Organizer
The Organizer, born Abner Jonas, is a former New York City candidate for mayor under the Reform Party who "organized" a number of criminal plots to facilitate his easy election. He used the strangely outfitted but skilled Ani-Men as his criminal underlings, keeping his true identity and precise motives a mystery even to them. The Organizer's scheme was exposed by Daredevil, resulting in his arrest and effectively the downfall of the Reform Party.
Biography
Abner Jonas was the Reform Party candidate for mayor of New York City in 1965. He nominated the relatively unknown lawyer Foggy Nelson as his district attorney, secretly believing that he would be easy to control. Jonas aligned himself with Deborah Harris, Nelson's high-school girlfriend, and had her get close to Foggy to manipulate him and keep him placid. Jonas's plan was to discredit the existing administration by causing a massive crime wave through the city. To accomplish his goals, Organizer gathered a group of highly skilled criminals, each of whom would adopt an animalistic persona: Ape-Man, Bird-Man, Cat-Man, and Frog-Man, collectively known as the Ani-Men. He granted each an appropriate but uncanny costume. Frog-Man was a former Navy combat diver known as "Frog" Le Blanc, who left the military under shady circumstances, and remained on the run from the government. Organizer sent a visual message to Frog and effectively blackmailed him into joining his cause. He recruited Henry Hawk, his Bird-Man, at a point when Hawk was running a small-time horse-race gambling operation. Hawk jumped at the opportunity to make a bigger score. Organizer recruited his Cat-Man, who used his costume's infrared vision and a "blackout bomb" to spring a jailbreak at a federal prison and free and recruit Monk Keefer, the soon-to-be Ape-Man.
The four men gathered in a secret suite in an office building, where the masked Organizer spoke to them on a large screen. Each of them were equipped with their monikers and appropriate suits, as well as communication headsets and remote cameras. Cat-Man would attack and rob the treasury in much the same way he had done to the prison; Ape-Man would use his natural athletic skill to rob a priceless ruby from a millionaire's penthouse; Bird-Man would use the functional wings in his suit to steal all record of past elections from the city archives; and Frog-Man would use his amphibious suit to enter the sewers and cut the city's power and communication lines. The job was a massive success: New York was utterly crippled, and police had no leads as to the culprits.
While hosting a Reform Party gala aboard his yacht, Jonas attempted to have Frog-Man stage an attack on the yacht to position himself as a victim. However, the hero Daredevil intercepted Frog-Man, forcing the latter to flee. Daredevil went on to tamper with a number of other crimes attempted by the Ani-Men, soon resulting in the police capture of Cat-Man.[1] Jonas and two other high-ranking Reform Party politicians held a meeting with Nelson and his partner Matt Murdock (secretly Daredevil himself), where Matt casually mentioned having evidence as to the Organizer's identity in their office safe. The Organizer ordered his men to investigate—they found nothing, and left the Nelson & Murdock office a shambles. This diversion proved that Jonas or one of the other two Reform politicians was the Organizer.
With Daredevil bearing down on his plan, Organizer decided to intensify matters. He told Deborah Harris to assassinate the current mayor, but she seemed unprepared to carry out this extreme measure. This order proved to be the Organizer's downfall, as Harris soon betrayed him and aligned with Daredevil to take him down. Daredevil trapped and fought Frog-Man, bringing him to police custody and disguising himself in his costume. The fake Frog-Man came to the Organizer and covertly transmitted video of their brief conversation to the police, who broadcast it on public airwaves. Organizer soon figured things out, but simply believed that Frog-Man was betraying him, and dropped him through a trap door. Jonas held a rally with the other Reform politicians, and staged an Organizer video in such a way as to make it seem impossible that he was him. Various Reform candidates began pointing fingers at each other, and Ape-Man and Bird-Man arrived to take Jonas away in a staged kidnapping. Daredevil arrived however, took down the Ani-Men, and exposed Jonas as the Organizer. All members of the Organization were taken away by the police, and Jonas's political career was destroyed. The other Reform candidates also had their public image tarnished by this incident, and the party effectively crumbled.[2]