***SPOILERS*** Always wanting to live the good life bank teller Mitchell Pierce, Paul Spencer, was hindered in doing that by earning $58.33, that's $450,00 in 2014 dollars, a week which barley paid his rent & food expenses. That"s when he came up with this great idea to moonlight as a milkman and break into people's apartments pretending to deliver milk bottles and rip the place off. Hijacking the local milkman's truck that delivers its cargo to the mostly rich & swanky upper West Side, or Central Park West, of Manhattan he has lots of customers who being on vacation, mostly in the Hamptons, who won't miss what he robbed from them until they get home at the end of the summer.
After ripping off his latest victim of among other things his gun collection, that includes a .44 Magnum, Pierce is caught red handed trying to escape and ends up blasting a policeman , with his Magnum .44, trying to apprehend him. Now a cop killer and on the run for his life, cops don't usually arrest cop killers they shoot them while "trying to escape", Pierce makes his way to the Central Park weather station at Belvedere Tower to make his last stand. He as insurance takes the weatherman Dobbs, Dean C. Almquist, as hostage as he barricades himself there against the police.
***SPOILERS*** Pierce plans to go down in a blaze of glory and take Dobbs and a number of the NYPD along with him. This has the by now reality challenged Pierce feel that by doing that he'll finally succeed in death as another John Dillinger, by getting shot in a police shoot-out, by being noticed in the history books that he couldn't succeed in life by being rich & independent! As usual even in that Pierce was a total failure in blowing his chance of immortality by getting caught alive with both his hands as well as .44 Magnum being tied or better yet stuck behind his back without him having a chance to use it!