League of Neptune Credit Union siege
| League of Neptune Credit Union siege | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Republican Guard units taking aim at the League of Neptune Credit Union building, 25 January | |
| Location | New Tyria, Tyreseia |
| Date | 23–28 January 1939 |
Attack type | Bank robbery, hostage taking |
| Weapons | Various |
| Deaths | 1 |
Non-fatal injuries | 13 |
| Perpetrators | Anchor Gang |
| Motive | Instill Invictist sentiment, acquire group funding |
The League of Neptune Credit Union siege was a foiled bank robbery and hostage crisis in New Tyria, Tyreseia that popularized the term "New Tyria syndrome." The event was widely broadcast in real time across radio news, and was one of the first financial institution robberies to gain mass nationwide coverage in Tyreseia. A group of Invictist militants known popularly as the Anchor Gang had raided the vault of the League of Neptune's Credit Union building in central New Tyria in hopes of acquiring banknotes to fund their operations and perform a high-profile act to gain notoriety. The Gang had hoped to use local tellers as hostages and a means for a guaranteed escape back to a safehouse of undetermined location. The attack quickly faltered as elements of the New Tyrian Metropolitan Constabulary and Republican Guard laid siege to the building. The incident gained further infamy through captives refusing to testify against the Anchor Gang or help law enforcement during the siege. Many at the time theorized about a potential manipulative emotional bond that could have formed between captor and hostage during the long siege; such behavior could also be amply explained by simple distrust of law enforcement's cavalier attitude towards the lives and safety of all involved. The siege ultimately ended in a pitched gun battle and storming of the Credit Union building. One captor was killed by gunfire while several Anchor Gang members, hostages, and law enforcement were wounded.
Events
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The end of strongman Azmelcart Xidduni's personal rule saw a general opening of Tyreseia's mainstream politics in the early 20th century, with numerous groups on different points of the spectrum coming to fruition. The increasingly powerful Trade-Anarchists and newly-formed Pax Tyreseiana salons were gaining increasing political currency. This sparked the outgrowth of numerous statist groups as a response, the most infamous of which being the fringe Anchor Gang. Part political action group and part criminal syndicate, the group merged statist, socialist, and Invictist ideals in their propaganda while performing increasingly daring and provocative acts of criminality throughout the 1930s to spread their message. The Gang's leader, Xem Nassaña, was particularly notorious as a career criminal, with many contemporary media sources doubting the sincerity of their political beliefs; instead, it was hypothesized their politics were merely a mask to "justify" their kleptomania and love of the spotlight. Their planned robbery of the central New Tyria branch of the League of Neptune's Credit Union was to be the capstone on an increasingly brazen string of bank robberies and train heists that spanned up the Exec riverfront, an event designed to, as Nassaña later described, "showcase the ineptitude of the current government without a strong force of will behind it." The raid also carried the ultimate motive of providing a large payout for the group to continue funding their lifestyle.
At 4:50 PM on January 23rd, 1939, the members of the Gang entered the headquarters of the League of Neptune Credit Union at Xari djal Prata 55, Malaca-Fluumi Ward, New Tyria. The Gang carried their rifles into the building disguised as large quantities of money in burlap sacks. Nassaña entered the director's office as planned shortly after, holding him hostage while the remainder of the gang "occupied" the front lobby. The plan was for the militants to either flee the scene before law enforcement could respond, or use the hostages to ensure their safe passage should authorities arrive to the building. The group had previously known of the bank's easy-to-open safe, requiring three sets of keys required to open it were used. A member of the Gang had even worked as a teller for a time to gather intelligence on the building and to plot escape routes. The group's entry, however, happened to be spotted by patrolling New Tyria Metropolitan Constable Izagu Chichera. Investigating the entrance of several men toting unusually large sacks, Chichera looked through the building's Art Deco glass doors only to witness some of the Gang with drawn rifles. One member spotted him; with nerves running high, he took a pot shot at Chichera, but missed. As Metropolitan Constables were not armed at this time, Chichera chose to rush to a nearby police telephone to call for assistance. A truck loaded with armed Republican Guardsmen was hurriedly dispatched to the scene, arriving at 5:08 PM. The Anchor Gang was attempting to leave the building with hostages in hand, but the arrival of the Guardsmen forced them back inside to attempt makeshift fortifications within the Credit Union lobby. No shots were exchanged during the initial confrontation; the Gang was wary of the superior number of officers on the scene, while the Guard were wary of hitting any bystanders or hostages in a firefight. The Guardsmen were quickly met with reinforcements at 5:27, who secured a perimeter around the Credit Union. Observer units with high-powered rifles were stationed in buildings across the street from the besieged building, while machine guns were set up near the main front and rear entrances of the building. A crowd of bystanders formed as night fell, either curious about the disproportionately large response by the Guard or worried for the safety of their money within the vault. In response, the Gang began spreading out throughout the multi-story building. The perpetrators spent the night of the 23rd engaging in increasingly desperate escape attempts, including but not limited to attempts to dig through to sewer lines beneath the building through the basement restrooms. This attempt only led to severe flooding of the building's electrical equipment, causing the building to lose power and nearly setting the electrical room alight before the water was brought under control.
