Spice the Hedgehog

Angelo di Riccio also known by his nickname Spice is a middle aged hedgehog hailing from the southern European country of Etna. He immigrated to the G.U.N. capital of Central City as a young boy and made multiple financial endeavours from making pizzas, to owning a security firm, before finally making a profit off of forming a massive criminal syndicate. He is the most notorious crime boss in Central City, yet he has never been suspected of any possible ties due to his familial ties to the Central City Police Department. For this reason he finds his men at odds with the cheshman, the neighborhood watch group independent from the police department that was founded by the well-known Ramilistani immigrant, Ali Atesh the Caracal.
==Appearance==
Spice is a hefty black hedgehog in his mid-fifties with graying fur. He usually wears a black suit buttoned up high with a white collared shirt and black tie. He wears high waisted pants with flat fronts that appear to be ironed regularly due to the crease going up the center of his legs. During warm weather he wears a black wool vest over his suit, and in colder conditions he sticks to a large woolen overcoat. When in public he was almost always seen with a bowler hat, but typically takes if off when inside buildings or when greeting as a symbol of respect.
==Personality==
Spice is a respectable and conservative man who values hard work and loyalty in the workplace, and rewards it graciously. While at home or in a casual setting, he is an abhorrent swearer and smoker, but knows when to keep his mouth shut and use it politely. To Spice, drinking and smoking are social traditions and when he brings out the whiskey and cigars, it almost always means he's ready for a long, deep, and civil conversation, and takes slight offense to those who don't take up on his offer. He enjoys gambling as a pastime, especially in the company of alcohol and tobacco, and is very old-fashioned, preferring to take matters into his own hands when no other solution works. Spice is not afraid to get his hands dirty if it means something gets done.
Despite being married and having three children, Spice is a major womanizer, but with innocent reasoning, he doesn't tolerate rape or any sort of sexual abuse or assault, even going so far as to beat one of his workers and leave him passed out on the side of the road for forcing a client to engage in unwanted sexual behaviors with him. Spice has a major live and let be attitude, he supports equal oppurtunity but doesn't believe that someone should be given an extra push for any reason, for he himself started at the bottom and ended up working his way to the top.
==History==
Hailing from the southern European country of Etna from a poor family, Spice grew up with very little to his name. His mother stayed home and tended to his six other siblings, while his father was a construction worker, who spent whatever little he made on drinks and smokes, where he would come home drunk and beat his wife for not being able to make ends meet with the leftover money he had after his shopping spree of substances. Spice and his siblings would watch their father abuse their mother, and remained fluid to his will, fearing the same fate as their mother. It was Spice, however, who first gained the bravery to step up to his father and defend his mother, causing him to become distraught with his son's betrayal and leaving his wife and children, who then became beggars (his mother became a prostitute and worked while Spice and his siblings where asleep) on the streets trying to set up for a better life in Central City.
Spice and his family moved to FREE (Federal Republic of Eastern Earth) expecting to be welcomed, but instead, were treated as second class citizens as humans around this time freshly emerged from their underground bunkers and were disgusted with the Mobians, the result of thousands of years of nuclear mutations caused by a war that fell between the United States and the Russian Federation. Spice and his family lived in the downtown slums, living off of trash and making money wherever possible. As more Mobians immigrated into Central City, international trade fluorished, and Spice started his own food business, where he used his power of taste manipulation, inherited from his mother, to create the best resturaunt in Central City.
When FREE went into a recession after the Dune Uprisings in Ramil and the rise of the United Mobian Republics, many Mobians were fired as many more desperately attempted to enter the country, causing a surplus of workers. Spice had lots of money saved from his business, and went to work employing the rising population of Mobians to do different jobs for him, but very quickly he noticed his net worth decrease. With the rising level of crime in Central City, Spice was now the target of numerous raids and as such hired security guards to be on his business at all times. Very quickly, word spread of Spice's security success, and was hired as a security manager and contractor, hiring security guards and making a decent profit off of it. Around this time, crime dropped and Spice saw his security business start to plummet too, which was when he had a plan.
Spice was in his mid-30s when he entered a life of crime. A couple years prior, Spice married a young woman named Rosaline who had resorted to prostitution to care for her two children, Spice offered her a place to live and told her not to go out and make herself feel uncomfortable. She was cared for by Spice and his family, and very quickly her children looked up to Spice as a father. Very soon after meeting Rosaline and letting her move in, they got married and had their own child, Sonny.
With his business losing in profit, Spice now had an obligation to make money for his family, and wasn't willing to back down so easily. He first had orchestrated a group of bank robberies, his sister Siciliana helping him as she was a bookeeper. Siciliana helped watch Spice and Rosaline's kids while she put the money in the books, effectively laundering dirty money through Spice's resturaunt. Soon, Spice had the money to enlist criminals to help him carry out his bidding, hiring cleaners like Arrow the Hedgehog and bank robbers like Dark the Bat, even having several run ins with Rouge the Bat before her business with G.U.N.
At the peak of his crime syndicate, Spice carried out massacres, employed hitmen, orchestrated bank robberies, dealt drugs like crystallized chaos, all the while running a security contract firm and being a close friend of the police department, where his stepson Cecil worked. It wasn't until a certain Ramilistani pyrocrat immigrated to Central CIty and formed his own anti-criminal group that Spice became concerned, but it gave him a sigh of relief as his nemesis ousted the rival groups and gangs from power, creating a power vacuum that Spice happily grabbed onto.
Now, as the cheshman grows, they become at odds with the Spice Syndicate, but with Spice an enemy, they begin to mettle with some unexpected territory; the corrupt Central City Police Department.
==Trivia==
*Spice started as a joke, but soon became the ultimate tie-in to all of Akrivus' characters.
*Spice's history shows the effects of the Defenders Universe, such as the fall of the Ramilistani pyrocracy.
Category:Characters
Category:Hedgehogs
Category:Crimelords
Category:Defenders Universe