Plot

After the funeral of one of their own, a criminal family decides to embark on an emotionally unnerving journey in an attempt to exact bloody revenge.

In the 30's, in New York, the coffin of the leftist gangster Johnny Tempio is brought to the house of his older brother Ray for the wake of family and friends. Ray is a cold gangster that likes to read and is married to Jean. His brother Chez is a hot head that runs a bar and is married to Clara . Ray decides to revenge the murder of his younger brother and believes the gangster Gaspare is the one who killed Johnny. Meanwhile Chez has a breakdown with tragic consequences for the Tempio brothers.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

New York City, the 1930s. A powerful crime family is caught in a lethal crossfire between union organizers and brutal corporate bosses. Against this turbulent backdrop, the family's three street-hardened brothers and the women they love are about to be plunged into a deadly confrontation with their enemies, with each other, and with their own dark heritage of violence, madness and murder.—Echo Bridge Home Entertainment

The film opens in a movie theatre where Johnny Tempio (Vincent Gallo) is watching Humphrey Bogart in "The Petrified Forest" talking about death. After the titles, we find ourselves at the home of the Tempio family where a coffin is brought into the house. Mourning the passage of their beloved brother Johnny are Chez and Ray. Ray is cold and calculating, while Chez is hot tempered. Flashbacks demonstrate Johnny to be more sensitive. Exposure to communist meetings as a spy sways Johnny's opinions. The chief suspect in Johnny's murder is rival gangster Gaspare Spoglia.

Ray and Chez swear revenge. Ray's wife, Jean, opposes the campaign of retribution and the violence it will bring, while Chez's wife, Clara, struggles to deal with her husband's obsessive nature.

Ray has Gaspare abducted for interrogation and they go to see Johnny's body. He is satisfied by Gaspare's claim of innocence, in part because he says that gangsters are superstitious, believing that the wounds of the corpse will start bleeding in the presence of the killer. Therefore the killer will not willingly enter the dead victim's presence. Gaspare is comfortable to be in the presence of the victim, so is not the killer. Ray releases Gaspare but instructs his men to murder him later.

As it turns out, Johnny was not murdered by rival gangsters, but rather, by a man who claimed Johnny had raped his girlfriend. Ray's men identify him by tracking the car he had driven to commit the crime. Pressed by Ray, the killer confesses that he had wanted revenge because Johnny had beaten him up in front of his girlfriend and friends, embarrassing him in the process. Ray kills him.

As he buries the now-deceased killer of Johnny, Chez reflects on his brothers' lives before the tragedy. He then returns to Ray's house and shoots and kills Ray and his two bodyguards in cold blood. After that, Chez shoots Johnny's corpse, lying dead in the casket. Chez then turns the gun on himself, despite Clara's pleas, as he refuses to live without his brothers.