By the morning of the 24th, it was clear to Nassaña and the rest of the Anchor Gang that a quick exit was not possible and that they were in for a long siege. Gang member Machu Jorranu attempted to negotiate the release of some female hostages in exchange for a form of transport and some food for the rest. Aram Puña, a high-ranking Guardsman on the scene, responded with an alternative proposal of all hostages released in exchange for a supply of "prison food" (implying that the Guard only wished to arrest them and refused to negotiate.) Other attempts during the siege were met with a similar lack of success. In the meantime, Nassaña spent his time split between haranguing his captives and making soapbox speeches to baffled onlookers on his ideology. It is not known whether these attempts were intended to garner public sympathy for the Gang; in any case, the effectiveness of the public addresses was curtailed by threats of shooting by jocular Guardsmen or heckling by passers-by. In later days, some New Tyrians would even make a point of visiting the Credit Union building, seeing the speeches as almost surrealist comedic relief and a spectacle to behold. So many civilians were visiting, in fact, that entire stretches of Xari djal Prata had to be cordoned off by Metropolitan Constables. At 7:55 PM on the night of the 26th, Nassaña again appeared at the window, this time to dump ashes and burnt ledger-books onto the street below. He shouted to baffled onlookers that had set the Credit Union's debt ledgers alight to "free the people from financial slavery." Such a move only served to bemuse many and anger some, as the Union exclusively offered low-interest business loans to member enterprises and League chapters; most of said interest payments often went back to these members as partners within the Credit Union.
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Morale within the Gang quickly worsened as the siege went on. Members later recounted discussions of surrender or of attempting to shoot their way out as early as the 24th, though these plans never came to fruition. The group's ability to fight was weakened by a lack of food in the building. The damage done by digging in the bathroom meant that the building's water supply had been rendered non-potable. Captives and captors alike were forced to drink this water anyway to survive. Delirious from lack of food and constant high stress, some members did not think to boil the water before drinking. In any case, several hostages and three Gang members were brought low with gastrointestinal distress over the course of the siege. The Guard never once permitted food to enter the besieged area, worsening the health of all within the building. At times, the food delivery to Guardsmen was even used to taunt Gang members inside the Credit Union, along with regular messages shouted over a bullhorn encouraging their surrender and emphasizing the futility of their ordeal. Some broadcasts even encouraged the captives to rise up against their captors, which created distrust among their holders. Eventually, it seemed the propaganda had impacted the group's plan: on the night of the 27th, the Gang members agreed to attempt a multi-pronged escape via shootout. It was assumed that the night watch would be lighter on personnel than in the daytime, and so the group would stand a better chance of escape. Contrary to the group's suspicions, the Guard had actually kept a larger watch at night to make up for the lack of visibility at night. As such, when the group struck out of the rear entrance in the early morning hours of January 28th, they were quickly met with overwhelming gunfire. Four Gang members and a hostage were wounded in the initial volleys, with several Guardsmen receiving light injuries in exchange. In retaliation, around a dozen Guardsmen chose to charge into the building, without orders from their superior officers. Machu Jorranu was found in the rear hallways by the charging officers; before he had time to react to their approach, he was gunned down and killed on the spot. The sounds of the Guardsmen breaching their way inside and shooting Jorranu was amplified and distorted by the acoustic profile of the main lobby, making the remaining Gang members think there were far more Guardsmen charging the building than there were. As a result, the other 8 members of the Anchor Gang threw their rifles over the mezzanine of the lobby and announced their surrender. Tired, hungry, and delirious from stress, the members were held in the building until sunrise while hostages were accounted for and evacuated to hospitals. At 8:25 AM on the 28th, the surviving members of the Anchor Gang were frogmarched outside of the Credit Union building as Guardsmen and Constabulary investigators moved in to assess the scene. Jorranu's corpse was unceremoniously removed from its place and heaved into a coroner's van. The final arrest drew intense media coverage, as the time between the shooting and the emergence gave ample opportunity for reporters and photojournalists to arrive on the scene.
