Nick works at the Santa Barbara Mirror newspaper as the assistant of editor-in-chief Phil Pritikin. When the paper's restaurant critic Vince Wagner dies from the poisoned mushroom risotto he ate at Antonio's, Nick is one of many desperate to take over the job that Pritikin describes as "the cushiest gig in all of journalism". He knows he probably has a leg up over the others in his privileged position as Pritikin's assistant and therefore tries to impress him by eating and reviewing Cheetos all day long. This does end up getting him the job, but he is arrested immediately after his job switch when it turns out that his tactics went a bit further than that and included killing Wagner himself. He prepared risotto containing deadly death cap mushrooms and snuck it into the restaurant posing as a health inspector to switch it out with Antonio's dish. He knew Antonio was a good fall guy because the chef had wished Wagner dead in an Angry Chef Letter (as Wagner's assistant Cooper calls them). The two mistakes he made in the process and which Shawn and Gus are quick to discover are that he had diced the mushrooms even though Antonio slices his, and that as a consequence of being prepared elsewhere the risotto had been served cold, which makes no sense in a five-star restaurant like Antonio's. This evidence is added to by the description mushroom farmer Al Mooney gives of the person asking about death cap mushrooms some weeks earlier, despite its drug-induced distortions: this person was nine feet tall (referring to Nick's above-average height), had sunshine coming out of his mouth (referring to the Cheeto dust around his mouth), and had a hippopotamus for a hand (referring to the hippo logo on the cuffs of his shirt). Nick is then arrested after he hammers in the final nail of his coffin himself by being the first to actually mention Mooney's name, thus inadvertently revealing that he had indeed visited Mooney at some point.