The Ledger

14.22 Gaijin

In this episode (14.22), a wealthy Japanese couple appears to have been violently robbed downtown, resulting in the death of the woman, but Briscoe and Green soon learn that there is more to the story than it initially appears. DA Branch helps McCoy and Southerlyn build their prosecution.

The episode begins at a 911 call center, where here that a Japanese tourist has been shot and robbed. The woman's husband says the assailant was a black male. The husband, Mr. Yoshida, is OK, but the woman is in critical condition. He tells the detectives that he and his wife had gone down to Ground Zero and then gotten lost. He says the robber took his wife's necklace and fled in a red van.

The husband is a wealthy and well-known club owner in Japan, and his wife is a model. Van Buren says she fears the case will make NYC look like Miami in the late 1990s, when tourists were constantly the subject of attacks.

The detectives begin their search for the perpetrator with a canvas of the neighborhood. They find a fleet of red vans at a maintenance company and talk to Tom Walker, the driver of one of the vans. Walker at first can't account for his whereabouts, but then it turns out that he detoured from his usual route to visit his girlfriend on her birthday and give her a present, a vacuum cleaner. This last revelation makes Green laugh out loud.

Back to square one, just in time to learn from Van Buren that Mrs Yoshida has died from her injuries. They round up a bunch of African-American guys and have the husband try to make an ID. No luck. The political pressure is starting in thouhg, and we learn that a city councilman and the mayor are involved. They catch their first break, though, when they learn a Lexus was seen speeding from the scene. It might be too little, too late, however: the Japanese government issues a travel advisory to its citizens, saying NYC is too dangerous to visit. Whatever.

The detectives review a map on the wall, considering information about the Lexus. They figure it may have been heading towards the Holland Tunnel. They go look at pictures that computerized security cameras took at the tunnel around that time, and find an image of a Lexus heading to NJ. They trace it to an elderly Japanese-American couple with a thuggish grandson, Bobby Ito. When they talk to Ito, they notice he has tattoos consistent with members of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. The Yakuza are supposedly a big deal in the Ginza district, where Ito has his nightclub. It begins to look like there is more going on here than a simple robbery.

They decide to move on Ito, and they corner him in his apartment, and we have a little Ed Green 5-Second Foot Chase™ to bring him into custody. They find the murder weapon in his apartment.

Ito lawyers up, but Mr Yoshida has fled back to Japan, where he trashes New York City in a televised press conference. McCoy and Southerlyn visit Ito in Rikers, where Ito suggests Yoshida hired him to kill his wife, so he get the $3 million in insurance money and pay off his $1 million gambling debt to the Yakuza.

The case against Yoshida starts looking better and better. A Chinese-American (important later) waitress at a diner confirms she saw Yoshida and Ito together at the diner. The case is coming along, now they just have to get Yoshida back in the United States. However, despite McCoy's visit to the Japanese consulate, the Japanese government refuses to extradite Yoshida, and they know that if he's tried in Japan (where standards regarding circumstantial evidence are much tougher), double-jeopardy will attach in the US, and they won't be able to prosecute him.

This leads DA Arthur Branch to come up with a plan: announce they have a suspect in custody -- one matching Yoshida's description of a young black man -- and tell the world they need Yoshida back to make the ID. To this end, Branch holds a press conference during which he falsely states that they have a black man in custody and they're sure it's him and they just need Yoshida to identify him. Van Buren is justifiably troubled by this, not just because Branch lied to New York and Japan, but because, as she says, the public sees yet another black man connected to a violent crime in the city, and it just reinforces people's fears.

Despite the questionable nature of the tactic, it works, and Yoshida returns to the US via JFK Airport, where Green and Briscoe arrest him in front of everyone. Yoshida is arraigned and remanded to custody. He's confronted with the evidence against him at Rikers, and his lawyer moves for a change of venue, so he won't be put on trial in a city he recently insulted on TV. The motion fails, but his cynical defense lawyer comes up with another tactic: during voir dire (jury selection), he exlucdes every black person. McCoy challenges the one Asian juror, but for reasons unrelated to race. Inexplicably, the judge allows the defense counsel to use this tactic, a decision which defies credibility in my opinion.

At trial, things go pretty well, but it's hard to tell which way the jury is leaning. There's an interesting moment when Yoshida says of Chen, the Chinese-America waitress that, "She's Chinese...maybe she thinks all Japanese look alike." This line seems to be a jab at the typical non-Asian-American stereotype of the appearance of Asians. Considering this and other evidence, the jury deliberates and comes back with a verdict of guilty.

McCoy ends the episode by warning his boss, Branch, that he's playing with fire by manipulating and lying to the press and the city about made-up suspects.

The title of the episode refers to a Japanese word for "foreigner," which is what Yoshida is in the US.

Posted by adm at May 27, 2004 07:21 PM

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