Kojak

Kojak begins sucking lollipops, after a wheel-man brags he's in on a caper which will make the NYPD more laughable than the Keystone Kops. Soon, a fellow gang member ices Artie the driver and dumps the corpse in a park. The gang member who jerked the trigger was only supposed to stash Artie out of town, so the gang leader's antsy that when Artie's body and belongings are discovered, the police will be on alert. Lt. Kojak keeps the murder out of the obits, but has no clue what the gang's target is. Loud-mouthed Artie owes a lot of people bread, and some tell Kojak's detectives that Artie'll cough up their cash on Monday. So Kojak has less than a week to foil the mammoth heist, plus his struggles to give up smoking make him even more caustic than usual.

On his first day on the job, a young rookie cop gets into a shootout with a gang of mob killers.

When mobster Michael X. Tomasso is shot during a speech all clues lead to a Harlem based rival. But Kojak suspects something fishy is going on and decides to dig deeper.

A robbery of armored car guards morphs into a deadly hostage standoff, with bulldog Lt. Theo Kojak as the negotiator. Half the Talaba Brothers gang escapes with the cash, but when the other half is cornered, they invade a surplus store, crammed with guns and ammo. The robbers also have bargaining chips: the 5 people in the building, plus a badly wounded patrolman, who dove in the store to warn of the incoming robbers. While young Detective Bobby Crocker pursues the thieves who got away, his boss at Manhattan South, the dapper, bald Kojak smooth-talks Jerry Talaba to get the hostages out. Hothead Talaba demands a crewed, fueled 707 at JFK, or he'll start killing the hostages, then toss them out before the TV cameras and hundreds of spectators - one by one.

Kojak receives threats against his life just as his niece is about to get married.

Lt. Kojak fails to bring down a wily heroin kingpin, so he ups the ante by putting himself up for sale, pretending he's got no shot at Captain's bars, so he's going for dirty money instead. Theo Kojak's top undercover operative Gil sets up an elaborate scam with the dealers, where the heroin Gil seized from Janis will be traded back to the smugglers, and bags of sugar will be put in their place in the Manhattan South property locker. But Janis connives to switch the deal around, so he has his own personal Theo on the inside, on the take.

An artist is killed over a missing plate to print counterfeit Canadian $20 notes. The victims's girlfriend has it, and Kojak has to find her before the killer does

Kenny Soames, a friendly young delivery man for a local pharmacy, sets up a residence for a big heist and uses his delivery van for the getaway. He then plans to leave the country with his girlfriend and $100,000 from his confederates.

On the trail of a ring counterfeiting lottery tickets, a detective's partner is killed. Det. Fiore feels guilty for giving in to his partner's quest for front page heroism, plus being felled by stomach pains when he had a chance to shoot his friend's killer. When Fiore's diagnosed with terminal cancer, he realizes he's sacrificed having his own life for devotion to Det. Ryan and Ryan's wife. Kojak worries that Fiore's quest for salvation will result in murder, blowing their long-pursued case against the counterfeiters.

Ex-con Lou is determined to settle old scores with his ex-wife and her mobster boyfriend who set him up to serve hard time. Lou's fiancée, a wide-eyed prison sociologist, enlists Kojak's help to keep Lou from killing and/or being killed.

Kojak investigates the theft of powdered morphine from a pharmaceutical company.

A boy asks Kojak to find his father who's gone missing. What they don't know is that he is being held captive.

After a night drinking, an off-duty cop and his friend are attacked by a group of thieves. The friend is killed with the cop's gun. Though ordered to beat duty, the cop, who has battled alcoholism over the years, impedes Kojak's investigation by trying to find those responsible for his friend's death himself.

While in a New Jersey town Kojak interferes with a young man's attempt to pick up a girl by fighting her boyfriend. It turns out the young man is Mike Viggers Jr., whose mobster father, well-known to Kojak, effectively runs the town. Humiliated by Kojak, young Viggers is determined to have the detective killed and will not be deterred even by his father's strong objections.

Kojak races to stop a Mafia war, incited by Chinatown hoodlums. First, the young tong mobsters ripoff a knock-over of a Crespi family policy operation, by low-level soldiers of the Scalesi clan. Not suspecting that the masked murderers are Chinese, the Crespis dispatch their Jewish consigliere to recoup the loss from Scalesi godfather Don Cheech, and discern if the Scalesies are muscling in on their territory. All atwitter, Lt. Kojak calls in NYPD Cosa Nostra expert Sgt. Polucci, to help stave off a full-scale gang war.

