Gunplay (Season 15, Episode 5)
Premise: Two undercover gun detectives are executed during a buy, and the trail runs from the shooters to a website of undercover officers’ photos posted by a defense attorney whose stepson died in one of their earlier stings.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 15, Episode 5
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), 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
- Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Gordon Samuels, Wendell Pierce as defense attorney Roger Porter, Suzette Gunn as Det. Luisa Valenzuela, Mustafa Shakir as Preston Hubbard, John Speredakos as defense attorney Bob Ardall
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- William N. Fordes & Lois Johnson
Summary
The Investigation
“Gunplay” opens with a gun buy gone wrong: undercover Firearms Investigation Unit detectives Calvin May and Dexter Richmond are shot at close range in their SUV near the George Washington Bridge while backup, with no clear view, listens over a spotty transmitter; their bodies are dumped from the car. Their guns and $3,000 in marked money are gone. May was Green’s friend. A witness leads to Trevor Hawkins, who has the detectives’ wallets but says he took them from the abandoned car, and the informant who arranged the deal names a broker, Ramsey.
Ramsey is found shot dead with the detectives’ guns and cash, an apparent setup, since the same .44 killed all three men. The gun’s history leads to a man wounded in an earlier robbery, who identifies Preston Hubbard. Det. Luisa Valenzuela poses as a woman buying ammunition for her man, and Green volunteers to play her boyfriend, riding off alone with Hubbard and Quincy Ellis and recording Ellis boasting about the shootings before police box in the car, where six .380 pistols turn up.
The Trial
Hubbard’s lawyer, Bob Ardall, blames Ellis for the shooting and trades a lead for a 40-to-life deal: a website posting photos of ten undercover officers, May and Richmond among them. The pictures were taken at the DA’s courthouse entrance by a courthouse worker paid $500 by defense attorney Gordon Samuels, who is arrested. His lawyer, Roger Porter, calls the site free speech, and the judge dismisses the case for lack of evidence but orders the site taken down.
The prosecutors learn that Samuels’s law partner once defended Jeffrey North, a college student caught bringing pistols up from Georgia. North’s roommate, Brian Brown, was Samuels’s stepson, and May shot him dead when he reached for a gun during that buy. Brown had bought 20 pistols; the six from Hubbard’s car were among them, and a search of Samuels’s home finds the rest. Pressed again, Hubbard admits Ramsey, once Samuels’s client, paid him and Ellis in guns, pointed them to the website, and was then killed by Ellis to cover their tracks. Samuels rejects 40 years to life, insists the detectives murdered his stepson and fires Porter to defend himself. In a cleared courtroom he cross-examines Valenzuela, accusing undercover police of entrapment and murder until the judge cuts him off.
Spoiler, the ending: The verdict itself is not shown; it comes back in under three hours, and the prosecutors treat Samuels’s attack on the police as a failed gambit. Word then arrives that Valenzuela was in a shootout during another gun buy in Brooklyn; she is unhurt, and the suspects are dead.
Why it stands out
- Green goes undercover as a gun buyer and rides alone with the suspects while they boast about the killings on tape.
- A defense attorney claims First Amendment protection for posting undercover officers’ photos online; the first murder case against him is dismissed, but the site is ordered taken down.
- Samuels fires his lawyer and represents himself, cross-examining an undercover detective in a cleared courtroom.