Manuel dos Piscatoris Silva started the Southern Angels when he was sixteen years old.

He and fourteen others.

That’s it, fifteen teenagers and an abandoned gas station as their clubhouse. A couple of kids that were having fun, that's all it was in the beginning,

Straight out of the slums of Brazil, they would terrorize nearby schools, take money from kids, and were constantly getting into trouble. Selling weed on the corners, jacking cars out of airports and even becoming some hired muscle for prostitutes in need of protection.

But as the years went by, more and more angels would join their little ground. Turning what was once a schoolyard gang of fifteen into a serious problem of 165 by the time Manuel was twenty-eight.

It was here that Manuel realized what he had in his hands, the chance to start punching in the big leagues. Manuel had started the Southern Angels as a joke, something to pass the time, but now that it had laid him the golden egg its real value had begun to show.

Greatness was within his grasp and he wasn’t about to let go.

Manuel had spent his whole life part of a middle-class family. He wasn’t rich or powerful, but they also weren’t poor. He was never neglected or mistreated, but he wasn’t the favorite, wasn’t the most loved. Everything about his life was normal, a life stuck in mediocrity, he used to say.

His entire life Manuel had admired the Cartells, how they were able to have whatever they wanted and never seemed to get in trouble. He saw that the people of the Cartells would walk through the streets with such pride and power, as they drove around in their fancy cars and expensive clothes.

And now he had a chance to have what they had, to be them. That was when he decided he would change the Southern Angels, from a gang into a Cartell.

Unfortunately Manuel never really understood what it meant to run a Cartel. Just having the numbers wasn't enough, you also needed to have a head that could lead. A Cartel in many ways was like a business, to make money one first needs a product. He would need land where he could produce the product and a large amount of resources to distribute the product.

Manuel had none of those things.

He had no product to sell, no routes to carry his drugs, no prostitutes to spread through the streets, and no officials that would back his rise. Any competent leader could lead a team of ten men and topple a castle but even with over one hundred men, Manuel was unable to gain any notable foothold in Brazil's criminal underbelly.

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For five years he would try again and again to rise to the top, but each and every one of his schemes would end in failure.

At one point Manuel bought $200,000 worth of drugs only to find out that it was a scam, leaving him only with two hundred crates of all-purpose flour. Another time over twenty drug peddlers from the Southern Angels were arrested all on the same day, this was due to them staying together within a one-block radius.

It also didn’t help that multiple times they were caught trying to openly sell their drugs at twelve in the afternoon during large rush hours.

Eventually, Manuel would find himself hopelessly outgunned when he would later try to take over the territory of, at the time, the largest Cartel in Brazil, El Lagarto. The retaliation they received was nothing short of horrific.

Members of the Southern Angles found their homes attacked at night, shots were fired in the streets and a birthday party of the daughter of one of his lieutenants was openly fired upon killing everyone attending.

Unable to fight back Manuel chose to flee, leaving his men and his friends behind. Within a week Manuel was on a boat to Cuba.

For six years Manuel would hide out in Cuba, living in the slums, trying his hardest to remain anonymous. But one night he got complacent thinking that by now the Lagartos would have forgotten him, so after a few drinks at the bar he started bragging that the Lagartos never caught him, that he was once again raising up his Cartel and would one day take back Brazil.

Luckily no Lagartos were there to pay him any mind, in fact, no one in the bar paid any attention to Manuel thinking that he was just too drunk to understand what he was saying.

But the attention that he did seem to get would be from someone who would later become his investor.

He came up to Manuel after the bar had closed, finding him slumped up against the wall too drunk to walk. He told Manuel that for a small price, he would give him Brazil. And in return, Manuel would pay him a set amount of money every month with the amount growing every year starting today.

Of course, he immediately agreed, why wouldn't he?

Without any questions, Manuel jumped onto the first plane heading straight for Rio, never stopping to think about how he would pay back his benefactor or even how he was going to survive against the largest Cartel in South America. He just knew that for some reason he had to get back to Rio as soon as possible.

Thankfully he didn't have to worry about any of that because as soon as he landed in Rio he found that miraculously all the heads of the Lagartos had suddenly disappeared leaving the entire Cartell without a leader, something that he was all the more glad to step up.

Gathering up what remained of his old friends he marched straight up to the old Lagartos headquarters and, with strangely almost no resistance, took the head seat for himself.

And just like that, Manuel was able to create a whole new Cartell from the remains of the previous one. And as long as he continued the constant payment towards his first investor Manuel found that his Angels suffered no damages and instead grew to greater heights.

As long as Manuel kept the cash flowing he knew that in time his Cartel would soon be able to cover the whole continent.

Truly there was nothing that could stop his rise to power.