Portugal. Early '80s. A group of criminals spreads terror across the Algarve, with more than twenty bank robberies. The gang is led by a man they call "the Doctor" and a carpenter named Faustino Cavaco with the nickname "the American".

Faustino's story begins in an Algarve village in the 1960s, continues in Paris, to where his father fled, and returns to Portugal, a country changing in a time of uncertainty. Captured and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, Faustino was the leading figure of the bloodiest prison escape in Portuguese history.