Merchandise (Season 12, Episode 4)
Premise: A girl killed fleeing a farmers’ market leads the squad to a ring that buys poor American children, works them on a Long Island farm and sells them for sex.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 4
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Devon Gearhart as Micah Holbart, Paul Schulze as Patrick Holbart, Gloria Reuben as Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine Danielson, Pia Glenn as Detective Erica Cruz, Fred Melamed as Dan Goldberg
- Director
- Peter Leto
- Writers
- Judith McCreary
Summary
“Merchandise” opens with a terrified teenage girl running from a farmers’ market into the path of a cab. Warner rules the death a homicide by forced starvation and finds that the girl was bound and had given birth within the past year. Vendors know her as Carly, a worker for Mission Farms, and her work permit identifies her as Carly Holbart, 15. Her father, Patrick, evicted after his wife died of cancer, lives in his car with his two youngest daughters. He admits that a year ago he handed Carly and her brother Micah, 13, to a woman called Magda Paloma for farm work on Long Island in exchange for a $500 advance. Mission Farms turns out not to exist.
A bystander’s video shows Micah pushing Carly into traffic. Micah turns out to have been arrested for prostitution by vice detective Erica Cruz, and Fin, with her help, leans on local pimps until Anthony Tyrell Jones arranges for a girl named Jasmine to bring Micah in. The detectives grab the boy, who fights, crying that the others will be punished; he is starved, scarred from beatings and sick from farm pesticides. His guardian ad litem, Dan Goldberg, blocks questioning while Micah is a suspect in Carly’s death, so Huang evaluates him. Micah describes a farm run by a man called Liam: a cellar, beatings, garbage for food, sex for money in city motels, and three babies born to the girls and taken away. Then he breaks down, saying he shoved Carly to stop her escape without knowing she was going for help.
Huang wants the FBI to take over, but Benson and Stabler bring the case to Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine Danielson, who swears them in as special deputy U.S. marshals. Micah’s mug-book choices lead to Victoria Reyes, who used the Magda Paloma alias and is now a protected federal witness. Threatened with losing her deal, Reyes says she sold seven children at $1,000 apiece to Liam and Julie Ryan, failed farmers; in Florida, five child workers of theirs were found dead from cyanide.
Spoiler, the ending: The squad finds the Ryans on leased land near Wyandanch. Their truck charges the detectives before the couple is pulled out and arrested, and the remaining children are found chained in a root cellar after being dosed with cyanide; medics rush to treat them. Danielson expects maximum-security life sentences. Micah is not charged but must attend counseling, the detectives place the Holbarts in a family shelter, and Patrick tells his apologizing son that the blame is his own.
Why it stands out
- Gloria Reuben returns as Christine Danielson, now an assistant U.S. attorney; she first appeared in season 9’s “Snitch” as a Manhattan bureau chief.
- This was the last episode to use the show’s original set in North Bergen, New Jersey; production then moved to the Chelsea Piers studios in Manhattan that the original Law & Order had used.