Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Promesse Infrante" ("Broken Promises") (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

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

Alas, the next Law and Order episode, an Organized Crime show called “Promesse Infrante” (“Broken Promises”), was nowhere near as good as the SVU show it followed. It was about a gang war in the New York streets between members of the Spezzano family – grandmother Isabella (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her grandsons Roman (Alberto Frezza), Rocco (Anthony Skordi), and Pietro (Luca Richman) – and an unseen Dominican gang boss. The Spezzanos are members of the Camorra, a centuries-old criminal enterprise based in Naples which I’ve read about before, notably in Peter Maas’s book The Valachi Papers. Maas explained that there were two major criminal organizations in Italy: the Camorra from Naples and the Mafia from Sicily. Members of both groups emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries and fought vicious wars against each other in the streets of American cities until a few level-headed people at the top of both groups decided it would make more sense if they settled their differences peaceably and worked together. So the term “La Cosa Nostra” (literally “Our Thing,” though the Italians involved in it usually rendered it as “This Thing of Ours”) was coined to allow members of the Camorra and the Mafia to work as one. The main dramatic issue is the ambiguity of the loyalties among the Spezzano family members with whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) interacts. He thought he had recruited Isabella as an informant when he was stationed in Italy during the 12-year interregnum between Meloni’s departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the debut of Law and Order: Organized Crime. Isabella is running a legal brewery in New York but Stabler suspects it’s really a front for the Camorra. Of Isabella’s three grandchildren, Roman and Rocco are hard-core Camorra members but Pietro, at 14 the youngest of them, is torn between loyalty to his Camorra brothers and a basically decent nature that more or less turns him off to the criminal lifestyle. The climax occurs at the Spezzano brewery, which Stabler is visiting to talk both Isabella and Pietro out of their involvements with the Camorra. Just as he’s trying to talk to them, the Spezzano brewery is attacked by gun-toting motorcycle-riding members of the Dominican gang. Stabler activates an electronic device he’s been issued by the police department to alert them to a crime in progress, and in the climactic scene 14-year-old Pietro Spezzano is holding a gun on Stabler. Just as Stabler thinks he’s talked Pietro into giving up and giving him the gun, Stabler’s hot-shot son Eli (Nicky Torchia) sees Pietro holding a gun on his dad and shoots him in the back. Pietro dies, much to daddy Stabler’s discomfort since he’d had hopes of talking him out of the gang life. It was an O.K. Organized Crime, though the sheer intensity of the body count started to get to me after a while, and frankly I liked the version of Elliott Stabler Meloni played on SVU – legitimately tough but also fair-minded and not bearing the unresolved burden of grief brought on by the assassination of his wife in the first episode of Organized Crime – better than what he’s become on this show.