The Ledger

11.5 Return

In this episode (11.5), the prime suspect in a murder flees to Israel to escape prosecution, and McCoy and Carmichael try to get him back. The murder involves a family business. Briscoe and Green investigate.

The episode begins with some teenagers going into the basement of a store they shouldn't, and discovering the body. It's a leather goods store, and the owner is the victim, Saul Kaplan. He's found with two gunshot wounds and $240 in his wallet. The kids reluctantly admit they were with a hooker that night. They talk to the hooker, and she tells them that another hooker she knows, a transvestite named Toreador, has a brand new leather jacket. They track down Toreador, a real character, who admits she got the jacket from a "friend" of hers. The friend is an employee of the store who was stealing from it, but he is innocent of the murder. They learn that the lock on the basement door had been tampered with post-opening, which means that whoever unlocked it had the key, but tried to make it look like he didn't. Going through the employee records, they find a guy with a record named Sal. His friend Eddie Novello has a jacket from the store, and under pressure, Eddie, who isn't too smart, confesses to the murder and says Sal ordered it. They pick up Sal at an afterhours club, and learn that he frequently sold jackets there with his friend Eli Becker. Eli, it turns out, is another employee of the store, and the son of the victim's business partner. Eli's about to be arrested, but he flees to Israel.

The Israeli consulate says that Eli has claimed his "right of return" as a Jew, and wants to have a trial in Israel. He was a resident of Israel a few years earlier, and so therefore says he is eligible to stay. Eli's father is no help at all, and is very protective of his son. A city councilor, apparently representing various Jewish interests in his distrcit, talks to the DAs office and says he wants to office to honor the right of return. Then they find out that Eli was adopted, and his mother was Irish Catholic, not Jewish. Eli's status as a Jew is then called into question.

In an unusual twist, Carmichael goes to a "Rabbinical Court" in Brooklyn which settles disputes in the Jewish community. If they determine Eli was not really Jewish, then perhaps the Israeli authorities will return Eli to US/NYC custody. The rabbis decide that the "standard for conversion" has not been met and that Eli showed no evidence of living a Jewish life. This decision greatly angers Eli's dad, who tells them to "drop dead" and storms out.

The DAs make a deal with Sal, who pleads to Man I, 10-20 years, and agrees to testify against Eli.

Eli's trial begins (42 minutes in to the episode). Things are going ok for McCoy, but really take off when the son of the victim, who has known Eli for a long time, rolls on Eli and says how Eli intimidated and threatened him. Now that it looks like McCoy has a conviction wrapped up, the city councilor returns and asks if Eli can serve his sentence in Israel. No problem there. In a big Family Conference Room Meeting, Eli admits to his disappointed parents that he committed the crime.

Posted by adm at April 9, 2004 07:54 PM

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