| Carmelo Gusto
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Carmelo Gusto was a confectioner who took part in Samson Tangaroa's confectionery contest in 2000. He specialized in making candy into various shapes by using candy pumps to fill them with air and then molding them.
IS-7 Incident[]
The contest[]
Gusto and Frost with their sons.
At some point prior to 2000, Gusto was afflicted with ageusia, a medical condition that robbed him of his sense of taste. This was devastating to a man striving to become the world's greatest confectioner. He then heard about a confectionery competition hosted by the famous television chef Samson Tangaroa at his mansion. The prize for the competition was the "Ultimate Cookbook," a book containing procedures for making cutting-edge pharmaceutical drugs that were as yet unreleased to the public. Gusto decided to participate in the contest after learning that it contained a recipe for a particular drug that would cure him of his affliction. The contest required that competitors' creations excelled not only in taste but in style as well. This was a problem for Gusto, as although his works tasted delicious, he had trouble getting his designs to come out properly.
Artie Frost was an acquaintance of Gusto's due to their two sons being close friends who attended the same elementary school. The two men decided to collaborate on the contest; Gusto would put the ingredients together, while Frost, by trade a famous sculptor under the pseudonym of Paul Halique, sculpted the confections into marvelous designs. Their plan worked, and both reached the semifinal of the competition. Gusto never told Frost about his condition, as his ability to create delicious foodstuffs was the only thing keeping him in the competition, and so Gusto instead had Simeon, his son, taste the desserts for him.
Betrayal and murder[]
Before the final round of the contest, Gusto created two batches of flavored ice for Frost to sculpt and brought them to him. However, with everything he needed for his last dessert, Frost told Gusto that he was breaking their collaboration and not sculpting the latter's entry; Gusto was on his own. To make matters worse, Simeon had not turned up to help him that day (unbeknown to him, Frost had forced Bronco, his own son, to tie up Simeon). Gusto was left with the ingredients, but neither the taste nor aesthetic ability to win the competition.
Frost threatening Gusto.
In desperation, Gusto rushed to Tangaroa's room, where the recipe book was kept, and found a camera. If he couldn't win the cure for his condition, he would just photograph the recipe. However, Frost entered the room and caught him in the act. He looked at the page that Gusto was photographing and figured out about Gusto's condition. Gusto was enraged and tried to hit Frost, but the latter landed the first blow, with Gusto hitting his head on a rock salt lamp and staining it with his blood. Mocking his former collaborator, Frost threatened not only to expose his attempt at theft but also to reveal his condition to the world unless Gusto paid him a large sum of cash. At this, Gusto grabbed the other rock salt lamp in the room and bludgeoned Frost to death.
Gusto initially hid the body inside Tangaroa's dessert entry, a chocolate treasure chest beside a large chocolate ship. He then entered Frost's room with the lamp with his blood on it and rubbed it on the strings of a lyre that was part of a flavored ice sculpture of Gemini to remove the blood. He then hid the lamps inside Delicia Scone's dessert entry, intending to frame her, as he had learned that her entry was merely a thin layer of confectionery over a model base and thus cheating. Knowing that Scone was having tea outside with Tangaroa and his assistant Judy Bound, he thought to freeze Frost's body inside the Gemini sculpture, obfuscating the time of death and thus hiding his involvement.
Later, Scone snuck into Tangaroa's room and sampled some of the desserts there, including the chocolate ship. Later, while Tangaroa was judging Gusto's entry, the ship fell down and broke open the treasure chest below, causing Bound to enter the room to investigate the noise and discover the body. Gusto then moved Frost to be frozen inside one of the sculptures as he had planned. Due to the early discovery of the body, Tangaroa was arrested instead of Scone.
Aftermath[]
Gusto assisted detective Tyrell Badd and later Gregory Edgeworth, Tangaroa's attorney, in their investigations of the crime. The flavored ice sculptures later went missing, and it was presumed that they had melted. Gusto was initially suspected of melting the sculptures, but Bound eventually admitted to doing so. Manfred von Karma, the lead prosecutor of the case, deliberately obstructed both Badd and Edgeworth so that neither would learn that the body had gone missing. When evidence that he had entered Frost's room was revealed, Gusto claimed that he had entered simply to retrieve a photo of him and Frost with their sons.
Tangaroa's trial lasted a year. Due to a forged autopsy report, the trial ended with Tangaroa being found guilty of being an accomplice to murder. The case, labeled the IS-7 Incident by the police, was left unresolved. Meanwhile, Gusto had not seen Simeon since before Frost's betrayal but abandoned any attempt to search for him (as, in his eyes, Simeon had betrayed him) to pursue his career. Having regained his sense of taste with the formula that he had obtained from the cookbook, Gusto left for Zheng Fa a week before the verdict.
Returning to the scene of the crime[]
Narrowly escaping death.
After three years of training in Zheng Fa, Gusto returned to the United States with vastly improved skills in December 2004 to win a dessert design contest and secure his place as a world-renowned confectioner. Over 14 years later, Gusto found out that Bound had bought Tangaroa's mansion and turned it into an art gallery focusing on Halique's works. He learned that the very statue in which he had hidden Frost's body was to be one of the objects on display and hence planned to retrieve it during the gallery's opening day. The statues were in the four rooms that had been used during the contest, with each room representing one of the four seasons.
