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likeshowbusinessUser Name/Nick: Naomi
User DW:metonumia
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metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin, Ashildr
Character Name: Harry Starks
Series: The Long Firm (mostly the book, with a bit of extra colour from the very faithful TV adaptation)
Age: Around 40
From When?: 1969, shortly before his arrest; his lover, Tommy, shoots him after being caught in bed with Ruby, a mutual friend. In canon, the bullet hits his shoulder but he could easily have been killed.
Inmate: According to the judge who eventually sentences him to 20 years in prison: "You led a disciplined and well-organised gang for the purpose of your own material interests and criminal desires. You terrorised those who crossed your path in a vicious and sadistic way. That you set yourself up as judge, jury and executioner in heinous attacks on innocent citizens is particularly odious and a disgrace to civilisation." Pretty much covers it.
Arrival: Arrives at the moment of his could-be death, against his will.
Abilities/Powers: N/A
Personality:
On a superficial level, and when he's in a good mood, Harry is charming, quick-witted and generous - in the way of a king or feudal lord who is beneficent to those beneath him, knowing he can afford to be kind so long as they know their place. He is semi-openly gay - that is, open in those environments where he can break the legs of anyone who objects - but categorises himself as 'homosexual', rejecting every cultural stereotype that goes with less formal terminology (though it's observed by several people that he can be quite camp in the company of people he's comfortable with). He isn't formally educated (having never gotten as far as his O-Levels, the equivalent of completing high school) but he is intelligent, if not particularly good at calculating risk or understanding when he's out of his depth. He can, however, take a long view of things - when questioned as to why he wouldn't grass on the corrupt police who arrested him, for instance, he points out that he'll still have to work with dirty coppers when he gets out of prison. Any possible reduction to his sentence isn't worth the definite hit to his reputation as someone the police can work with.
On the other hand, Harry is described in his lurid press coverage as the 'Torture Gang Boss', and that acts as a good enough headline for the personality that many people see when they fall foul of him. He has absolutely no fear of violence, and has a wide variety of tools at his disposal when he needs to scare those he considers to have misbehaved - he's infamous for using an electrified black box which is then hooked up to two vulnerable parts of the male anatomy. Respect is vitally important to him, as is other people's awareness of hierarchy; Terry notes that his violence was: 'To make one thing very clear. That he was the guvnor.' However this does mean that, for example, he has a particularly blind spot to when he's being scammed - because he can't comprehend how anyone would have the nerve.
Alongside respect (of his colleagues in the criminal underworld) he also craves respectability - a sense of class which he tries to foster by filling his club with showbusiness personalities, minor politicians and sportspeople alongside 'faces' - that is, other gangsters. For the same reason he engages the peer Lord Teddy Thursby to give his business activities an air of legitimacy. Thursby, among others, observes that Harry seems to aspire to be something greater and purer than he is; he's fascinated by the upper-class world Thursby inhabits, and seems to aspire to a higher social status than his racket gives him access to. His own activities seem to have him straining towards a kind of aristocracy, even when he can't seem to reach it.
His nickname, 'Mad Harry', is meant in a more cruelly literal way than a lot of people assume. Harry is diagnosed bipolar and sometimes has it under control, taking medication and seeing a psychiatrist for patches of the canon timeline. His manic episodes are usually violent and destructive - he channels them into his work, 'putting the frighteners on people' - whereas his depressive periods are characterised by long periods of lone brooding, self-neglect and (around people he cares about) unusual emotional vulnerability. He's also been known to harm himself, quite badly, just to demonstrate how unafraid of pain he is. Later in the period covered by canon he seems to have this under better control, medically, but he is still sometimes prone to what his firm refers to as his 'black moods' or simply 'going into one'.
Harry seems to have to engage in a certain degree of doublethink to make it through the day. He seems to genuinely think of himself as a businessman, even though his only semi-legitimate enterprise - his club, the Stardust - is constantly on the brink of failure due to its suboptimal location and his outdated tastes, both of which he seems either oblivious to or in denial of. It only really perks up after being rebranded as a strip club, and he seems to genuinely regret the loss of the 'classy' establishment he once believes he had to more modern mores. His only successes are in criminality: fraud, protection, racketeering and smuggling, and even his firm is prone to their share of failures. Once the Kray twins (considered the larger threat) have been dealt with and police resources are redirected at Harry, he's managed to lose/alienate/kill anyone who might have helped him and he goes down almost immediately.
