name: Alfred “Freddie” Crane age: 48 gender & sexuality: Cis male, heterosexual relationship status: Ask your mother occupation: Co-Founder of Crane Bros LTD neighborhood: Summit Lake
Trigger warnings: domestic violence, drugs, violence, murder, death, crime
Alfred Crane is a menace to society. Always has been, always will be.
Born on the 14th of July in 1975 to two young parents in East London, “Freddie” had no reason to believe that their working class household was any different from anyone else’s. Sally and George McAdam kept a small home, that gradually felt smaller with each additional sibling born to the family, but there was always food on the table. They weren’t poor; they worked hard. If they wanted for something they couldn’t afford, well, George had creative means of getting it - means which he taught all of his children in the fashion of gambling, hustling and deception. Freddie learned early on that one had to take what one wanted out of life, cunning was an admirable means to that end, but brute force was the method enjoyed the best.
Sharing the bedroom closest to his parents’, Freddie grew accustomed to hearing the altercations between them on nights when George would come home piss drunk after losing his and his wife’s wages to gambling. It happened so frequently that Freddie began to think this dysfunction was typical too. He hated to hear his sweet mother cry, to see the fear in the other children’s eyes as they huddled together waiting for their father’s tirade to die out. No one came to help and Freddie knew better than to seek help outside of the home, so Freddie and his other siblings that could work, went out to try to keep the family afloat, to try to appease their mercurial father, more importantly to appease his father’s enemies.
As cruel and violent as George was in bad times, he was capable of charm and glimpses of fatherly care in good times. This was naturally confusing to an impressionable child. George wasn’t a villain, Freddie reasoned. The world was just a fucked up place and some people had a larger share of shit than others. He saw himself in his father, more and more as he grew older, which led him down an inevitable path of trouble. It started at school, several negative reports from teachers, picking on other kids who looked at him funny, selling drugs in bathroom stalls. His ‘acting out’ only grew worse with every birthday that passed. Sally did her best to talk sense into him, but ultimately he was too much like his father to be persuaded to set himself right.
When his second youngest brother, Nathan, killed their father, Freddie didn’t know how to reconcile his grief. He was 17. He knew that George deserved it, that if brutally pushed into a corner as many times as Nathan was, he would do the same. And yet, George was his father too– with all of his flaws. Life owed him for this. Freddie grew angry, unable to turn his rage to his brother, he spewed it out in all directions everywhere else. He resorted to a policy of throwing punches first and asking questions never. He showed up to school only to run drugs or persuade girls to skip with him for ‘fun’ or to pick fights with teachers whose opinions he cared nothing about. He found the rough crowd and positioned himself to run it, broke into houses, stole, fought at pubs for fun, and finally assaulted a teacher who dared to question his mother’s parenting. Legal troubles only began there for Freddie, but a move to New York in 1994, when his mother remarried to Jack Crane, a wealthy tobacco entrepreneur, offered a seemingly clean slate. In his eyes, a new stomping ground and a new father figure well-versed in white collar crime, gave him license to do whatever the fuck he pleased. Freddie earned unbridled access to money, to quality drugs, to women. It was his decade of debauchery.
Against all odds, Freddie escaped the prison system and overdose and spent several years running amok with Nathan and their younger siblings, under the cover of Jack Crane’s tobacco business. They developed friendships with unsavory characters in New York and back in London from the old days of running drugs and hustling that ultimately came to be valuable connections for their impending business ventures. Nathan and Freddie saw opportunities in facilitating connection between their contacts and the disgustingly rich and bored elite. Freddie had personally slept with enough bored, lonely housewives to know that they had cash to burn as long as they didn’t have to get their hands dirty. Freddie and Nathan devised schemes to establish themselves to be independently wealthy. On one such night of plotting, drinking cheap whiskey at a local pub, the boys resolved to invest in the distillery business, which would become a front for their other creative endeavors. They knew how to distill gin from their grandmother’s teaching and they had the capital and the connections to make it happen.
Ten years ago, the brothers founded Crane Bros Distilleries. Nathan was the brains, Freddie was the brawn. Partners in crime in every sense of the word. With unresolved daddy issues and a penchant for coke-induced benders, Freddie is always poised for a fight. Freddie protects the family business, Nathan protects Freddie from the long arm of the law. At least, Nathan does his best to, but Freddie is a loose canon and doesn’t take kindly to constructive criticism..
