People had long said that anyone seeking their fortune in Shenghai needed to remember three maps.
The first was an ordinary street map of Shenghai.
The second mapped the powers in the concessions.
The third mapped the gangs.
For ordinary people, the third was especially important. In a city as vast as Shenghai, its gangs reached into every corner and every trade; dealing with them was almost unavoidable.
The most powerful were undoubtedly the White Lotus Gang, the Hong Gang, and the United Crowds Gang. These three committed every kind of crime, and little more needed to be said about them.
Beneath them were gangs large and small that trafficked people, ran casinos, sold opium, and picked pockets. There were also dockside tyrants, night-soil tyrants, rickshaw tyrants, fish-market tyrants, and vegetable-market tyrants—
In short, if a trade could be squeezed for profit, a gang had its fingers in it. Their members numbered forty or fifty thousand altogether, though that included those on the fringes. Even counting only core members, there were several thousand.
This time, the Mystic Umbrella Company intended to arrest every core gang member first, then round up those on the fringes. Some would inevitably slip through the net during the operation, but that did not matter. Once their core members were finished, the gangs themselves would be all but destroyed.
Afterward, the company would vigorously develop industry and the economy, uprooting all those disorderly forces once and for all.
Vroom—
In Jiangyan District, eighty-three buses rolled along in a long procession. Behind them came thousands of workers on horses, motorcycles, and bicycles, all riding high as they surged toward every part of Shenghai.
The buses came from the Shenghai Long-Distance Bus Company, which Mystic Umbrella had acquired. Originally a private company with a little over twenty vehicles,