After a summer spent traveling around Europe, he hitchhiked to New York in 1980 to pursue a writing career, supporting himself by taking a series of jobs in the restaurant industry, driving a cab and doing temp work.
In 1990 he was hired by Art+Auction magazine, where he quickly became the senior writer, specializing in investigative stories of art theft, fraud, counterfeiting and malfeasance.
After watching United Flight 175 crash into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers, Vincent scaled back his art critic job to write instead about what he considered more timely and pressing issues.
In 2003, after learning that his friend, the artist Steve Mumford, had gone to Baghdad following the start of the Iraq War, Vincent went as well, first in 2003, then again in 2004, operating freely as a journalist, traveling through the country without so much as a cell phone, interviewing the local populace, observing the reality of life on the ground.
Initially he pursued stories such as the reconstruction of the marshlands drained by Saddam Hussein, but in the process of meeting and speaking to locals on all levels, from people in the street to government officials, he uncovered and began investigating reports of Iran's growing logistical and financial support for the local insurgency and the unchecked movement over the border of Iranian agents, drug smuggling to support the area's militias, the killing of Basra's Christian populace, increasing corruption and violence in the local police force and the inexplicable unwillingness of the British forces stationed there to address such dangerous issues.