Paul Kroll, a Chicago street cleaner and Swedish immigrant, is driven by ruthless ambition and a willingness to bend every rule. He engineers the firing of a fellow worker as part of a larger scheme and convinces his foreman to let him stay on the payroll so they can split the salary. Soon there are eight phantom workers, and Kroll and his partner have enough cash to plan a return trip to Sweden. At the same time, Kroll secretly romances his partner's wife, Babe, and he misleads the people back home about his supposed success. When the local match factory falters, his uncle pleads for him to come back and save it. He persuades Babe to withdraw the money he has stolen by fooling her into thinking they are fleeing together, but he abandons her when he sails to Sweden.
Back in Europe, the con man continues to expand his operation. Erik Borg is the only friend who knows the truth about Kroll's real achievements, so he is brought on as his assistant. Kroll’s reach grows as he eventually owns all the match factories in Sweden, and his ambitions do not stop there. With information gathered from influential women he has charmed, he pushes into monopolies across Poland, Germany, and beyond, offering loans to cash-strapped governments and bribing officials to cement his control.
The lure of power intensifies when Kroll meets Ilse Wagner and, more strikingly, Marta Molnar, a rising star he aims to win over. To impress her, he even hires a famed gypsy violinist to serenade her, yet his business begins to suffer as he borrows more money to sustain his social conquests. Marta’s departure for Hollywood pulls him back to the company, but trouble accelerates when he learns that the recluse Christian Hobe has invented an everlasting match and Kroll orchestrates Hobe’s institutionalization as a madman. The stock market crash tightens the squeeze, making new loans impossible. To cover his tracks, he buys $50 million in fake Italian bonds from forger Scarlatti and arranges for Scarlatti to drown in a lake, using the bonds as collateral to secure a $40 million loan from an American bank.
As life spirals, Marta returns to Sweden and Kroll contemplates retirement, but she reveals she loves Trino, the gypsy violinist. With his forgeries exposed and the American loan canceled, Kroll’s carefully built empire collapses. He cannot salvage it and ends the story by shooting himself on the balcony, his body tumbling into the gutter where his quest for endless power began.
