If this is a bigger, thinkier question than you feel like dealing with right now, then please know I will not be offended if you don’t answer it. But anyway, I was just thinking about Nick and Rio. How would you headcanon that they got to where they got? Rio joined a gang, seemingly in prison, and worked his way up. Meanwhile Nick went the blue collar crime route. What do you think their partnership would’ve looked like before Rio was king and Nick was city councilman? Tbh I want a prequel!
Hi! Sorry it took me a minute to answer this one! It's a really interesting quetsion.
I think it was likely that Nick was the connect in those early days. The flashbacks in 4.08 showed that Nick was really building his relationships with the wealthy guests of the golf club and acting as a sort of gopher for them. He's always been depicted as pretty parasitic, but I think in those early days he was focused on making himself indispensable to a particular sort of guy, and as he built up their trust, he was able to utilise that.
It's likely that at least some of those guys were probably interested in drugs, and we know that's where Rio started because of his conversation with Beth way back in 1.06, and I can see that being a way for Nick to prove his worth (and gain a degree of control) by connecting that crowd to Rio and the gang's business. While it wouldn't afford Rio the same degree of protection Nick's capable of later, it probably does already give them a bit of security given Nick would at that point have enough dirty laundry over the golf club guys to give him leverage.
I feel like in that sense, Nick became a sort of plug for those guys fairly quickly, and likely could work as an intermediary between the gang's affairs and the guys through Rio, and once Rio was moving up and into money laundering, I think Nick was probably able to help broach a lot of those relationships. It makes sense for instance that Nick would have those sorts of dynamics with the owners of the Fine & Frugal chain from operating in that sort of crowd for as long as he had, and as a result be able to sort of lubricate the business dealings to get them washing Rio's gang's cash.
What that means for Rio and Nick's relationship I think is really what we saw on the show. They were fairly symbiotic in many ways, and I think the main reason their relationship was tense was less about the business and more the fact that it had been built on the trauma of Nick having him arrested in the first place. Nick deliberately forced Rio into this particular life, and then he used him in it, and while Rio turned that into something that worked for him, I imagine there's a lot of fury and pain attached to that still too.
What do you guys think?
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