Crime Must Pay the Penalty #41

Facing deportation and determined to stay in the country at any cost, racketeer Mike Loomis hatches a scheme involving plastic surgery and a stooge double—engineering his own death while assuming a new identity as Martin Stark. But when he moves to rebuild his criminal empire, old habits and telltale mannerisms threaten to expose him to a rival gang boss who knows him far too well. As violence erupts and the walls close in, Mike discovers that his carefully constructed new life can't escape the consequences of his past.

Lou Stark, a brutal escaped convict with a reputation for violence, clashes with rival hoods and his own mob boss Manny Hines in a dangerous game of underworld power and betrayal. When a setup lands him back in prison, Stark becomes obsessed with breaking free again—but his path to escape leads him toward a reckoning he never saw coming.

A Navy deserter jumps ship in Havana and falls into the orbit of José Luggiano, a Cuban crime boss who's built a heroin empire by smuggling "white death" into the United States—and who's convinced Masters he's the man to move a fortune in product across the Atlantic in bulk. When Masters successfully delivers a boatload to New York in October 1935, his offhand remark about a rival gangster triggers a chain of violence that spirals far beyond anyone's control, with the deserter caught squarely in the middle.