In the early 1940s, an infamous New York paparazzo gets an assignment from a club owner to do a background search on a mysterious gangster, which leads him down a very dangerous path.

Leon Bernstein is New York's best news photographer in 1942, equally at home with cops or crooks. The pictures are often of death and pain, but they are the ones the others wish they had got. Then glamorous Kay Levitz turns to him when the Mob seem to be muscling in on the club she owns due to some arrangement with her late husband. Bernstein, none too successful with women, agrees to help, saying there may be some good photos in it for him. In fact, he is falling in love with Kay.—Jeremy Perkins {J-26}

Lonely World War II-era New York photographer Leon Bernstein, known as "The Great Bernzini," possesses a steadfast commitment to his artistic ambitions, even if his gruesome crime scene tabloid photos -- his métier -- earn him the revulsion and shunning of proper society. His agnosticism toward his subject matter allows him to be trusted by crooks as well as cops, and it is that which draws him via a beautiful widow's manipulation into a web of intrigue that may result in his death, or in possibly the greatest photoshoot in U.S. history.—HallowLooyuh