Gusto entered the rightmost room, believing it to be the Winter Wing, and locked the door so that he could check the Gemini statue undisturbed. The lid of the glass casing was frozen shut, so he used a nearby gas burner to help open it. Unfortunately for Gusto, this was all a plot by Bound to expose the true culprit of the IS-7 Incident. She had switched the Winter and Autumn Wings and disguised the latter as the former. As Gusto opened the casing of what was really the Pisces statue, a poisonous gas was released. Gusto stumbled out of the door and lost consciousness. He was rushed to an infirmary inside the mansion.
After he recovered from the poison gas, Gusto found out that prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, son of Gregory Edgeworth, had begun investigating not only the truth behind the attempted murder, but also what had happened during the IS-7 Incident. Although Miles figured out what Bound had done, he also began to suspect Gusto as Frost's killer. Unfortunately for the young prosecutor, there seemed to be no solid evidence tying Gusto to the crime, and thus, he had to resort to a mixture of logic and manipulation to get anywhere in his investigation. Nonetheless, he soon determined the reasoning behind the confectioner's visit to the gallery that day.
With the truth revealed, Gusto finally openly confessed to his crime, but pointed out that, since 18 years and 4 months had passed since Frost's death, the statute of limitations for the case had expired. Even the fact that the statute had been extended by three years due to his time abroad in Zheng Fa was not enough. Gusto was thus certain of his victory over the prosecutor, until the latter revealed a gaping hole in his plan: Tangaroa had only been convicted as an accomplice, which meant that the statute of limitations would have been extended by the length of Tangaroa's trial if the true killer remained undiscovered. Therefore, the statute of limitations was now over 19 years, and thus had not expired. Gusto was finally arrested for his crime, and Tangaroa's name was cleared.
Personality[]
Mugshot in 2000.
Mugshot in 2019.
Carmelo Gusto had one purpose in life: to become the world's greatest confectioner. He determinedly pursued this objective via regular training and would frequently burn and scar himself in the process. One such scar crossed from his cheek, over his left eye, and cut partway into his chef's hat. His wearing of red was intended to help hide his injuries. In his thirties, his creations never turned out the way he wanted, but after his training in Zheng Fa, this greatly changed for the better. He was even able to create a life-size candy effigy of himself, right down to the stitches in his clothes.
Gusto generally came across as a calm and reserved man who had a habit of going into a meditative state. However, this supposed meditation was simply a ruse that Gusto employed when cornered in order to ignore other people. As he became older, he became more openly arrogant and prideful, with the additional habit of falling into bouts of maniacal laughter. He seemed to view other people solely in terms of their capacity to help him achieve his dream. No longer seeing a use for Simeon after regaining his sense of taste, Gusto laughed off his disappearance and made no attempt to find him before fleeing to Zheng Fa. Gusto held a great deal of respect for Tangaroa and did not intend to have him take the fall, but the conviction did not seem to bother him much in the end.
Name[]
- Japanese/Chinese - Yutaka Kazami (風見 豊)//Fēngwěi Fēng (風尾 豐):
- His Japanese name means "full of flavor" (風味が豊か).
- His Chinese name is almost the same except pronunced the kanji in Mandarin.
- His Chinese name is a corruption of "full of flavor" (風味豊 Fēngwèifēng).
- In both languages, '風' also means 'wind' on its own, which can allude to Gusto's use of air pumps.
- His Japanese name means "full of flavor" (風味が豊か).
- English - Carmelo Gusto:
- His official English name alludes to "caramel," and it's also a shortened spelling of the Italian translation of the word, which is "caramello." His surname "Gusto" originates from the Latin term "gustus," which means "taste". The term can also mean "doing something with great enthusiasm", referencing his vigorous pastry sculpting.
- After his surname, Delicia nicknames him "Gusty", which can also allude to the wind or air theme (aforementioned in his Japanese/Chinese name description).
- His official English name alludes to "caramel," and it's also a shortened spelling of the Italian translation of the word, which is "caramello." His surname "Gusto" originates from the Latin term "gustus," which means "taste". The term can also mean "doing something with great enthusiasm", referencing his vigorous pastry sculpting.
- French - Rafaello Gusto:
- His given name in French is a reference to the Italian-manufactured coconut truffle Raffaello.
Unofficial[]
- English - Dane Gustavia:
- His English name in the fan translation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit is "Dane Gustavia," with his last name sounding similar to "gustatory," which is a word used to refer to things associated with tasting or the sense of taste. "Dane" is the demonym for a citizen of Denmark, and "danish" is also the name of a type of pastry, which is possibly a reference to Gustavia's career as a pastry chef.
- His English name could also be a reference to Gustavus Swift, inventor of the Refrigerated Railroad Car.
Development[]
- Gusto's older self has slightly darker skin, a more muscular physique, and more scars than when he was younger.
- He also has a tattoo of a seahorse on his left hand when he's older.
- While the change in his candy creations from puppy to wolf and from chicken to phoenix are fairly self-explanatory, the change from seahorse to dragon would make more sense to a Japanese audience. This is because the Japanese word for a seahorse is "tatsunōtoshigo" (竜の落子), which roughly means "dragon children."