Dateline NBC: "Hit List" (NBC-TV, aired April 1, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched a two-hour Dateline NBC program called “Hit List,” dealing with a decorated New York police officer named Valerie Cincinelli, her husband Isaiah Carvalho, and the man she had an improbable affair with, John DiRubba. Already it looked to me like in having extra-relational activities with DiRubba she was “trading down,” since her husband was in his early 30’s (as was she) and, though not exactly drop-dead gorgeous, was a good deal hunkier than DiRubba, who was in his early 50’s and looked like an extra in The Godfather. Nonetheless, Valerie aggressively came on to him and slipped him her phone number – as she had earlier done with Isaiah when they first met – and she first took him financially for just about everything she had and then, when John was getting restive about the situation, lowered the boom on him and first held a gun to his head when she demanded the whereabouts of his then 14-year-old daughter (though John and his daughter had a perfectly licit relationship, Valerie was still phenomenally jealous of her and wanted the girl not only out of John’s life forever but off the planet forever), and then demanded that he locate a hit man to do in both the daughter and Isaiah. (Apparently the reason Valerie wanted Isaiah dead instead of merely divorcing him was that if they divorced, he’d be entitled to a portion of her retirement pension from the police department, and she wanted him permanently removed so all the pension money would remain hers.)

At first John waited for Valerie to come to her senses and turn back into the hot, sexy cop he’d fallen in love with (even though she was already married, which he justified to himself by her having told him her husband was abusing her and she wanted out of the marriage, anyway) instead of the murder-obsessed freak she was becoming now. When she didn’t let up on her demands that he find her a hit man who could kill both Isaiah and John’s own daughter, he pretended to go along but actually called the FBI. The FBI arranged a sting operation in which they got Isaiah literally to play dead: they had him drive his car to a deserted spot and there took a photo of him slumped in the driver’s seat with broken glass all around him to make it look like he’d been shot and killed. Then they texted the photo to John’s phone with instructions to show it to Valerie as proof that the fictitious hit man he had hired with her money had done the job. Valerie freaked out – as a police officer herself she knew the cops could and would trace the text back and catch the actual shooter, who would presumably rat them out – and the wires John was wearing captured an obscenity-laden phone call (NBC’s censor’s fingers were working overtime on this one bleeping out all the “F”-bombs both Valerie and John, she more than he, were dropping) in which the two conspirators argued over whether John had covered their tracks well enough to make sure they didn’t get caught.

The Dateline NBC producers told this story in strictly chronological order, making it look like Isaiah was really dead until the story reached the point at which he turned up alive. Valerie’s defense was that it was all John’s fault; she hinted he was a member of organized crime (though the only apparent connection he had with organized crime was that the fabled “Teflon Don,” John Gotti, lived down the street from him on Long Island) and that he had initiated the hit plot and it had all been his idea, not hers. In the end federal prosecutors arranged a plea deal with Valerie whereby she would serve only four years for obstruction of justice after her two murder-for-hire charges were dismissed, apparently because federal law requires that in order to convict someone of hiring someone else to kill somebody, there has to be an actual payment of money or something else of value for the deed – and there wasn’t. I wonder if Valerie, who used her law-enforcement skills to stage-manage the whole thing and try to avoid legal jeopardy, actually knew that and took it into account when she plotted the murders. She had John withdraw $7,000 from a bank account and then refused it, saying she wanted the money in gold coins instead, and that may have been her way of making the payment untraceable so the FBI and federal prosecutors couldn’t nail her for the really serious crime in which she was involved.

Be that as it may, the result was that both the men in Valerie’s life are fearful of what might happen when she’s released: Isaiah is worried she’ll try to have him killed again, this time for real, and John fears for the safety of his daughter after this crazy bitch already tried to have her killed – and the daughter herself is entering young womanhood and wondering whether she has anything to fear from her dad’s ex, Valerie. It was a quirky story even by Dateline standards – one could readily imagine it as a 1940’s film noir with Barbara Stanwyck (who else?) as Valerie – and the Dateline NBC host even joked that if a Hollywood screenwriter submitted this to a producer, the producer would reject it as unbelievable. It just goes to show you that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction …