Lucky Stiff (Season 19, Episode 11)
Premise: When the owner of a struggling trucking firm is shot in the street, the trail leads to a green-energy broker who sold the same trucks again and again, and the broker’s own murder after his conviction leaves a fortune for his heirs to fight over.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza)
- Guest stars
- Robert Iler as Chad Klein, Adam Grupper as Stan Klein, Laura-Leigh as Alicia Carson, Bruce Altman as defense attorney Brad Feldman, Michael Aronov as Alex Arshavin
- Director
- Marc Levin
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Matthew McGough
Summary
The Investigation
“Lucky Stiff” begins with the murder of Vic Russell, head of the Westside Express trucking company, shot twice in the back on a Manhattan street with his watch torn away. Russell was born Vladimir Rezanov in Russia and is known to organized crime detectives. His dinner companion, loan shark Alex Arshavin, says Rezanov expected to repay a debt soon and was followed from the restaurant by a man in a black SUV, whose sketch matches Stan Klein, a carbon-offset broker paying Rezanov to switch his trucks to biofuel.
Klein’s customers have together paid to convert far more trucks than the 40 Rezanov owns, and Rezanov’s coded ledger shows Klein passed along $300 a truck while charging $2,000. Klein’s wife owns a black SUV, a print from his thumb turns up on Rezanov’s wrist, and Arshavin picks him out of a lineup. He is charged with fraud and murder.
The Trial
Rubirosa and Cutter merge the counts into one charge of enterprise corruption, with the dead Rezanov as Klein’s partner, so a conviction means automatic forfeiture but an acquittal bars any retrial. Klein makes $1 million bail and separates from his wife, Patricia. At trial, a yard worker recalls Klein’s son, Chad, washing the SUV the morning after the killing, and the detectives find Rezanov’s watch, initialed in Cyrillic, on Chad. Chad testifies that it was under the passenger seat, and the jury convicts his father.
Before sentencing, Klein and Patricia are found shot in his rented apartment by her daughter, Alicia Carson, who says Klein blamed “the Russians” as he lay dying. The bullets come from the gun that killed Rezanov. Alicia’s roommate reveals that Alicia and Chad, stepsiblings, are secret lovers, and Chad says Rezanov had threatened to tell Patricia. Defense attorney Brad Feldman then wins abatement: since Klein died before appealing, his conviction is void and roughly $2 million stays in his estate.
Patricia left everything to her husband, so if he outlived her, Chad inherits it all, which is what Alicia’s account implies. At a Surrogate’s Court hearing, Cutter shows that Chad once took a law course covering abatement. Alicia’s lawyer then cites a draft autopsy report suggesting Patricia died last, and when Chad refuses to split the estate, Alicia says he told her to lie, that neither victim spoke, and accuses him of the murders.
Spoiler, the ending: Chad is arrested, and Alicia’s testimony is expected to convict him of both murders; no trial is shown. The draft report was a fake that misspelled Dr. Rodgers’s name, and she accuses the prosecutors of forging her work. The office then throws a welcome-back party for McCoy, home from Washington as his campaign begins.
Why it stands out
- Robert Iler, best known as A.J. Soprano on The Sopranos, plays Klein’s son, Chad.
- Klein’s conviction is wiped out under the abatement doctrine because he is murdered before he can appeal, freeing assets the state would have seized.
- The prosecutors try Klein for enterprise corruption with a dead man as his only co-conspirator, a gamble that makes forfeiture automatic but rules out a retrial if it fails.