African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1167: Chapter 76: Solving the Case

Staring at the bodies being carried out one after another, Maracaibo Police Department Chief Chavez’s veins bulged; this was the most vicious incident since the founding of Maracaibo City.

”Chief, the count is in. A total of one hundred and eighty people were killed, all of them core members of the Ladani Dan Black Gang, including Carmen, Luo De and other gang leaders. All died from gunshot wounds. There was an intense firefight between the two sides, but we haven’t found any personnel from the opposing force.”

”Because it happened late at night, there weren’t many eyewitnesses. Only a local resident, Otar, plucked up his courage to take a peek yesterday. According to what he said, the other side on the street looked very well-trained and organized, so it’s very likely they were a rival gang to the Ladani Dan Black Gang...”

Chavez quietly listened to the clues his subordinates had dug up, cold sweat pouring inside. Never mind for the moment who the Ladani Dan Black Gang had offended; the hellish scene before his eyes alone was enough to silence everyone in Maracaibo.

He walked over to a shrouded body, forced himself to pull it together, and asked, ”Is Carmen in here?”

A subordinate answered, ”Yes. Based on the remaining fragments and clothing, we determined this is Carmen, the former boss of the Dan Black Gang.”

Chavez held his breath and lifted a corner of the shroud, revealing a Carmen inside who still barely resembled a human being.

Some officers nearby, seeing Carmen’s face half-burned away by fire, felt a wave of nausea and deep discomfort; a few younger cops ran off on the spot and threw up their previous night’s meal.

As the big boss of the Maracaibo police, however, Chavez didn’t react much. As a veteran officer, he had seen quite a lot.

In the early 20th century, public security in most countries wasn’t exactly good. Even in relatively peaceful countries, things like this couldn’t be entirely avoided; the most typical example being East Africa.

East Africa, once a textbook ”militarist state” and ”police state,” coupled with a Monarch like Ernst who attached great importance to public security, had long been known for its official policy of harshly cracking down on crime.

Dar es Salaam City, Mombasa City and other East African coastal areas could be said to be the safest places for ordinary people along the entire Indian Ocean Coast, and the same went for East Africa’s West Coast.

The East African police force was also one of the few truly powerful criminal suppression agencies in the world. And as East Africa in recent years had cleared out beasts, indigenous tribes and other threats, its control over civilian firearms had been greatly tightened. Especially in fully developed areas, gun control had been completely implemented.

Of course, East Africa for now certainly couldn’t achieve an all-out gun ban like a certain Eastern Power in the previous life; mainly because society still had a rigid demand for guns. There were still many undeveloped areas in East Africa, the most typical being Gabon, which had just been annexed.

As a tropical rainforest region, Gabon’s threats from wild beasts and indigenous tribes were anything but small, so owning firearms there seemed quite necessary. In rainforests, which are very easy places to hide, the backing of hot weapons was even more indispensable.

Overall, East Africa’s gun control was still relatively strict nowadays—at least compared with most parts of the world.

And even so, East Africa’s crime rate was not low. Of course, it differed noticeably from that of Europe and America and other countries. After all, petty theft counts as crime, and murder, arson, and looting also count as crime. The former is impossible to eradicate, and because East Africa strictly governs according to law, they actually catch more of those; the latter has almost no room to exist in East Africa and certainly doesn’t become normalized the way it does in other countries.

Especially for a gang like the one in Maracaibo that operated openly under broad daylight, swaggering around—if this were East Africa they’d have been sentenced long ago. In recent years, as East Africa opened up its free market, in order to ensure social stability it implemented a hardline ”strike hard” campaign; the East African police had killed a whole bunch of chickens to scare the monkeys.

During Chief Chavez’s tenure in Maracaibo, he had weathered plenty of big storms; people who died as miserably as Carmen were not exactly rare in this city.

