The Ledger

10.21 Narcosis

In this convoluted episode (10.21), a corrupt cop or a teenage hacker appears to be responsible for the death of a sleazy prostitute/madame who also ran a lucrative online striptease business. Briscoe and Green investigate; McCoy and Carmichael figure out who to prosecute.

The episode begins with two lady friends walking down the street talking about how men aren't trustworthy. One of them women discovers the victim's body behind some trash cans. She has no ID on her. She's been strangled.

Through her fingerprints, they learn she has an arrest record and went by the name "Lotus Blossom". She wasn't raped, but details from her record and body suggest she was a prostitute. The dets visit the address on her arrest report and meet her trashy old dad in a dirty t-shirt. He's estranged from Lotus Blosso (real name: Lorraine Selby), and his wife, Lorraine's mom, is dead. They visit the funeral home where Lorraine paid for the arrangements, and learn she also paid for the arrangements for another Chinese woman. They visit the doctor who signed the death certificate, and he has an address that leads to an apartment above a shady massage parlor. In the apartment, they notice indentations in the carpet which suggest something (like a desk) has been removed.

They talk to neighbors and learn someone had removed things to a white van a few days earlier. They also learn the cops had raided the massage parlor and that Lorraine appeared to run the parlor. One of the neighbors who wrote down license plates for vehicles he believed patronized the massage parlor gives them the plate of the white van.

They trace the van to "Enchanted Imports," where they find a guy watching over some shipping containers. Living inside one of the shipping containers are a dozen Chinese women who had been smuggled in from China and had been forced to work as prostitutes. They interrogate the watchman, who eventually leads them to a man named Eugene who apparently masterminded the smuggling and prostitution operations.

One of the Chinese women says through a police translator that she saw Lorraine fighting with a man with a mustache. Eugene tells them where they can find security video tapes from the parlor. On a tape marked "Insurance," they find video of a police raid. During the raid, two mustachioed cops are seen planting evidence (a marked bill) at the scene.

They question the cops, who admit that they planted the evidence and that they were being extorted by Lorraine. They were forced to act as protection for her, lest she reveal the evidence-planting. They claim they did not kill her.

You would thing the script would pursue this angle, but instead it starts to go astray here.

They go through the files they find on Lorraine's computer and learn that she was chatting with someone who was threatening her. Long story short, they eventually trace the username of this person to a kid in Queens who was obsessed with her and had spent $50K on her, charging it to stolen credit cards and those of his parents. The kid said stuff to her like, "Meet me or I'll kill you." Skoda, having not met the kid, says he's an "internet addict," and he and the ADAs have a big discussion about what that means.

But then of course it turns out that the boy's father, desperate and powerless over his son's obsession, tracked down the girl and killed her. Physical evidence: fibers from his torn wool gloves.

During the trial (51'), the defense trashes the victim, and the jury goes along with it. They ask if they consider a reduced charge, and the judge lets them consider Manslaughter I, which they convict him of (off camera). McCoy is angry over the reduced charge.

As the episode ends, Schiff says, "A crime that started somewhere in China destroyed a family here in New York." In fact, this isn't true. The incident that led to the prostitute's death had nothing to do with the smuggling: her involvement with her killer was one-on-one and through the interactive website. More evidence of the script sucking: the entire first half of the episode -- all the stuff about smuggling and the corrupt cops -- had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime.

Sloppy, loose writing in yet another L&O episode that approaches the internet with paranoia.

Posted by adm at March 9, 2005 05:31 AM

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