This episode features both Dennis Farina and John Santucci. Both were frequent collaborators with Michael Mann and appeared multiple times in the series. The two actors first appeared together in Mann's Thief (1981), in which Farina played a gangster and Santucci played a cop; in real life, Farina had previously been a cop with the Chicago Police Department while Santucci had worked as a jewel thief in the city. In fact, Farina had arrested Santucci during his time with the Chicago PD. Furthermore, the main heist in "Thief", involving the use of a thermal lance to cut through a vault door, was based on a real-life robbery orchestrated by Santucci.
Although this is only Lombard's second appearance on the show, he has been mentioned in passing in two intervening episodes, revealing that the Vice unit has been actively investigating him for most of the season. Lombard would be the only villain in the series to have such a significant over-arching presence - most other villains, even recurring ones, were never mentioned outside of the episode(s) in which they actually appeared.
The hit man in the passenger seat at the end of the episode is the same hit man Crockett scares away from the meeting with the wife in No Exit (1984).
This would be Dennis Farina's final appearance as Al Lombard until World of Trouble (1989), in which Ned Eisenberg would also reprise his role as Librizzi. In the interim, Farina would be cast by Michael Mann (along with John Santucci) in his new series Crime Story (1986).