncomfortably close to the ancient weapons. Among the agents, the swordsman Mr. 1 (Daz Bonez) and the okama Mr. 2 Bon Kurei (Bentham) repeatedly came near killing Zoro and Sanji.

After the fall, the members scattered to very different fates. Crocodile and Daz Bonez later escaped Impel Down and went on to form the Cross Guild, Robin joined the Straw Hat Pirates, Bentham stayed behind to cover Luffy's prison escape, Galdino drifted into Buggy's outfit, and Igaram and Vivi returned to their royal duties in Arabasta. Many of the remaining agents reunited at the New Spiders Cafe.