Brian Heder

Brian ran product through the Keys back when that trade was at its peak, and he's never stopped. He works out of a boat yard with his wife Lori, and he's Jason's landlord in the loosest sense: Jason stays there and doesn't pay.

In the Extended Look he's the go-between, the man who knows somebody who needs a job doing tonight. That's a familiar figure at the start of a Grand Theft Auto story, and it usually means the jobs get worse from there.

An old Keys smuggler

Brian's a specific Florida type, and he isn't a generic crook. Smuggling in the Keys in the late seventies and eighties was mostly run by people who already owned boats and already knew the water: fishermen, charter skippers, boat yard men. When the money turned up they didn't have to change jobs, just what they were carrying. Plenty of them were never caught, and they just got old where they were.

That's the man Rockstar's drawn. He isn't building an empire and he isn't hiding either. He's running the same routes he always ran, out of a yard with his name on it, with a wife who works the business with him.

Brian's Marina

The launch trailer opens on the yard itself, and the name's on the roof in red letters: Brian's Marina. It's a dry-stack operation, with boats racked several high beside the shed and a sign offering to rent you a rack. Inside, two men are working on a cabin cruiser up on stands, and the badge on its hull reads Shasa. Jason takes a phone call out front.

A marina is the right cover for a man like this. Boats come and go at all hours, nobody asks why a hull's sitting lower in the water than it should, and a rack rental business explains a lot of cash. Rockstar hasn't said whether the marina's a business the player can run or just Brian's base.

Lori

Lori's Brian's wife, and she's part of the same operation, working the boat yard the two of them still push product out of. She's shown up next to him without getting a story of her own so far, and Rockstar hasn't released anything about her separately. We're covering her here until there's enough for her own page.

The people around him

Brian sits in the middle of the Keys side of the cast. Jason lives on his property. Cal Hampton, the conspiracy hobbyist who listens to Coast Guard radio for fun, is in the same circle and turns up at The Rusty Anchor. And in a smuggling operation, a guy who listens to Coast Guard traffic all day might be more useful than he looks.

Stephen Root, if the reports are right

Reporting on the Extended Look identified his voice as the character actor Stephen Root. Rockstar hasn't published a cast list and hasn't confirmed it, so it stays as reporting. If it's right, it says a lot about the tone the Keys scenes are going for, since Root can be genuinely unsettling or very funny, and he's often both in the same scene.

Related: Leonida Keys.