James Mann

An intelligent man who nonetheless enjoyed a life seeped in violence, lust and cocaine, James managed to avoid being killed by Kate Birchfield when he was thirty but had to pay the price of going into hiding. When he re-emerged ten years later with the intention of becoming Leader of the Gargoyles once more, James not only ended up discovering he had a twenty-year-old daughter, Andrea Costigan, but also managed to convince an old friend of his, Colin Johnson, to reveal the illusive secret of Deveraux College. After James's fight with Jessica Ellie Steel during his invasion of Deveraux, the vast amount of money he had left for her in his will prompted his own daughter to shoot a bullet through his head.

Reasonably tall at 6'2", James's height only accentuates the fact that he is a lot thinner than he should be. Although once he was once considered quite handsome, and to an extent still is, time has taken its toll on forty-year-old James. His short black hair is often greasy-looking, his short moustache and beard very unkempt, his cold, grey eyes blood-shot and tired-looking. Despite still dressing pretty well, preferring to wear black shirts and dark jeans, over the years James has learnt to care a lot less about his appearance - mainly because he found a ready supply of women who cared far more about his wealth.

James Mann could possibly be best described as an embodiment of three of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins - lust, gluttony and greed. From a very young age, Mann was very aware of the fact that he was intelligent, and that said intelligence could lead him to exactly what he wanted - women, drugs and money. He has also always been extremely bored with his own life, previously desiring a life of violence and excitement away from his dull, middle-class family. Now, James is best described as a man who has absolutely everything he wants and still wants a hell of a lot more.

Although his own family threw him out of the house when he was fourteen, and Mann hasn't seen them since, he's believed to have somewhat constructed a family of his own - many suspect he has several illegitimate children, although he has never actually met any of them. Needless to say, if asked he'll often say he doesn't particularly care either way.

Having first tried cocaine at the age of thirteen, James is also now a full-blown addict and, on the rare occasion where he is denied a dose, exhibits symptoms including intense paranoia, aggression and hallucinations. However, lack of cocaine is rarely a problem for him, and he can often be found "doing a Scarface" - taking a large pile of cocaine, putting his nose to it, and inhaling as much as possible. He has had near-fatal overdoses on a couple of occasions, but is far too addicted now to ever contemplate giving it up.

Unlike many of the people who would end up working for him, James Mann was actually born into a reasonably well-off middle-class family from Queens, New York. Growing up, James's teachers always told him he was intelligent but had an 'attitude problem', meaning that he could probably get the best grades possible if he ever actually bothered to try. James didn't particularly seem to care for any of his subjects - although he managed to scrape a pass in most of them - and was generally a loner at school, not particularly interested in having many friends.

By the time he was around thirteen, James had started skipping classes to travel around New York, using his lunch money to pay for transport all across the city. It was on one such trip that he came across a neighbourhood in Brooklyn where money was scarce and crime, it seemed, had free reign. Excited at the idea of a life beyond the one he currently had, it wasn't long before James started running with what his parents would call 'the wrong crowd' - by the following year, his parents had already found stashes of cocaine in his room, and James Mann soon found himself kicked out of his house. He moved permanently to Brooklyn and continued to engage in illegal ventures, constantly frustrated that the criminal activity in the borough never seemed to go beyond small, disorganised gangs.

By the time he was eighteen, James was beginning to earn some kind of respect from fellow criminals, but he still felt he wasn't getting quite the treatment he deserved. It wasn't until he got into a fight with a drug dealer and ended up shooting him through the head that Mann finally gained some kind of proper authority. Not long after, he had people who began to follow him, and James saw the potential for what could be a criminal force to be reckoned with in New York and possibly even the entire country. Slowly, but surely, James built up a complex network of people around him who could lie, cheat, steal and, most importantly, provide New York with the illegal goods it so craved. Soon, James found he had everything he'd always wanted - snorting cocaine became a daily habit, sleeping with a different woman every night became blasé and money was no longer an issue in the slightest. Mann started making acquisitions such as hotels and corporations to serve as front companies for his expanding criminal empire, an organisation which soon became known as The Gargoyles. The name had originally belonged to a criminal gang that had once spanned across the entire East Coast of the United States, but had eventually been taken down in an operation chiefly led by one Frederik Johansson. James thought it fitting for his organisation to be seen as a rebirth of what the Gargoyles once were, and he himself particularly liked the irony that gargoyles were supposed to protect buildings from evil spirits, when his own gang did quite the contrary.

By the time he was thirty, the Gargoyles were thriving and James, despite now fully satisfied with life, continued running the gang - if anyone ever asked him why he still did it, he'd simply reply that it was just because he could. What he never expected, however, was to one day receive a call from an uprising member of the Gargoyles named Mickey Tannenbaum, telling him that he was due to be killed that night by another uprising member, Kate Birchfield. Mann asked his second-in-command, Johnny Cunningham, to pretend to be him for that night mainly as a precaution - and, sure enough, James Mann had to incinerate his ex-colleague's dead body the following morning. Unable to resume his post without drawing attention, James reluctantly passed it over to Mickey Tannenbaum himself. James has remained working for the Gargoyles for the past ten years, but any work he does is kept very secret. Most recently, however, he has become bored with his status and is longing to return as Leader of the Gargoyles once more.