List of Criminal story arcs

This article is a list of story arcs of the Icon Comics series Criminal.

(Issues 1-5, Oct 06 - Mar 07)

The story begins fifteen years after Tommy Patterson was killed in state prison, and five years after Leo survived the disastrous "Salt Bay job." Since then, Leo has been keeping a low profile as a pickpocket as he struggles to take care of Ivan, who suffers from both Alzheimer's disease and an addiction to heroin. Leo closely follows his own rules for survival, and so he has a reputation, not only for being brilliant at planning scores, but also for being a coward who always manages to escape a bad situation. Both aspects of this reputation attracts the attention of Seymour, who also survived the Salt Bay fiasco, and a crooked cop named Jeff. They try to recruit Leo to work an armored-car heist, telling him that the police evidence van is carrying $5 million in diamonds. He refuses because he has a rule against working with corrupt police officers, but Seymour knows Leo won't say no to a woman named Greta, a recovering heroin addict who's working the heist to start a new life with her daughter Angie. Leo eventually agrees to join the crew and recruits his friend Donnie, an epileptic con man.

When Jeff includes his own partners in the score, Leo and Greta suspect a double-cross, but they continue with the heist's planning and execution. Leo thought the double-cross would occur after the heist, so Jeff and his partners have the element of surprise when they open fire during the robbery, killing Donnie and wounding Greta. Leo still followed his rule about having his own back-up escape route, so he and Greta manage to drive away with the score, which he discovers isn't diamonds but rather a briefcase of heroin.

Jeff and his partners work for a drug kingpin named "Roy-L.T." Hyde, and the evidence-van heist was intended both to retrieve his merchandise and facilitate the release of his lieutenant named Delron. Furious with their failure, "Roy-L" kills one of Jeff's partners, and he then sends the recently freed Delron with Jeff to track down his nearly $1 million in heroin. While she recovers from her wound, Greta, Ivan, and Leo lie low at his grandfather's farm. He and Greta fall in love, and while they're sleeping together after a night of passion, Ivan finds the suitcase of heroin, and Jeff and Delron track down Greta's mother and daughter.

When Leo wakes up, he finds that Ivan died, overdosing on the uncut heroin. Leo withdraws emotionally from Greta, refusing to talk to her about his past, and while he buries Ivan behind the farmhouse, she makes the mistake of calling him a coward. Leo suddenly takes the heroin back to the city to find a way out of their predicament. There he meets "Genuine Jen" Waters, an old friend who now works in Internal Affairs for the police and who tells him about what "Roy-L" and Jeff were planning: they had hoped Leo would escape, but without the drugs, so that he could be the cops' sole focus. Meanwhile, distraught over how Leo left and tempted by the one remaining bag of heroin, Greta makes the mistake of calling of her mother's house, where her mother has been murdered and where Jeff is waiting to trace her phone call. Leo breaks into Seymour's apartment, hoping to use him to get out of the dire situation, when he finds a message on the answering machine: Jeff and Delron have found Greta.

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