Great Satan (Season 20, Episode 3)
Premise: A virtual-kidnapping scam turns up an informant inside a small group plotting to bomb a synagogue, but a second, real bombing and the informant’s own secrets put the prosecution at risk.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 3
- 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), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Ben Youcef as Sameer Ahmed, Michael Kenneth Williams as Charles Cole, Joanna Adler as defense attorney Barbara Speight, John Bolger as Don Sorenson, D.K. Bowser as Arthur Jackson
- Director
- Michael Dinner
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Luke Schelhaas
Summary
The Investigation
“Great Satan” begins with a virtual kidnapping gone wrong: curb shopper Jimmy Caruso is shot in the chest while digging through a trash can that holds $10,000 in crisp hundreds. Bank records lead to Don Sorenson, who admits firing after a caller claiming to hold his daughter demanded the cash in a fast-food bag. His daughter, Jill, then walks in, having cut class and lost her phone near Times Square. Caruso survives. The stolen phone called a number in Yemen that regularly calls Sameer Ahmed, a Brooklyn man naturalized six months earlier. Van Buren, meanwhile, begins chemotherapy.
A wiretap catches Ahmed’s partner setting up another fake kidnapping, and Ahmed is arrested at the pickup. He offers to inform on acquaintances he says want to hurt America: prison convert Charles Cole, Ali Hossam and Joe Darwish. Over the FBI’s objections the case stays with the NYPD, and Ahmed gets probation on the extortion in exchange for cooperating. Recorded in secret, the men pick a Washington Heights synagogue, buy fake C-4 and detonators from a police plant posing as a National Guard veteran, and are arrested loading the device into a car. That night a real bomb destroys Congregation Beth Sinai four blocks away, injuring no one.
Facing life without parole, Cole names the second bomber, Arthur Jackson, a man he knew from Attica who timed his attack to match theirs; police find maps of the target and plans for downing military aircraft with Stinger missiles. Darwish’s filthy apartment holds expired antidepressants and methamphetamine that Ahmed gave him with an encouraging note.
The Trial
With Hossam a dishwasher and Darwish diagnosed with depression, entrapment looms, but the prosecution keeps them, noting the target housed a shelter for abused women, and charges both plots as one conspiracy. At a hearing, Cole admits giving Jackson a detonator the police had supplied, meaning the bomb that leveled Beth Sinai used NYPD equipment.
At trial, defense attorney Barbara Speight shows that Ahmed egged the others on, then asks whether he saw Darwish around Christmas 2007. Ahmed abruptly recants, saying he manufactured the plot to stay out of jail. A detective later explains that an unsolved December 2007 warehouse burglary would make his citizenship application a lie, exposing him to deportation to Syria, where his father was once imprisoned and tortured. On redirect, Ahmed insists the defendants wanted to kill Americans, admits he recanted to hide the burglary, and invokes his citizenship oath.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts every defendant. Ahmed is jailed pending deportation, editorials ask who is to blame for the synagogue blast, and an old ruling limiting the power to revoke citizenship is floated as a possible lifeline.
Why it stands out
- Van Buren starts chemotherapy for her cancer, with her son at her side.
- In a twist that embarrasses police and prosecutors alike, the detonator that set off the real synagogue bomb came from the NYPD’s own sting.
- Two barely connected bomb plots are tried as one conspiracy, linked only by a single conversation between Cole and Jackson.