Vazquez Sazindi was a Human urchin born in Khazalet, with little to his name but a quick mind and no particular respect for the law. He had no patience for honest work and saw early that it would never get him where he wanted to go, so he began as a con artist, selling counterfeit goods out of borrowed stalls and back rooms. He poured watered-down spirits into stolen bottles under famous labels, sold charms that did nothing, and forged deeds to land no one owned, and he was always gone before his buyers realized what they had paid for. The work taught him that desperate people will sign almost anything, and that drink loosens judgment faster than anything else.
As his ambitions grew, Vazquez moved into larger crimes, among them smuggling, extortion, and fencing stolen goods, and eventually into the trade in people. He made a business of finding those with no other options, such as debtors, runaways, and the newly ruined, and offering them a way out that bound them to fight in the Ruckus Ring. His contracts were written so that the debt never quite came due and the fighter never quite went free, and anyone who tried to break one learned that the final terms were enforced with a blade. He also bought fighters outright from slavers when the price was right, and it was through one such purchase that he came to own a Dwarf the slavers had taken as a distillery hand: Ragnum Stillhart.
Ragnum had innate talent as a Martial Artist and quickly became a favorite of the Ring. He won bare-knuckle fights so often that, before long, no one in Khazalet would bet against him, and Vazquez saw that the only way left to profit from his fighter was to make him lose. He began giving Ragnum drink before his fights, plain grog at first and later bottles of high-proof whiskey, until the drunken fighter's reputation made the drinking seem unremarkable.
On the night it mattered, he laced the cup with enough poison to kill three men. Ragnum stumbled into the arena and somehow managed to defeat his opponent; however, when Vazquez went to angrily meet with his prizefighter below the Ring, he found that he had disappeared.