His contradictory thought processes extend themselves to how he feels about, and treats, the people he's close to. One of Harry's lovers says this of him that he "didn't like to do business with anybody that he couldn't tie to a chair. He liked to break people." More accurately, he likes to surround himself with weak or vulnerable people who he can control. From his young lovers, to his easily blackmailed friends in high places, Harry doesn't let people close unless he has some sort of power or leverage over them, or palpably benefits from their relationship. Harry seems to genuinely like and need some people but he has no real concept of how to treat people as equals. He repeatedly hurts and terrorises his lovers and close friends, doesn't see himself as being in the wrong for doing that - after all, they were asking for it - and doesn't seem to understand why this repeatedly loses him friends. The people he pulls into his orbit seem to go through a process of being initially attracted by his charm and generosity, then terrified by the darker side he reveals, and by then they're in too deep or too indebted to him to draw away without being hurt in the process.
Barge Reactions:
Harry is a character coming onto the Barge from the late 1960s and so faces a period of adjustment to a cultural milieu that averages out around the 21st century and, obviously, includes things completely beyond his experience - superpowers, magic, non-humans etc. He will adjust very quickly, or at least look like he will, for fear of being considered out of his depth or vulnerable. He won't like the discovery that the reputation he's spent years working up has become meaningless, and will be easily drawn into violence just to make it clear that he's not to be messed around.
What he will react to worst is the idea that the Barge represents an indefinite sentence until he's 'better'; this plays into his worst fears of being committed to a psychiatric facility rather than simply imprisoned, with no release date. Between this and the possibility of a rough flood or two, he'll have to work through the idea that he's just had some kind of break with reality as a result of his betrayal by Tommy and Ruby. (Harry will be pragmatic, if not at all open, about seeking medication for his manic depression.)
Update: Harry spent several months on the Barge previously. He quickly adjusted to life on board, finding a few friends - notably in Tiffany, Horatio and Alfie - as well as forming a 'romantic' relationship with Pietro. He's also killed a few people, including Bull and Kylo Ren, mostly as a way of illustrating that he's not a pushover.
Overall he's spent much of his time feeling understimulated and frustrated by the process of being pushed pillar-to-post by the temporary warden system. The floods and breaches have also been somewhat deleterious to his mental health. However, if anything, this'll make him more willing to cooperate with a permanent warden when he does get one.
He will, as far as he's aware, have been in a coma and will be surprised by the length of his absence.
Path to Redemption:
Harry has the potential to be more, and better, than he is. He certainly has aspirations towards belonging to a more honourable (and wealthier) class than the one he was born to. He's very intelligent, even if he doesn't have the tools to express it, and can genuinely care for people, although he can't express that in a healthy way either. He does also feel a strong sense of responsibility on occasion - for example towards Bernie Oliver, a young male prostitute who was murdered at a party hosted by one of Harry's associates. Harry has no reason whatsoever to investigate this case - he doesn't learn that he supplied the party himself until fairly late on - but does it in the knowledge that nobody else will bother looking very hard into the death of a young gay man with no family.
On the Barge, a warden will have a lengthy job on their hands. He'll be cooperative in some ways just because he'll want to stay active, mentally and physically; he deeply fears succumbing to mental illness and regards keeping 'exercised' as a way to avoid that. For the very same reason, however, there will be a degree of backlash against the nature of the Barge itself - as mentioned above, he will see the ship as being more like a mental institution than a prison. Working through this, and then through the fact that he can't fake his way out, will take effort and patience on behalf of his warden.
Lingering on his past won't do any good; Harry has a tendency to brood over his failures and he has so many of them. A clearer focus on the future and what he could accomplish by going straight(er) and laying off the violence. The way he treats the people he claims to love is obviously something that needs to be addressed; Harry likes people, needs their company, treats them horribly and then loses them. He doesn't seem to see the relationship between the latter two points.
History:
[General note: Harry's canon comes across via the first-person narratives of five people who encounter Harry, so some of this is inferred; it's also clear that their stories overlap or run concurrently to one another, so the exact order of events is hard to tell in some cases.]
Harry was born in the late 20s and grew up in Shoreditch, a child during the Second World War; his home was bombed during the London Blitz and his father, a Jewish Communist with minor criminal interests, was absent throughout the war. Harry describes himself as the 'youngest spiv on Shoreditch High Street,' so was presumably running some kind of black market trade when he was a teenager in the 40s. This may have been where he met the gangster Billy Hill, who he worked for into at least the early 50s, assisting with smuggling operations out of Tangiers. He did some time in Dartmoor and Exeter jails in the mid-50s, and was later briefly certified and spent time at Long Grove Mental Hospital. He recovered and was released. In around 1959 he was freelancing, and worked briefly for Peter Rachman, a notoriously exploitative landlord. By at least 1962 he had established his own club, the Stardust, at 'the wrong end of Soho' and used it as a base for his small firm of smugglers and racketeers.
