Robert "the Equalizer" McCall (born 1954) was a former US Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and American DIA agent who became a vigilante from Boston, Massachusetts. In 2014, his attempt to rescue a teenage prostitute from her abusive pimp brought him into conflict with the Russian Mafia and led to McCall becoming a vigilante, employing his old DIA skills to take down the Pushkin crime family and, ultimately, become a professional vigilante using the pseudonym "the Equalizer".
In 2018, his old colleague in the DIA, Susan Plummer, was killed in Brussels while investigating the death of an agency affiliate. McCall's investigation led him to discover that his old partner, Dave York, was behind both assassinations. McCall successfully eliminated York and his team of mercenaries in Brant Rock as a hurricane raged, with McCall moving back into his old home.
In 2023, McCall assassinated a Sicilian Mafia gangster and terrorist financier, Lorenzo Vitale, though was shot in the back by Vitale's grandson. After making it back to the mainland, he passed out from shock and was nursed back to health by Enzo Arisio in the small town of Altamonte. As McCall recovered in the town, he discovered it was being targeted by Camorra boss Vincent Quaranta and his brother Marco for commercialization. He fed this information to Susan Plummer's daughter and CIA analyst Emma Collins, which ultimately led to Collins nearly dying from a car bomb during her investigation into the drug trade financing Islamist groups. After McCall killed Marco in a confrontation, Vincent nearly kills carabiniere Gio Bonucci in front of the town until he was driven off by the citizens recording. McCall then massacred Vincent's men before dosing him with a lethal amount of his drugs, slowly following him across town until Vincent finally died.
Biography[]
Robert McCall was born in Brant Rock, Massachusetts, and he served in the United States Marine Corps before being an agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for several years, working with Susan Plummer. McCall became fluent in Spanish as part of his job, and he also became an avid reader and a talented fighter. The DIA staged his death in a car bombing when he decided to retire, and McCall used his fresh start to work at a Home Mart hardware store in Boston, where he was beloved by his coworkers for his friendliness and charm. He helped his Hispanic coworker Ralphie lose weight in order to train for becoming the store's security guard, ultimately helping him succeed in that goal.
In 2014, he met the teenage prostitute Alina Yesipova at a diner he frequented, and she often asked him about the books he was reading; one night, the two formally introduced each other and became friends, although McCall was concerned when he saw her reluctantly enter the car of an obese and abusive client and return to the diner with bruises a day later. One night, while walking Alina home, McCall saw the Russian pimp Slavi Kosma and his henchman Tevi Krutov have Alina enter their car, slapping her for attacking one of her clients, before Slavi warned McCall that Alina was no good, and gave him his "Russian Nights" business card and offered to give him another "girl", mistaking McCall for Alina's customer.
A day later, after returning to the diner, McCall found out from the diner's owner Jake that Alina had been hospitalized, so McCall headed to the medical center and found that she had been severely beaten. He learned from her friend, fellow prostitute Mandy, that she had been beaten by her pimp for fighting back against an abusive customer. McCall returned to his apartment, and, after a moment of reflection (inspired by his previous conversations with Yesipova about Don Quixote, a book about a man who bears the chivalry of a bygone age), McCall decided to use his old skills to rescue Alina. He drove to the address on Slavi's business card, a Russian restaurant, and walked up the stairs to meet with Slavi. Slavi was surprised to see McCall and was insulted that McCall showed up without invitation, and McCall offered Slavi $9,800 for Alina's freedom, leading to Slavi and his bodyguards laughing him off before Slavi grew angry. Slavi told McCall that he would let Alina go in one month, after she was "used up", and insulted McCall, telling him to leave. McCall took back his money, walked to the door, and proceeded to lock it before turning around and approaching Slavi. Slavi's bodyguards Onufri T. Belevich, Ilya S. Ostapyuk, Demian D. Kurepin, and Tevi sprung to action, but McCall disarmed one of them and shot Slavi in the throat before killing the others with one of their knives and with a bottle opener. He then taunted a dying Slavi, telling him that he would suffocate on his blood in 30 seconds, and that Alina was free.
