Helen Ware, an artist's model, known as the Brown Venus is sad, discouraged and unhappy. When her men friends learn that she often poses nude, they try to become unduly "friendly" or just shun her, with the result that a beautiful girl with the figure of a Goddess finds herself without a lover. In desperation, she goes to a notorious night club and is later seen about to start on the downward trail. In New York's Harlem section, gangdom is running riot. Gangster Kid Cotton kills a man and runs away with the man's sweetheart, who is unaware of the crime until she reads about it in a newspaper at the "Mad Mullah" club in Chicago. Helen is near their table, overhears their discussion of the killing, and later finds herself involved in the case. Government undercover man Robert Fletcher trails Cotton to Chicago, and a peculiar twist of fate brings Helen to his hotel room, and a most intimate situation follows. Cotton sets up a numbers bank in Chicago in opposition the the policy gang, and a gang war breaks out. Gomez and his gang are rubbed out and Cotton becomes the king of the underworld. But the dragnet, thrown around him by Fletcher, begins to tighten.