In canon, Harry's story is told via five people who touch his life. Terry becomes his lover, 'kept boy' and minor figure in the firm after they meet at a club in 1962; they grow steadily closer, but the prospect of life with Harry frightens Terry so much that he eventually drives Harry into offering him an ultimatum, and then walks out of their relationship. However, he discovers that Harry has more control over him than he thought - having bought out the lease on Terry's flat, which he didn't think Harry even knew about.
He finds himself being drawn back into the business, no longer as Harry's lover but as the front for a con called the 'Long Firm' where hundreds of white goods are bought on credit under a false identity, then rapidly sold for cash in one day - the business is suddenly dissolved and the nonexistent owner cannot be pursued for payment on his debts. One of Harry's men, Jimmy Murphy, plans to skim off the profits of the con and share them with Terry - when they are discovered and Terry refuses to cooperate, Jimmy knocks him unconscious and flees with the entire takings. Harry tortures Terry for information on the scam, then lets him go, relatively unhurt physically; they never see one another again. It's heavily implied that Harry has Jimmy hunted down and shot.
Lord Teddy Thursby, Harry meets in late 1964 at a sex party at his Chelsea home - he regularly hosts these events for wealthy gay men, and hires numerous young men to 'distribute as largesse' - and they become friends. Harry makes the financially ailing Teddy the director of some of his 'companies' and shortly after, hires him as a 'business consultant' in exchange for a monthly fee and (implicitly) the regular service of one of Harry's boys, Craig, who Teddy eventually tires of and kicks out. After a few months, Teddy recommends that he invest in a building project in Nigeria.
Then things start to go bad. Halfway through the process, in March 1965, Harry is arrested but released after a month due to the failure to appear of a key prosecution witness; Teddy is pressured to intervene on his behalf and is, humiliatingly, accused of being in business with the criminal underworld. After Craig shows up demanding money, Teddy reports this to Harry, who later tells him at another party that he 'slipped on the soap and fell down the stairs' and is probably either dead or permanently incapacitated. Harry also has him drugged and sexually assaulted, taking photographs to use as blackmail material, which he then uses as leverage to force Teddy to accompany him to Nigeria in the summer of 1965 and investigate the progress of 'his' township. They find Harry's been scammed, but when they track down the culprit, they're followed by the local authorities who arrest him and demand that Teddy and Harry return home. Harry loses a sizeable investment but remains on reasonable terms with Teddy.
Harry was also acquainted with Jack 'The Hat' McVitie, a drug dealer (and in real life, an occasional associate of the Kray twins - Reggie Kray stabbed him to death in 1967, the murder for which he received life imprisonment). Around 1967, when the Richardson Gang are broken up and most of their members imprisoned, Harry sees an opportunity to move into car park scamming and baggage theft at Heathrow and make some quick money before the Krays take over. By this time, most of Harry's firm have gone - in prison, gone straight, or dead - so he hires Jack as extra muscle when he goes in to take a share of the profits in exchange for protection. Around this time it emerges in the news that a 17-year-old male prostitute, Bernard Oliver, was murdered and his body stuffed into two suitcases. DI George Mooney, a bent copper who frequently goes looking for bribes, enquires about this with Harry as Bernard was one of 'his boys' (and, while he's at it, asks him to take over the pornography trade operation running out of Soho). While taking over the Heathrow racket seems straightforward, Harry chooses to look into Bernard's murder and takes Jack along, against protest.
They talk to the record producer Joe Meek about Bernard, but he's in no condition to be useful, talking about a a party he attended out in the country. Shortly after Meek's death, Mooney tells Harry the investigation into Bernard's death has been closed and swiftly gets Harry moved on to taking control over protection rackets in the porn 'bookshops' in Soho. The Heathrow scam goes bad when security arrangements are changed and Jack and his associate Beardsley narrowly escape arrest. By this time, Harry is deeply involved in the bookshop racket and has worked out that the party Bernard attended was hosted by Teddy Thursby. He doesn't give up any information under intimidation, but does tell Harry that it was him (via his current lover, Trevor) who supplied Bernard and several other boys to the party.
Harry and Jack go to the field where Bernard's body was found, and find an empty caravan there - it's obviously where Bernard's body was dismembered and some of his organs have been kept and preserved. They wait for the owner to return and establish that he wasn't the killer - 'they' gave him the body to dispose of - but there's an altercation and Harry slashes his throat before he can say more. They burn the caravan. The next time Jack meets Harry, he's in a deep depression, Trevor having left him, and because Jack's become a liability he refuses to do any further business with him. (Jack later learns that Bernard was almost killed at Thursby's party, finished off by Mooney and then handed off to be disposed of, but this information never gets to Harry.)
