Bait (Season 9, Episode 3)
Premise: A suburban teenager’s lies about a shooting hide his work as an unregistered informant, and McCoy goes after the narcotics detective who ignored a warning that his snitch was about to be killed.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 3
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- José Zúñiga as Detective Mark Rivera, Tom Guiry as Kevin Stanton, Victor Colicchio as Reggie Mathis, Rafael Báez as Oscar Benvenidez, Roberta Wallach as defense attorney Michele Selig
- Director
- Lewis H. Gould
- Writers
- Story: I.C. Rapoport; Teleplay: David Shore
Summary
The Investigation
“Bait” starts with 17-year-old Kevin Stanton of Ridgefield, Connecticut, collapsing in a Lower East Side doorway with a bullet wound in his chest. He claims two Black men hijacked his car and made him empty his bank account, but ATM video shows him alone and relaxed, and the burglar caught with his Mazda had found it abandoned. A drugstore receipt for condoms leads to Sarah Teasdale, a 16-year-old from Long Island found dead the next morning in a Seward Park shed, killed by a .38. Kevin denies knowing her and is arrested for her murder.
His prints turn up in a vacated drug apartment used by dealer Reggie Mathis. Narcotics Detective Mark Rivera, who once arrested Mathis, is unhelpful until he suddenly supplies the dealer’s hideout. Mathis and his partner, Oscar Benvenidez, are caught, and when Benvenidez’s prints are found on the shed door, Mathis blames him for shooting both teens over $1,000. Kevin, promised no drug charges, says he went to buy speed and woke beside Sarah’s body.
The Trial
Benvenidez’s lawyer shows that the tip on the hideout came from an illegal wiretap, Rivera admits it to the judge, and Mathis’s statement is suppressed. In Rivera’s files, Carmichael finds a raid he never wrote up, where Kevin was caught with two juveniles and quietly let go. Kevin admits Rivera pressured him into informing, steered him to Mathis, handed him $1,000 for the buy, and warned him after the shooting to stay quiet. Benvenidez now says Mathis knew about a snitch and that he phoned a warning to the narcotics squad; logs show a call reached the squad while Rivera was taking calls.
Rivera denies taking it, but alone with Briscoe he all but concedes he weighed the tip against a big case. McCoy seeks a manslaughter indictment. Briscoe objects to building a homicide case on a cop and threatens to forget the conversation, but he testifies before the grand jury. A judge refuses Rivera’s late request to testify there himself.
Spoiler, the ending: Rivera pleads guilty to criminally negligent homicide, with one to three years recommended, and testifies against Mathis. The jury votes the death penalty for Mathis in about half an hour, and Briscoe has stopped speaking to McCoy.
Why it stands out
- Rivera used a 17-year-old as an informant without the parental, bureau or lawyer approval the rules require.
- Briscoe openly resists McCoy, saying he will not help pin a killing on a cop for doing his job, before testifying anyway.
- Carmichael draws on her years in Special Narcotics, saying narcotics work pushes cops and prosecutors alike toward shortcuts.