Douglas "Boss" Callihan was the Anarch Baron of New York City.
Biography[]
Callihan was born in Londonderry, Ireland sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century, and is old enough to have been affected by the tenure of Lord Castlereagh as the British Chief Secretary for Ireland, who quashed the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Despite being Irish himself, Callihan at the very least admired the man for some reason, later keeping a portrait of him in his personal office. He emigrated to the United States in the 19th century, and as an adult worked his way into New York City's political scene through the infamous Tammany Hall organization.
The excesses of Tammany Hall during the nineteenth century made many people very rich — especially Boss William Marcy Tweed’s Democratic Party cronies, who successfully bilked New York City out of as much as $200,000,000. While Tweed himself was eventually arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned (later dying in prison), Callihan one-upped the old boss. Callihan used his money to buy his way into one of the other shadow societies of New York—the Kindred. Embraced by a Sabbat Ventrue, Callihan laid low and laundered his money through the Cainites of his new peerage.
Callihan quickly grew disillusioned with the Sabbat. Few of its members had the sort of refinement and decorum that he was used to. Those few who did snubbed him because of his lineage — had he known beforehand about clan sentiments, he would have tried to convince a Lasombra to Embrace him. As feelings between the sect and Callihan soured, he took up with a group of reformers calling themselves anarchs. With his money, his skill at manipulating people and events, and his notoriety in the mortal world, the anarchs welcomed him.
Callihan rose quickly through the anarchs’ ranks, becoming a boss in his own right. While the faction didn’t truly appeal to him any more than the Sabbat, he had managed to acquire some degree of power and influence within it. And it was just that possession of power that kept him where he was, a lion among the jackals, or so he saw it.
Over the years, he grew familiar with the Sabbat’s enemy, the Camarilla, and chose to keep himself and his anarchs out of the Battle of New York, hoping to steal a place for himself while the sects were distracted fighting each other. The Camarilla proved too swift, however, and the anarchs were caught off guard as the sect swept in and claimed all the old Sabbat domains for itself. Callihan was incensed, but the opportunity still existed. The Camarilla played on terms much more like his own than the turgid Sabbat, so he figured that he could adapt to their ways and finally take the socially prominent place that was his due.
Unfortunately for him, it was primarily young Kindred who had made their permanent havens in the city — the few “elders” who were around were no older than himself and seemed to largely want to place themselves behind the scenes for their own protection. Callihan chafed under these circumstances, especially when his anarchs were suddenly relegated to Staten Island domains.
V5 Timeline[]
In March of 2020, Callihan was found dead in his office under mysterious circumstances. The Lasombra clan representative Julia Sowinski was tapped to lead the Camarilla's investigation.
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