As much as the writers on Hawaii Five-O stretched for different sorts of stories, they shouldn't have stretched here. It's a story that would have been much more at home on a grittier show like Kojak or The Rookies. It's also terribly dated.
Plus, somehow I just don't get a cop completely ignoring wide-open solicitation to write a parking ticket, or the hookers not taking a pause at least until the officer moves on.
The show did several "crooks versus crooks" power struggles, and the trope was already old hat by this time, halfway through the series. There were no sympathetic characters here whatsoever, and as a viewer I saw no reason to intervene. Let the crooks knock each other off. ;-)