Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson)

Batman Begins Time Frame
In Batman Begins, Falcone, played by British Oscar-nominee Tom Wilkinson, all but controls Gotham City, flooding it with drugs and crime. He is above the law, with most of Gotham's politicians and police on his payroll (examples being two councilmen, a union official, Judge Faden, Detective Flass, and an unnamed policeman). It was mentioned that he shared a prison cell with Joe Chill, who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents. He had a female operative (disguised as a reporter) kill Joe Chill for threatening to testify against him, depriving Wayne of the chance to take his own revenge. Bruce confronts him at an underground establishment and tells Carmine that not everyone in Gotham is afraid of him. "The Roman" dismisses the young billionaire as a harmless nuisance and has his thugs beat him up to teach him a lesson. Years later, Falcone goes into business with Dr. Jonathan Crane and Ra's al Ghul, smuggling a fear toxin into Gotham inside toy rabbits. As a form of payment, Crane, who runs Arkham Asylum, diagnoses Falcone's henchmen as insane when they are arrested so they can avoid prison. Wayne, who by now has become Batman, discovers and foils the plan and knocks Falcone unconscious, leaving him tied to a searchlight for the police to find. The trussed-up mobster, surrounded by a tattered overcoat, projects a bat-like shape into the sky; this impromptu calling card would later evolve into the Bat-Signal. While in prison, Falcone tries to blackmail Crane into allowing him a part in the upcoming fear toxin project. Crane instead puts on a freakish scarecrow mask he uses in his experiments on the asylum's inmates and gasses him with the fear toxin. Crane literally terrifies his former partner-in-crime out of his mind and left in a wild state of psychosis. Falcone is incarcerated in Arkham, continuously muttering the phrase "Scarecrow". However, he was not seen amongst the many criminals that Ra's al Ghul's men released from Arkham as a diversion to get the toxin into the main waterline, and his fate was left ambigious, although it was later revealed in The Dark Knight that he was eventually recaptured. After captured, Sal Maroni took over Falcone's crime family.