The man you see pictured above is one Carmine Falcone, (former, as far as current Bat-continuity goes) crime boss of Gotham City. You may remember him from Batman Begins, of course, where he was played by Tom Wilkinson — a curious choice being that Mr. Wilkinson neither looks nor sounds especially Italian, but whatever.

He’s also largely immaterial to this post given that we’ve already established that the Harvey Dent/Jim Gordon/”Bat-Vigilante” trifecta has already locked him away at the start of our hypothetical Batman I  movie, but the slack left in the absence of him and the other incarcerated Crime Lords has been picked up, to an extent, in our imaginary flick by one Vincent Lucchesi, a name I dropped earlier but that we now will be meeting in earnest for the first time in a scene that, I freely admit, is heavily influenced by Nolan’s first Bat-flick.

Now, I confess — last time around, I left you with the distinct impression that our next segment would revolve around a TV interview with Bruce Wayne, but looking at things more closely over the last couple of days, I’ve decided that now might be a good time to introduce Mr. Lucchesi, since he’s going to figure prominently in this (again, completely imaginary) film, and because I think I’d like to show Batman in action for the first time at right about this point — although, fair warning, that’s going to be our focus tomorrow : one thing at a time, as always!

Anyway, I started this post with a picture of Falcone because Lucchesi is an entirely invented character (at this point — he’s going to eventually become a fairly well-known member of the Batman “Rogues’ Gallery,” but again, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves!) but he’s a bad-ass Gotham crime boss, and if you want to find pics of a bad-ass Gotham crime boss to kick off your blog post with, you’re stuck with Falcone images — this one, needless to say, from Loeb and Sale’s Batman : The Long Halloween (yes, again!).

If you’ll recall, busting Lucchesi has proven tough for the Dark Knight Detective because his deepest, darkest, most well-hidden secret seems to be that he’s importing an entirely legal, if obscure, experimental liquid compound through a string of front companies, and it seems only logical that in the two-day interregnum between Bruce Wayne’s “official” return to Gotham and his Monday morning chat-show appearance, he might want to have a look at one of these shipments in his Bat-persona.

To that effect, our next scene will show Lucchesi in a plush, Penthouse-type office, smoking an imported cigarette in a long holder, and meeting with a few of his less-than-trusted henchmen. Their conversation will be revolving around a shipment coming in that night, and Lucchesi will naturally ask who’s been tasked to provide “security” for the set-up. When one of the goons replies “Flass,” Luchessi will slam his fist on the desk and yell “Flass??????? You imbecile! Dent and Gordon just sent him upriver this morning!!!!!!!!!!,” thus hearkening back to our “Meet Jim Gordon” scene from a posts (but only a few minutes, movie-wise) ago. “Aren’t you clowns on top of any of the information that’s going around this town?”

“Gosh, we’re sorry, Mr. Lucchesi, so many guys been going down it’s gettin’ kinda hard to keep up!,” one of the toadies will stammer in response, to which Lucchesi will reply,” Well, it’s gettin’ too damn late to bring in anybody else, and I sure as hell can’t leave it to you nitwits, so it looks like I’m just gonna have to go down and oversee this operation myself. We’re at too critical a stage right now to leave it to a bunch’a goddamn amateurs!” At that point Lucchesi, immaculately dressed in an expensive Italian suit, will grab his equally-expensive Italian overcoat and hat and storm out of his office, his lackeys in tow behind him as he swears on his mother’s grave extreme vengeance, delivered with interest, upon Harvey Dent for all the trouble he’s been causing his operation.

If he knew the gruesome fate that was in store for him, he’d have stayed back at the office and farmed the job out after all —