Brian Heder
An old-school Keys smuggler still working out of his boat yard, and the man letting Jason live rent-free.
Brian ran product through the Keys back when that trade was at its peak, and has not stopped. He works out of a boat yard alongside his wife Lori, and he is Jason's landlord in the loosest sense of the word: Jason stays there and does not pay.
In the Extended Look he functions as an intermediary, the man who knows somebody who needs a job doing tonight. That is a familiar shape in a Grand Theft Auto opening, and it usually means the jobs get worse.
The archetype he is built from
Brian is a specific Florida type rather than a generic crook. The Keys smuggling economy of the late seventies and eighties was largely run by people who already owned boats and already knew the water: fishermen, charter operators, boat yard men. When the money arrived they did not have to change careers, only cargo. A great many of them were never caught and simply got old in place.
That is the man Rockstar has drawn. He is not building an empire and he is not hiding. He is running the same routes he always ran, out of a yard with his name on it, with a wife who works the business alongside him.
Lori
Lori is Brian's wife and part of the same operation, working the boat yard the pair still push product out of. She has appeared alongside him without being given a story of her own so far, and Rockstar has released nothing about her separately. She is covered here rather than on a page of her own until there is more to say.
The circle around him
Brian sits at the centre of the Keys side of the cast. Jason lives on his property. Cal Hampton, the conspiracy hobbyist who listens to Coast Guard radio for entertainment, is in the same orbit and turns up at The Rusty Anchor. In a smuggling operation, a man who monitors Coast Guard traffic is not purely comic relief.
The casting
Reporting on the Extended Look identified his voice as the character actor Stephen Root. Rockstar has not published a cast list and has not confirmed it, so it stays reporting. If accurate it is a strong signal about the register the Keys material is going for, since Root's range runs from genuinely unsettling to very funny and often both at once.
Related: Leonida Keys.