Disappearing Acts (Season 4, Episode 5)
Premise: A rape victim is whisked into federal custody, and the hunt for her attacker runs into a federal prosecutor protecting a key witness against the Russian mob and his family.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 5
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March)
- Guest stars
- Pam Grier as Claudia Williams, John Heard as Peter Sipes, Tom Guiry as Gavin Sipes, Caprice Benedetti as Amanda Curry, Joe Maruzzo as Joe Tucci
- Director
- Alex Zakrzewski
- Writers
- Judy McCreary
Summary
“Disappearing Acts” opens when two employees find their company’s chief operating officer, Amanda Curry, raped and beaten in her office late at night. At the hospital, FBI agents arrest her for securities fraud and laundering money for organized crime, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Williams limits what the detectives may ask. Curry says her attacker called it payback and mentions a man named Sergei before Williams ends the interview. DNA from the scene matches two Brooklyn rapes of women close to Russian mob boss Sergei Perlman: his girlfriend, a stripper later murdered, and his sister, who has since died of cancer. The lab adds that the rapist is an untreated diabetic.
All three women joined the same gym, and its owner, Peter Sipes, drives a Ford Focus matching a partial plate seen near Curry’s building. Sipes refuses a DNA swab, a drunk in the squad room greets him as Gregory, and the next day Curry has disappeared from the federal jail’s records. Consecutive Social Security numbers for Sipes and his son, Gavin, point to witness protection. The drunk, petty thief Michael Kerring, says Gregory Rossovitch ran with Russian gangsters in West Hollywood before supposedly dying in a car bombing. By the time the detectives reach Sipes’s New Jersey house, Williams has moved him.
Williams says Sipes’s testimony has helped tie Perlman to 257 murders. Cabot’s habeas petition forces her to have the FBI draw Sipes’s blood; it does not match the rapist, but its Y-chromosome does, pointing to Gavin, who Williams says has left the program. Gavin owes $400,000 to an illegal card club, and his father has gone broke covering his debts. Sipes explains that he was a chemist who rose high in a Russian crime family, turned informant after it killed his wife, Anna, for skimming, and later told Gavin everything about the people he had dealt with. He agrees to surrender Gavin at a supervised visit in Connecticut.
Before the handover, gunmen kill Sipes and a deputy U.S. marshal, and the FBI and Internal Affairs investigate Benson and Stabler for exposing his location. Then the detectives learn that Gavin has paid his gambling debt in cash. Under questioning he admits the three rapes, calling the women partners in the mob’s crimes, and says he gave Perlman’s people his father’s address because he needed money and believed they only wanted to talk.
Spoiler, the ending: The detectives arrest Perlman for both murders, but a gunman disguised as a guard opens fire with an automatic weapon during Gavin’s transfer, and without Gavin the charges against Perlman must be dropped. Williams admits she has no next move.
Why it stands out
- Pam Grier guest stars as Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Williams, opposite John Heard and Tom Guiry as Peter and Gavin Sipes.
- The case puts Benson and Stabler themselves under FBI and Internal Affairs investigation.
- The episode first aired on NBC on October 25, 2002.