Manny is an acquaintance of Metzger’s who portrays Metzger on a failed TV pilot. While Metzger started out as a child actor and later became a lawyer, Di Presso started as a lawyer, briefly tried his hand at acting, and then went back to law. In fact, he is a lawyer for the mafia, and he is running from the mafioso Tony Jaguar when Oedipa, Metzger, and the Paranoids encounter him in a scuba suit in Fangoso Lagoons. He explains that he is investigating the bones at the bottom of Fangoso Lagoons’s lake for a case against Pierce Inverarity’s estate. Supposedly, when Tony Jaguar dug these bones out of the Lago di Pietà in Italy and sold them to the Beaconsfield cigarette company, Beaconsfield never paid him. A caricature of a fast-talking mob lawyer, Di Presso serves as a character foil to point out Metzger’s own moral shortcomings.