Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Red, White, Black, and Blue" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed May 15, 2025; aired October 30, 2025)

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

Following this quite good Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode on Thursday, October 30, NBC showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime show called “Red, White, Black, and Blue” in which the principal villain is Miguel Olivas (Emilio Rivera), who’s risen so high in the Sinaloa drug cartel he’s known as “El Diablo.” Olivas has made an offer to turn state’s evidence, and to that end he’s being interrogated by assistant district attorney Anne Frazier (Wendy Moriz), only it’s a trap. Working through a Black veteran police officer named Tommy Da Silva (Peter Macon) who’s working for him as a bodyguard for a second job, Olivas is able to hire a squad of hit men to crash the hotel room and kill the people in law enforcement who were trying to take him down. He personally shoots Officer Da Silva and pistol-whips Anne Frazier to death after she pleads with him not to shoot her, and he says, “I won’t shoot you, but … .” The police investigation attracts not only the Organized Crime unit but also a detective named Tim McKenna (the older, heftier but still not bad-looking Jason Patric) who’s like Captain Ahab, with Olivas as his Moby Dick. Though he didn’t actually kill them himself, McKenna admits he was responsible for getting Olivas’s wife and child murdered. McKenna also angrily confronts Da Silva’s (white) widow Mary (Michelle Pruiett) with allegations that he was a dirty cop, and at first she throws both McKenna and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) out of her home before ultimately admitting that he was dirty and she knew about it.

She said the reason he went to the Dark Side was that after over 20 years of service, the New York Police Department was getting rid of their pension program and so he would have been left with nothing to retire on, so he started working for Olivas and the Sinaloa cartel and protecting one of their safe houses. Other detectives on the Organized Crime squad, including Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), have traced four Sinaloa drug distribution centers but there’s a fifth one that they haven’t been able to nail because it’s actively being “protected” by corrupt cops. McKenna and Stabler deduce that Olivas was hiding out at the mysterious address and get Reyes to tell them where it is, and after a quite effective suspense sequence in which Stabler hunts down Olivas through an elaborate set of tunnels under the house (kudos to director Eriq La Salle here!), he finally finds Olivas, or what’s left of him, gurgling to his death after fellow cartel members have knifed him in the tub in the hideout’s secret bathroom – though it’s left ambiguous as to whether he’s really going to die immediately or be able to recover to a modicum of health. Though this episode is obviously setting us up for yet another long-term story arc in Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, at least it had a convincing and reasonably conclusive ending. Though it wasn’t as good as the two other Law and Order shows that preceded it – especially the “Under the Influence” SVU – this Organized Crime episode was reasonably convincing and quite solid entertainment, and Jason Patric was able to make his obsessed Ahab-like character utterly convincing.