Dario Brando

Dario looks like an aging man of stocky build, his hairline retreating into a balding mullet and his face framed by a white beard, with several teeth missing and a scar running across his forehead. A tattoo on his chest shows a cross inscribed with a dedication to his mother.

Corrupt, drink-soaked, and violent, Dario is a thoroughly immoral man with no scruples about robbing the dead, as he proves when he strips a ring from an unconscious George Joestar he takes for a corpse and orders his companion to leave the infant Jonathan to die. When George survives, Dario spins the theft into a rescue tale to exploit the gentleman's trust, and George's kindness in covering for him leaves Dario baffled rather than moved. As a husband and father he is monstrous, driving his wife to death through overwork and beating his son over the flimsiest offenses, even ordering the boy to pawn his dead mother's clothes for drinking money. Still, some faint spark of care remains, enough for him to let Dio be taken in by the Joestars.

A poor man in Victorian England, Dario came upon George Joestar's carriage wreck in 1868 and set about looting it, assuming there were no survivors; when George caught sight of him beside the surviving baby, the gentleman mistook the scavenging for a rescue and felt permanently indebted. Even after the truth surfaced, with Dario jailed for trying to pawn Mary Joestar's wedding ring, George pressed no charges and urged him to become a better man, handing him money to open a hotel. Dario's dishonesty and poor head for business sank him back into poverty and worked his wife into an early grave. For the next twelve years he took his frustrations out on his son Dio, who came to hate him enough to secretly poison him with a compound obtained from Wang Chan. Never suspecting his own child, Dario died urging Dio to collect on George's old debt, unaware that a letter he had already mailed to the Joestar mansion would one day help expose his son's crimes.