16-year-old Scott Bearman has a good enough life growing up in rural Ohio and although he is doing okay he wants something more. When the opportunity arises, for he and his friend Mark to make a few quick and easy dollars, they enter into their first drug deal.
Flushed with the success, soon the two friends are building a small but lucrative crime organization through their supplier, Deatz, and things are looking good.
But in the world of crime nothing ever stays good for long and when his girlfriend and her mom do a moonlight flit and leave town in the middle of the night, Bearman has to learn how to cope with his anger while trying to make a success of his new venture.
Mark soon wants out, concerned by Bearman's rage and what he is creating, and when a New York crime family discovers that Deatz has been working with a Chicago mob to undercut them, it looks like Bearman's world is falling apart and he must act decisively if he is going to save his own skin.
As New York gangsters converge on the quiet Ohio idyll looking for revenge, it looks like the end of the road for Deatz but the chance of a new beginning for Bearman.
But can his friendship with Mark be saved? And how long can he keep his own little empire before someone else muscles in?