Soldier of Fortune (Season 12, Episode 4)
Premise: A diamond dealer is seized at gunpoint in an attack that kills two people, and the case leads to $100 million in conflict diamonds, soldiers from Sierra Leone and the head of the world’s dominant diamond cartel.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 4
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Röhm), DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest)
- Guest stars
- Lance Reddick as Captain Maru Gasana, Michael Hayden as Henri Girard, John Cullum as Bernard Powell, Sr., Jeffrey DeMunn as defense attorney Norman Rothenberg
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Barry Schindel
Summary
The Investigation
“Soldier of Fortune” begins with a kidnapping on Lexington Avenue: masked men with automatic weapons pull a well-dressed man into a van, killing shopper Iris Draper and banker John Hammins, who seems to have tried to help. The FBI steps in when diamond dealer Richard Powell is reported missing. Powell had canceled his appointments in advance, insured $7 million in stones days earlier, and told a department-store buyer he expected top-grade diamonds. The van turns up in Long Island City with Powell inside, beaten, his throat cut and one hand severed.
Bank video shows Hammins, who oversaw collateral for his bank, entering a vault with Powell, who walks out holding the briefcase he had just bought. The getaway vehicles were stolen from a Brooklyn car lot whose salesman Denebe Wurie fits a witness description and has just flown home. A raid on his apartment finds a bloody machete and Gasana, an army captain from Sierra Leone, who gives only name, rank and serial number. Wurie and two other soldiers have already left the country on military passports.
The vault held about $100 million in rough diamonds owned through a Swiss shell by Girard Ltd., a cartel that controls most of the world’s diamond trade. Its head, Henri Girard, is in New York for price-fixing talks and stops answering questions. Apprentice cutter Janusz Bruk explains that Hammins and Powell meant to skim the best stones, which were conflict diamonds Girard should not have owned, and that another dealer had been offered them first. Gasana eventually names his superior, Colonel Koidu, who has ties to security firms Girard pays to guard mines.
The Trial
McCoy charges Girard, arguing that only he could have told the soldiers when the stones would leave the vault. Gasana recounts rebels cutting off his little sister’s arm and says he took Powell’s hand so it could do no more harm, adding that the stones went home and he was betrayed. Girard says his company led the boycott of conflict diamonds, but under cross-examination he argues that the whole world looks away when it is convenient.
Bernard Powell then confesses that he was the dealer Hammins approached first, and that he warned Girard, never imagining his own son would take up the offer.
Spoiler, the ending: Faced with Powell’s account, Girard admits he asked a government contact to recover the stones quietly, but says Koidu, whose pro-government faction is fighting rebels for the mines, acted on his own. McCoy lets Girard leave the country in exchange for help extraditing Koidu and the three soldiers and a list of the company’s holdings, including its stockpile of conflict diamonds. No verdict is reached.
Why it stands out
- Lance Reddick guest stars as Gasana, a Sierra Leonean army officer who sees the robbery as a mission for his country.
- The case turns on conflict diamonds, stones sold to fund civil wars in countries like Sierra Leone and Angola and placed under UN sanctions.
- A grieving father turns out to be the source of the tip that led to his own son’s murder.