Cosmo Vitelli is the tenuous but proud owner of a Sunset Strip-joint, the Crazy Horse West, and nightly he gazes upon the stage and ‘his girls’ like a dad at his sleeping kids; they are family. When a gambling debt threatens to pull the rug from this happy if sordid home, Vitelli agrees to pay it off with a snuff job on a bothersome Chinatown bookie — who turns out to be a kingpin.