The Melville Chocolate Company

The company was originally set up as a front for The Regulators to launder their ill-gotten gains from protection rackets and other sources, but by chance the man put in charge of it was a chef and a chocolate lover who created some truly tasty chocolates that the general public genuinely wanted to buy. The company started growing largely on its own, with a little help from the Regulators.

One of the ways it grew was by packaging poisoned chocolates in boxes belonging to its competitors and by using them to carry out assassinations. The person who paid for the contract got the murder he or she paid for, the Regulators got their money, and the competing company got shut down and investigated for days or weeks by the city guards, costing them large amounts of money.

The Regulators were careful not to destroy all rival businesses, as this would expose their company in public as being Regulator linked and bring down heat on them. The company has four functions, public and otherwise. First it does what it says it does, making and selling chocolate of high quality. Second it researches new chocolates, by no means all of them legal although the majority are. Third, it launders money from extortion, theft, the selling of illegal weapons and drugs and other illegal activities, hiding them within its legal profits. Fourth, it has a small inner core of about thirty undercover Regulators who carry out assassinations.

If the target is too well guarded to be poisoned by chocolate, or murdered in the normal way, one way is to blow a dart into them from a blowpipe, a chocolate one in winter, a wafer one in summer, that is eaten as quickly as possible after the hit is done, so that if the assassin is picked up he or she will have no weapon on them, nor will one be found anywhere near them.

The tiny dart has two poisons. One does no harm for thirty seconds after ingestion through the skin and then stops the heart and makes it seem like a heart attack. But for those few with hearts strong enough to beat the effects of the poison, a second poison kicks in, creating terrifying hallucinations that often make the target kill or injure themselves and others for no apparent reason. If they survive this then the visions can kick in later at any random time within as long as a week afterwards.

The criminal part of the company is so well hidden that it would take a clever detective to have a chance of uncovering it. And most of the crimes are to do with laundering money and hiding the odd Regulator on the run rather then murder.