Plot summary

A four-man team in Los Angeles known as the hat squad fights organized crime in 1953. Led by Max Hoover (Nick Nolte) the team, consisting of Ellery Coolidge (Chazz Palminteri), Eddie Hall (Michael Madsen), and Arthur Relyea (Chris Penn), uses many various means to identify the criminal element and push them out by any means, many times force-arming or using extreme coercion to accomplish their goals, including tossing one unlucky criminal off of a mountain and shooting up another criminal dope pusher with a lethal injection of Heroin. Their superiors look the other way because the hat squad gets results. While investigating the murder of a young woman the squad discovers that she was Allison Pond (Jennifer Connelly), and Max recognizes her as a former lover of his. What makes matters worse is that Allison Pond had a long string of lovers and filmed surreptitiously her liaison with them including her trysts with Max. Among her professional liaison is General Thomas Timms (John Malkovich) the leader of the Atomic Energy Commission and a key person in the security of the experiments being done on Atomic testing. When Max ferrets out the secrets Timms is keeping he sees the bigger picture and the truth that there are many others who are trying to prevent the murderer's identity from being found out.