Plot

In 1950's Los Angeles, a special crime squad of the LAPD investigates the murder of a young woman.

This film is about the adventures of a 1950s special anti-gangster police squad in Los Angeles, the infamous 'Hat Squad.' The four members of this squad are big, tough, no-nonsense cops who don't hesitate to break the law, if it suits their purposes. When a local woman is murdered, their investigation turns up the fact that she had been romantically linked to several prominent men and had secret films taken of her liaisons. Since one of those men is the powerful U.S. Army General at the head of the then-new Atomic Energy Commission and another is the (married) leader of the Hat Squad, complications ensue. The FBI even gets involved in an attempted cover-up.—Tad Dibbern <DIBBERN_D@a1.mscf.upenn.edu>

Post-WWII Los Angeles. Lieutenants Max Hoover, Ellery Coolidge, Eddie Hall and Arthur Relyea comprise a LAPD squad who are tasked with keeping the city clean of organized crime using whatever means necessary, even if it is outside the law. They investigate the crushed body death of a young woman found in a remote residential development site. According to the coroner, it is like she fell off a cliff, despite there being no cliff in sight. Hoover doesn't initially tell his colleagues, but they all eventually learn that Hoover knew the woman intimately, her name being Allison Pond. Hoover and Allison's affair, which lasted six months and which Max ended, is something about which Hoover's loving and devoted wife, Katherine, does not know. Shortly thereafter, the squad receives some evidence delivered to them, namely a home made sex film of Allison and who they will learn is General Thomas Timms, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. The implications are that Allison did not know the film was taken, that there are several other reels of film of Allison with her various sex partners who also did not know about being filmed, that there is a reel including Hoover, and that the films have something to do with Allison's death. Regardless of Hoover's personal involvement and the potential for the film to ruin his marriage if Katherine were to find out, the foursome try to navigate the highly secretive world of the military to discover who killed Allison and why, with the FBI thrown in for good measure, their involvement in an effort to maintain national security.—Huggo

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.