The Ledger

3.10 Consultation

In this episode (3.10), a woman from Nigeria dies after one of the 60 heroin-filled condoms she swallowed bursts in her stomach on her way to a drug dealer in Harlem. Briscoe and Logan discover that a Nigerian tribal chief with diplomatic immunity is behind the smuggling scheme, but Stone and Robinette struggle to charge him.

The episode begins with the woman riding in the back of a taxi cab from the airport to Harlem. She begins looking ill and distressed, so the cab driver takes her to the hospital, where she dies. It turns out she had something else in her belly: an unborn son, who also died.

After talking to the doctor, the detectives track down the cab driver, who gives them the intersection where she was supposed to drop the woman off. They go there and find an African restaurant, where the proprietor is familiar with the woman's extended tribe, the Yoruba. They talk to another Yoruba man, but it's a dead end. They track down the person who paid for her plane ticket, though, by visiting an African travel agency where Logan sweettalks the travel agent (Beverly Johnson, in the first of her two appearances on the series). The ticket was paid for by Mr Marietta, who heads up the management of a Nigerian-American petroleum company. He says he sponsored her to come over and work for them, as he has done with many workers. He gives them contact information for the woman's husband, who had already been living in the states for some time.

They talk to the husband and he is devastated. He appears to be unconnected to the drug smuggling operation. They check with Immigration, and a funny, idiosyncratic INS technician deciphers her computer records and determines that the woman was sponsored to enter the country by Marietta and a Nigerian tribal chief.

They visit the chief, who is dressed in a three-piece suit and lives in a big mansion. They talk to him and he polite but evasive. They look into the chief's background and learn he has two arrests for fraud, but charges were dropped in both cases. He had swindled a bank out of repaying some loans. But these loans connect him to Marietta and the oil company.

Through the INS tech, they learn of another worker who was sponsored by the two men. They figure this worker probably smuggled drugs in, too. They bring him in for questioning, and he pleads, "Don't flog me." Apparently, that's how they get answers in Nigeria. Briscoe says, "We won't flog you...yet..." and he starts talking. He rolls on Marietta, whom they arrest (28').

Marietta lawyers up with a guy named Jacob, but he won't give them the dirt on the chief. Prints in the hotel room where the woman was headed lead to another man, a driver for the chief, so this connects him to the operation, but it's a thin case, which bothers Schiff. "It's the Supreme Court of New York, not Romper Room," he says.

Robinette talks to the woman's husband to try to get him to roll, but he won't speak against his chief. Nonetheless, they arrest the chief on charges of Criminal Facilitation 2 (40'). He gets a lawyer, too, and they tell the police what we've suspected: he has diplomatic immunity. They kick him loose until they can get a better case.

Stone and Robinette discuss taking the case before the World Court at the UN, but then Schiff calls them in and introduces them a the legal attache from the Nigerian embassy in DC. The attache is disgusted with the tribal chief, and wants to dissociate him from the Nigerian diplomatic contingent.

The ADAs and the attache meet with the driver and pressure him by suggesting they will extradite him to Nigeria where he will face trial and a certain death sentence. He then decides to roll on the chief. They also make a deal with Marietta to roll.

At the chief's trial (52'), they catch the original victim's husband in a lie -- he knew the driver even though he said earlier he didn't -- and he produces a letter from his wife saying the chief said she just had to do what that other swallower had done. This is the evidence they need to link the chief directly to the smuggling ring.

It becomes time for the verdict, but the chief is nowhere to be found. He's flown to Nigeria. They check the travel papers, and learn the Nigerian legal attache authorized them, in order to prosecute him in Nigeria, using the court record from America. Stone angrily confronts the attache and they discuss justice.

Casting notes: The Nigerian chief is played by Wendell Pierce, and the legal attache is played by Roscoe Lee Brown, a recognizable character actor who has been around forever.

Character background: Briscoe mentions he has a 17-year-old daughter who comes up from Florida every summer. He also talks wistfully about the days when he could sweettalk women, too, over "two cuba libres."

This is the 275th episode summary I've written about the original series -- only 50 more to go!

Posted by adm at September 9, 2004 06:24 PM

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