Opening doesn't make any sense.

All that effort from Seagal and Forsythe still managed to steal the film. Unfortunately we may never see a director's cut, Flynn passed away a short time ago, not that he would have necessarily been granted the privelage by Seagal or the film company.

In watching the opening scene again, there is a possibility that Richie was involved in the two million dollar hit/bust that Bobby is referring to. Perhaps, Bobby and the other cops were unaware that Richie was involved, or possibly behind the whole operation.

There may have been deleted footage or dialogue linking the events and characters together.

I always thought the bust had to do with King and his men, but i can see what you are getting at, Gator_MacReady. It does seem now like Gino got too distracted from the actual hit/bust they were there for, when he saw King hitting the hooker, and ended up blowing their cover by storming up (along with the other officers) to King and his men.

As a viewer, we are left to assume there is no connection between what goes on in the opening scene, and what happens after the film title credit appears. It is never explained where all the money and drugs came from, that Richie opens in the hidden safe. Again, we are left to assume that Richie was running some form of big money making drug operation. References are made early in the film to Richie being a dope dealer. Gino also advises his captain that he will feed him information on every dope dive that Richie has, in exchange for letting him deal with things, his way.

As one other reader pointed out, William Forsythe still stole the film, regardless of how much footage of him was cut, at Seagal's request.

Some of that cut footage of Forsythe has appeared on network TV at times, presumably to compensate for the amount of violence and language cut from the network TV version.

Seagal was concerned about William Forsythe upstaging him so he had he severely cut down the screen time of Richie Madano.