McCall then returned to his normal life now that Alina's abusers were dead, but he continued his vigilantism by tracking down two corrupt policemen who had severely burned Ralphie's mother's taco shop when she could not pay their protection money. McCall ambushed them in an alleyway, beat them down, and forced them to return the extortion money to Ralphie's mother, enabling her to repair the store and allowing Ralphie - who had quit his job at the hardware store to help his mother rebuild - to return to the store and pass the security guard test. McCall also helped retrieve a ring which an armed robber had stolen from a female Hispanic cashier at his store, quietly leaving the ring (which she had been given by her mother) in her cash drawer for her to retrieve.
One night, McCall was visited at his apartment by Teddy Rensen, who claimed to be a policeman investigating the murders of five men at a Russian restaurant. McCall claimed that he had gone to the restaurant to meet up with a friend who had fallen sick with a fever and could not attend, giving a satisfactory explanation for proving his innocence. Rensen decided to leave and told McCall that he would keep in touch, but McCall called out Rensen's charade, asking him if he wouldn't leave him with a business card like most other policemen, and asking how he knew he had eaten at the restaurant, claiming to have paid in cash. Rensen told McCall that he was a man who was sent to find people, but he refused to answer McCall's questions as to who sent him, and Rensen left.
Rensen gradually compiled evidence on McCall with the help of the corrupt policemen Frank Masters, Stephen Remar, and Chris Pedersen, and Rensen decided to attempt to kidnap McCall at a diner. McCall noticed that a supposed electrical worker who sat down at the diner had hands too soft for an electrical worker, and he called out his bluff. When the worker approached McCall with a gun and attempted to kidnap him, McCall took the gun from him and shot him and wounded him, although he was wounded in the leg in the process. As McCall left the diner, he took several photographs of Rensen as he sat in his car, and he proceeded to reutrn home. That night, McCall treated his leg wound, and he hid in the shadows as Rensen and the detectives arrived and searched his apartment. The detectives found a one-way plane ticket to Mexico among McCall's possessions, leading them to believe that McCall had left the country, but Rensen stated his belief that McCall wasn't going anywhere.
McCall decided to visit his old friend, Susan Plummer, at her and her husband Brian's home. Susan cautioned McCall that she no longer worked for the DIA and was only a consultant by then, but she agreed to help her old friend after he explained the trouble he had gotten into, flying off in a helicopter and returning with information on Rensen's photograph. She revealed that McCall hadn't killed five pimps, but wiped out the Russian oligarch and crime boss Vladimir Pushkin's East Coast hub; Rensen, whose real name was "Nicolai Itchenko", was a former Spetsnaz operative and secret policeman who became an assassin following the USSR's downfall; Detectives Remar and Pedersen were found dead with their severed testicles in their mouths in the back of a car trunk in a Russian Mafia execution; and Detective Masters hadn't showed up for work in several days. Plummer then warned McCall that Itchenko wouldn't stop until he killed McCall and everyone he cared about.
The next morning, Plummer asked McCall why he cared about Alina, and McCall said that he didn't know why he cared, but that what the Russian Mafia had done to her led him to care very much. McCall said that all it took was for someone to do something unspeakable to another person to persuade one to do whatever they could, and Plummer told McCall that, while part of him died when his wife Vivian did, the part about McCall that Vivian loved the most had not died. Plummer then encouraged McCall to be that man.
McCall tracked down Masters to his apartment, where he lured him into his car in his garage, hit him and shoved him into the car, trapped him in the car as he dropped a hose connected to the exhaust pipe in the back seat, and sat in a chair by the window. He then interrogated McCall, occasionally starting the car and pulling up the windows to cause McCall to choke on the carbon monoxide. He ultimately broke McCall and forced him to cooperate with him, and Masters took McCall to meet Andri Yefremov, whose 155 Warren Street slaughterhouse was a front for a drug smuggling operation. McCall pretended to be a new employee of Pushkin before stealing Yefremov's gun and pointing it at him, leading to a Mexican standoff between himself and the unarmed Masters on one side and Yefremov and his bodyguards Gavrila V. Babanin, Eduard G. Zhutov, and Vikentiy V. Barsukov on the other. McCall persuaded Yefremov to have his men lay down their arms and surrender, and McCall gave away a large cash pile to the predominantly Chinese workers at the slaughterhouse before having Masters call in the drug operation to the police, who shut down the factory and arrested the Russian mobsters. He then had Masters give him the location of his safe deposit box containing his "escape plan" - a memory stick with information on Pushkin's criminal activities - before leaving him to be arrested by the police, with loads of the corrupt cash in the trunk of his car.
