Buggy’s Bounty at 15 million Berries

Fifteen million is the going rate for an East Blue captain who levels defenceless towns and empties Orange Town of its people. The figure is correct. It is correct because the Navy had no idea whom it was pricing.

Buggy had seen to that. When the great pirate era opened, he buried the fact that he had served aboard Gol D. Roger's ship, specifically to stay clear of the World Government's eye, and went off to build his crew in the weakest of the four seas. The apprentice who used to argue with Shanks on the deck of the Oro Jackson became a provincial raider, was priced as one, and nobody checked for years.

He ended up locked in Impel Down after walking into a Marine garrison he had mistaken for the cave holding Captain John's treasure. Level 1, the shallowest floor of the prison. It was during the breakout that Marine Headquarters named him and Luffy as its two instigators — and it did so while announcing what it had just turned up about his past. The escapees from Level 2, who were already following him for setting them free, came to revere him for it, even as Buggy himself pointed out that every one of them was worth more money than he was.

A letter from the World Government arrived on top of all this, his wanted status was retracted, and the amount stayed frozen for as long as he held the title. Among the Warlords serving alongside him, the lowest known frozen figure after his was Boa Hancock's eighty million. What the government was buying was not a fighter. It was a line of contact with several hundred men who had just walked out of its own prison.