

However, Lance, who has already infiltrated the gang, is spurred by the death of his brother into staging a premature attempt on Diaz’s life. Tommy manages to gain Ricardo’s trust over time by performing multiple tasks for him, and becomes a trusted member of Diaz’s Gang. Together, and through the help of recently-acquired allies Colonel Cortez and Kent Paul, they discover that Vice City’s most powerful drug lord, Ricardo Diaz, was responsible for the ambushed deal, and the death of Lance’s brother. During his search for leads within Vice City’s underworld, Tommy teams up with Lance Vance, the surviving member of the Vance Crime Family, who is seeking vengeance for the death of his brother Victor. Tommy assures Sonny that a painful death awaits those responsible for the ambush. This infuriates Sonny, and he demands that Tommy get back both the cocaine and the lost money, or lose his life as a consequence. Having narrowly escaped with Ken, Tommy immediately phones Sonny and informs him of the botched deal. The men steal both the drugs and the money that Tommy was charged with protecting.

The deal is supposed to be the beginning of the family’s expansion “down south,” but during the exchange, concealed masked gunmen kill three of the people involved in the deal (Harry, Lee, and Victor Vance), when they ambush the deal just as the exchange is about to occur. Tommy and the two Forelli soldatos with him, Harry and Lee, meet with Ken Rosenberg, a bent lawyer serving as the Forelli family’s contact in Vice City, when he meets them at Escobar International Airport to drive them to the meet. Sonny quickly realizes that having “The Harwood Butcher” returning to Liberty City and working on behalf of the Forelli family would be harmful to business, so he decides to send Tommy to Vice City to oversee an important drug deal between the Forelli family and the Vance Crime Family. With the help of the Forelli family’s connections, he was spared the death penalty, but served fifteen years for manslaughter.ĭue to Sonny’s influence, Tommy is released from prison in 1986. It appeared that Vercetti had successfully assassinated the man he had been sent to kill, but was then surrounded and had to fight his way out. Vercetti was sent to prison in Liberty City, in 1971, for multiple counts of homicide, apparently totalling eleven (although Vercetti was originally sent by the Don of the Forelli family, Sonny Forelli, to assassinate only one man), which earned him the nickname “The Harwood Butcher", a reference to the Liberty City neighborhood in which the murders had occurred. Vercetti was born in 1951 to unknown parents.
