Entrapment (Season 7, Episode 9)
Premise: A gunman wounds activist Roland Books and kills his bodyguard, and the case against the son of Books’s murdered predecessor rests on an informant’s tape.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 9
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Michelle Hurd as Angela Roney, Chris McKinney as Huey Tate, Gloria Foster as Satima Tate, Samuel E. Wright as Dubois, Ron Cephas Jones as Roland Books
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- René Balcer & Richard Sweren
Summary
The Investigation
“Entrapment” opens outside a Harlem restaurant, where Roland Books, head of the African American Congress (AAC), is wounded and his bodyguard, Otis Cooke, is killed by .25-caliber fire after Books clashes with white contractors over minority hiring. Books took over the AAC after Marcus Tate was assassinated four years earlier. Steel contractor Robert Falco needs the Harlem job to repay a union pension-fund loan, but his driver’s missing time turns out to involve a deal for stolen car stereos.
The young stereo thief remembers a blue Ford with an AAC sticker parked near the restaurant. One of the group’s blue cars belongs to Satima Tate, Marcus Tate’s widow, and is kept by her son, Huey. Huey says he was alone at a movie, but the car’s tires carry fresh mud. When the detectives look for Huey’s old friend Angela Roney, FBI agents take her in and produce her tape of Huey vowing to kill Books to avenge his father. Huey is arrested for Cooke’s murder and the attempt on Books.
The Trial
Books calls the arrest a government frame-up and pledges bail. The FBI asks Schiff for a plea to protect Roney, and gunshot residue turns up in the car, but Huey’s lawyer, Dubois, turns down a manslaughter offer and claims entrapment. Roney was once a paid FBI informant against a Colorado doomsday cult. At the hearing Huey says Roney pressed him for weeks until he agreed, though he says he backed out. When Agent Fletcher refuses to describe his recent contact with her, his testimony is struck, and the judge dismisses the charges.
Roney’s former roommate says Roney had her own keys to Huey’s car. Threatened with contempt, Fletcher admits Roney had tried to sell him the Tate story for $20,000 and that he brushed her off after she failed a polygraph. Faced with the keys, residue on her jacket and no alibi, Roney pleads to second-degree murder, saying Huey supplied the gun and wanted Books dead.
Spoiler, the ending: The gun was licensed years earlier to Cooke, the bodyguard, and Books denies knowing how it reached Huey, so nothing corroborates Roney and there is no case against Huey Tate. Books appears in public with Huey and his mother, recasting the shooting as an FBI plot.
Why it stands out
- The story returns to the killing of Marcus Tate, first seen in Season 3’s “Conspiracy.”
- Michelle Hurd, who plays informant Angela Roney, later played Det. Monique Jeffries on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
- An entrapment ruling frees the defendant after an FBI agent refuses to answer questions about his informant, and the informant turns out to be the shooter.