Super Mob Boss

In this corner, an Animal-Themed Superbeing with Super-Strength, Super-Reflexes, Spider-Sense, and a Healing Factor. In the other corner, a Muggle businessman with questionable means of income.

In the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, crime leaders and mob bosses are usually the domain of cop shows, and for superheroes a Starter Villain before true supervillains start showing up.

Then you have these people.

Maybe they have superpowers themselves, maybe they have Superpowered Mooks under their command, maybe they employ super technology, maybe they are Badass Normals that can stand up to the heroes, or maybe they're such a Magnificent Bastard that the heroes can do nothing to stop or even touch them. For whatever reason they are a major threat.

These characters are often used in more mature and darker superhero stories, since tropes related to The Mafia usually fall into this, but even kids' shows sometimes have these characters. Despite the name, not necessarily more likely to run a Monster Protection Racket than any other major supervillain.

To make this trope more flexible, works that don't involve superheroes can be examples, but still must be from stories that are similar to those, with the heroes having superpowers and supernatural abilities, or more conventional villains being also part of the cast.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bungo Stray Dogs: Ougai Mori is the boss of the Port Mafia, a criminal organization of dangerous "ability users" and one of the main antagonists of the series. He himself has the ability to create and manipulate a Guardian Entity of his liking (which takes the form of a little girl) and despite his goofy persona shows to be a ruthless and feared Manipulative Bastard.
• Deconstructed with the yakuza in Chainsaw Man, as every time they try to take advantage of the power of Devils it ends up being more than they can handle. First, they try to kill Denji in favor of a contract with the Zombie Devil, who in turn transforms them into zombies before a newly-empowered Denji wipes out the lot of them. They come back when some of their own (led by Katana Man) go after Denji for revenge, but it’s clear that they’re merely being used by the Gun Devil for its own interests.
• Hunter × Hunter: Downplayed with the Mafia during the Yorknew City arc. On paper, they certainly fit the trope, being a wealthy and powerful criminal community with numerous Nen users at their beck and call (from the animal-themed Shadow Beasts to a Mafia Princess capable of predicting the future). However, they simply can’t catch a break when pitted against the Phantom Troupe, the real Arc Villain for the part, who slaughter their forces en masse and repeatedly outgambit them.
• The Don of Passione is this in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, being the Big Bad on top of that. Like many users the series, he has a Stand that lets him delete a section of time while allowing him to move through the erased segment giving him an advantage that he used to kill Bucciarati. The protagonists Giorno Giovanna and his teammates were originally planning to work up the ranks and take him down so they can end Passione's drug trade. However, they went into direct opposition after finding out the Boss is willing to kill his own daughter to maintain his anonymity, who had never even met him anyway. By the end, the Boss, Diavolo, has been trapped in a Resurrection/Death Loop, while Giorno is now the head of Passione with his Stand, Gold Experience Requiem.
• My Hero Academia has Overhaul, the boss of the Shie Hassaikai Yakuza clan, whose ultimate goal is to revitalize organized crime after its power was crushed due to the rise of superheroes. Overhaul himself is a powerful quirk-user with the power to deconstruct and reconstruct matter solely by touch and has a personal retinue of fanatically loyal henchmen with deadly quirks of their own.
• One Piece:
  • Capone Bege. He started as a mob leader, but when he dominated the whole crime underworld of the West Blue, he got bored and decided to leave and become a pirate, but kept his mannerisms and mafia attire, and kept the same methods of going after leaders and then watch their organizations crumble without them. He also has superpowers; he ate the Castle-Castle Fruit, which turns his body into a fortress, he can shrink his henchmen and store an army inside himself, and place weapons inside him like cannons, whose cannonballs will revert into normal size after being fired. As his superpowers primarily involve transporting his henchmen and resources around and he uses guns in a world where most people are badass enough to not need them, he still retains the muggle spirit of this trope.
  • Donquixote Doflamingo. While he remains a pirate through and through, he’s become a powerful criminal mastermind through expanding his crew into a vast organization that has its hands in everything from the slave trade to illicit Devil Fruit production. His own Devil Fruit, the String-String Fruit, lets him generate string for a variety of deadly purposes, from tearing people to shreds to manipulating their actions against their will. The fact that he maintains a respectable image as the King of Dressrosa and treats his closest subordinates like family further evokes the look of a charming but ruthless crime lord.
  • Sir Crocodile. Using his status as a Warlord and casino owner to front his criminal activity, he ran a syndicate of bounty hunters and spies that controlled multiple islands and eliminated anyone who got in his way. His Devil Fruit, the Sand-Sand Fruit, lets him manipulate and transform into the eponymous element, tightening his iron grip over the desert kingdom he set up shop at. Later on he formed the Cross Guild alongside Mihawk, gaining enough influence in the criminal underworld to put bounties on Marine officers and threaten the World Government. His style of dress is even meant to imitate the attire of a classic Mafia boss.
• Tokyo Tribe has Buppa. This evil crime lord is so strong that he broke a young man's back and killed him by simply raping him too hard.

