Fed (Season 20, Episode 11)
Premise: A community organizer found dead with “FED” inked on his chest turns out to have been a conservative secretly filming his liberal employer, and the case widens into embezzlement and an affair at the top.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson), Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Benjamin Bratt as Rey Curtis, Sam Robards as Davis Webb, Danai Gurira as Courtney Owens, Ramon Fernandez as Arturo Ramirez, Boris McGiver as Jerry Gans, Ernie Hudson as Frank Gibson
- Ripped from the headlines
- The murder victim, found with “FED” written across his bare chest, is based on Bill Sparkman, a census worker found dead in Kentucky in 2009 with the same word on his chest.
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Story: René Balcer; Story & teleplay: Keith Eisner
Summary
The Investigation
“Fed” opens with the murder of Jim Landy, a canvasser for a voter-registration nonprofit called the Rights Alliance. A street cleaner finds his body by the Federal Reserve Bank with “FED” scrawled on his chest in marker. He was beaten for about half an hour and choked, and traces of iron oxide turn up in his hair.
Gravel from the tires of his father’s SUV leads Lupo and Bernard to Jerry Gans, an anti-government Patriot Ranger on Staten Island, who admits Landy secretly filmed their argument and that he threatened to fetch his gun. Gans is held on a terrorism charge over a stockpile of rat poison as armed supporters rally for him. Meanwhile, records show Landy once co-chaired a campus Bush re-election committee, and a college friend says he once staged a hoax to embarrass liberals.
Landy, it seems, was secretly filming his own employer. Assistant Marissa Rumstead admits going to his building that night, and a video shop’s copy of his footage shows her and a co-worker plotting to plant a condom in a Pasta Plate restaurant’s lasagna to extort franchises. Prints at the shop and paint pigment traced to a shuttered Staten Island paint factory, where blood is found, point to staffer Arturo Ramirez, and he and Marissa are arrested.
The Trial
Alliance head Davis Webb urges McCoy not to rush, and Cutter balks while Gans, who hid Landy’s camera in his composter, remains a plausible suspect. Footage from the camera shows office director Courtney Owens calling Landy that night and sending him to meet Ramirez. Her husband, Adam, a former Alliance bookkeeper, bought about $500,000 in bonds as the same sum vanished from an Alliance fund. Mid-case, Van Buren attends the funeral of Deborah Curtis, wife of her former detective Rey Curtis.
Marissa says Owens had her lure Landy to the factory and then retrieve his memory cards; Ramirez denies everything. His phone records lead to an airport hotel near JFK, where cameras show Webb and Owens meeting regularly. The prosecutors conclude Webb paid off Owens’s husband with Alliance money and had Landy killed to hide the affair. After protesters heckle McCoy at a crime panel, he and Van Buren clash over the stalled case.
Spoiler, the ending: Van Buren notices Owens’s expensive stockings and gets her to admit the affair continues; while recorded, Owens confronts Webb, who says he told Ramirez to do whatever was needed. Webb and Ramirez plead guilty, deals for Owens and Marissa are in progress, and Gans gets five years’ probation for robbery and obstruction. No trial is held. McCoy apologizes to Van Buren.
Why it stands out
- Benjamin Bratt returns as Rey Curtis, back in New York to bury his wife, Deborah, who died of multiple sclerosis; he tells Van Buren he spoke with Lennie Briscoe a few days before Briscoe died.
- Van Buren’s illness comes up when Curtis says he has heard she is sick.
- The case is closed without a trial after Van Buren persuades Owens to draw an admission out of Webb on tape.