Ruby Ryder, a largely unsuccessful actress, becomes a friend of Harry's in 1962 (having first met him when he paid an intimidating visit in 1959 as an employee of Peter Rachman, whom she had recently ended a relationship with). They remained close throughout the 60s and she met her future husband at the Stardust in '65, though Harry envied their relationship and mourned the loss of a more exclusive friendship with her. When Eddie was arrested and sent down around 1967, Ruby found it difficult to get work and got close to Harry again; he found her a flat in Chelsea, paying the rent, and later took her on as a 'choreographer' when he was forced to refurbish the club and reopen it as the Stardust Erotic Revue. Harry was careful to make sure the business was run properly and that the girls were paid well and had Equity contracts in case they ever wanted to go on to more legitimate work.
Ruby got deeper into Harry's criminal enterprises when he called in the various 'favours' she owed him, asking her to act as a go-between for himself and Mooney when it came to keeping him bribed. She helped to broker a division in control over Soho between Harry's firm and the Maltese and for a while things seemed to be going well; during this time Harry had a new boyfriend, Tommy, who was interested in being an actor and was coached by Ruby despite having very little inherent talent. They grow quite close and, unbeknownst to Harry, sleep together.
After the Krays' arrest and first court appearances, some of Harry's smuggled porn is busted by Customs and Excise, who he believes were tipped off - he is also under the impression that Mooney isn't distributing the money he's being paid. He dispatches Ruby to find out what's going on and she learns that one of Harry's firm, Tony Stavrakakis, is informing on him in exchange for a reduced sentence. She doesn't tell him.
Shortly after, Harry travels to Sweden in the company of Judy Garland and her new husband, who he's befriended by that point - though the trip is mostly intended to open new smuggling routes. He returns early after a concert cancellation to find Ruby and Tommy naked in bed together; a fight between Tommy and Harry ensues, and Harry ends up on the Barge.
Sample Journal Entry: [Note: content warnings for mental illness, self-harm, suicide.]
[Harry's sitting at a desk in his room, communicator carefully positioned for a slightly upward angle. He was absolutely bewildered by these devices, at first, but adjusted quickly.]
Now, here's what I find interesting about this little racket you've got going.
Thing is, you can say all you like about rehabilitation and the lot, but while you say that, while you're here you've lost your one basic bit of leverage, ain't you? Your actual fear of death. The one thing might keep a man from straying too far, and you've given it the boot.
It's like a mental hospital. Did a bit of time at West Grove. [A careless shrug. How could that possibly have happened.] Some of the lags in there, didn't want anything more in life than they wanted to top themselves. And the lengths they went to, to stop 'em - padded walls, straitjackets, didn't even let some of the poor cunts shave themselves.
Seems to me it might have been more effective to let one of them slip, every once in a while. Drag a body into that godforsaken day room, lay 'em out, let everyone get a good look. Get a lungfull of how a man shits himself as he dies. How there's no dignity in that man's carcass, no courage.
Might leave 'em a little more inclined to reflect on the merits of the mortal coil. And as for this place, the fleeting nature of even the most slow and lingering death...
[He shrugs.]
A less reasonable man might see that for carte blanche.
Sample RP:
A 'temporary warden'.
There's almost nothing about the Barge that Harry doesn't find a bleak fucking joke, but the terminology takes the biscuit, it truly does. The screws at the Moor wouldn't take money to be associated with this shabby bunch of do-gooders; his understanding of a warden is someone who reaches a crossroads in life and decides at the last minute that they'd rather have the nod from Her Majesty's Government to crack heads and break minds.
Not, in some cases, that the Barge definition of the term strays too far from that. Among the glossy Yank teenagers and the lunatics who claim they aren't human, there's a few - hard mouths, split knuckles, watchful eyes. Men (and, he grudgingly recognises, women) of few words. The kinds of people who get to be the Admiral's chosen ones because they put the frighteners on a particular breed of people. People like Harry himself, he doesn't suppose.
Harry hopes he'll get one for himself. Not because he believes they'll have some empathy with his position, but because it interests him that they've been so arbitrarily placed on one side of the line. He wonders how hard he'd have to push to get them over, and Harry--
He's always had a good strong arm on him.
But his first assignment is a girl. Sixteen or seventeen. And she suggests (with all the breezy confidence of a girl who's never had to deal with the Harry Starks of the world) that they meet for lunch, and he goes, because it's no skin off his back to be seen to behave on occasion.
Disappointingly, the mouthy twat he's been keeping tied to a chair for the last few days now also has a temporary warden, so Harry slits his throat and dumps him in an empty cabin for their new screw to find.
