While he works temporarily as a truck driver, Daniel J. "Bugs" Raymond thinks of various "angles" to get rich. After offering to protect garage owners for seventy-five dollars a week, he destroys cars parked on the street so that car owners will use the garages more frequently. Bugs next becomes partners with Nails Markey, who, with his father, owns 200 produce trucks. From 1925 until 1931, through intimidation, threats and murder, they organize all the trucks in the city. After Bugs and his gang arrange a banquet for prominent citizens and then send thugs to hold up the guests, they collect enough evidence of wrongdoing among the guests to keep them from interfering with their racket. Bugs, who is dissatisfied that his mistress, Daisy de Lisle, is not more "ladylike," meets Dorothy Stone, an attractive, college-educated granddaughter of a former governor and the sister to financier and builder John L. Stone. Through sabotage of machinery, Bugs's gang coerces Stone into paying them to supply trucks for the building of his new tower. When Stone stands to lose a quarter of a million dollars because the tower will not be completed on time, he accepts Bugs's offer to see that it is finished ahead of schedule if Bugs is appointed director of the firm. Now that he has established himself in the "legitimate" business world, Bugs tries to pay off Daisy to go to Europe, and he keeps away from his gang as he spends more and more time with Dorothy, playing billiards and golf and going to the opera. Nails then decides to take over the gang, and he orders attacks on the city's food industry. When a radio commentator lashes out against the racketeers, Nails hires Bugs's bodyguard, Jimmy Kirk, to kill the "loud speaker." Headlines connect Bugs with the murder of the radio commentator, and Bugs has Jimmy killed. After the dedication of the tower, Stone and other businessmen tell the district attorney that they are through with graft. Bugs, whom Dorothy, now engaged to another man, has rejected, decides to become a hoodlum again and arranges to hijack Dorothy during her wedding the next day. Daisy suspects that Nails, who has tried to proposition her, is plotting against Bugs, but she does not warn him. On the way to the wedding, Nails shoots Bugs and throws his top hat in front of the church.