So Chavez didn’t find the fate of this local strongman Carmen particularly surprising; what truly made his heart pound was the powerful methods of the Ladani Dan Black Gang’s enemy.

The Ladani Dan Black Gang was a large organization with over a thousand members, even holding hot weapons in their hands. In Maracaibo they practically blotted out the sky with one hand; even Chavez had to give Carmen some face before, turning a blind eye to some of their activities.

Yet such a powerful organization was annihilated overnight. The strength of their opponent was simply beyond imagination. And when he thought about such a formidable force having been lurking under his very nose, Chavez naturally felt deeply uneasy.

So Chavez asked his subordinates, ”Did the killers leave any more clues? Is there any force in our city or nearby that could wipe out the Ladani Dan Black Gang?”

A subordinate said, ”Chief, if there’s a force you don’t even know about, how could we possibly know? Of course, if we’re not talking about grey forces, there are still people who could destroy the Ladani Dan Black Gang—for example, the upper-class families in Maracaibo. If they worked together, the Ladani Dan Black Gang would be child’s play.”

Chavez shook his head. ”That’s absolutely impossible. The families in Maracaibo aren’t as powerful as you think. If they had cooperated, there’s no way we wouldn’t have gotten wind of it.”

Chavez ruled this out immediately. Others might not understand, but he was very familiar with the movements of Maracaibo’s top families, because Chavez himself was one of them.

As the police chief of Maracaibo, Chavez hadn’t reached this position without a background. His family was itself a major force in Maracaibo; many family members worked in the city government, and they even had high-ranking officials in the capital, Caracas.

So the movements of Maracaibo’s upper-class families couldn’t be completely hidden from Chavez—especially in a major event like the destruction of the Ladani Dan Black Gang, assuming it had been their own people who acted.

”Is it possible the City Defense Army did this? After all, to handle this much weaponry, the City Defense Army is a prime suspect.”

”The City Defense Army isn’t much stronger than we are; it definitely couldn’t have been them,” Chavez said, rejecting the idea.

That pack of drunk, good-for-nothing City Defense troops were poorly equipped and few in number; their strength was not even on par with the police. After all, Venezuela was a poor country with very lax military preparedness, and the City Defense Army had little gravy to skim, unlike the police, who could at least reap plenty of benefits within the city.

Yes, under Chavez’s leadership the police department was far from clean. They even cooperated with the Ladani Dan Black Gang. The gang’s siphoning of oil and water from Maracaibo also involved paying tribute to the city police.

Although the Ladani Dan Black Gang was powerful, they were still vermin in the gutter who couldn’t show their faces in the light. Their rise and expansion had also been a result of Chavez turning a blind eye. Chavez had known the gang’s founder, Ladani himself, and had even thrown him in jail back when the Ladani Dan Black Gang was just a mid-sized outfit.

”Right! Who have the Ladani Dan Black Gang offended recently?” Chavez suddenly thought of something.

Since the Ladani Dan Black Gang had been wiped out, it meant they must have provoked someone—and those people were no lightweights, able to source large quantities of arms. So by analyzing who the gang had recently crossed, it shouldn’t be that hard to find the answer.

Guided by Chavez’s hint, a subordinate said, ”We really did overlook that. The Ladani Dan Black Gang has been operating in Maracaibo for over ten years. Previously they could exist and grow, but now they’ve been eliminated, so the people they offended are very likely not local forces. After all, everyone here knows each other’s backgrounds, and no one wants to push things to such an extreme.”

Chavez nodded and said, ”Good, let’s follow that line of thought. We’re bound to get something.”

Although the Ladani Dan Black Gang had been wiped out, most of the casualties were core members. The gang had more than two hundred core members, some of whom simply weren’t at the headquarters last night and thus slipped through the net.

Moreover, aside from these core members, the Ladani Dan Black Gang still had many peripheral members who had basically suffered no losses. So whatever trouble the gang had stirred up recently could definitely be learned from their mouths.