Carlito Brigante, a seasoned Puerto Rican heroin dealer, is released early after serving five years of a thirty-year sentence in a federal prison in New York. His release is the result of a skillful legal maneuver by his lawyer and friend David Kleinfeld, who succeeds in demonstrating procedural irregularities in the original trial. From the very beginning, Carlito narrates his own story in voice-over, foreshadowing from the outset that his fate will be tragic: the film opens with his body being wheeled on a stretcher, mortally wounded, while the preceding events unfold in retrospect.
Once free, Carlito publicly declares before the judge and those around him that he has changed, that the years in prison have transformed him, and that he is firmly committed to leaving the world of organized crime behind. His goal is to save enough money to retire to the Bahamas and open a car rental business — a modest but genuine dream representing his desire for redemption.
However, reintegration proves immediately complicated. Carlito returns to the same East Harlem neighborhoods where he built his reputation, and the criminal environment surrounds him from the very first moment. On one of his first nights out, he accompanies his cousin Guajiro to a drug deal that quickly turns into an ambush. Carlito manages to survive thanks to his instincts and experience, but the incident makes it clear to him that the world he tried to leave behind has no intention of letting him go. Even so, he reaffirms his resolve not to become involved in criminal activities again and accepts Kleinfeld's offer to become the manager of El Paraíso, a nightclub in Manhattan.