Comic Books

• Astro City: The top crime boss of Astro City is a supervillain known as the Deacon. Unlike most villains, he doesn't have superpowers or gadgets himself. He doesn't need them.
• The DCU:
  • While the sheer amount of corruption and organized crime in Gotham City is part of why Bruce Wayne became Batman, most of the mob families fall aside as Batman takes down their rings and more dangerous supervillains take their place. One exception is Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. the Penguin, who with nothing more than connections, goons and some fancy umbrellas stands as one of Batman's major villains. The Joker himself may count depending on the adaptation. Black Mask is a modern and more brutal variation.
  • Tobias Whale from Black Lightning is an Alternate Company Equivalent to Marvel's Kingpin and the titular hero’s Arch-Enemy, spearheading the 100 that Black Lightning normally fights. He doesn’t limit himself to running one criminal enterprise, either, and has tried to set up shop in Gotham City.
  • In Superman, Intergang is a mafia-like element in Metropolis which is a constant thorn in Superman's side. In the comics and Superman: The Animated Series, it turns out they're supplied by Darkseid, but in Lois & Clark (where there is no Darkseid), it's played more straightly.
• Invincible: Machine Head is one of the most powerful crime lords in the world, and has lots of superpowered goons. One of his former goons, Titan, betrays him and takes over Machine Head's criminal organization.
• In Kick-Ass, the Big Bad is the head of the local mob: John Genovese in the comic, Frank D'Amico in the film. His son, Red Mist, goes on to be the world's first supervillain, though in practice he's really just some rich asshole with lots of money to hire goons rather than being legitimately dangerous himself.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Kingpin is the most well-known example of this trope. Nemesis to both Spider-Man and Daredevil, Kingpin is the king of the Marvel Universe's criminal underworld and has given grief to beings several times more powerful than himself. Officially he is just a normal human, but he is inhumanly strong thanks to training, and while stories show him using super-technology like his cane with a deadly disintegrator beam, he relied less on them over the years... and then he became one of the leaders of the Hand, which means that he has an army of literal zombie ninjas at his beck and call that he occasionally uses for such things as racketeering. Though as was shown in One More Day, when Spider-Man decides to stop playing around, Kingpin is nowhere close to actually being in his league when it comes to combat.
  • There is also Tombstone, Hammerhead, Silvermane, and Count Nefaria. Most of those villains have fought the likes of Daredevil and Spider-Man, but Neferia was a bona-fide Diabolical Mastermind powerful enough to take on The Avengers.
  • The Hood was an Unlucky Everydude who got magical cape and shoes from certain demon that granted supernatural powers, and with that in hand, he fights to become a mob boss, becoming a real menace for groups as the New Avengers. But even without his magical clothes, he's also a Badass Normal who can fight with his guns and fists.
  • Norman Osborn initially aspired to rule the criminal underworld when he first became the Green Goblin, until Motive Decay set in and he became obsessed with tormenting Spider-Man. Storylines such as the Goblin King arc in Superior Spider-Man (2013) do show he is fully capable of managing his own crime enterprise when he’s able to keep his eye on the prize.
  • Mr. Negative from Spidey’s Rogues Gallery is a Jekyll & Hyde-esque crime lord with Yin-Yang Bomb powers granted by his access to the Darkforce and Lightforce (the same forces Cloak and Dagger get their powers from). His backstory reveals he was a human trafficker before gaining his dark abilities, in the process developing a more malevolent split personality that soon built a gang for himself.
  • Joe Fixit, the original Grey Hulk alternate persona, worked as a bodyguard for the mob in Las Vegas.
  • Once, a handsome mobster by the name of Billy Russo attempted to assassinate everyone connected to The Punisher and got thrown through a glass window by him, reducing his face to a scarred mess. Going crazy after that, he adopted the nickname of Jigsaw and became a formidable enemy of the Punisher; he's also tangled with Spider-Man and Nightcrawler. No superpowers, but somehow tough enough to survive all those Punisher encounters.
• Powers:
  • Johnny Royale leads a gang with various superpowered members. Johnny himself also has powers, specifically that he can teleport. This might not seem very impressive for the leader of a superpowered gang, but comes in handy when it comes to pulling heists or establishing an alibi.
  • Another case explored and deconstructed what happens when a non-powered mob boss has an underling with superpowers; said underling soon becomes the Dragon-in-Chief and leaves the "boss" a hopelessly emasculated Authority in Name Only.
• Savage Dragon: Overlord (real name Antonio Seghetti) is the leader of Chicago's Mafia and not only hires superpowers muscle for his rackets, but he runs around in a very Nineties-styled Doctor Doom rip-off Powered Armor, capable of taking on (and taking out) the Dragon in a one-on-one fight. The men who took his mantle after he was killed were no different.
• The main antagonist of Shi is a Yakuza crime lord who killed her father and brother when she was a child. Being trained by a decade for her grandfather, Shi goes for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against him, but he's also a lethal martial artist who killed a lot of people apart of Shi's family and having a tough Final Battle where she almost died, but finally could defeat him, barely.
• In Stormwatch PHD, one of the team's first opponents is the Walking Ghost, an intangible Russian mob boss who also happens to be Gorgeous' ex.

