Basic Trope: Criminals get away with crimes because their powerful friends and/or family get them out of trouble.
- Straight: Corrupt Corporate Executive Brandon Gold commits fraud against a small business vendor, and gets away with it because the judge presiding over the case is a personal friend.
- Exaggerated:
- Brandon Gold hires a terrorist cell to blow up an office building of one of his biggest rivals. The attack makes national headlines both from the bombing and the infamous acquittal of Brandon Gold on national and/or international terrorism charges because the judge presiding over that case was a childhood friend of Brandon's.
- Brandon Gold is friends with the presidents, Prime Ministers and Kings of most of the countries of the world, even the ones the U.N. is not keen to acknowledge (you’d be surprised how many of them went to Cambridge) and it’s not hard for him to get a pardon or "special dispensation" for his "peccadilloes".
- Downplayed:
- The Judge dismisses cases against his friends unless the evidence is extra-strong, and in such cases he will convict to save face.
- Gold uses his connections to get a plea deal that greatly reduces his sentence, but that doesn't really let him get away with his crimes.
- Gold does go to prison for his crimes but uses his connections to become a Boxed Crook doing a job that he enjoys.
- Gold pays for some, but not all, of his crimes.
- Justified: The culture in the context of Brandon Gold's story is one where the only way to get ahead in politics or business is to have wealthy friends or family and to scratch their backs when they scratch yours.
- Inverted:
- Brandon Gold is an Honest Corporate Executive who refuses to commit fraud because he knows it would harm or alienate the people he's connected to.
- Brandon Gold refuses to commit fraud because his friends and extended family have been a good moral influence on him.
- Brandon Gold gets harshly punished because the victims of his fraud had friends in high places.
- Subverted:
- Everyone thinks Brandon Gold committed fraud and plans to use his connections to get away with it, but then it turns out it was one of his managers embezzling the money that would've gone to his vendor, and Gold himself had nothing to do with it.
- Everyone thought the judge Brandon about is a high member, but turns out the friend is an incompetent employee who his boss was looking for an excuse to fire. Brandon got convincted by a more mature judge who takes the friend's place.
- Gold expects to get away with the fraud, but the judge knows he can't get away with helping Gold get away with it and convicts him despite the connection between them.
- Gold is convicted when new evidence surfaces.
- Double Subverted:
- Gold knew about the manager's actions, turned a blind eye, and the court, in turn, turns a blind eye to his blind-eye turning—again because Gold's friend is the judge.
- Gold knows the appeal judges as well, and they get him off the hook even after his initial conviction.
- But that evidence was faked, improperly introduced, or circumstantial, so Gold goes free.
- Parodied:
- Gold gets away with Poke the Poodle-esque minor infractions like petty theft (and we are talking stealing the one penny that was in the "take a penny, leave a penny" tray) because he knows the judge, but the victims of the petty theft treat it as Serious Business (which is why he was in the courtroom to begin with).
- Gold is taken at first to a courtroom overseen by a judge with whom he has no pre-existing relationship, but then when they realize who he is, she recuses herself in favor of a colleague who is Gold's friend.
- Zig Zagged: Gold was innocent of the crime that the public believed he did, but it later turns out he committed another crime that the government papered over due to how many officials he knew. However, when the public becomes aware of that, the officials must punish Gold, but he manages to use his connections to get his sentence reduced.
- Averted:
- Gold never commits a crime nor is accused of committing one.
- Gold doesn't have any connections, or at least, none in the specific setting in which he's accused of a crime.
- Gold's connections are the ones asking Alice to nail him for this crime.
- Enforced:
- The producer, wanting to deliver An Aesop about corruption, shows a powerful and well-connected villain getting away with crimes.
- It is too early in the show for Brandon Gold to end up in jail. The writers decide to add a corrupt judge who is friends with Brandon as one more member of the Big Bad Duumvirate and justification.
- Invoked: Bob comes into the Nouveau Riche class and deliberately makes as many connections as he can so that he'll have an easy time breaking rules later.
- Exploited: The public suspects Gold of doing this on a regular basis, so a politician plays up the stories based on public outrage and says he'll put an end to it to try to win votes.
- Untwisted: Brandon Gold is portrayed by the work as someone who is morally upright before a case comes up where he's accused of something...but then it turns out Gold is Straight Edge Evil, actually committed the crime, and uses his connections to get away with it.
- Defied:
- Alice learns that Gold got away with his crimes because the judge was one of his friends, and gets a retrial with a judge who has no clue who Gold is.
- Alice kills Gold. A "The Reason You Suck" Speech containing a Pre-Mortem One-Liner about how his connections aren't going to save him this time is optional, but highly encouraged.
- Alice destroys all Gold's connections before gunning for him.
- Alice makes Gold too embarrassing for his connections to want to do anything with him.
- Alice plays the same game as Gold and becomes friends with his connections. By the time she comes gunning for him, they like her more than they like him.
- Alice takes Gold to a place where his connections can't really do anything to stop his fate, other than maybe tweet angrily.
- Gold's connections tell him that they don't give a damn how long they've been friends, they're not going to get him out of his just desserts.
- Brandon Gold decides that what his connections want in return for their assistance is to much of a price to pay, and instead to face the music for his crimes.
- Discussed:
- A news report focuses on corruption in a foreign country where who you know determines whether you are convicted or released. Someone watching this news report voices suspicions that their own city works the same way.
- "Don't try to use your 'friends in high places'; I have a few of my own."
- Conversed: Characters talk about a movie they saw that had a Corrupt Corporate Executive who got away with everything due to their connections.
- Deconstructed:
- The world is shown to be a Crapsack World where integrity and competence at your job mean less than who you know, so nothing ever really gets done, or at least never gets done correctly.
- The judge helping Gold gets disbarred as it is very obvious to the authorities that he acquitted a guilty man due to personal relationships.
- Reconstructed: Companies and courts begin cracking down on incompetence and crime because some of the highest-up people want to make money and cannot do so effectively in a world where people can't do their jobs, so they use their influence to create these reforms ... as long as they stay in power themselves...
- Implied: The judge smiles knowingly at one of Gold's family members after delivering an acquittal.
- Logical Extreme: Gold is committing genocides and mass rapes, and it's being covered up because he knows everyone at the top in the government and media.
- Played for Laughs: The officials that Gold knows use some ludicrous excuses to get him out of a jam that make the audience in- and/or out-of-universe laugh.
- Played for Drama: The story focuses on the moral crises that some of the officials go through, and the dilemmas they face: lose their position and ability to do good, or do something that they know is bad.
- Played for Horror:
- The name "Brandon Gold" is a Brown Note that scares the bejabbers out of everybody within earshot. You really do not wish to know what his connections do to interlopers.
- Brandon Gold has the ultímate "friend in low places".