Aftermath
The siege had garnered widespread national and even international news coverage primarily due to the seemingly odd behavior of the bank's captives. The group refused to cooperate with authorities; even during the siege, there was no indication that any hostage even considered the encouragement by the Republican Guard to rise up against their captors. After their release, their obstinance continued and intensified. No former hostages agreed to testify against the Anchor Gang; one woman, a bank teller named Lucha Zavrrana, even was called as a star witness by the Gang's defense counsel during the ensuing trial. Though the lack of prosecutorial testimony was not enough to spare the crew from lengthy prison sentences, the ex-hostages still attracted significant coverage in the weeks following their ordeal. The unusual nature of their apparent sympathy of their captors drew much speculation; the most famous theory came from psychoanalyst Steja Sidaleña, whom coined the term "Siege Syndrome," later to become "New Tyria Syndrome." The crux of her theory was that the hostages had formed a kind of perverse and sympathetic social bond with their captors. Later works of Sidaleña's expounded on this assertion, expanding her theory to socialist readings of class conflict and capitalist hierarchies. Though even her original theory was controversial in psychological circles from the outset, it grew wildly popular in the public sphere in the siege's immediate aftermath, and has remained the incident's most widely-remembered facet in the following decades.
The event also forced Tyreseian law enforcement to totally rethink hostage-taking procedure. Such events were in themselves a novelty in the country; the antics of the Anchor Gang were some of the first widely-known modern instances of hostage robberies. The length of the siege, continual risk of hostage death, and public pressure forced the Republican Guard, New Tyria Metropolitan Constabulary, and other agencies to create detailed contingency plans that prioritized the lives of hostages. Dedicated negotiators were trained for the first time to deal with such incidents. Though Xidduni had been dead for decades, many Tyreseians in the public sphere decried the reckless attitude of the Guardsmen at the scene as remnants of the dictator's "despotic" regimen, and accusations of their total lack of empathy for the victims was widespread. Many of the former hostages in the siege recounted similar feelings during the event, likely acting as the largest actual contributer to their lack of cooperation with authorities and supposed sympathy with their captors. Calls were even made to disband the Guard, though many of these demands were satisfied with the resignation of the Guard Prefect and promises of significant reform.
The New Tyria Workers' Mint was headquartered on the same street in New Tyria as the Credit Union building at the time, and was home to the nation's Bullion Depository, containing all the metals necessary to back Tyreseia's then-currency, the Piastre. was Though the Depository was not attacked by the Anchor Gang, the facility was still connected to the scheme. Machu Jorranu had formerly worked at the Mint building as a custodian to gather intelligence for the Gang, and the location was considered as a potential target before being rejected due to high on-site security. As a result of this connection, the Supreme Workers' Assembly convened in the months following the siege to discuss removing Tyreseia's currency, the Piastre, from a metallic standard. The Piastre was already floundering as other currencies transitioned to fiat backing, but the national government was hesitant about such a dramatic monetary upset. The apparent vulnerability of physical assets, as proven by the siege, convinced many legislators to propose beginning the switch in earnest to prevent copycat groups from wreaking havoc by attacking the physical vault of metal reserves needed to keep the currency's value. The debate was vigorous and evenly-matched, but on January 13th, 1942, the Assembly voted to begin moving the Piastre to a fiat backing.
In popular culture
The term "New Tyria syndrome" remains nearly ubiquitous in Tyreseian culture despite its revision and discrediting in academic circles in the latter half of the 20th century. Regardless, media depicting its namesake event have been few and far between. The most notable film depiction is the 1994 motion picture Bad Credit. The film parodied and celebrated low-budget action film imports of the 1970s and 1980s, using the production of a fictional film about the siege as a backstage for its commentary. Another film depiction was the 2003 film 147 Hours, a 147-minute arthouse film arguing for the illegitimacy of the term "New Tyria syndrome" by reimagining interactions between law enforcement, the captors, and the hostages. The siege also features as a moment, either depicted or merely alluded to, in works depicting the wider campaign of the Anchor Gang. The 1978 documentary miniseries Anchor Gang: Crusaders and/or Psychopaths? used 12 episodes to examine the self-professed motivations of the Gang and its leader to understand if their political views were sincerely held or merely a smokescreen to justify antisocial violence. The fringe interpretation that New Tyria syndrome comes from institutional power imbalance has been explored in other works of media and philosophical literature. The most prominent example comes from the writings of gender relations philosopher Annarixa Perra and her 1964 essay Love and Power. The controversial work examined instances of intimate relationships between superiors and subordinates in a given hierarchy (teachers with students, bosses with secretaries, etc.) and argued that they were not cases where the superior "abused their power," but rather instances of power structures working as intended: the superior was merely exploiting a subconscious drive in the human mind to be attracted to those that oppress them.