Fan Works

• Vigilantes' Dawn: Commented on by one of the epigraphs of the sequel, a YouTube video created in 2078. Apparently, normal organized crime such as The Mafia doesn't survive the rise of superheroes. While organized crime does still exist, it's been taken over entirely by supervillains and their "rotating casts of minions".

Films — Animated

• Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths: Ultraman, Superman's Evil Doppelgänger from an alternate universe, is the head of the Crime Syndicate, the Evil Counterpart of the Justice League, which in this film is modeled after The Mafia. He is even referred to as to as "The Boss of Bosses" because he is by far the most powerful member of the Syndicate and earned his title as The Don by being extremely ruthless to both his enemies and his allies.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Crow, the head of the mob, Top Dollar, has a sister/lover who is a mystic and who realizes how to weaken Eric by attacking the Crow that brought him back to the mortal world, then schemes to steal the Crow's power for herself.

Literature

• Black Blade: Victor Draconi is the head of the Draconi family household and the Big Bad of the trilogy. Victor lives in the magical and mob-controlled city of Cloudburst Falls and has abilities and powers of his own which he steals by torturing and killing his enemies. His ultimate plan being a purge of the other crime families in control of the city to allow him to take control.
• In The Dresden Files, Chicago mob boss Gentleman Johnny Marcone is actually badass enough to gain standing as a freeholding lord recognized by the Unseelie Accords. While a completely ordinary human himself, he is fully aware of the supernatural community and regularly deals with major players like Queen Mab and Donnar Vadderung. Even when he becomes the wielder of one of the denarii, he remains a mob boss first and foremost.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Double: Ryubee Sonozaki heads Futo City's premiere criminal organization and is capable of transforming into the immensely powerful Terror Dopant.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • Even though he's of more normal proportions than he is in the comics, Wilson Fisk still fits this trope. He's even able to break Dex's back while Dex is in the very Daredevil costume Fisk procured for him.
    • Nobu in seasons 1 and 2 is introduced as an associate partner of Wilson Fisk's, but turns out to be part of the Hand and has been using the same resurrection substance as the leaders, allowing him to survive Matt setting him on fire.
  • Luke Cage (2016): Bushmaster in season 2. The head of the Brooklyn-based Stylers, he gains super-strength from Hollywood Voodoo and is a whole other ballgame from terrorizing normal human street gangs and local crime syndicates.
  • The Defenders (2017): The Hand are depicted as a syndicate of three men (Bakuto, Murakami and Sowande) and two women (Alexandra and Madame Gao) who have stayed alive for centuries thanks to a resurrection substance.
• Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya has Dokusai. When you're the top ninja of a ninja gang, this is a given.
• Uncle Six from Wu Assassins is a Triad boss with martial arts skills and supernatural power over fire.

Podcasts

• Marvin Glass, head of the eponymous Glass Crime Family in Pretending to Be People, is a Humanoid Abomination with psionic powers, which he uses to set up blood sports and drug deals.

