In 1959 New York, a pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivner befriends an oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side. Both men served overseas during WWII and returned changed, no longer fitting inside the lives they'd left behind. Uninterested in taking orders from bosses or playing by the rules of polite society, the two friends partner up as a bookmaker and an enforcer and create an illicit gambling operation that proves to be very profitable, though risky, and their situation gets rather sticky when they find themselves stuck between a powerful Irish gang and the Mafia.