He organizes all the gangs in a classic protection racket: They pay him a cut, and he enforces territorial boundaries, makes good on losses, and when someone breaks the rules he punishes them with deadly force.

Just about everyone is satisfied except for Rocco who wants the kingpin slot for himself, and Pat O’Grady an honest police chief who has known Louie since he was an orphaned street kid.

Louie has a young brother, Jackie who goes to a fine military boarding school in a different city.

With just one surprise last meeting to say good bye to his associates—and warn them not to try to find out where he is going Louie and Doris marry and head to Florida, stopping on the way to visit Jackie.

Mileaway explains to some of the gangsters that he has besieged Louie with letters and telegrams but he refuses to return: He doesn’t want Doris or his kid brother mixed up in the rackets.

Mileaway phones, and Doris tells him Louie has become “an awful dud.” He spends five hours a day writing his memoirs.

He ends by losing his temper with Mileaway and when Doris tells him his friend is right he asks her if she is “one of them.” Has she got so much hoodlum in her that it won’t come out?

In order to force Louie to come back, some of the gangsters try to kidnap Jackie outside an ice cream parlor by telling him that his brother sent them.

Swearing revenge on the two men who killed his brother—Gimpy and Midget, so-called because of his big pot belly— Louie returns to the city.

Louie and Mileaway kill Gimpy and dump his body in front of O’Grady’s stakeout.

Louie admits that money doesn’t always mean happiness, but on the other hand, he never would have met Doris in the first place if he hadn’t been rich, and she is the happiest girl in the world.

“I could think of a thousand places if you weren’t married to Louie.” She takes off her ring and tucks it into Mileaway’s hand.

He goes inside and at a signal from a man watching, a half-dozen drivers jump into their trucks and warm up their engines, revving the motors so they backfire repeatedly.

The cops give Mileaway the third degree but he doesn’t flinch until O’Grady mentions “the house in Charleston Street” (where he and Doris were together).

He asks the kid to get him some groceries, and when he returns the innocent youth tells him that he met a friend of his, O’Grady, who also knows Louie.

A waiter arrives from a restaurant around the corner with a last supper from the boys: a steak dinner, complete with a cigar, already lit.

Laughing, Louie tosses his gun on the bed, on top of the newspaper, adjusts his tie and fedora in the mirror and puts the cigar in his mouth at a jaunty angle.

Their review continues, "Lewis Ayres, although perhaps too much the clean-cut young college boy to have a hand in such business, plays excellently..."[6] A recent review by Allmovie that was reprinted in The New York Times noted that the picture was "an innovative film and featured a lot of elements that would become standards in the gangster genre including tommy guns carried in violin cases, terrible shoot-outs, and lots of rum-running rivalry.