The “Shaft” franchise is composed of action-crime films, centered on a family of African-American police detectives all sharing the name John Shaft, who over the course of the films have altercations with a variety of crimes.
John Shaft, a private detective, is informed that some gangsters are looking for him. Police Lt. Vic Androzzi meets Shaft and unsuccessfully tries to get information from him on the two gangsters. After Androzzi leaves, Shaft spots one of the men waiting for him in his office building. He forces the first gangster into his office where the second gangster is waiting. During a short fight, Shaft dodges one of them who goes out the window, while the other surrenders and reveals to him that Bumpy Jonas, the leader of a Harlem-based organized crime family, wants Shaft brought uptown to Harlem for a meeting.
While New York is never at a loss for criminal activity, things take a turn for the worse when the corrupt co-owner of a funeral parlor and insurance agency kills his partner, a personal friend of John Shaft, only to discover that the money he was planning to steal to pay his gambling debts is missing. He makes a deal with the mobster he owes (Joseph Mascolo) to split the business but also makes the same deal with crime lord Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn). The bullets start flying when the hoods find they've been played against each other, and Shaft is forced to clean up the mess.
At home in his New York City apartment, John Shaft is drugged with a tranquilizer dart, then kidnapped and persuaded by threats of physical force, the promise of money, and the lure of a pretty tutor to travel to Africa, assuming the identity of a native-speaking itinerant worker. His job is to help break a criminal ring that is smuggling immigrants into Europe then exploiting them. But the villains have heard that he is on his way.
Based on the movies of the same name, John Shaft is a two-fisted black private eye along the lines of Mike Hammer and Phillip Marlowe. Each week presents a different case and a different crime to solve.
New York Police Department Detective John Shaft II is called in to investigate the Racism murder of Trey Howard, committed by Walter Wade, Jr., the son of a wealthy real estate tycoon. Shaft briefly meets a potential eyewitness to the murder, Diane Palmieri, but she disappears soon after and cannot be found for the trial. Wade is released on bail and flees to Switzerland.
When the son he doesn't know comes to him for help, badass private eye John Shaft discovers his offspring is anything but a chip off the old block.
