Passione

Even with fewer than a thousand on its books, 757 once the freshly enlisted Giorno is counted, Passione ranks among Italy's mightiest gangs. Its home is Naples, yet agents out of Rome and Venice are hardly rare. Command runs in a tight ladder below Diavolo, known only as the Boss: an adviser carries his instructions down to the lieutenants, or capos, each handed a territory and a set of crews built for one line of work, be it dealing drugs, killing, guarding bodies, or crunching information. The best-known of these units are La Squadra Esecuzioni, the assassins, and the Unita Speciale, which reports directly to the Boss.

Secrecy and rot define the outfit. Diavolo issues every command through go-betweens, will not show his face to a soul, and spends his effort scrubbing away all evidence of himself, going so far as to have his own daughter delivered to him for death; probe his identity and you are marked a traitor and made a warning to the rest. Order inside the ranks is loose, with graft and infighting everywhere and loyalty seldom reaching past one's own crew, so schemes against the Boss never stop, driven for some by greed and for others by anger that the gang now trades in the very drugs it once vowed to oppose. Its savage initiation, a stab from the Arrow, thins out the weak and mints the Stand users that pack its ranks.

Diavolo set Passione up in the late eighties, most likely 1986, as crime spread across Europe, and it prospered by feigning war on the drug trade while quietly running its own. The roots of his ruin were laid early: Jean Pierre Polnareff began chasing the Bow and Arrow and was forced into hiding, while La Squadra Esecuzioni came to loathe the Boss after Sorbet and Gelato were made a grisly warning. In 2001 the Boss commanded that his daughter Trish be brought to him so he might wipe her out, and Vento Aureo was set in motion.

That March, Giorno enlisted meaning to topple the Boss, allied with Bucciarati, who loathed the narcotics business. Once Giorno slew the lieutenant Polpo and Bucciarati took the rank, the team was ordered to shield Trish, then broke into open revolt after the Boss moved to kill her. Their pursuit of his true identity wound through Sardinia and onward to Rome, where the Arrow reshaped Polnareff's Stand into Chariot Requiem; at the price of Bucciarati's life, Giorno claimed the Arrow and awakened Gold Experience Requiem, whose power at last overcame the Boss. With Diavolo beaten, Giorno tucked the Arrow inside Coco Jumbo and rose as the gang's second head. Later novels trace what follows, above all Fugo's war on a breakaway narcotics team, closing with his pledge of loyalty to Giorno.