You know it’s coming. So let’s speculate on how they will do this one.
My bet: The show starts with Madoff dead, a sympathetic investor is found to be the killer. The defense lawyer goes straight for jury nullification, arguing, in some more words that “he needed killing”. Jury acquits.
Yours?
Wednesday’s episode WAS their Madoff episode. But it was the mistress who was dead, not Madoff. And – speaking in 20/20 hindsight, of course – that’s really the way to do it, because it provides the opportunity for him to be despicable on the stand.
But we could speculate how the spinoffs might have handled the same material:
SVU: Someone chops off Madoff’s weenie. Defense goes for jury nullification, arguing that he has already suffered enough, what with the weenie removal. Jury, filled with men who don’t want to think about weenies to begin with, acquits.
CI: Goren outwits Madoff using his knowledge of some arcane financial law, or perhaps the mating habits of Bolivian spider weasels. Probably both.
Darn, I missed Wed episode. What was it about? Nevermind spoiling it, I don’t care.
L&O has this weird thing where they take stories “from the headlines” as the main draw for the show, but in the end the actual mystery/case is nothing like the real headlines. It’s just a nice wrapper.
I’ll spoiler it anyway because there’s no spoiler notice in the thread title.
A woman is found dead in Harlem. Turns out she was hit by a newspaper truck while running away scared. Why was she running away scared? Turns out she’d been held captive in an abandoned building nearby. She was held captive by someone who knew she was the mistress of a Big Investment Firm guy, and the kidnapper wanted $200k.
The alleged kidnapper was this guy who ran a program for ex-con boys. He wanted to buy a “farm” for the kids and needed $200k. He had gotten the Big Investment Firm Guy to promise a donation from his Big Investment Firm. But, the Firm tanked so the guy reneged on his promise. The kidnapper guy wanted the Big Investment Firm Guy to give money out of his pocket instead.
In the trial, the defendant’s lawyer spent a lot of time talking about how the Big Investment Firm Guy was evil and had plenty of money to give. In fact, he was out of town just this week on a “business meeting” in the resort town of Sedona, AZ. The judge kept telling the defense lawyer to STFU.
The defendant said that the girlfriend was the one who came up with the scheme. She said that Big Investment Firm Guy had plenty of money to give out of pocket, and that he’d never call the cops because he didn’t want his wife to know he was having an affair. The defendant didn’t know why the girlfriend broke out of the abandoned building, ran down the street and was so scared that she jumped in front of a truck. He said she must have been scared of the rats in the building.
The kids from the defendant’s center at first were giving all sorts of conflicting alibis for the defendant. Then the cops took them to this “farm” that he’d been promising them. It was nothing like he’d described. Also, when the kids were on the stand the prosecutor got them to admit that the defendant often made promises he couldn’t keep. Of course the defendant gave a heartwarming speech on the stand about how everything he did was for the kids.
Anyhoo, the jury was completely swayed by the defendant’s attorney’s arguments about how Big Investment Firm Guy was greedy and it was his greed that drove the defendant to do what he did. They acquitted him.
That’s it.
In addition, the defense attorney was played by the guy who played Artie on The Sopranos.
This wasn’t the Madoff episode really, it was the Lehman Brothers/Bear Stearns/AIG/Citigroup episode.
That was an odd episode. From the very first scene I thought the mistress was in on it, since she removed all her jewelry and put it in her bag. I kept waiting once the verdict was in for the cops to find something that would show she really was in on it, but it just ended. The cops found her bag in the abandoned apartment. Wouldn’t they have noticed all her jewelry inside it and thought it strange? We as the viewer are not usually given important evidence that is never commented on by the characters. It felt like they kept bringing up threads of where to go with the story that never panned out. I thought the whole twist would be that the husband found out where she was being held, went to see her & bruised her arm, and she fled from him, but as it stood it felt like the story was unfinished.
They’ve done it. It’s an older episode, but I’ll spoil it anyway.
It started out with an attorney getting killed, and it was because a novelty salesman had hired him to sue a novelty store for stealing his idea. The novelty store’s owner was the mistress of the Madoff character, and her store was a front for his money laundering. The attorney found out, then sent off letters to all the victims, saying for a nominal fee he could get their money back. Some people paid, and it turned out the son of one of the victims killed the attorney after he talked to Madoff in his halfway house.
I was thinking of another episode but that was more of an Enron / hedge fund company than a Madoff.
I suspect the episode will end with the Madoff character shot dead on the courthouse steps by one of his victims.
They couldn’t have been done the episode before the Madoff scandal went off.
I am sure he’ll end up dead in that episode though.
They won’t be subtle about it. An episode based on Madoff will use the phrase “Ponzi Scheme” at least fifty times.
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No, no, no, you’re all wrong. In the Madoff episode, the Madoff character will drive some poor man to kill himself and his whole family after getting scammed out of everything he owns, and DA will charge the defendant with murder under some kind of “greedy bastard” theory of accountability.
Ah, but how will that allow the DA to present Madoff as a “bastard, but he didn’t deserve to die, being a ‘financial terrorist’ doesn’t carry a dead sentence” Vs the defense’s “let’s teach all the crooks a lesson”? 
BTW, the defendant will have a really sad story behind the motive for his killing, like a disabled child who needs money, or an organ transplant, which he cannot afford now because he lost everything in Madoff’s scheme.
OK, so I guess that THIS week’s episode was really the Madoff episode. I don’t know that it really worked for me, despite the presence of Sledge Hammer himself as the newscaster.