Kurt Kincaid

"Never play a sucker for the short con when you can play him for the long con."

- Kurt Kincaid

Kurt Kincaid was a notorious human crime lord, hailing from a family on Madrigal. He survived the fall of his homeworld and the loss of many of his family's operations, only to rebuild a criminal empire that moved before and behind the Covenant advance, preying upon the people that the UNSC couldn't protect.

Biography
Kurt Kincaid's origins are unclear. He was certainly raised on Madrigal during the bush wars that were fought over control of the fertile river valleys in the Tierra Atlas Oriental mountains. It is rumored that he is related to Jacob Kincaid, an ecologist with the Madrigal Terraforming Project who is rumored to have had a hand in introducing La Dicha to the region, but surviving records are inconclusive. If the two men are related, Kurt was likely conceived in an extramarital affair.

His childhood in the backwater provinces of Madrigal, if that is indeed where he hails from, explains why his DNA was registered in no crime databases until it was successfully isolated from a sample collected in 2538. Although this would otherwise have brought his career as a con man to an end, Kurt already had over a decade of experience in bypassing security protocols, and he often continued to pass undetected. Likewise, an origin on Madrigal would explain his casual approach to violence and willingness to shed blood and take hostages to achieve a goal.

Kurt first rose to prominence in the Esquival Scheme. Forming a shell corporation, Kurt began organizing an evacuation program which would relocate people and industry away from the Covenant advance. Businesses showed interest, freighters were chartered, and industrial machinery was packed up to move. Kurt absconded with the money, one of the freighters, and millions of credits worth of terraforming equipment. The Esquival Scheme was free of bloodshed, a marked outlier in his career.

Methods
Kurt Kincaid is first and foremost a confidence man. Although he manages a successful criminal enterprise, his biggest payoffs come from infiltrating organizations to gain influence, and then using that influence to expose valuable assets. The key to this strategy is Kurt's fantastic talent for acting, even without the aid of cosmetics and prosthetics. Due to his mixed ancestry, Kurt can pass himself off as hailing from one of dozens of colonial cultures, and he can imitate anyone from a recovering La Dicha addict to a UNSC Army colonel.

Kurts' enterprises are marked by violence. He doesn't use threats of violence so much as bloodshed with the promise of more. This let him carve a niche in the interstellar black market that was dominated by established criminal syndicates and policed by ONI. To quote Kincaid on his competition, "After Madrigal, these [Foxtrots] are a cakewalk."