Chicago, October 1932. Within minutes of the time the Globe's top reporter Carlton Edmunds was shot, Eliot Ness and his men are on the scene. Ostensibly it appears a stray bullet in a gunfight hit Edmunds; he was just a passerby in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Lee Hobson picks up 4-5 pieces of cotton batting-- the gunmen were firing blanks: except for the one bullet that hit Edmunds, who was 30 feet away. The ""gunfight"" was staged to fool the sole witness to the shooting: newsman Barney Rusch. Ness tells Barney that earlier, Edmunds had said he was working on a story about scrap metal-- a story that would tear this town wide open. Just then, a cross-country flight, from East coast to West, has a stopover in Chicago; reporter Floyd Gibbons gets out at the terminal to make some phone calls. Globe-trotting reporter Floyd Gibbons is a fast-talking, straight-shooting whirlwind of activity; not even losing his left eye in World War I slowed him down-- for more than the past do (thetvdb.com)