Boy Gone Astray (Season 20, Episode 7)
Premise: An interior designer who secretly supplies marijuana is gunned down at her door, the shooters turn out to be young teenagers trained as killers by a Mexican cartel, and their lawyer is a former Manhattan prosecutor.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 7
- 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
- Jonathan Cake as defense attorney Marcus Woll, Mario Quinonez Jr. as Rafa Alvarez, Manny Perez as Ricardo Alvarez, Elizabeth Rodriguez as Isabel Alvarez, Ernie Hudson as Frank Gibson
- Ripped from the headlines
- The plot reflects 2008 reports that Mexican drug cartels ran camps training recruits ranging from army deserters to American teenagers, and it draws on narcocorridos, the ballads that chronicle the drug trade.
- Director
- Rose Troche
- Writers
- Story: René Balcer; Story & teleplay: Keith Eisner
Summary
The Investigation
“Boy Gone Astray” begins with the murder of interior designer Nina Wilshere, hit by a barrage of bullets as she opens her apartment door, while millions of dollars in art on her walls goes untouched. A gallery mentions a second unit on the 12th floor, which turns out to be stocked with marijuana. A wiretap on dealer Lucas Evra, whom she had just cut off, records her final call, which she ended because a boy at the door said he had lost his key.
Lobby video shows schoolboys entering, one with a gun under his shirt, and a limo’s dashboard camera catches them leaving in a new Maserati. The buyer, known only as Joe, is traced to a leased house in Scarsdale. Cocaine-tainted $100 bills carried by a woman leaving the house justify a search warrant, and police find three armed boys, Rafa Alvarez, Sammy Molina and Carlos Cabezas, whose guns match Wilshere’s murder and two other drug killings.
Marcus Woll, a former Manhattan prosecutor, takes over the defense, saying the families hired him. A judge throws out everything from the house, accepting that most cash carries cocaine traces, and frees Cabezas. Rafa’s parents say he vanished six months earlier and was taken to a training camp in Mexico. A narcocorrido about “La Gringa Brava” ties Wilshere to the rival Ramon family, and a Vela cartel band’s song, released the day she died, details her wounds. Prints on a handwritten verse identify Eddy Blanco, a Vela lieutenant who bought the boys’ cars, and he is arrested.
The Trial
Woll now represents Blanco as well, so Cutter persuades Rafa’s parents to replace him, and a judge removes Woll from the boy’s case. With help from Dr. Theresa Burkhardt, who has treated child soldiers in Africa, Rafa breaks down over a dish of his mother’s birria and describes being drugged, trained and sent to kill Wilshere on Blanco’s orders. Blanco is indicted, and a new cartel ballad threatens Rubirosa, who refuses McCoy’s request that she leave the case.
At trial Woll moves to bar Rafa’s testimony as the product of manipulation and wins a day’s delay. Overnight Sammy Molina is killed in a juvenile facility, and Rafa refuses to testify. Blanco rejects a plea offer that the prosecutors make as a bluff. The judge denies Woll’s motion but refuses Cutter a continuance, giving him two hours to produce his witness.
Spoiler, the ending: Rubirosa and others plead with him as the deadline nears, but he will not speak. No verdict is shown; in the later episode “For the Defense,” the prosecutors recall that Woll won this case after their main witness was frightened off the stand.
Why it stands out
- Van Buren’s cancer storyline comes to the fore: her son brings her medical marijuana from Vermont, and the chief of detectives, a cancer survivor himself, quietly warns her to be discreet.
- Rubirosa enlists her high-school boyfriend, a DJ, to help decode the cartel ballads and mentions an outlaw ancestor, Juan Cortina.
- Jonathan Cake introduces Marcus Woll, a former ADA turned defense lawyer, who returns two episodes later in “For the Defense.”