Hondo Ohnaka

Hondo Ohnaka was a Weequay male pirate who led the Ohnaka Gang from a stronghold on the planet Florrum during the Clone Wars. A self-styled pirate king, he served no master but his own profit, and over a long career he crossed paths with the Jedi, the Sith, the Hutts, and bounty hunters before reinventing himself as a smuggler and shipping operator in the years of the Galactic Empire and the New Republic.

The Ohnaka Gang and the capture of Dooku#

Hondo Ohnaka commanded the Ohnaka Gang, a band of Weequay pirates operating from a fortress on Florrum in the Outer Rim. When Count Dooku crash-landed on Vanqor early in the Clone Wars, Ohnaka's pirates captured the Separatist leader and held him for ransom, sending word to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine that they would trade him for a reward. The Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker were sent to verify the pirates' custody of Dooku, agreeing to arrive unarmed; the affair ended with Dooku's escape, but the episode made Ohnaka notorious as the rogue who had briefly held the galaxy's most wanted man.

Ohnaka's path crossed many of the era's hunters and rogues. The bounty hunter Aurra Sing, an old acquaintance, visited his Florrum base with the young Boba Fett and the Trandoshan Bossk, and his gang extorted the Felucian farmers of a nysillin plantation, who hired bounty hunters to drive him off.

Conflict with the Sith#

When the renegade Sith brothers Maul and Savage Opress sought to take over the Ohnaka Gang, they captured one of his ships and demanded he join them or surrender his base. Ohnaka set the pirates against one another, but the arrival of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Jedi Master Adi Gallia turned the skirmish into a battle. Opress slew Gallia, yet Ohnaka rallied his pirates and, allied with Kenobi, drove the wounded brothers from Florrum, costing Opress an arm. The defeat at his hands marked one of the few times the Sith brothers were forced to flee.

Smuggler under the Empire#

After the rise of the Empire, Ohnaka turned increasingly to smuggling. Imprisoned on the world of Naraka, he shared a cell with a laborer named Terba before the rebel Spectres, led in the effort by the young Ezra Bridger, broke him out. Thereafter Ohnaka became an unreliable but recurring ally of the rebel cell, his ventures driven always by profit. He won the freighter Broken Horn from the crime lord Vizago in a game of sabacc, lured the rebels into a scheme to steal a rare argora bird, and traded with the crew of the Ghost for fuel and information. His example weighed on Bridger, who came to resolve that he was not like Ohnaka anymore.

The New Republic Era and legacy#

Ohnaka outlived the Empire. By the time of the conflict between the New Republic, the First Order, and the Resistance, he had established Ohnaka Transport Solutions, a shipping company that operated as a front for his smuggling, run from Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu. He even made a deal with Chewbacca to use the Millennium Falcon, hiring a temporary crew for one of his ventures.

In his later years Ohnaka set down his version of galactic history in books written with his protocol droid DK-RA-43, among them the Galactic Explorer's Guide and a volume on the galaxy's most notorious bounty hunters. Self-aggrandizing and selective, these accounts spread his name and his tall tales across the galaxy, securing the legend of the pirate king who had outlasted Republics, Empires, and Sith alike.