Furio Tigre

"Phoenix Wright"

- (There are two things that I consider inexcusable. Poisoning, and betrayal! Only a coward would hurt people using either of these tactics.)

Furio "The Tiger" Tigre was a witness in the murder of Glen Elg. He was the owner of a loan shop called Tender Lender, along with his assistant "Violetta".

Accident
Five months before Elg's death, Tigre was riding his scooter when he crashed into a car, severely injuring its driver. Unfortunately for him, the driver was Viola Cadaverini, the granddaughter of Bruto Cadaverini, the most powerful criminal in all of Los Angeles. In order to placate Bruto, Tigre needed to acquire $1 million to pay for the surgery needed to save Viola's life.

Murder
To this end, he called in the loan of a young computer programmer named Glen Elg, who had racked up a huge debt due to his gambling addiction; with no way to pay off the loan, Elg used his talents to create a devastating computer virus that Tigre could sell on the black market for millions of dollars. On the day in which Elg had agreed to repay the loan, however, Elg managed to catch a lucky break. He won the grand prize of the city's local lottery, more than enough money to pay off his debts, but not nearly enough to take care of Tigre's. A desperate Tigre poisoned Elg and took the CD containing the virus, acting out the murder afterward to provide a false witness for testifying and pinning the blame on Maggey Byrde, who was a waitress at the restaurant in which the murder had taken place. The owner of the restaurant was also in deep debt to Tigre and was forced to help with the charade. Finally, in order to clinch his scapegoat, Tigre masqueraded as Phoenix Wright and represented Byrde in court, easily getting her a guilty verdict with his intentionally shoddy handling of the case.

When Tigre defended Byrde, she asked him, thinking he was Wright, about his tan. Tigre responded that he had been to Hawaii on a business trip.

Downfall

 * Main article: Recipe for Turnabout

One month later, Dick Gumshoe angrily chastised the real Wright for the trial, of which Wright had not previously been informed. Wright took up Byrde's appeal and brought out the true killer in court. In the end, Wright tricked Tigre into implicating himself by presenting a bottle containing Elg's ear medicine and claiming that it was the poison used to kill him; Tigre laughed and made an outburst that corrected him, explaining, in intricate detail, the type of bottle which held the poison, something he would have been unable to do if he was not the killer. Upon realizing his mistake, Tigre let out a horrifying roar, which caused all the lights in the courtroom to break.

Personality
Furio Tigre had a very short temper and literally roared like a tiger when he got angry. He liked to intimidate his debtors as well as just about everyone else he met. His sky-high interest rates allowed him to control his debtors. Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey would often hide under a table in fear when he roared. Even in court, the judge cowered under Tigre's roars. Godot was the only one who was unfazed by his tactics. His lack of intellect was seen in his cover-up of the crime scene and his shoddy disguise as Phoenix Wright, though the court was too intimidated to say anything about the disguise. His reliance on intimidation to get his way mostly made up for this, until Wright fooled Tigre into implicating himself for Glen Elg's murder.

However, Tigre had another side to him. In a compromised situation, Tigre would be reduced to a simpering suck-up. This usually happened when he was around Viola Cadaverini (due to Tigre's debt to her grandfather) and when he was cornered during Maggey Byrde's appeal trial.

Name

 * "Shibakuzo" is Kansai slang which roughly means something along the lines of "I'm gonna kick your ass!"


 * "Toranosuke" roughly means "tiger boy" in Japanese.


 * "Zenitora" may come from the Japanese "zeni" (ぜに) meaning “money" or "coin”, and "tora" (虎), which means tiger. This would make his alias literally "money tiger", which is fitting considering his occupation. "Naniwa" is the former name of the city of Osaka in Japan.


 * The name "Furio" comes from the word "furioso", which means "furious" in both Spanish and Italian.


 * "Tigre" means "tiger" in a number of languages.


 * Prior to finding out his name, Maya Fey refers to Tigre as "Xin Eohp", which is "Phoenix" spelled backwards. She also asks about whether there was a fake Maya named "Ayam", which is "Maya" spelled backwards. When Fey confronted Tigre with Wright, she accidentally called him "Xin Eohp," to which Tigre roared, causing Fey to hide under a nearby table in fear.

Development

 * Furio Tigre talks in a Brooklyn accent (example: "youse" instead of "you") and uses italianized terms (example: "dis" instead of "this"). In the Italian translation, he uses the letter "k" liberally throughout his sentences (a letter which does not exist in Italian, implying him to be foreign). In the original Japanese version he speaks with a Kansai accent.


 * He was designed with a blood-red suit and gold chain to give him a more intimidating appearance.


 * The image on his suit of a tiger biting down on a dragon is intimidating on its own, but makes more sense in the Japanese version. Wright's Japanese name is "Ryuuichi" (龍一) which alludes to the dragon and Tigre's name is" Toranosuke" (roughly meaning "tiger boy"). In Eastern mythology, tigers are the eternal rivals of dragons and there are numerous artworks depicting dragons and tigers locked in an epic battle. A Chengyu (Chinese idiom) to describe equal rivals is "Dragon versus Tiger".


 * Tigre is often considered to be the "evil" counterpart of Phoenix Wright due to his similar appearance. Maya Fey using Wright's name backwards ("Xin Eohp") as a placeholder name for Tigre is a reference to this, making him seem like almost a mirror-image of Wright.