Bounty (Season 14, Episode 2)
Premise: A bounty hunter is found dead in a cheap Manhattan hotel, and the trail leads to a star reporter whose interview with a fugitive heir may never have happened.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 2
- 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 Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Reuben Jackson as Brian Kellogg, Peter Jacobson as defense attorney Randolph J. “Randy” Dworkin, Richard Topol as Arnie Gleason, Colleen Clinton as Cosette Alexander, Mark La Mura as Wesley Schultz
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode is inspired by the Jayson Blair scandal, in which a New York Times reporter resigned in May 2003 once it emerged that he had invented and copied material in his stories.
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- Michael S. Chernuchin
Summary
The Investigation
“Bounty” opens with a murder at the Clinton Hotel on 10th Avenue, where neighbors complaining about loud music find a guest known only as Bob dead, his skull cracked and nothing in the room to identify him. The scene suggests a sex date gone wrong, and his only call went to Cosette Alexander, a call girl who was with a Boise businessman at another hotel. Her voicemail leads to a client, financial reporter Arnie Gleason, who denies giving out her number.
Bob’s manicurist says he came from Philadelphia by car, and a nearby garage holds his Buick, its trunk stuffed with files on Mitchell Maas, a bookstore heir on the run after a rape case. The car belongs to bounty hunter Robert “Bobcat” Rovelli, whose cell records lead to Brian Kellogg of the New York Sentinel, author of a recent phone interview with Maas. A detail in the article hints at a meeting, and Kellogg admits to a steak dinner with Maas but invokes New York’s shield law. McCoy has him arrested for harboring a fugitive.
The Trial
Kellogg’s lawyer, Randy Dworkin, answers with a First Amendment speech, but the judge leaves the issue to a jury. The navigation system in Kellogg’s company car leads to a Greenwich, Connecticut, motel, where he spent the night of the supposed dinner with a woman named Denise. Rovelli had been trailing Maas west and turned east the day the interview ran; his copy underlines a claim that Maas missed his Coors Field seat by the dugout, though the seats were behind home plate. With Kellogg’s prints in Rovelli’s room, McCoy charges second-degree murder, arguing that Rovelli spotted the fake and tried to cash in.
Dworkin’s opening blames affirmative action, arguing that the Sentinel pushed Kellogg, who is Black, into jobs he could not handle and that the strain lessens his guilt. The judge allows it and urges a manslaughter offer, which McCoy refuses, and the prosecutors argue over the policy among themselves. Managing editor Wesley Schultz concedes Kellogg rose from obituaries to senior editor in about a year and kept his job after lying about the Maas call. Kellogg testifies that he had to be superior just to avoid seeming incompetent, and that he hit Rovelli when the bounty hunter laughed at him.
Spoiler, the ending: McCoy announces a new witness, Kellogg’s married lover Denise, and Kellogg pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter with the maximum term of 12½ to 25 years. McCoy tells Dworkin the jury’s sympathy would have vanished once she took the stand, then admits he never spoke to her and was guessing based on Greenwich.
Why it stands out
- A single underlined line about a ballpark seat is what tells the bounty hunter, and later McCoy, that the interview was invented.
- Defense attorney Randy Dworkin builds his case on affirmative action, and the policy sets off a heated argument among the prosecutors that reaches back to Frederick Douglass.
- New York’s shield law bars prosecutors from forcing Kellogg to reveal what a source told him, so McCoy charges him with helping a fugitive instead.