Law and Order: "Wicked Game" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 14, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the cycle of three Law and Order shows that make up the bulk of NBC’s Thursday night prime-time schedule, including the reboot of the original Law and Order as well as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. I missed the first 19 minutes or so of Law and Order because I was late switching over from MS-NBC at 8 p.m., but what I did get to see turned out to be one of their most interesting recent episodes, a “torn from the headlines” story of a middle-aged and well-to-do white Gay man who got off on picking up young Black Gay street kids, taking them to his place, injecting them with crystal methamphetamine and bringing them to the edge of death (and, in some cases, actually killing them) while he performed sex acts on them while they were either unable to resist or totally unconscious. In the show, called “Wicked Game,” the killer is “Kyle Swanson”; but this story (by Pamela Wechsler and Art Alamo) is based on the real-life case of West Hollywood power broker Ed Buck, who in a macabre coincidence had his sentencing hearing (he got a 30-year prison sentence) on the same day this Law and Order telecast aired: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/14/ed-buck-sentenced-political-activist-methamphetamine-deaths.

Like the fictitious “Swanson,” the real Buck had powerful friends in politics and business – he donated a total of $500,000 (at least) to political candidates, almost all of them Democrats – and for years a few concerned activists in the Black Queer community tried to get him investigated for his crimes, only his rich and powerful friends protected him. The case against Buck didn’t get taken seriously until 2017, when a young man named Gemmel Moore died of a drug overdose in Buck’s West Hollywood apartment, and two years later an older man, 55-year-old Timothy Dean, also died of an overdose in Buck’s home. While he was hiding out from police investigating Dean’s death, Buck was also hosting another Black Gay man, Dane Brown, and filling him up with drugs while having sex with him. According to the article by Dani Anguiano in The Guardian linked to above, “Brown, who was homeless, moved into Buck’s apartment, where Buck frequently injected him with meth, often several times a day. He was hospitalized in September 2019 after Buck shot him up three times with back-to-back doses, putting five times the meth in his system that Moore and Dean had when they died, prosecutors said. Brown returned to Buck’s home weeks later where Buck again injected him with an overdose of methamphetamine, and refused to help him, he said.” Eventually Brown was able to escape Buck’s clutches and get himself to a hospital, where he spent several days in a coma before making a report to police about his story.

In the fictional version, “Kyle Swanson” also picks up Black Gay men on the streets and gives them money in exchange for sex and for their participation in his sick drug games, and he’s convinced his political donations and other cultivations of rich and influential people have bought him impunity. He’s also savvy enough that when he’s finally busted, he hires a Black lawyer. The cops find two other men who went through “Swanson’s” sick, perverted games and survived, but one of them gets paid $300 to leave town (presumably by “Swanson” or one of his agents) and the other is scared shitless because he’s out on parole on a drug charge and merely being around a place where drugs are used is a violation of parole for which he could be sent back to prison – right when he’s stopped using, got a job and looks like he’s turned his life around. District attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) tries to get the young man’s parole officer to back off, but the parole officer is a hard-ass by-the-book type and the ending of the show leaves it up in the air as to whether this poor young man can suffer by going back to prison (where, we can assume, he’ll be repeatedly raped and sexually abused again) or can continue to keep his life turned around. But the prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), are able to put the young man on the stand and so disgust the jury that they bring in a verdict of guilty – and “Swanson” starts screaming as he’s led back to jail that he’s got rich and powerful friends who will go to bat for him and get those pesky prosecutors fired. This Law and Order is a fine dramatic retelling of one of those real-life stories that make you sick to your stomach at the sheer vileness of certain members of the human race – though it also gives you much to admire in the determination of various people to stop the abusers and seek justice.