Tabletop Games

• The Xanathar of Forgotten Realms is a Beholder mob boss, with all the powers that entails. "Xanathar" is actually a Legacy Character, as whatever beholder kills the previous leader of the Xanathar guild or shows up after they're dead tends to take over the guild and the name.
• Mutants & Masterminds has several examples of mob bosses that can pose a serious threat to superheroes. Two of Emerald City's major villains are leaders of major criminal syndicates that also have superpowers: Takazumi Kaneda is the leader of the local Yakuza branch in his public identity, but with his ability to change his skin into liquid steel, he can face superheroes head-on as the Steel Shogun. Koschei the Deathless is a russian mobster with powerful psychic abilities that allow him to manipulate events from the shadows.
• The Chairman from Sentinels of the Multiverse is this, being an Expy of the likes of Kingpin. His villain deck is actually one of the harder ones to beat, even with a full hero team. The fluff even points out he has access to a Lazarus pool that keeps him in his physical prime despite being well over 100 years old.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: T.R, the leader of The Factio Pugni, possesses superior mechanical modification skills. Upon gaining ownership of The Walter Raleigh that becomes his turf, he began full construction to create a offensive battle mech modified with powerful parts and equipment from various technology which he personally controls to deal with anyone crossing into his territory.
• BioShock: Manipulative Con Man Frank Fontaine ran a monopoly over Rapture’s resident Psycho Serum ADAM, making him powerful enough to challenge city founder and top dog Andrew Ryan in the game’s prologue. When the war inevitably broke down Rapture, he changes goals to unleashing ADAM onto the surface world, and by the end takes the drug himself to power up and become the Final Boss.
• Inverted in Champions Online with the Gemini Gang. Their leader, Mr. Gemini, is a supervillain with Self-Duplication who figured out how use his powers to make clones of other people (though the clones get progressively weaker the less they resemble him) and decided that it would put him at a disadvantage if people found out he could do that, so he pretends he's a leader of a Gang of Hats with the theme of "the more you look like the boss, the higher your position in the gang" to hide it.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the main villain of the Thieves' Guild questline is the medieval fantasy version of this. The Player Character is, for all intents and purposes, a Physical God who, when properly leveled, takes down armies, dragons, and daedra with terrifying ease. Mercer Frey is the leader of the Thieves' Guild and at first seems to be just an unusually skilled locksmith and fighter. But it turns out he's got powers granted by the Daedric Prince Nocturnal, as well as her artifact, a magical key that can unlock anything (including human potential). Later, the Dragonborn can also be similarly blessed by Noctunal (though they can't use the Skeleton Key in the same way).
• Geese Howard from Fatal Fury series is a crime boss who has the control of the city of Southtown since The '70s during the events of Art of Fighting, and was also trained in the martial art of Aikido so he can beat up enemies who challenge him without help.
• In Freedom Force, one of the most annoying foes is Pinstripe, the mob boss that has the ability to control his own density, as you don't have the characters to handle him when he shows up, and his attacks are surprisingly powerful. While not immensely powerful, he is responsible for the origins of three different characters, the appearance of another, gets two separate arcs to his name, and comes directly after the threat of World War III with the Soviets.
• A Hat in Time:
  • The Mafia of Cooks are the villains from the first level, and the first major threat for the heroine Hat Kid; while all the mafia goons are very dumb, incompetent, have terrible grammar and are terrible cooks despite their name, they can easily provide a decent challenge to Hat Kid, and their leader is much smarter and is even more capable in a battle than the rest of them.
  • The Nyakuza Metro DLC has the Empress, a talking sphinx cat who leads the Nyakuza that forces Hat Kid to do her bidding after stealing her Plot Coupons. She can't even be fought as not only does attacking her simply have her insta-kill Hat Kid, but the inevitable confrontation with her simply consists of trying to escape her and her gang while she blasts you with a rocket launcher.
• In Like a Dragon, the Yakuza works on the rules of Rank Scales with Asskicking, where anyone with a notable position of power can range from being simply tougher than the average goon to being capable of insane physical feats. For example, Kiryu has won a fistfight against two fully grown tigers, and Majima managed to dodge a bullet from a gun that was pressed to the back of his head and fired — twice.
• Mortal Kombat's Kano is the leader of the Black Dragon syndicate of mercenaries whose main business is arms trafficking, with no problem doing business with invading forces from another realm like Outworld. He sports a cybernetic eye that can shoot lasers, but otherwise fights directly through his assortment of knives.
• Muro from Oni is this to a T. He has a Daodan Chrysalis just like Konoko, making him an Empowered Badass Normal. In one ending, he even takes on a One-Winged Angel form.
• Junya Kaneshiro from Persona 5 counts in a unique way. Despite being the third major boss fight and the whole reason Makoto joins the team, as well as having multiple other students under his wraps, he would certainly qualify... except you don't fight him but his Superpowered Evil Side in the cognitive world.
• In an example more obvious in retrospect, Giovanni and Team Rocket from Pokémon, especially in the anime, in which they're still active. Pokémon Red and Blue, Pokémon Gold and Silver, and their remakes have them operate a lot like a Yakuza, among other things using the Viridian City Pokémon Gym as a front. Later foes included eco-terrorists, a madman bent on destroying and rebuilding the universe, Team Plasma who planned to use the legendary dragon to make people give up their Pokémon (then later try to freeze the world to death), a cult bent on a holocaust, and an abusive mother who wants to open dimensional rifts despite the dangers. Notably Team Rocket never summoned a legendary Pokémon to do their bidding. By the time of Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon he's somehow gained the ability to travel across dimensions and uses this to form a Legion of Doom consisting of alternate versions of previous series villains with plans of being a Multiversal Conqueror.
• In Project × Zone 2, Goro Majima and Kazuma Kiryu from Like a Dragon count, being high-ranking Yakuza able to stand toe-to-toe with the likes of M Bison from Street Fighter and Selvaria Bles from Valkyria Chronicles, among others.
• The Boss in Saints Row started as a One-Man Army to galactic emperor with Powered Armor. The series also has mystically or inexplicably empowered mob bosses or enforcers like Sunshine or Hector for the antagonistic roles.
• Spider-Man (Insomniac):
  • Spider-Man (PS4): While Kingpin and Hammerhead resemble their comics self, Tombstone is reimagined as a streetwise drug lord who runs his own gang of crooked bikers, but remains as dangerous as ever.
  • Spider-Man: Miles Morales introduces their version of Tinkerer as the head of a high-tech gang of delinquents and capable of fighting on par with Miles through her technological expertise. Played With as she is only using the gang to get revenge on a Corrupt Corporate Executive who killed her brother and lacks her colleagues’ ambition to rise up the criminal underworld.
• Mr. X in the Streets of Rage series definitely has elements of one, especially in Streets of Rage 3 where he's revealed to have become a Brain in a Jar piloting a robot body.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss has Crimson, an imp from Hell and Moxxie's abusive dad, who heads a gang based on Italian mafias with himself as its don despite the series' demonic setting.
• RWBY: Roman Torchwick is a crime lord who serves as The Heavy for the first two volumes. Despite living in a world filled with Animalistic Abomination Grimm and superhuman Hunters and Huntresses (while lacking the powers Hunters and Huntress possess), he is able to fight on par with the heroes and pose a major threat during the time he was active.

