[Lorebane24]

My party has just finished the second run from the Boston Lockdown book, and now we're moving off the rails and starting in on a couple arcs I'm working on.  For the next game, the party gets in on the ground floor of the lesser arc - Damon trying to completely take over the Boston underworld.  He's got a former Seraphim on his side who is currently installed as a double agent in the O'Riley family.  The party saw him at the meet for their last run (he was acting as bodyguard for the Johnson) but haven't actually spoken to him.  He's going to be their Johnson on the next run, which I have figured in a couple of broad strokes:

They're hired by this guy (Raphael) to run what is essentially a double sided false flag operation.  Damon wants the major crime syndicates to wreck each other now, so he's been brokering an alliance between the Morelli family and the Boston Yakuza, which Raphael has already informed Don O'Riley of.  Now, the party is going to be hired to break into a corporate compound and steal something important.  Don't know what corp, don't know what they're stealing.  Their job is to make it look like this was either a Yakuza run, or at least a Yakuza backed one.  They need to be obvious enough about it that their target can trace the hit back to the Yakuza.  Then, the party has to take whatever they steal, conveniently neglect to disable tracking on it, and place it in an O'Riley warehouse, so that the corp thinks it was the O'Riley family doing a frame up on the Yakuza, and the O'Riley family thinks the Morellis are having their Yak allies run a frame up on them.

I haven't got anything more specific than this right now, though.  An advice on what sort of swag might serve as a good spark to ignite a mob war?  What sort of help should the party be offered to make it look like a Yakuza hit?  The party has thus far leaned more towards a black trenchcoat style, and we had a bit of a shootout against Ex Pacis flunkies in the last run, so I'd like it if I could give them the opportunity to resolve the whole run without a firefight this time.

[TheWayfinder]

For the swag to be important enough to potentially spark a mob war, the corp has to be somewhat in bed with one of the mobs.  But, before we get into that, we have to clarify some things. 

Organized crime syndicates aren't necessarily monolithic.  Each faction has many smaller factions within them, and even they are not fully unified, and there's plenty of infighting all around.  So, to have the Yakuza blamed for, say, a run made on a corp facility protected by the Mafia, you have to be a bit specific on who's family is being hit and by which faction of the Yakuza.  But, this in and of itself may not really spark a mob war. 

Because what really sparks a mob war is when it gets personal.  Sure, having one mob hit another mob's racket that's set up might do it, but chances are all that's going to result in is a minor retaliation.  However, kill a Made Man, or even a Mafia Boss, and have the Yakuza blamed for that, and you have the potential for a war.  What's then essential is to make sure that both sides don't get together and determine the truth, which could be part of the adventure itself. 

Immediately following a hit on a Made Man or a Mafia Boss is that the Mafia will talk to the other smaller Mafia families in the territory and deals may be made in order to coordinate a response.  What's important here is how powerful each faction is.  It may be that the Yakuza may be more powerful than the Mafia, and therefore the big boss won't want an all-out war, in spite of the loss of one of theirs and the indignity that comes from that.  Besides, it'll be bad for business, and even if the Mafia should win, they're going to be hard-pressed to recoup their losses. 

So you can have your players do a run on a corp facility protected by the Mafia, or Triads, or whatever, and in the process of stealing something, they kill someone important, and maybe that was intended all along by Mr. Johnson.  If the PCs don't do it on their own, have Mr. Johnson shadow them with another professional runner, a hitman who will use the run to create just enough of a distraction in order to kill the real target. 

[Lorebane24]

Ah, sorry, I guess I wasn't totally clear.

So the big players in the mafia in Boston are the O'Riley (Irish) and the Morelli (Italian, I think) families.  They're aren't huge fans of one another, and the O'Riley family is the biggest fish in town.  The Yakuza doesn't have much of a presence, but they are here.  Lockdown implies that they mostly just operate as the street level arm as MCT since they don't have much else what with the mafia and various gangs cornering the market on like everything else.

So Damon the dragon, who recently managed to corner the city's market on BADs by playing the two families against one another, is, in my campaign, playing a long game and intends to keep running with it and weaken the various syndicates in the city to the point that he can move in and take over the vast majority of Boston's organized crime.

The first step of this, which is already done, was facilitating an alliance between the Yakuza and the Morelli family - a temporary and tenuous alliance that they hope they will both benefit from if they can dethrone the O'Riley family.

They aren't hitting a corp guarded by the mob.  They're just stealing something and stashing it at an O'Riley warehouse so the corp finds it there and starts hitting back against the O'Riley family, or at the very least makes sure shit stops falling off the back of trucks for them.  The party also has to leave enough evidence behind that the O'Riley family, once they start trying to figure out who it was that framed them, gets pointed towards the Yakuza, who they know are allied with the Morellie family.  They know the Yaks on their own aren't big enough and don't have enough to gain by lashing out at them, so they will naturally assume it really is the first assault in a joint attack by those two syndicates.  Probably not enough to kick off a full blown war yet, but it certainly puts them on VERY unfriendly terms while Damon works out how to get the Vory and the Triads involved.  Meanwhile, he plays up his influence over various gangs, who will later be his soldiers as he moves in on syndicate territory when they start tearing each other down.

[iduno]

So if they aren't taking out anyone important enough to start a mob war, and aren't hitting someone backed by one party or the other, they must have crossed some line?

Not disabling the tracking sounds like a good opportunity for the authorities to show up just as the runners are leaving (can't have a run go too smoothly). Stepping on toes or killing someone deserves turnabout, but calling the cops? That's going too far. Especially if it gets the warehouse raided, and hurts business. The other guys will take offense to being blamed, and you could be one good spark from a firestorm.

[Lorebane24]

Ended up going with an extraction of an marketing director who is also the mistress of one of Evo's regional heads.  They were given explicit orders not to disable her implanted commlink, so they just knocked her out instead.  It was actually hilarious.  They hacked some credentials and posed as representatives for a movie studio that wanted to make a documentary about how this line of Evo products was helping underprivilaged metahumans and scored a meeting.  They made a big model troll that they insisted was going to be shown off at the meeting to demonstrate the quality of their effects, but they made it hollow, AND a faraday cage.  They knocked out the exec in the meeting after the hacker put the cameras on a loop of their presentation, quickly killed all the metahumans at the meeting (Yakuza-style metahate) with caseless rounds and tantos and stuff, and stuffed the exec into the troll.  Then they bluffed their way past the guards outside the doors and hauled ass out of there before the fact that the presentation was over reached the guys watching the camera feed.