User DW:
metonumiaAIM/IM:
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin, Ashildr
Character Name: Harry Starks
Series: The Long Firm (mostly the book, with a bit of extra colour from the very faithful TV adaptation)
Age: Around 40
From When?: 1969, shortly before his arrest; his lover, Tommy, shoots him after being caught in bed with Ruby, a mutual friend. In canon, the bullet hits his shoulder but he could easily have been killed.
Inmate: According to the judge who eventually sentences him to 20 years in prison: "You led a disciplined and well-organised gang for the purpose of your own material interests and criminal desires. You terrorised those who crossed your path in a vicious and sadistic way. That you set yourself up as judge, jury and executioner in heinous attacks on innocent citizens is particularly odious and a disgrace to civilisation." Pretty much covers it.
Arrival: Arrives at the moment of his could-be death, against his will.
Abilities/Powers: N/A
Personality:
On a superficial level, and when he's in a good mood, Harry is charming, quick-witted and generous - in the way of a king or feudal lord who is beneficent to those beneath him, knowing he can afford to be kind so long as they know their place. He is semi-openly gay - that is, open in those environments where he can break the legs of anyone who objects - but categorises himself as 'homosexual', rejecting every cultural stereotype that goes with less formal terminology (though it's observed by several people that he can be quite camp in the company of people he's comfortable with). He isn't formally educated (having never gotten as far as his O-Levels, the equivalent of completing high school) but he is intelligent, if not particularly good at calculating risk or understanding when he's out of his depth. He can, however, take a long view of things - when questioned as to why he wouldn't grass on the corrupt police who arrested him, for instance, he points out that he'll still have to work with dirty coppers when he gets out of prison. Any possible reduction to his sentence isn't worth the definite hit to his reputation as someone the police can work with.
On the other hand, Harry is described in his lurid press coverage as the 'Torture Gang Boss', and that acts as a good enough headline for the personality that many people see when they fall foul of him. He has absolutely no fear of violence, and has a wide variety of tools at his disposal when he needs to scare those he considers to have misbehaved - he's infamous for using an electrified black box which is then hooked up to two vulnerable parts of the male anatomy. Respect is vitally important to him, as is other people's awareness of hierarchy; Terry notes that his violence was: 'To make one thing very clear. That he was the guvnor.' However this does mean that, for example, he has a particularly blind spot to when he's being scammed - because he can't comprehend how anyone would have the nerve.
Alongside respect (of his colleagues in the criminal underworld) he also craves respectability - a sense of class which he tries to foster by filling his club with showbusiness personalities, minor politicians and sportspeople alongside 'faces' - that is, other gangsters. For the same reason he engages the peer Lord Teddy Thursby to give his business activities an air of legitimacy. Thursby, among others, observes that Harry seems to aspire to be something greater and purer than he is; he's fascinated by the upper-class world Thursby inhabits, and seems to aspire to a higher social status than his racket gives him access to. His own activities seem to have him straining towards a kind of aristocracy, even when he can't seem to reach it.
His nickname, 'Mad Harry', is meant in a more cruelly literal way than a lot of people assume. Harry is diagnosed bipolar and sometimes has it under control, taking medication and seeing a psychiatrist for patches of the canon timeline. His manic episodes are usually violent and destructive - he channels them into his work, 'putting the frighteners on people' - whereas his depressive periods are characterised by long periods of lone brooding, self-neglect and (around people he cares about) unusual emotional vulnerability. He's also been known to harm himself, quite badly, just to demonstrate how unafraid of pain he is. Later in the period covered by canon he seems to have this under better control, medically, but he is still sometimes prone to what his firm refers to as his 'black moods' or simply 'going into one'.
Harry seems to have to engage in a certain degree of doublethink to make it through the day. He seems to genuinely think of himself as a businessman, even though his only semi-legitimate enterprise - his club, the Stardust - is constantly on the brink of failure due to its suboptimal location and his outdated tastes, both of which he seems either oblivious to or in denial of. It only really perks up after being rebranded as a strip club, and he seems to genuinely regret the loss of the 'classy' establishment he once believes he had to more modern mores. His only successes are in criminality: fraud, protection, racketeering and smuggling, and even his firm is prone to their share of failures. Once the Kray twins (considered the larger threat) have been dealt with and police resources are redirected at Harry, he's managed to lose/alienate/kill anyone who might have helped him and he goes down almost immediately.