Sammy Loo's Chinese bandits step up their incendiary action, by shanghaiing ailing Scalesi boss Don Cheech in an ambulance, along with his nurse and meds. The tong gangsters resent being left out of the American Mafia diversity program that let Irish, Jews etc. in on the upper level of organized crime. With a $2 million dollar ransom from the Scalesi clan, the Manhattan tong can compete with the combo. Kojak finds that the disrupters are Chinese, but how can the NYPD or Italian gangsters root out the kidnappers in Chinatown, where they'll stand out like a Black Hand ?

A nebbish helps his therapy group by bombing the nemeses they whine about. Kojak can't find a pattern in the serial murders, especially after an innocent secretary who just moved to Manhattan is blown up, but he knows there is one because she was killed in a parking space with her name on it. NYPD holds back that the bombs all come in brown paper bags, to fend off serial confessors. Danny Zucco can't wait for his next group to see the joy he's brought to his adopted family.

A college girl hurries home after being raped by two men, one of whom kills the other at the scene and flees. Kojak suspects a rape by two men, and sets out to identify the woman as well as the other rapist, while the father of the girl sets out to kill the surviving rapist.

When Kojak works with the FBI to apprehend a drug dealer. He sends one of his detectives to work with an FBI agent posing as buyers. When the dealer arrives he shoots both men and takes off with the money. He meets a partner who then shoots him and makes off with the money. When Kojak gets a description of the partner and gives it to his FBI contact, he is ordered by another agent not to give Kojak anymore info. It isn't long before Kojak suspects that the agent is holding out on him, he follows him and meets the other agent whom he knows and finds out that the agent is looking for the killer and has a personal stake in it. When the man refuses to work with Kojak, Kojak tells him to stay out of his way.

Kojak works on a Wall Street robbery that involves three murders. When usual methods fail, Kojak goes undercover as a Greek millionaire. He suspects a well-known stockbroker whom he hopes to catch attempting to sell the stocks to him. Things go awry when the thieves find out that the Greek millionaire Kojak is impersonating is actually in Europe. Kojak is kidnapped and counts on his colleagues saving him.

A pair of suicides at the same hotel makes Kojak believe that they were actually murders as he finds connections between the victims. Discovering that a young Army wife had fallen from a roof at an earlier convention (which they had attended) leads Kojak to her call girl sister. She has convinced the soldier that it is his duty to punish the men involved. As he's about to kill the last person related to the girl's death, Kojak must prevent another next murder.

A gun shop owner is coerced into obtaining a quantity of handguns for the hoodlums to whom he owes gambling debts. When a young gang member is killed and the weapon traced to his store, he is eliminated to prevent his talking to police. His motherly bookkeeper witnesses his abduction and is taken into protective custody, pending her appearance before the grand jury. Safeguarding the sassy senior is not an easy task as the hoods try to silence her-permanently. Kojak is the only officer she really trusts.

Two off-duty police officers are killed when a bomb explodes in a bowling alley. A police informer (Paolo Olivarez), who had come to warn them, arrives too late and though slightly injured is able to hobble away. A Bronx detective demands that Kojak allow him to help bring in his informer; they trace him to his sister Marinella's in New Jersey. Back in New York, the bombers booby trap Paolo's apartment; when that fails, they notify him that they have kidnapped his sister to ensure his silence. Knowing that they want to kill him, Paolo offers to trade himself for her freedom. Kojak learns of his plans and where the bombers' HQ is; he faces a hostage situation involving Marinella, and Paolo is frantic. Will Kojak call their bluff?

Ray Kaufman, a former homicide detective dismissed for corruption, now working as a private eye, takes photos of a rich man's much younger wife, Janet Seymour, out with her husband's business manager, Tony Howard. Janet's husband is distraught and commits suicide. Kaufman, who is still in the house, convinces Howard, who comes upon the body that they should fake a murderous intruder so Janet can collect the $500,000 insurance policy. Kaufman keeps the suicide note and the gun which Howard had picked up and, after Howard is arrested, plants them in his apartment. He offers to sell the suicide note to Janet, enabling Howard's freedom. Kojak realizes Kaufman is more capable of faking the murder scenario than Howard, and when another murder occurs, Kojak is sure of who is the criminal.

An obsessed neighbor murders anyone he thinks is a threat to his relationship with a mentally fragile young woman.