Taylor West

* **Name:**Taylor West
* **Position:**(formal) Chairman of the North Wind Cooperative and head of Go West Properties LLC (informal) leader of the Chinook  smuggling network.
* **Metatype:**Human  (*Homo sapiens sapiens*)
* **DOB:**Unknown, assumed to be some time in the mid to late 2030's.
* **Education:**Possible.
* **Family:**Unknown.

A lot of Taylor West's early life before joining the Chinook in the late 2050's is a mystery, possibly even to West himself. One of nature's tellers of tall tales, good-ol'-boy Taylor West is more than happy to regale people with aw-shucks stories of his childhood. Only thing is, those stories change wildly from telling to telling. And of course, being from the shadows, your guess is as good as anybody's about whether "Taylor West" is a real name or not. Now while some of this might just be the natural criminal instinct to obfuscate personal details and a preference for a good story over the truth, both of which West has in spades, those that know him say that West himself always seems a little confused on the subject and there is speculation that a massive crash he was in over Lake of the Woods in '61 might have had something to do with it.

Whatever the case, certain things do seem to be true. Taylor does seem to be from somewhere in the back country of the state of Manitoba, on the UCAS  side of the border, and does legitimately seem to have some sort of farming/cowboy background.

Things get a little clearer about the time he joined the Chinook sometime around 2056-57 as a hot-shot pilot, originally for 'Handyman' Green's crew up north, running telesma  from the Lake of the Woods to Duluth. He was already a rigger when he joined, and was already noted to be one hell of a flyer. During the heady days of the late 50's and early 60's (a bit of a golden age of shadowrunning, spanning from the chaos of the Election of '57 to the Year of the Comet ) he gained a rep as being as good with his silver tongue as with a vehicle rig and his tendency to set up risky scams that actually worked got him the attention of the Chinook's leader at the time, old 'Dirty' Dick Bannish. Dick is said to have traded Handyman Green a used T-bird and some cases of aged whiskey to get him to let West join his crew. As part of the boss' crew, West had even freer rain to set up his schemes and run his cons and his outrageous, and usually profitable, antics won him a place at Dick's right hand and got him an impressive rep among his fellow smugglers, as well as cementing good will among their allies (such as the Lake of the Woods elves, the Mustafa Clan of Duluth and even old rivals such as the Black River Boys ). During this time, he was famously involved with the head of the Black River Boys, Maddy Reinhardt in a playful-rivalry-turned-torrid-affair.

Nobody knows what he was doing flying over northern Minnesota and southern Ontario on the misty night of November 17, 2061. To his dying day Dirty Dick swore he never gave the green light to anything in that region and Handyman Green, who's turf it was, didn't even hear about it until after the fact. But whatever he was doing there, his T-Bird (which he'd named 'Madeline' after Maddy) was spotted flaring out somewhere over Big Island and he came down near Wheeler's Point in a crash that would have killed him if he hadn't been found by some local Lake Elves and brought to care. Handyman Green swears to the Spirits that the wreckage had already been picked clean by the time his boys arrived on the scene. Theories as to what brought him down, a missile attack, an angry spirit (not uncommon in the region), even a matrix attack or pure mechanical failure, abound, all with the same lack of evidence.

Whatever the case, it is known that it is from this point forward that whatever had been between Taylor and Maddy was gone and only blood and anger would exist in its place from that day until this.

The Taylor West who emerged from a coma six weeks later in the Sanssentia complex in Duluth was, well not a different man exactly, but MORE of the same man. His schemes got bigger, his talk got wilder, and his sense of self-preservation was nearly absent. And he now had something nobody had seen in Taylor West previous to this. Ambition.

With Dirty Dick's blessing, he gathered some of his best friends in the Chinook and formed his own crew, avoiding both the far north (where his crash had happened) and the far east (where Maddy thirsted for his blood), taking up the profitable Fergus-St.Cloud stretch of the route between Fargo and the Cities, shipping telesma and BTL. He started to take on more of the business side of things, although he would still fly regularly until the Second Crash rendered his old-school VCR obsolete. He started to invest his crew's earnings in local businesses, buying up garages, bars and real estate to launder their funds and give them a cushion between jobs, enterprises that also forced him to start investing in local cops and officials as well.

Its said that it was Taylor's interest in legit business that got Dick, a competent but short-sighted old crook, interested in politics. Which led to the infamous "Winnipeg Shuffle", a scheme for smuggling small arms up to the Manitou Council by way of Winnipeg. He gathered together several of his best crews, including West's, in a complicated scheme. However, Dick had failed to take one thing into account, the local gangs, and assumed he could just do an end run around the 1323, who took that stretch of the border to be their turf. Maybe he figured it was better to get forgiveness than ask permission? Whatever the case, he got neither, instead he got 23 bullets from several of the Ares Predators he was shipping. With Dick suddenly deceased, Taylor had to take charge of the operation, playing the 1323 against their rivals in the Cowboy Mafia and slipping an army's worth of guns up the elves under the noses of the Niswi-mishkodewinan authorities.

And that was that. Nobody declared Taylor West head of the Chinook, it just happened and has kept happening ever since then. As first among equals of the crew chiefs, he's kept his position by keeping his chiefs in clover, arranging profitable alliances, fixing up valuable cargoes and establishing the North Wind Cooperative, an umbrella organization responsible not only for managing the Chinook's now-extensive legitimate enterprises but also for using those profits to 'influence' corporate and government officials to provide cover for their operations, including current Hennepin County District Attorney Carly Hughes, who it is rumored is considering a mayoral run in 2076.

But Taylor West isn't just interested in backing and owning politicians, it seems he wants to enter the public arena himself. Over the last few years he's spent more and more time setting himself up in Winnipeg, the city of his rise to power, spreading around charitable nuyen, raising his public profile, making all the right friends on all three sides of the borders there. Ever since getting himself elected to the City Council in '72, he's been courting the Libertarians in the Sovereign Citizens Alliance and publicly questioning the decisions of city manager Avi Goel on the 'trix and the airwaves. It seems obvious, and Taylor West means it be obvious, that he's gearing up to take Goel's place, in his usual way, by hook AND by crook...

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