Bling (Season 17, Episode 18)
Premise: When a rapper is found shot in her home, her secret affair with a married jeweler to hip-hop stars points to him, and then he points to her tough record producer.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 18
- Detectives
- Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Det. Nina Cassady (Milena Govich)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Nicky Katt as Isaac “Iced Out Ike” Krantz, Ato Essandoh as Andre Blair, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley, Joey Auzenne as Don Bissell
- Director
- Karen Gaviola
- Writers
- Matthew McGough
Summary
The Investigation
“Bling” begins when two autograph hunters walk into the home of rapper Clarice James, known as Sweet Clarice, and find her dead, shot twice in the chest with her jewelry untouched. A car dropped her off around 1 a.m. Green and Cassady look first at her feud with Roxy Black, whose associate Ricky Bonner was wounded outside a radio station, but Bonner calls the rivalry hype. Clarice was also owed about $200,000 in royalties by Andre Blair of Time of Death Records, a producer with assault and gun convictions who once dangled a man from a hotel window.
Her phone records show constant calls to Isaac Krantz, “Iced Out Ike,” jeweler to rap stars, who says she owed him $400,000. The medical examiner finds Clarice lived for hours after being shot and was six weeks pregnant, and a clinic doctor says she canceled an abortion while deciding what to do about the father, a married man who did not know. A safe-deposit box holds about $1 million in jewelry bearing Krantz’s mark, and his phone puts him near her home after 1 a.m. A doorman at his Tribeca hideaway saw him change clothes, and blood on his shoe matches Clarice’s type. He is arrested in front of his wife.
The Trial
A paternity test confirms Krantz is the father, and he agrees to a 15-year plea. At his allocution, though, his story of punching Clarice and shooting her in the head conflicts with the autopsy, and Judge Walter Bradley rejects the plea. Krantz now says Blair shot her in front of him and threatened his family. After Krantz is stabbed at Rikers by a man who invokes Blair’s name, he agrees to testify that Clarice had threatened to expose Blair’s drug dealing and his laundering of money through diamond purchases.
Blair used an ATM near Clarice’s brownstone that night and will not give an alibi, telling the detectives he is a target because he is Black. Branch lets McCoy drop the charge against Krantz and indict Blair. At trial Blair says he rang her bell, got no answer and glimpsed a thin white man inside. Rubirosa starts to believe him, and a visit to Rikers reveals that Krantz paid inmate Don Bissell, through a $10,000 transfer to Bissell’s wife, to stab him in a way that would miss his organs.
Spoiler, the ending: Faced with a possible 45 years, Krantz accepts McCoy’s offer and pleads guilty to Clarice’s murder, still claiming she attacked him. The case against Blair is dismissed. Blair asks for an apology, and McCoy says he followed the evidence; the prosecutors are left weighing Blair’s claim that it is always about race.
Why it stands out
- A judge throws out the jeweler’s guilty plea during allocution because his account of the shooting does not match the medical evidence.
- The prosecutors put the wrong man on trial: their star witness turns out to have arranged his own jailhouse stabbing to frame the producer.
- Rubirosa questions whether the prosecutors believed the jeweler over the producer because of race, a theme the episode returns to in its final lines.