Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Dead Presidents" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV,. aired April 28, 2022_

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

As usual, after the relative power of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “Dead Presidents” (also the name of a 1995 movie about a returning Viet Nam War veteran who finds out that virtually every opportunity he has to make a better living for his family involves crime), was relatively disappointing. At least this one was relatively coherent and involved an attempt by Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, more grizzled than he was in his SVU days when I fell in lust with him but also dressed far more sexily, in leather pantsuits instead of the Armani he wore on SVU), posing as number two man of an organization of corrupt cops called “The Brotherhood,” attempting to set up both Brotherhood founder Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary) and corrupt Black businessman Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson) by offering to steal back several million dollars in hard currency the Brotherhood stole from Webb in the first place. He traces the cash to a money launderer named Rutger Ulrich (Carsten Norgaard – incidentally “Al Norgaard” was the one honest member of the hopelessly corrupt police force in “Bay City,” actually Santa Monica, in Raymond Chandler’s novels).

Using $1 million of Webb’s money as seed capital to get into Ulrich’s operation, Stabler, Donnelly and Malachi (Wasam Keach), a computer hacker who got recruited to join the Organized Crime Task Force to avoid prosecution as a hacker (a deal a number of real-life hackers have also made with law enforcement when they’ve been caught), deduce that Unrich keeps his money in a safe concealed in a secret part of his room, only when they break in they find just $700. Meanwhile Stabler’s superior officer, young Black Lesbian cop Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is unhappy that her wife is about to take a job for the law firm of Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Ron Cephas Jones) even though Bell’s task force is investigating him for corruption. Stabler is also digging up his own past, particularly the Golden Cross his dad Jack Stabler got for heroism in what Donnelly has told him was a faked operation: at the time Stabler’s and Donnelly’s father were on the police force and Donnelly had told Stabler that his dad actually shot himself in the leg with the suspect’s own gun to make it look like a “good shooting” instead of the outright murder of an unarmed man. If nothing else, the Organized Crime plot conceit at least gives Meloni a chance to show off his acting chops in ways he only rarely got to show on SVU, but the overall plot complexity of this show is getting tiresome and so are the forced cliffhanger endings to show how Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are all worshiping at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL.