Law and Order: "Mammon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

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

Last night starting at 8 I watched the usual Thursday night cycle of Law and Order shows, including a quite good episode of the flagship Law and Order series called “Mammon.” It starts witht he murder of an African-American graduate student who’s shot dead in the street outside her home, and the police investigating the case, Detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalan Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), after the usual red herrings, trace the killing to the “prosperity gospel” church of Pastor Mike Butler (Lyriq Bent), who is considerably qu ieter and more soft-spoken than the old “Rev. Ike” but has adopted the same modus operandi: demand huge donations from his mostly poor Black inner-city congregants, live a lavish lifestyle including fancy cars, suits and watches, and present that to his parishioners as an example of what God will do for them if they just keep giving him their money. Along the way Pastor Mike has genuinely helped a lot of people, mostly ex-cons for whom he’s arranged for jobs and also funded their drug rehab. Among the people he’s been most helpful to are Lonnie Ballard (Donald Paul), foster brother of the murder victim – they’re not biologically related but grew up together in the same foster home so they emotionally relate as brother and sister even though they weren’t – and his assistant pastor, Samuel Bryant (Willie C. Carpenter), an ex-con with a long rap sheet who claims to have turned his life around when he found God in prison.

It seems that Lonnie donated $60,000 to Pastor Mike’s church and his foster sister demanded that Pastor Mike return it after Lonnie got laid off from the job Pastor Mike had arranged for him. When Pastor Mike refused to give back the money, the sister threatened to expose him to the police and the media, so Pastor Kike offered $50,000 to Pastor Samuel to kiull her. The murder was duly carried out and the $50,000 deposited in Pastor Samuel’s bank account, but prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) are unable to establish a connection between the payment and the hit. Lonnike refuses to testify against the man who helped him get off heroin and got him his job in the first place, and the only person they can find is his own minister, Reverend Henry Sherman (Colby Lewis). Rev. Sherman actually founded the church and then retired, turning it over to Pastor Mike, but he’s still a minister and after the murder Pastor Mike called Rev. Sherman and confessed to ordering the hit. The prosecutors learn this but Rev. Sherman invokes the legal privilege of a priest-penitent relationship to refuse to testify about it. There follows an elaborate chourt hearing in which Pastor Mike’s lawyer defends the reverend against having to testify, while Price and Maroun argue for what amounts to a crime-fraud exception to the privilege.

In the end the judge orders Rev. Sherman to testify, the reverend says Pastor Mike did indeed order the hit on the grad studeit who was about to expose him, and eventually Pastor Mike pleads the case out and accepts a 20-years-to-life sentence. While I hadn’t heard of the “prosperity gospel” since Rev. Ike faded from the scene decades ago, no doubt this sirt of phony “religious” scam is still going on,and while I was a bit surprised that the set representing Pastor Mike’s church was surprisingly plain – I would have expected someone making as much money as Pastor Mike would have built himself a mega-church with which to further mesmerize his followers – overall it was a quite good episode with a really powerful, if somewhat predictable, ending. Lonnie, who previously complained to the prosecutors that if they ruined Pastor Mike he would literally have nothing left to live for, scores some heroin and is found dying of an overdose in hs apartment. At the fadeout the cops appear to have rescued him in time – though I was a bit surprised that no one responding to a distress call from the home of a known junkie came equipped with a dose of Narcan to revive him and counteract the effects of the heroin – but that still leaves Lonnie’s future very much in doubt even if he survives. It’s an example of the moral complexity that’s one of the things that separates Dick Wolf’s franchise shows from most of the rest of the cop shows on TV today (or ever).