Blood Money (Law & Order episode)

"Blood Money" is the 213th episode of NBC's legal drama Law & Order, and the eighth episode of the tenth season.

Plot

An elderly retired insurance salesman is found dead and stabbed in a taxi cab after he arrives at his final destination. The driver only noticed that the man was helped in when he was picked up near a bank. When the medical examiner investigates, she finds that before he was stabbed, he was also shot.

The detectives learn more about the victim, and find out that he sold life insurance to European Jews during the Second World War. After the war, he refused to honor the policies of holocaust victims and emigrated from Italy to the United States, where he worked for the American parent company of his Italian firm.

The victim kept a handwritten log of all the policies he sold in a safe deposit box at the bank and took it with him when he was subpeonaed to testify about the scheme. Years before, he had shown his son the book, telling him that it was worth a large amount of money.

The prosecutors determine two different crimes occurred: when the victim left the bank, he was shot by his son to stop his father from selling the book, then afterwards he was stabbed by a man hired indirectly by the insurance company to steal the book.

The prosecutors charge the stabber and his accomplice with manslaughter, the son with murder, and the chief executive of the insurance company with over one thousand counts of grand larceny, one count for each of the accounts purported to be in the book. The policies would, in total, be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

At first, the prosecutors have a difficult time making a case, but one of the executive's assistants fills in details of the case after feeling remorse during earlier testimony. This assistant tells the prosecutors that the executive was the one who created the plan to steal the book, and that he was in possession of the book. In return for the book, the executive agrees to plea guilty with a prison sentence of four to twelve years and a written waiver of extradition to Italy.