Shiller was called back by the principal, and even if he could remotely control things, there was still an actual need for others to manage the affairs of the mental health hospital. This task then fell onto Bruce's shoulders.
Shiller confidently threw all his work at Bruce. Bruce always felt that the professor's faith in him was even greater than his own confidence in himself.
He was only a university freshman, and on his first internship, he had to take over a non-typical psychiatric hospital. The people he had to manage there were not really mentally ill patients - they were just more dangerous and challenging to deal with.
When Bruce doubted his capacity to perform this job, Shiller told him: "Sometimes, you don't challenge yourself, you won't realize that you're a genius."
The first day on the job, Bruce ran into a significant problem: he couldn't tell who was who.
Even though he had memorized a book thick report of patient records, including all their names, room numbers, and corresponding medical histories, this would have been more than enough for an intern at a regular hospital.
But unfortunately, there was not a single traditional mental patient here. Behind each of their names and diagnoses were highly intricate social statuses.
Who belonged to which mob? Which mob was at odds with another? Who used to be enemies? Who were accomplices? This information couldn't be discerned from the medical records.
Having overheard some of Shiller's phone conversations, Bruce was able to use his extraordinary memory capacity to gather information, which became his introductory gift package. Reconstructing everyone's social status was troublesome, but he could deduce it from the existing clues.
Apart from that, Bruce excelled at pretense, the same way he played the role of Playboy. In this hospital, he became a flamboyant, affluent socialite who was fascinated with the mob life.
The identity of the world's richest man gave him many privileges; it was unlikely that anyone in the mob would believe that the wealthiest man wants to scheme against them. Hence, when Bruce showed interest in the mob stories, they saw him as a wealthy young man who had lived a life of excess and was intrigued by the thrilling life in the mob.
So when they told their stories, even if they added their own fabrications, Bruce could still derive useful and genuine information about the mob from these tales.
Understanding the complex web of mob relationships was the key to understanding the complete structure of this city of crime.
Bruce discovered that the survival rules of this city were far more complex than he had imagined.
Starting from small-time gangs, every group, even those with a dozen or so members had their survival rules.
These small-time gangs often patrolled the streets, picked pockets, and paid protection fees to bigger mobs, in a bid to survive.
Larger mobs, which had hundreds of members, were the main factions in Gotham. Most of these mobs ran one or two businesses, which could be anything from a shop to a factory.
They provided protection for these businesses, dispatched thugs to attract customers and there were times when small-scale conflicts arose over customer poaching. The conflicts were usually minor, with gangsters firing a few shots from behind cars, and rarely escalating to massive shootouts.
Moving further up, there were the largest of mobs, with hundreds of members. These mobs had each reached another level—they each had at least one unique business sector of their own. Bruce discovered that these damn mobs had even achieved industrial segmentation.
A mob with hundreds of members often controlled at least one smuggling pipeline, or a complete cultivation, extraction, and sales industrial chain, or they owned majority of the industries in the Red Light District. Some of the top performers even achieved monopoly in certain industries in specific regions.
Reaching this level, their daily profit was already staggering, but this also led to saturation.
Moving further up, they could no longer be called mobs, but should be referred to as crime families. It was the Twelve Families that ruled Gotham. Other than the core military power in the hands of the heads of these families, they did not really have to do any hands-on business. All they did was control the large mobs with dozens or even hundreds of them under each crime family, who were responsible for managing different businesses in distinct regions.
When Falcone established the Twelve Families, he allocated them different industries so they each had their separate focuses.
Falcone, however, was at the top of the pyramid, dictating and controlling all families and mobs from there.
In the process of gathering and analyzing this information, Bruce found that Gotham, which seemed chaotic and lawless, was in fact quite a solid pyramid. Wealth was extracted layer by layer from the crime industries, and then redistributed and produced again by the ones at the top.
In this cycle, Gotham developed its unique ecosystem, making it the largest hub of the crime industry in the entire U.S.