Webcomics

• Mobster Kingpin, the Big Bad of Problem Sleuth. He's a mob leader with access to powers and video game-like techniques just like the main three heroes. Exaggerated when his imaginary self descends into demonhood and becomes Demonhead Mobster Kingpin, a being capable of ripping the universe in half.

Western Animation

• Arcane: After the Time Skip, Silco has risen to the top of the Wretched Hive Zaun, in part through his synthesizing and production of Shimmer. While he himself isn’t a fighter, he surrounds himself with powerful muscle such as his Shimmer-using top enforcer Sevika and Mad Bomber surrogate daughter Jinx.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • In Batman: The Animated Series, Rupert Thorne is a non-costumed, non-powered mob boss who, purely through his cunning and ruthlessness, manages to remain a major power in the Gotham underworld even among all the costumed villains. He has appeared in some other continuities, but is never as dominant as he is in the B:TAS one.
  • The Big Bad of Static Shock is Ebon, a former gang-member (maybe) who was given shadow-manipulation powers by the Big Bang and takes advantage of the aftermath of the Bang to establish a criminal gang of his own — the Meta-Breed — with which he intends to take over the criminal underworld of Dakota City.
• Hazbin Hotel:
  • Sir Pentious fits by technicality, he may be a snake demon Mad Scientist but the show takes place in hell so by local standards he's just a "Notable Criminal Kingpin" as Tom Trench calls him.
  • Above Sir Pentious are the Overlords, sinners who carved out their own spheres of influence in Hell through owning the souls of others. They collectively rule Pentagram City and each manage their own enterprise, ranging from weapons dealing to pornographic filmmaking.
• In The Legend of Korra, Republic City is filled with criminal gangs consisting of benders abusing their abilities to prey upon the weak. One of the most prominent examples was Yakone, a crime lord during Aang's time who managed to master Bloodbending to the point that he's able to incapacitate an entire courtroom with his mind in broad daylight and proved to be enough of a threat that Aang was forced to De-power him. Despite this, Yakone would later teach bloodbending to his sons Noatok and Tarrlok, who would go on to cause further trouble by the time of the show.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Former Sith Lord Darth Maul united several factions of the criminal underworld to form the Shadow Collective, which took over Mandalore and opposed both the Republic and the Separatist Alliance during the Clone Wars. When the Shadow Collective fell, he went on to found another crime syndicate, Crimson Dawn, which lasted well into the days of the Empire.

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