McCall proceeded to confront Itchenko at a Russian restaurant after taking down his associate Luchok G. Rostov, presenting his bloodied glasses to Itchenko. McCall then told Itchenko to call his boss and tell Pushkin to shut down his operations that night, but Itchenko refused, and Itchenko then curiously asked McCall what he thought of when he looked at him. Itchenko said that he saw McCall as something to be removed, like lint or a bottlecap, so McCall recounted a story he had learned from a Russian police captain of a troubled child who murdered his adoptive parents due to his insecurity, saying that the story was how he saw Itchenko. Itchenko, realizing that McCall knew his past, proceeded to tell McCall that he saw his sentimentality as a weakness. McCall proceeded to give Itchenko his phone number and offer him a last chance, telling him to call him when he had made a decision about McCall's offer of mercy. McCall warned Itchenko that, while he had once sworn to a loved one that he would never relive his days as a man who had done some horrible things, he said that he would made an exception for Itchenko. McCall then stood up and left the restaurant, dropping Rostov's glasses in Itchenko's drink.
That night, McCall forwarded the memory stick files on Pushkin's operations, including his prostitutes, to the FBI, and he headed to the docks and blew up a Great Eastern tanker, a ship which belonged to Pushkin's company. This shut down Pushkin's New York operations, and he lost millions of dollars and his transportation capabilities. Itchenko was forced to assemble a new team. The next evening, Itchenko retaliated by bringing his team to the Home Mart and taking McCall's coworkers Ralphie, Jenny, Brian, Jay, and Marcus hostage; Itchenko called McCall and had Ralphie tell McCall about the hostage situation. Itchenko offered to trade their lives for McCall's, giving McCall 29 minutes to get to the store.
McCall distracted the criminals by connecting his phone to the store and playing the song "Midnight Train to Georgia" over the loudspeakers, a humorous reference to his earlier claim to one of his coworkers that, in his former line of work, he was a member of "The Pips". He used the song to mask his movement as he took down Milorad V. Sorokin in the security office and rescued Ralphie, and he also stealthily took down Dionisiy S. Kosaryov before having Ralphie help the other hostages escape through the security doors in the back of the store. He then stealthily killed Vissarion Y. Banin by hanging him with barbed wire, stabbed Matvey A. Avtukhov through the neck with a pole saw, killed Svyatoslav V. Varennikov by drilling him in the back of the head, stabbed Danya R. Yumashev dead, lured Slava A. Vinokurov into a room where he placed spray cans in a microwave (before a wounded Ralphie turned the store's power back on, causing the microwave to explode and kill Vinokurov), and wounded Itchenko several times before shooting him in the neck, killing him.
Three days later, McCall flew out to Moscow, making his way to Pushkin's apartment (killing all of Pushkin's guards along the way), where he confronted Pushkin as the latter exited the shower. McCall frequently turned the lights on and off, and Pushkin asked what McCall wanted. McCall said that he wanted peace, and Pushkin said that peace had a price, and he was willing to pay it. However, he did not see McCall at his chair, and he searched around his apartment and found the sink clogged and overflowing. Pushkin turned on the lights and called out for his guards, but he realized that McCall had left an electrical wire on the flooded floor, and Pushkin accidentally electrocuted himself to death as McCall exited the mansion, walking past the bodides of Pushkin's guards before returning to America.
As McCall walked to his house, a cleaned-up Alina ran up to him and told him that she had since gotten a job and quit prostitution, and that she had also taken up reading, making McCall smile. She also revealed that, when she woke up at the hospital, she found an envelope with $10,000 in it and a ticket out of town, and McCall agreed with her guess that it was probably hush money, but said that she could use it for a new start. She then thanked McCall for his help, and, when Alina said that she would miss McCall's stories, McCall told her that she had her own, and she then bade him farewell. McCall proceeded to start a new life for himself, putting out an online advertisement to help people in need, and calling himself "the Equalizer".