Vincenzo

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Vincenzo arrives in Seoul with a private objective: recover a fortune in gold hidden beneath Geumga Plaza, a commercial building whose tenants stand in the way of Babel Group's planned redevelopment. He has spent years as a lawyer and consigliere in the Cassano crime family in Italy, so he treats the plaza as a problem of leverage, not a home. His familiarity with coercion does not help him navigate its small businesses, where the tenants distrust a stranger who suddenly cares whether their building survives. The conflict takes shape through two competing clocks: Vincenzo needs the structure intact long enough to reach the gold, while Babel wants the property cleared for a tower. Every attempt at a routine eviction brings another display of the conglomerate's ability to disguise force as legitimate business.

The plaza's Jipuragi Law Firm introduces Vincenzo to Hong Yoo-chan, a principled attorney suing Babel Pharmaceuticals over harm to drug-test subjects. Yoo-chan's daughter, Hong Cha-young, works for Wusang, the firm defending Babel, and initially uses the aggressive tactics her employer rewards. Her position changes when Yoo-chan is murdered after standing up to Babel; Cha-young leaves Wusang and joins the law firm her father built. Vincenzo recognizes that their targets overlap, though their motives do not: she wants to continue her father's legal fight, while he still wants access to the building and its hidden cache. Their uneasy partnership lets the story place court strategy beside the less lawful methods Vincenzo brought from Italy.

Babel’s apparent chairman, Jang Han-seo, fronts for his violent half-brother Han-seok, who initially hides behind the identity of a junior lawyer. That concealment makes official channels difficult to trust. When deaths are dismissed as suicide, Cha-young demands further investigation, while Vincenzo catches a detective receiving payment from Wusang and forces him to surrender the case files. Footage of a vehicle following the victims, together with marks on their bodies, supports a different account of their deaths. The Geumga residents then join the resistance, appearing in masks for a public announcement ridiculing Babel’s legal enablers. Their campaign is deliberately theatrical, but its purpose is practical: people who relied on their respectable positions are being made visible. Vincenzo finally identifies the hidden chairman after confronting the men sent to attack him.

The conflict reaches Vincenzo’s mother, Oh Gyeong-ja, just as he is beginning to reconnect with her. Cha-young arranges photographs of them together and gives them space to talk, allowing a relationship previously kept at a distance to become briefly tangible. Babel answers by attacking the Geumga building with a timed gas device; Han-seo’s warning brings the fire brigade, and Vincenzo prevents the explosion. The danger then moves to the hospital. A hired killer posing as an orderly murders Gyeong-ja, turning the place where she should have received care into another site of Babel’s violence. Vincenzo follows the attacker through security footage, forces him to reveal the route back to those responsible and kills him in front of his employers. The earlier legal contest has now become a direct personal vendetta.

The hidden gold keeps producing trouble of its own. Cho Young-woon tries to take a gold bar he believes contains the Guillotine File, a cache of incriminating information, but Vincenzo distracts and disarms him. Their confrontation is interrupted when the residents unexpectedly return from an outing. Cha-young stalls them while the men hide the gold again and restore the temple above the heavily secured underground vault. Only afterwards do Vincenzo and Cho realize that the iris-scanning device needed to reopen it has been left inside. Their expertise cannot prevent a wonderfully mundane mistake: they have locked themselves out of the fortune. Meanwhile, the residents help pressure a union leader into exposing Babel’s anti-union operation, and recovered documents allow the lawyers to disrupt Han-seok’s public appearance. The building’s occupants have become participants in the campaign rather than people waiting to be rescued.

The Babel campaign ends with a costly physical confrontation: Han-seo sacrifices himself to stop Han-seok from killing Vincenzo, and Cha-young is shot while Vincenzo escapes with her. The Geumga tenants help capture Han-seok, whose final fate is set by Vincenzo's own brutal code. Vincenzo leaves Korea under threat of prosecution, while Cha-young remains and wins a posthumous retrial for his mother. A year later, she briefly reunites with him at an Italian diplomatic celebration. His disappearance and return leave their relationship open to distance, while the tenants continue their shared life. The series does not transform Vincenzo into a conventional reformer: his methods secure a personal victory and help preserve a community, yet the rule of law remains damaged by the powerful people who exploited it. Comedy comes from the mismatch between mobster competence and eccentric tenants, while the underlying question stays serious: what can people do when a corporation can purchase the appearance of legitimacy?