His contradictory thought processes extend themselves to how he feels about, and treats, the people he's close to. One of Harry's lovers says this of him that he "didn't like to do business with anybody that he couldn't tie to a chair. He liked to break people." More accurately, he likes to surround himself with weak or vulnerable people who he can control. From his young lovers, to his easily blackmailed friends in high places, Harry doesn't let people close unless he has some sort of power or leverage over them, or palpably benefits from their relationship. Harry seems to genuinely like and need some people but he has no real concept of how to treat people as equals. He repeatedly hurts and terrorises his lovers and close friends, doesn't see himself as being in the wrong for doing that - after all, they were asking for it - and doesn't seem to understand why this repeatedly loses him friends. The people he pulls into his orbit seem to go through a process of being initially attracted by his charm and generosity, then terrified by the darker side he reveals, and by then they're in too deep or too indebted to him to draw away without being hurt in the process.
Barge Reactions:
Harry is a character coming onto the Barge from the late 1960s and so faces a period of adjustment to a cultural milieu that averages out around the 21st century and, obviously, includes things completely beyond his experience - superpowers, magic, non-humans etc. He will adjust very quickly, or at least look like he will, for fear of being considered out of his depth or vulnerable. He won't like the discovery that the reputation he's spent years working up has become meaningless, and will be easily drawn into violence just to make it clear that he's not to be messed around.
What he will react to worst is the idea that the Barge represents an indefinite sentence until he's 'better'; this plays into his worst fears of being committed to a psychiatric facility rather than simply imprisoned, with no release date. Between this and the possibility of a rough flood or two, he'll have to work through the idea that he's just had some kind of break with reality as a result of his betrayal by Tommy and Ruby. (Harry will be pragmatic, if not at all open, about seeking medication for his manic depression.)
Update: Harry spent several months on the Barge previously. He quickly adjusted to life on board, finding a few friends - notably in Tiffany, Horatio and Alfie - as well as forming a 'romantic' relationship with Pietro. He's also killed a few people, including Bull and Kylo Ren, mostly as a way of illustrating that he's not a pushover.
Overall he's spent much of his time feeling understimulated and frustrated by the process of being pushed pillar-to-post by the temporary warden system. The floods and breaches have also been somewhat deleterious to his mental health. However, if anything, this'll make him more willing to cooperate with a permanent warden when he does get one.
He will, as far as he's aware, have been in a coma and will be surprised by the length of his absence.
Path to Redemption:
Harry has the potential to be more, and better, than he is. He certainly has aspirations towards belonging to a more honourable (and wealthier) class than the one he was born to. He's very intelligent, even if he doesn't have the tools to express it, and can genuinely care for people, although he can't express that in a healthy way either. He does also feel a strong sense of responsibility on occasion - for example towards Bernie Oliver, a young male prostitute who was murdered at a party hosted by one of Harry's associates. Harry has no reason whatsoever to investigate this case - he doesn't learn that he supplied the party himself until fairly late on - but does it in the knowledge that nobody else will bother looking very hard into the death of a young gay man with no family.
On the Barge, a warden will have a lengthy job on their hands. He'll be cooperative in some ways just because he'll want to stay active, mentally and physically; he deeply fears succumbing to mental illness and regards keeping 'exercised' as a way to avoid that. For the very same reason, however, there will be a degree of backlash against the nature of the Barge itself - as mentioned above, he will see the ship as being more like a mental institution than a prison. Working through this, and then through the fact that he can't fake his way out, will take effort and patience on behalf of his warden.
Lingering on his past won't do any good; Harry has a tendency to brood over his failures and he has so many of them. A clearer focus on the future and what he could accomplish by going straight(er) and laying off the violence. The way he treats the people he claims to love is obviously something that needs to be addressed; Harry likes people, needs their company, treats them horribly and then loses them. He doesn't seem to see the relationship between the latter two points.
History:
[General note: Harry's canon comes across via the first-person narratives of five people who encounter Harry, so some of this is inferred; it's also clear that their stories overlap or run concurrently to one another, so the exact order of events is hard to tell in some cases.]
Harry was born in the late 20s and grew up in Shoreditch, a child during the Second World War; his home was bombed during the London Blitz and his father, a Jewish Communist with minor criminal interests, was absent throughout the war. Harry describes himself as the 'youngest spiv on Shoreditch High Street,' so was presumably running some kind of black market trade when he was a teenager in the 40s. This may have been where he met the gangster Billy Hill, who he worked for into at least the early 50s, assisting with smuggling operations out of Tangiers. He did some time in Dartmoor and Exeter jails in the mid-50s, and was later briefly certified and spent time at Long Grove Mental Hospital. He recovered and was released. In around 1959 he was freelancing, and worked briefly for Peter Rachman, a notoriously exploitative landlord. By at least 1962 he had established his own club, the Stardust, at 'the wrong end of Soho' and used it as a base for his small firm of smugglers and racketeers.
