Victor Shanley had once been New York City's most-acclaimed crime-fighting, crusading District Attorney and the scourge of the underworld. But the workaholic demands of the job led him to drinking and alcoholism. Dismissed from office in disgrace and divorced by his wife, Carol, Shanley soon found himself a gutter-drunk. But when hired by gangster Al Kruger, racketeer in charge of a hot-car ring, Shanley is soon back on top and made rich in the process, and relishing the revenge he had taken on the law-and-order faction he bitterly thought had done him an injustice. Shanley befriends a young engineer, Bob Terrell, who had inadvertently gotten mixed up with Kruger's mob, and gets Bob a job with an aircraft-factory in Tennessee. But Kruger, fearful that Bob might have knowledge that will incriminate him, has his henchman "Slim" Jacobs murder the young man. Shanley vows to get revenge on Kruger.
