Profiteer (Season 17, Episode 6)
Premise: The murder of a body armor executive at his daughter’s sweet 16 party leads to an Iraq veteran avenging a fallen friend, and then to the company official who shipped vests he knew might fail.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 6
- 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
- Titus Welliver as Bill Whitney, John Boyd as Kenny Ellis, Brandon Scott as Alan Crockett, John Benjamin Hickey as defense attorney Aaron Solomon, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Director
- Arthur W. Forney
- Writers
- David Wilcox
Summary
The Investigation
“Profiteer” opens with a body armor murder: Gary Howard, 54, chief executive of Presidio Armor, is gunned down outside a hotel as he steps from a limousine at his daughter Jenna’s sweet 16 party. The gunman waited behind a planter with a newspaper carrying Howard’s picture. Bill Whitney, who runs Presidio day to day, blames antiwar anger over its army contracts, and the company’s security man points to Lloyd Savitsky, a fired chemical engineer accused of sabotaging a batch of ceramic plates. Savitsky fights Cassady when the detectives find him, but the eyewitness does not pick him out of a lineup.
Someone then delivers a Purple Heart engraved for Matt Garcia, an Army reservist killed in Iraq, to Howard’s widow. Garcia’s widow still has his medal, and his friend Alan Crockett says a rifle round went through Garcia’s vest. An advocacy group recently gave Howard’s name to a caller who claimed to be an Army investigator, and an angry unsigned letter carries prints from Garcia’s unit. Phone records link Crockett to Kenny Ellis, whose life Garcia once saved and who was driving when Garcia was shot. Green persuades an armed Ellis to put his gun down, and the weapon matches the murder.
The Trial
Ellis’s lawyer, Naomi Schatzberg, plans an extreme emotional disturbance defense, and Dr. Elizabeth Olivet finds he does suffer from post-traumatic stress. Rubirosa learns that two days after Garcia’s death the army recalled 400 vests from his battalion, which Presidio says passed retesting and were destroyed. Whitney has quietly paid Garcia’s widow $20,000. Crockett admits that he and Ellis smuggled Garcia’s vest home and tried to extort Howard, and testing shows its plate was badly flawed. Savitsky’s alleged sabotage matches the vest’s production date, yet Presidio still met its quota.
McCoy offers Ellis 15 years for his testimony and charges Whitney with depraved indifference murder in Garcia’s death. Defense attorney Aaron Solomon gets Ellis to call the vest an isolated failure and calls a sergeant who lost a leg but credits Presidio armor with saving his life. Whitney testifies that he kept shipping a suspect production lot to keep troops supplied, and McCoy shows that the only warning sits on one page of a report more than 400 pages long.
Spoiler, the ending: Before the case reaches a verdict, General Barrett arrives from Washington to press Branch to end it quietly, and Whitney’s lawyers agree to five years. Branch overrules McCoy because the military would otherwise help the defense, and Whitney accepts the plea. McCoy demands to know how many soldiers his vests killed, and Whitney replies that he saved lives.
Why it stands out
- McCoy charges the armor company’s executive with depraved indifference murder for sending a soldier into combat in a vest from a batch he knew was compromised.
- A general’s visit from Washington leads Branch to overrule McCoy and accept a five-year plea for the executive.
- Titus Welliver plays executive Bill Whitney, and John Benjamin Hickey plays his defense attorney.