In canon, Harry's story is told via five people who touch his life. Terry becomes his lover, 'kept boy' and minor figure in the firm after they meet at a club in 1962; they grow steadily closer, but the prospect of life with Harry frightens Terry so much that he eventually drives Harry into offering him an ultimatum, and then walks out of their relationship. However, he discovers that Harry has more control over him than he thought - having bought out the lease on Terry's flat, which he didn't think Harry even knew about.
He finds himself being drawn back into the business, no longer as Harry's lover but as the front for a con called the 'Long Firm' where hundreds of white goods are bought on credit under a false identity, then rapidly sold for cash in one day - the business is suddenly dissolved and the nonexistent owner cannot be pursued for payment on his debts. One of Harry's men, Jimmy Murphy, plans to skim off the profits of the con and share them with Terry - when they are discovered and Terry refuses to cooperate, Jimmy knocks him unconscious and flees with the entire takings. Harry tortures Terry for information on the scam, then lets him go, relatively unhurt physically; they never see one another again. It's heavily implied that Harry has Jimmy hunted down and shot.
Lord Teddy Thursby, Harry meets in late 1964 at a sex party at his Chelsea home - he regularly hosts these events for wealthy gay men, and hires numerous young men to 'distribute as largesse' - and they become friends. Harry makes the financially ailing Teddy the director of some of his 'companies' and shortly after, hires him as a 'business consultant' in exchange for a monthly fee and (implicitly) the regular service of one of Harry's boys, Craig, who Teddy eventually tires of and kicks out. After a few months, Teddy recommends that he invest in a building project in Nigeria.
Then things start to go bad. Halfway through the process, in March 1965, Harry is arrested but released after a month due to the failure to appear of a key prosecution witness; Teddy is pressured to intervene on his behalf and is, humiliatingly, accused of being in business with the criminal underworld. After Craig shows up demanding money, Teddy reports this to Harry, who later tells him at another party that he 'slipped on the soap and fell down the stairs' and is probably either dead or permanently incapacitated. Harry also has him drugged and sexually assaulted, taking photographs to use as blackmail material, which he then uses as leverage to force Teddy to accompany him to Nigeria in the summer of 1965 and investigate the progress of 'his' township. They find Harry's been scammed, but when they track down the culprit, they're followed by the local authorities who arrest him and demand that Teddy and Harry return home. Harry loses a sizeable investment but remains on reasonable terms with Teddy.
Harry was also acquainted with Jack 'The Hat' McVitie, a drug dealer (and in real life, an occasional associate of the Kray twins - Reggie Kray stabbed him to death in 1967, the murder for which he received life imprisonment). Around 1967, when the Richardson Gang are broken up and most of their members imprisoned, Harry sees an opportunity to move into car park scamming and baggage theft at Heathrow and make some quick money before the Krays take over. By this time, most of Harry's firm have gone - in prison, gone straight, or dead - so he hires Jack as extra muscle when he goes in to take a share of the profits in exchange for protection. Around this time it emerges in the news that a 17-year-old male prostitute, Bernard Oliver, was murdered and his body stuffed into two suitcases. DI George Mooney, a bent copper who frequently goes looking for bribes, enquires about this with Harry as Bernard was one of 'his boys' (and, while he's at it, asks him to take over the pornography trade operation running out of Soho). While taking over the Heathrow racket seems straightforward, Harry chooses to look into Bernard's murder and takes Jack along, against protest.
They talk to the record producer Joe Meek about Bernard, but he's in no condition to be useful, talking about a a party he attended out in the country. Shortly after Meek's death, Mooney tells Harry the investigation into Bernard's death has been closed and swiftly gets Harry moved on to taking control over protection rackets in the porn 'bookshops' in Soho. The Heathrow scam goes bad when security arrangements are changed and Jack and his associate Beardsley narrowly escape arrest. By this time, Harry is deeply involved in the bookshop racket and has worked out that the party Bernard attended was hosted by Teddy Thursby. He doesn't give up any information under intimidation, but does tell Harry that it was him (via his current lover, Trevor) who supplied Bernard and several other boys to the party.
Harry and Jack go to the field where Bernard's body was found, and find an empty caravan there - it's obviously where Bernard's body was dismembered and some of his organs have been kept and preserved. They wait for the owner to return and establish that he wasn't the killer - 'they' gave him the body to dispose of - but there's an altercation and Harry slashes his throat before he can say more. They burn the caravan. The next time Jack meets Harry, he's in a deep depression, Trevor having left him, and because Jack's become a liability he refuses to do any further business with him. (Jack later learns that Bernard was almost killed at Thursby's party, finished off by Mooney and then handed off to be disposed of, but this information never gets to Harry.)
