Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Lago d'Averno" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed May 8, 2025, aired October 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After these two excellent episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit aired Thursday, October 23, the Law and Order: Organized Crime show that aired immediately afterwards (though it premiered May 8 on NBC’s “streaming” service, Peacock) was more disappointing than usual. It was called “Lago D’Averno” (“Lake Avernus”) and more or less completed the story arc about the Camorra, the gang of bandits from Naples that morphed into a major organized crime syndicate. As I’ve mentioned before, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia came over to the U.S. at the same time through Italian immigrants in the 19th century, and carried over their bitter, sometimes bloody rivalries from back home into the U.S. streets. They made an uneasy alliance so the Neapolitan and Sicilian gangsters could work together instead of killing each other, and picked a name, La Cosa Nostra (usually translated by the gangsters themselves as “This Thing of Ours”), which would represent them both. In this storyline, the Neapolitan Camorra are in a bitter gang war against a group called Los Santos from the Dominican Republic, though the main intrigue is within a Camorra family called the Spezzanos. Matriarch Lucia Spezzano (Dorothy Lyman) is running the whole show through her grandsons Rocco (Anthony Skordi), Roman (Alberto Frezza), and Pietro (Luca Richman). Their mother, Isabella Spezzano (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), was actually recruited as an informant by Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) during the 12 years he spent in Italy between his departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the start of Law and Order: Organized Crime.

Pietro was shot dead at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Promesse Infrante” (“Broken Promises”), by Eli Stabler, Elliott’s son, who was just admitted to the New York Police Department from the police academy three weeks earlier. Now he’s being hounded by an Internal Affairs officer, Moses Warren (Malcolm Goodwin), who’d always had it in for Elliott and figured he could get back at him through busting or disciplining his son. Rocco Spezzano is supposedly in prison, but he escapes by bribing another prisoner to take his place in his cell, and he comes out looking for vengeance against both Roman and Isabella. In a truly horrifying sequence, he cuts off Isabella’s finger and then puts the lit end of a cigarette against the severed end. By the time the police arrive at Isabella’s lavish country estate, complete with horses for her to ride as her main form of recreation, Isabella has been tortured to death. Also involved in the intrigue is the local church the Spezzanos attend, where in addition to a priest who’s shown as decent but largely ineffectual, there’s also a nun who’s part of the Spezzano gang and is disguising herself behind her habit. The episode lurches to an unsatisfying close as Eli Stabler confesses to his dad that he isn’t sure he really wants to be a police officer after all; he just did it because both his grandfather and his father served as New York cops, and previous episodes proved that Elliott’s dad was actually corrupt. Elliott’s mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn, whose presence here practically defines “overqualified”) asks Eli point-blank which kind of cop he’s going to be: a bad one like his grandfather or a good one like his father. It was an O.K. episode but rather clunky, and of course it’s handicapped by the fact that unlike in the other Law and Order shows, Organized Crime is worshiping at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL and doing those convoluted “story arcs” that add little to its appeal, at least for me. (Other, younger viewers may disagree; the late Gerry Williams told me that young people today had a hard time with the original Star Trek precisely because each episode was complete in itself and there weren’t continuing story lines, as there have been in the series’s more recent incarnations.)