***SPOILERS***Freelance photographer Mike Kovac, Charles Bronson, didn't know what to expect when he got a phone call from protection racket boss Glenn Markey, Barry Kroeger, to get his butt over to the downtown Irish Theater for the story, or photo, of his life. Not knowing exactly what to expect Kovac is then held at gunpoint By a masked Markey and his top enforcer Carver, Robert Carricart, who then work over businessman Sam Bartlett, Bill Erwin, and is forced to photograph Bartlett as he's gunned down by them! Kovac is then told by Markey to have the photograph of Bartlett published in the local newspaper to show anyone else who's not paying him off that he means business! Markey couldn't have been more ridicules in practically fingering himself despite his flimsy mask, that didn't at all disguise his identity, in Bartlett's murder! It the NYPD stepping in on the case in the person of the not that on the ball Lieut. Abrams, Robert Ellenstein, who made what was already a bad situation even worse! Lieut. Abrams has a story published in the newspapers that there's an eye witness in the Bartlett murder which doesn't take that much of an effort for Markey to deduce, since he was there with him at the murder scene, that the eye witness was non other then Mike Kovac himself!
***SPOILERS*** Markey who wasn't all that bright to begin with soon comes up with this brainstorm of an idea to kidnap Kovac's father Alton, Ludwig Stossel, to keep Mike for testifying against him! This moron of a hood, Markey, gets even farther into his brainless stupidity in not only holding, after kidnapping him, Alton hostage but planning to murder him,together with his son Mike, even if Kovac agrees to keep his mouth shut!
It's when Kovac starts to come to his senses by taking things into his own, and taking them out of the incompetent NYPD's, hands and goes it alone that he gets results! In not only saving his pop's life but putting that full of himself creep Glenn Markey in his place, a jail cell, by calling Markey's bluff and not giving into his demands! Which in the end would have meant certain death for him and his father Alton if he did!