 The Great Santini is a brilliant stage magician with a hidden past. His real name is Stefan Mueller and he was an SS officer assigned to the concentration camps. Jesse Jerome, his current employer, has learned of the illusionist s Nazi career and is using the information to blackmail him. One night, while ostensibly performing his celebrated trick of being locked in a steel cabinet and dowsed in a tank of water, Santini is really disguising himself as a waiter and walking unseen to Jerome s office. When Jerome turns up dead, it looks like a contract killing. But the rumpled, redoubtable Lt. Columbo of the LAPD, assisted by the overeager Sgt. Wilson, has a few tricks of his own.