Sleepers

Lorenzo "Shakes" Carcaterra, Thomas "Tommy" Marcano, Michael Sullivan and John Reilly are four childhood friends (played by Joseph Perrino, Jonathan Tucker, Brad Renfro and Geoffrey Wigdor respectively) living in Hell's Kitchen, New York City in the mid-1960s. The four friends work for local gangster King Benny (Vittorio Gassman) who has them deliver bribe money to the local police precinct on a weekly basis. They are often under the eye of Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), himself a one-time delinquent.

On a hot summer day in 1967, the boys play a prank on a Greek American hot dog vendor, stealing his cart. A near-fatal accident occurs when the cart falls down a subway station staircase, crushing a man named James Caldwell (Don Hewitt) at the bottom of the stairs. Found guilty of reckless endangerment, the four are sentenced to serve time at the Wilkinson Home for Boys in upstate New York.

There, the boys are systematically beaten, abused and raped by head guards Sean Nokes, Henry Addison, Adam Styler and Ralph Ferguson (played by Kevin Bacon, Jeffrey Donovan, Lennie Loftin and Terry Kinney respectively). When the guards put together a team of inmates to play a touch football game, the four Hell's Kitchen boys are selected and decide to use the game as an opportunity to get back at the guards physically. They ask Rizzo (Eugene Byrd) - whose reputation is such the guards leave him alone - to lead the inmate team in the game. Rizzo agrees, and the inmates win, but their victory is short-lived as the guards physically abuse the boys and toss them into solitary confinement (Addison beats Rizzo to death).

The boys are eventually released, but are never the same. They gradually drift apart.

In 1981, approximately 14 years after starting their torment at Wilkinson, John and Tommy (as adults, played by Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup), now gangsters, come across Sean Nokes, now working as a security guard, in a Hell's Kitchen pub. They murder Nokes in front of several witnesses.

Shakes and Mike (as adults, played by Jason Patric and Brad Pitt) enlist the help of their childhood friend Carol Martinez (Minnie Driver), Father Bobby, a local cop named Nick Davenport (Daniel Mastrogiorgio), mob boss King Benny, and a struggling lawyer, Danny Snyder (Dustin Hoffman), to guarantee their friends' acquittal and expose the abuses committed at Wilkinson's.

Mike, by now an assistant District Attorney, arranges to be assigned to the case, secretly intending to lose as a means of getting revenge. Shakes is a low-level editorial assistant at the New York Times, where he uses contacts to gather background information on the Wilkinson guards. Carol is a social worker, and uses her office to access private files.

Adam Styler, now a policeman, is arrested by the NYPD's Internal Affairs division, led by Davenport, for murdering a drug dealer. Henry Addison is murdered a few days later by gangsters led by Little Caesar (Wendell Pierce), Rizzo's older brother, who has learned the truth surrounding Rizzo's death from King Benny himself. In the courtroom, Ralph Ferguson, now a social worker in Long Island, is discredited as a character witness for Nokes as the abuses perpetrated by the guards are exposed in open court.

To clinch the case, after a long talk with Shakes and Carol, Father Bobby lies on the stand about where John and Tommy were on the night of the shooting. The priest swears under oath they were with him at Madison Square Garden at a Knicks basketball game. As a result, they are found not guilty.

The four are reunited one last time for a party at a Hell's Kitchen bar. An epilogue reveals that after the trial, John and Tommy return to their criminal lives and are found dead a few years later (Tommy is murdered and John succumbs to alcohol poisoning).

Mike, out of favor with the D.A.'s office for losing an apparently open-and-shut case, quits practicing law. He moves to England to live alone, working as a part-time carpenter. Shakes remains in the city and works his way up through the ranks of journalism. Carol continues to live in Hell's Kitchen, where she raises a son, John Thomas Michael Martinez, nicknamed "Shakes."