Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Partners in Crime" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once again the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode, “Partners in Crime,” was the weakest of the three, though it had its moments and it also took on at least in part the subject of impunity. It begins at an early-release hearing for a prisoner named Octavio Montanero (Brandon Espinoza), who’s been “inside” for 10 years since he confessed to murdering a Black male police officer who was now-Sergeant Ayanna Bell’s (Danielle Moné Truitt) original partner and mentor on the force. Only he now says he didn’t do it; the real killer was Irish-born gangster Eamonn Murphy (Timothy V. Murphy), and Bell, who had originally gone to the hearing to testify against his release, now decides to reopen the case, especially since the ballistics tests on Montanero’s gun were “inconclusive.” Unfortunately, just as Bell is starting to re-investigate Montanero’s case, he’s knifed to death in prison in what authorities rule a “suicide.” From then on writers Barry O’Brien and John A. McCormack (did Dick Wolf and company decide they needed Irish-American authors to write convincingly about an Irish-American crime boss?) proceed abotu the business of building up Eamonn Murphy into the latest of this series’ Moriarty-like super-villains, setting up a bar on the premises of an old Irish drinking establishment run by a youngish-looking man who I think is supposed to be Teddy Silas (Gus Halper) from their last big story arc, though I could be wrong.

When this episode starts he’s under house arrest, but the police offer to let him out of home confinement at least long enough to reopen his bar in hopes that Murphy, his principal lieutenant Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), and their gang will make it a favorite hangout. That means that all the bar personnel have to be undercover cops, including their blackjack dealer (since they’re reopening not only the bar itself but also the illegal casino in its back room), a young series regular named Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger) who proiudly boasts that she put herself through college working at Atlantic City casinos and deliberately stacking the decks to let her customers win so they’d give her bigger tips. (By the way, Ainsley Seiger has the same birthdate as I do, though of course hers is 45 years later than mine!) Once the bar has its grand reopening Seamus O’Meara is pleased not only with the winning streak he’s on at the blackjack table but the comely dealer he’s handing him these hot cards. The episode ends with a cliff-hanger that is fortunately less annoying than those things usually are, and it’s interesting that now that this show has cycled through Anglo, Black, Mexican and Cuban super-villains, it’s now the turn of the Irish. Eamonn Murphy is depicted as someone actually born in Ireland but one who immigrated to the U.S. as a young adult, and the extent of his evil is revealed when he confronts Montanero’s widow Mia (Gladys Torres) with a particularly vicious man-eating dog at his side. Mia protests that the reason her husband turned on Murphy was that Murphy stopped paying them the bribe money, and in a positively (or negatively) Trumpian way Murphy protests, “Loyalty is supposed to be unconditional.”