Buggy’s Bounty at 15,000,000 Berries

He got into Impel Down by walking into a Marine garrison he had mistaken for a cave containing Captain John's treasure. They filed him on Level 1, the floor reserved for small catches. This figure had been his for years by then, and nobody in the administration had any reason to revisit it.

What follows is a chain of misreadings. Buggy ended up named as one of the two instigators of the breakout, alongside Luffy. The Navy accordingly ran a background check, and turned up the fact that he had served as an apprentice aboard Gol D. Roger's ship and grown up beside Shanks. From that history the institution inferred power and influence. The escapees from Level 2 inferred exactly the same thing and followed him, and Buggy himself pointed out that every last one of them was worth more money than he was.

The Warlord seat lands on top of all this, and the amount does not move by a single berry. The result is a configuration the registry produces only once: the most protective status in the world stapled to the smallest figure in its own category, held by a man whose sole asset was an address book he had picked up in prison by accident.

The World Government was not buying a fighter. It was buying the only available point of contact with several hundred criminals who had just walked out of its own penitentiary, and it paid for that access with a title rather than with money.