Ruby Ryder, a largely unsuccessful actress, becomes a friend of Harry's in 1962 (having first met him when he paid an intimidating visit in 1959 as an employee of Peter Rachman, whom she had recently ended a relationship with). They remained close throughout the 60s and she met her future husband at the Stardust in '65, though Harry envied their relationship and mourned the loss of a more exclusive friendship with her. When Eddie was arrested and sent down around 1967, Ruby found it difficult to get work and got close to Harry again; he found her a flat in Chelsea, paying the rent, and later took her on as a 'choreographer' when he was forced to refurbish the club and reopen it as the Stardust Erotic Revue. Harry was careful to make sure the business was run properly and that the girls were paid well and had Equity contracts in case they ever wanted to go on to more legitimate work.
Ruby got deeper into Harry's criminal enterprises when he called in the various 'favours' she owed him, asking her to act as a go-between for himself and Mooney when it came to keeping him bribed. She helped to broker a division in control over Soho between Harry's firm and the Maltese and for a while things seemed to be going well; during this time Harry had a new boyfriend, Tommy, who was interested in being an actor and was coached by Ruby despite having very little inherent talent. They grow quite close and, unbeknownst to Harry, sleep together.
After the Krays' arrest and first court appearances, some of Harry's smuggled porn is busted by Customs and Excise, who he believes were tipped off - he is also under the impression that Mooney isn't distributing the money he's being paid. He dispatches Ruby to find out what's going on and she learns that one of Harry's firm, Tony Stavrakakis, is informing on him in exchange for a reduced sentence. She doesn't tell him.
Shortly after, Harry travels to Sweden in the company of Judy Garland and her new husband, who he's befriended by that point - though the trip is mostly intended to open new smuggling routes. He returns early after a concert cancellation to find Ruby and Tommy naked in bed together; a fight between Tommy and Harry ensues, and Harry ends up on the Barge.
Sample Journal Entry: [Note: content warnings for mental illness, self-harm, suicide.]
[Harry's sitting at a desk in his room, communicator carefully positioned for a slightly upward angle. He was absolutely bewildered by these devices, at first, but adjusted quickly.]
Now, here's what I find interesting about this little racket you've got going.
Thing is, you can say all you like about rehabilitation and the lot, but while you say that, while you're here you've lost your one basic bit of leverage, ain't you? Your actual fear of death. The one thing might keep a man from straying too far, and you've given it the boot.
It's like a mental hospital. Did a bit of time at West Grove. [A careless shrug. How could that possibly have happened.] Some of the lags in there, didn't want anything more in life than they wanted to top themselves. And the lengths they went to, to stop 'em - padded walls, straitjackets, didn't even let some of the poor cunts shave themselves.
Seems to me it might have been more effective to let one of them slip, every once in a while. Drag a body into that godforsaken day room, lay 'em out, let everyone get a good look. Get a lungfull of how a man shits himself as he dies. How there's no dignity in that man's carcass, no courage.
Might leave 'em a little more inclined to reflect on the merits of the mortal coil. And as for this place, the fleeting nature of even the most slow and lingering death...
[He shrugs.]
A less reasonable man might see that for carte blanche.
Sample RP:
A 'temporary warden'.
There's almost nothing about the Barge that Harry doesn't find a bleak fucking joke, but the terminology takes the biscuit, it truly does. The screws at the Moor wouldn't take money to be associated with this shabby bunch of do-gooders; his understanding of a warden is someone who reaches a crossroads in life and decides at the last minute that they'd rather have the nod from Her Majesty's Government to crack heads and break minds.
Not, in some cases, that the Barge definition of the term strays too far from that. Among the glossy Yank teenagers and the lunatics who claim they aren't human, there's a few - hard mouths, split knuckles, watchful eyes. Men (and, he grudgingly recognises, women) of few words. The kinds of people who get to be the Admiral's chosen ones because they put the frighteners on a particular breed of people. People like Harry himself, he doesn't suppose.
Harry hopes he'll get one for himself. Not because he believes they'll have some empathy with his position, but because it interests him that they've been so arbitrarily placed on one side of the line. He wonders how hard he'd have to push to get them over, and Harry--
He's always had a good strong arm on him.
But his first assignment is a girl. Sixteen or seventeen. And she suggests (with all the breezy confidence of a girl who's never had to deal with the Harry Starks of the world) that they meet for lunch, and he goes, because it's no skin off his back to be seen to behave on occasion.
Disappointingly, the mouthy twat he's been keeping tied to a chair for the last few days now also has a temporary warden, so Harry slits his throat and dumps him in an empty cabin for their new screw to find.
