Law and Order: Organized Crime: "All in the Game" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was one of the best of this problematic show, problematic not only because of Dick Wolf’s and his writers’ obeisance to the Great God SERIAL but also because of the virtually unlimited power of the super-villains. In case you forgot, the immediately previous episode shown two weeks before ended with Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger) being kidnapped and thrown in the trunk of the car belonging to Irish-American gangster Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), whom she’d been romancing either out of genuine affection, part of her job requirement or both. She tried to arrest him and he overpowered her and threw her in his trunk, then drove her out to the grave he had dug to accommodate Italian-American gangster Michael Amato (Don DiPetta). Seamus’s boss in the Irish Mafia, Eamonn Murphy (Timothy V. Murphy), had assigned him to kill Amato but J(et had talked him out of it, with the result that Amato brought a gun into the club where Murphy had made his headquarters and shot up the place. The cops eventually trace down O’Meara and there’s a shoot-out in which he’s badly wounded, and he’s taken to a hospital – only some of Murphy’s crooks slip past the police guards by disguising themselves as officers and ultimately cut O’Meara to pieces with knives, then the authorities pass it off as O’Meara losing a knife fight with fellow inmates.

The cops actually arrest the seemingly untouchable Murphy but he gets out of it because the FBI is actually protecting him. I have seen reports of the FBI going this far out of their way to protect gangsters on the ground that they were informants and whatever information they were giving the FBI was so important it didn’t matter to the feds that they were still killing peolpe and committing other crimes. I remember reading a book about one such case – the name I remember was “Pete Evans” but he may have been the author of the book rather than the man the FBI was protecting, and there’s also the well-reported case of Whitey Bulger. The head of the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau, sergeant Aywanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is so ticked off at the way the FBI agents sweep into her office and confiscate all the files on Murphy – especially since she’s been able definitively to establish that Murphy murdered her police partner and mentor 10 years previously, then bribed another man to take the fall for it and had him killed when he tried to renege on the deal – that Bell goes gunning for Murphy herself,

She’s interrupted when Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) tracks them down and talks her out of shooting the bastard – thereby sparing her career and Murphy’s life, so he can continue to terrorize people and carry on his murders and depredations under the FBI’s protection. There’s also a subplot in which Teddy Silas (Gus Halper) bribes a car repair shop owner to cut his ankle bracelet so he can flee the country and escape, though he too is caught and the hapless fellow who accepted his bribe because Silas had taken his expensive cars to the shop for years ends up being arrested himself for helping a fugitive from justice. This Law and Order: Organized Crime episode ends ambiguously, with the promos hinting that Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners have decided that the Eamonn Murphy storyline has run its course and they plan to do a new one, though it would not surprise me at all if they bring him back. They certainly need to deo something to give this horrible man his comeuppance!