Crime Must Pay the Penalty #40

Four hoods with more muscle than sense owe a dangerous man four hundred dollars they don't have, forcing Brick Doran to lead his crew into increasingly desperate schemes to stay alive. When a routine job at the waterfront goes violently wrong, Brick discovers that being the toughest punk in the room doesn't protect you from the consequences of your own choices. This 1954 crime tale shows what happens when ambition and arrogance collide with a world that doesn't care who you think you are.

In 1945, career hoodlum Blackie Moran guns down innocent bystanders during a botched bank heist, then adds prison escape and murder to his rap sheet—but his face gets plastered across every newspaper in town. Desperate to settle an old score with the elevator operator who helped bring him down, Blackie undergoes a risky, back-alley facial reconstruction to slip past the cops and get his revenge. Now unrecognizable and burning for payback, he makes his move.

When organized crime floods San Francisco in the late forties with a wave of coordinated robberies and violence, rookie cop Jeff Turner hatches a dangerous plan: go undercover to infiltrate the gang's ranks and expose the secret criminal training school that's turning street punks into expert operators. Turner assumes a false identity and works his way into the mob's inner circle, ultimately enrolling in the notorious six-week course to gather evidence from the inside. With his cover intact and the operation mapped out, Turner must orchestrate the takedown before the criminals realize one of their own is working for the law.

Joe Donovan, a down-at-the-heels private detective with a flexible moral compass, strikes up a lucrative partnership with Frank Nonno's crew—he negotiates stolen goods back to insurance companies for a cut, while they handle the actual robberies. But when a job turns deadly and Nonno demands Donovan fence the merchandise despite the murders involved, the shamus faces a choice that could make him complicit in something far worse than double-dealing.