Homecoming, Part One.

It’s day two of our Grand Theft Auto IV feature, and a former mafia capo has been called out of retirement by a ghost from his past, back to the city he swore he’d never set foot in again.

A thousand feet up, it’s hard to say how I can tell Liberty City has changed, I just know. I know that I’m on approach to Francis International, tray-table secured and seat in the upright position, and it should feel like coming home, but instead I feel like just another tourist coming to see “The Worst Place in America.” Can’t argue with the city’s new motto; things were different back in the day when Cosa Nostra ran things. It was all about business, there was honour in that simple truth, and there was respect. If you asked me to pinpoint exactly where it all started to turn to shit, I couldn’t tell you. There’s no defining moment for that kind of thing, it just creeps up on you like fucking cancer...one week there’s a few Jamaicans slinging dope, then it’s the Yakuza or triads muscling in, then it’s some spicks running blow in through the docks. They pushed, we pushed back, we escalated, they escalated. It was just part of the business. It was manageable.

One week you’re on top, the next...shit, then it’s all gone in a heartbeat. But I got out, against all odds, I took a bullet to the gut and took some heat from the cops, but they couldn’t make any of their shit stick to me. Honestly though, it was all luck...some asshole tears their city to shreds, racking up a body count like a bad action flick, and the pigs have got better things to do than put the squeeze on some capo like me. The long and short of it was that the mafia’s spine was broken, its head cut off. The Colombians had moved out, the rest had gone underground: the city could sleep safe and the mayor could bank on re-election. Luck, really, pure luck.

The plane touches down and I’m officially back in Liberty City for the first time in seven years. I know it’s changed, from the news, from what my old buddies tell me...I know, but now it’s time to find out for myself just how much. I’ve got no luggage to pick up, just my carry-on, and besides, I’ve got more than enough baggage with me. The guy I’m supposed to be meeting offered to send me a car, but I told him I wanted to check in with some people before our sit-down. Truth is I just knew I’d need a bit of time to adjust to being back in the city I once called home, that, and I had something to pick up first.

Francis International had changed a lot, but then, airports always seem to be half finished, forever under construction and expanding. It’s bigger than I remember, but the arrivals/departures concourse is almost exactly how I left it when I limped on a plane to start a new life. A constant shuffle of Liberty’s trademark yellow-cabs lined the kerb, but a cabbie needs a destination and destinations can be traced. So for old time’s sake, I decided to rent a Sentinel. They didn’t have black, so I had to settle for silver; when the broad at the counter asked me how long I’d be hiring the car for, I said one day: I doubted it’d be longer than that.

The car felt different to how I remembered it; heavier, a little looser in the steering and on the road. Maybe it was just me getting old, maybe it was the fact I’d picked the car up from a damn rental place...back in the day, if you saw a sentinel, you knew it was driven by the family, hand-tuned by Joey Leone himself. Outside the sky is almost free of clouds and smog, giving the morning a sharp, stark contrast. The dew has given everything a slick sheen, like the city has just woken up and had a shower, fresh and ready to face the day It’s only 8:30am, but in Liberty City rush hour is pretty much 7am to 10pm, so I join the queue of cars, just another citizen on just another day in the rotten apple.

Liberty City had undergone a lot of changes since I had last been here, Bobby D had told me. I hadn’t spoken to my oldest and most trusted soldier since the day I left Liberty City, but last week He called me up, called in his marker. He told me about some guy named Ray Boccino, said Cosa Nostra was taking back Liberty City and he needed as many soldiers as he could get. I told Bobby I had a life now, that I couldn’t just drop everything, but he called in that favour I owed him – he was the guy who kept me breathing until the medics arrived, after all. So I told Bobby I would do this for him, I would fly down and hear his boss’s offer. Just listen, no commitment; I was happy with the life I had made for myself, and it would take something pretty special for me to go back to the old ways.

Bobby told me that after I left, most of the other criminal syndicates in the city had been left broken and crippled too; the Colombians had turned tail and ran, the Yakuza had scaled back their operations, and only the triads and the Jamaicans still operated in some form today.

“So who muscled in and filled the power vacuum?” I asked him immediately.

“You don’t miss a trick, do you, Charlie? You always was the shrewd one,” he laughed. “Now we’ve got a fuckin’ migrant problem: Euro-trash like Albanians and Russians, as well as the damn Irish. Koreans and Mexicans too, shit, it wouldn’t surprise me none if some damn Australians hopped in on their kangaroos and started a racket.” His smile had faded now, and his tone grew more serious.

“Be careful when you get here, Charlie, us Italians are a fuckin’ minority group in Liberty now.”

Bobby was right that the city had changed though; a lot of attempts at urban renewal and gentrification; as I drove through the old Red Light District I noticed a sign indicating it had become the much classier sounding Hove Beach, and the old triad-run Chinatown was nowhere to be seen – Bobby told me it had vanished with the triads, slowly re-emerging years later in Algonquin. But the biggest surprise came when I swung the rented Sentinel towards what used to be Saint Mark’s, our old turf – it wasn’t there anymore. Downtown, Schotter, South Slopes...I couldn’t really tell which of the new districts had consumed the old seat of Leone family power, only that seven short years had all but erased every trace of the mafia’s dominance over the area.

I managed to park the Sentinel after scouring the streets of Schotter for almost twenty minutes, but I couldn’t spot what I was looking for. It had been awhile, and everything had changed, so I decided to walk it out, hoping that maybe it would be more familiar once I was out of the car. It was possible that I just couldn’t remember where it was, I might be in the entirely wrong area, but then, as I rounded the corner I saw it: Ammu-Nation. Closed. Boarded up, no longer in business. I walked as if in a trance, unsure if my eyes were telling me the truth, but close up the yellowing signs and mayoral edict reinforced the truth.

“Dawkins closed it down,” slurred a voice behind me. I spun around, and was confronted by the sight of a filthy hobo, his clothes and skin a grey-brown, his stench undeniable.

“Dawkins?” I asked once I regained my composure, and after I’d taken a step or two back.

“Deputy mayor, hypocritical piece of shit,” he hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it in what I could only guess was the direction of City Hall now. “Outlawed gun sales, to stop all the violence. Cops don’t really give a shit about enforcin’ it, but you can’t buy `em anymore.”

“Oh,” I said, because I had nothing else to say. My mind was racing, but before I could formulate an alternate plan of action, the hobo stepped closer, right up in my face.

“I know where you can get a piece if you need one,” he whispered conspiratorially, his breath reeking like a liquor store after a shelf collapse. “Man’s got a right to protect himself from the damn terrorists when they come.” He then proceeded to rattle off a few locations where black marketeers plied their wares while I held my breath, nodding.

“Thanks, buddy,” I said.

“Hey c’mon, man, that info has gotta be worth a few bucks!” he whined. I rounded on him and gave him my hardest stare, the one that used to instil fear in my subordinates and opponents.

“Get a fucking job, you bum,” I growled, and gave him a shove for good measure.

Then, I went to find a gun.

Continued in Part Two...

Written by Dominic Rozenberg.