Crime Does Not Pay #68

A small-time crook with a Napoleon complex, Hymie Nabosco muscles his way into Chicago's underworld rackets, but his outsized ambitions and unfortunate reputation for violence—not to mention his notorious odor—keep landing him in hot water. When a rival gang threatens his newfound power and a compromising photograph threatens to expose him, Hymie finds himself trapped in a escalating war that tests whether cunning and ruthlessness alone can keep a man on top.

Selma and Marvin Burgess turn a slenderizing salon into the front for a systematic criminal operation, recruiting young women and coaching them in forgery and bad check schemes that spread across the Eastern seaboard. As their seven-month run of success builds, tensions and betrayals within the outfit threaten to unravel everything they've built—leading to violence and the final reckoning that their enterprise can't sustain.