Ward Littell, former FBI agent turned high-powered Mafia lawyer, arrives in Dallas with J. Edgar Hoover's blessing to "manage" the investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassination and ensure a consensus: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Pete Bondurant, whom Littell once arrested, but now is an uneasy friend and partner, is a veteran of the CIA's war against Fidel Castro and now the point-man for the Mafia's Las Vegas operations.

Wayne Tedrow Jr., a US Army veteran and Las Vegas Police Department officer, is paid six thousand dollars to fly to Dallas and murder Wendell Durfee, a black pimp who has offended the casinos, and is thus thrust into the assassination's aftermath.

As the tension over race relations and the Vietnam War builds and explodes throughout the 1960s, all three become involved in plots to kill Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

[1]In 2002, Bruce Willis optioned the rights to produce and star in a TV miniseries based on American Tabloid and The Cold Six-Thousand.