Verbal explains that, six weeks earlier in New York, he and the other criminals were arrested on supposedly a trumped-up hijacking charge, and decided to pull another heist to get back at the police. Led by Keaton, a former corrupt policeman, they robbed a group of corrupt cops who transported smugglers in a police convoy. They then went to California to fence the stolen jewels with a criminal named Redfoot. Redfoot turned them on to another jewel heist, but the quarry turned out to be heroin, and the five had to shoot their way out. Soon after, a lawyer named Kobayashi contacted them and told them that Keyser Söze, a Turkish crime lord with a mythical reputation from whom all of the thieves had unwittingly stolen (including Hockney who hijacked the original truck six weeks earlier in New York), had offered them a job: invade a ship manned by a gang of Argentinian drug dealers with whom Söze was competing and destroy the $91 million worth of cocaine that they were transporting.