A young woman, Rita Adams, asks her ex-gangster father why people call him a snitch. He is then shot in front of her. She is sent to an orphanage, where her best friends are Mickey Roma and Bob Elliott.
Rita grows up as a struggling single girl who lives with her best friend, singer Donna, and who has a drunk boyfriend, Harold De Witt, son of a rich and powerful man, Clarence. Rita loses her job at a factory when she fails to bond. Bob, who is now an aerospace engineer, offers to try to get her the job.
When Harold drives Rita home at night, he kills a pedestrian in a hit-and-run while Rita is in the car. On the advice of her father's lawyer, Bruce King, he has Rita take responsibility for the accident, saying that otherwise he will be disinherited and that she will only have probation. She is sentenced to one to five years in prison.
Rita gets out of prison and her orphanage friend Mickey, who is now working in organized crime, explains how Harold betrayed her. Rita takes to crime, robbing gullible men.
Clarence De Witt wants the police to crack down on organized crime and leads a reform ticket.
Jimmy Kelly is an undercover cop in the gang as Bill Dugan. Kelly/Dugan collects protection money for gangster Kurt Parrish, who complains that revenues are down because of DeWitt's reform efforts.
Mickey, in turn, asks Rita to return the letters from Harold's file that prove his guilt, but she has her own revenge plan and buys radio time to speak out against DeWitt's hypocrisy. This landed her a meeting with Parrish and mobster Lou Wood, and after Rita negotiated a place for herself in the syndicate, she visited DeWitt with photocopies of the letters. Rejecting DeWitt's offer of money, Rita forces him to use his political influence to the benefit of the union, prompting Jimmy to remark that Parrish is using votes, or "paper bullets", to take over.
When Mickey learns that the real Dugan is in prison, Jimmy is kidnapped by Parrish's men, and the ensuing police chase ends in an accident. Joe convinces the newspapers to publish the false information that Jimmy was killed in the accident, which devastates Donna, who has fallen in love with him.
Rita then quits the union to marry Bob, but immediately after the wedding she is arrested and indicted along with Parrish, Wood and DeWitt. During the trial, courtroom spectators are shocked when Jimmy testifies and all four defendants are convicted. As Bob comforts Rita and promises to wait for her, the children play on the playground she built as a monument to youthful innocence.
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