Rolling Dark

Edmund Morris, known now on the violent streets of Camden, New Jersey as “Guyanese Eddie”, immigrated to the U.S. from Georgetown, Guyana as a young boy. After growing up in Jamaica, Queens, he enlists in the U.S. Army and eventually becomes a soldier in the elite 101st Airborne Division: “The Screaming Eagles”. He fights in the Iraq War and sees action in Mosul, where an R.P.G. blows up his Humvee, killing his best buddy, and leading to the amputation of his right leg and terrible scarring on his face. Eddie returns home after rehabilitation and discovers he has a twelve-year-old daughter he never knew about, the result of a one-night-stand prior to entering the military years ago. He learns she might be in Camden, New Jersey, and is horrified to discover she may have fallen prey to a Caribbean-based human-trafficking network selling young girls into pornography. To find and save his daughter, Eddie goes underground into the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Camden. One by one, he assembles a crew of three other criminals he finds in sordid establishments around the city, but keeps his identity, past, and ultimate goal, a secret from them – they simply think they’re a stick-up crew pulling off heists for the cash. Eddie’s use of military-grade weapons, equipment, and tactics in his crimes quickly gets the attention of the U.S. Attorney General’s Camden office. Once they discover Eddie has partnered with “Lucky Liam”, a Brit and wannabe porn producer on the run from London’s Metropolitan Police Service, and in the U.S. illegally, they form a task-force to catch them. Dubbing Eddie and his men as the “Heathen Crew”, for their donning of terrifying demon masks during robberies, they send in an undercover Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who successfully infiltrates the group. That agent is Darryl Robinson, who adopts a street identity as “Dante”, and quickly becomes Eddie’s most reliable cohort. Rounding out the group is “Moonshine”, a pothead who proves himself to be too nervous, inept, and ultimately, a terrible liability to the Heathens. After two successful, but nearly disastrous heists, tension between Eddie and Liam leads Liam to break off from the crew and hit the road. Eddie picks up Dante and Moonshine one night in a stolen car and reveals he’s learned Moonshine is an undercover detective with the New Jersey State Police. Eddie’s also developed suspicions about Dante and to alleviate those concerns, he orders Dante to shoot Moonshine. While pleading for his life, Moonshine and the group are interrupted by an auto-theft task-force who swoops in and arrests them all for riding in the stolen car. Dante eventually learns the truth: Moonshine really is an undercover detective with the New Jersey State Police; Lucky Liam was captured by authorities and is pending deportation; Eddie has been turned over to the U.S. Attorney's Office. He’s in the U.S. legally, but never became a citizen, as it's not a requirement of the U.S. Army, but his crimes make him deportable. Dante learns Eddie never had a daughter; he made the whole story up. Suffering from P.T.S.D., Eddie's only way of surviving was to make up a situation where he could again lead a squad of guys to search for something that never existed. On the day of his deportation back to Guyana, Eddie sends a package to Dante at his office: it's the demon mask he wore during the robberies signaling to Dante that Eddie knew he was an undercover agent the whole time.