Created, the Destroyer

Remo Williams, a Newark police officer, is framed for killing a drug dealer and sentenced to the electric chair. Conn MacCleary, disguised as a priest, gives him a pill as part of a plan to fake his death. The execution is weakened, Remo is pronounced dead, and accomplices revive him outside prison. A Vietnam flashback explains MacCleary’s interest in Remo. MacCleary recruits him into CURE, a covert extralegal operation directed by Harold W. Smith from Folcroft. Remo accepts after MacCleary admits his role in the frame-up. Chiun, an elderly instructor at Folcroft, trains Remo. When MacCleary is badly injured investigating Norman Felton, Smith orders Remo to kill him.

Remo refuses; a newspaper later reports MacCleary’s suicide. Remo follows MacCleary’s lead on Maxwell. The narrative recounts Felton’s rise from a deprived childhood and his first murder of Vito Morroco to a paid-killing and body-disposal business connected to Carmine Viaselli’s criminal organization. Remo follows Felton’s daughter Cynthia to Briarcliff, manipulates her trust, and is abducted by Felton’s men; he kills his captors. He and Cynthia have sex after a confrontation in which she later says he took advantage of her. At Felton’s residence Remo kills Marvin Moesher. He then draws Felton to the junkyard by asking about a 1934 Maxwell. Felton and Jimmy put Remo in a steel crusher, but Remo escapes, defeats Felton, and starts the crusher with both men inside, killing them.

The machine is a Maxwell Steel Reducer made by Maxwell Industries, resolving Maxwell as a machine rather than a person. Remo reports the machine/operator discovery to Smith, then pretends to be Felton’s employee conveying a fabricated request to lure Viaselli to the yard; Cynthia does not know what Remo has done.