SVU Episode #13-7: Mail-Order Brides
Recap: Wow. I think SVU's excellent writers stepped out for a coffee break, and while they were gone, the guys who wrote Saw IV snuck in and wrote the manuscript for tonight's show.
In the opening scene, we find the tattooed corpse of a lithe young woman behind a dumpster. She's been raped in every possible way. Her face has been sanded down to the bone by a power sander, her teeth have all been extracted, and her fingers amputated to conceal her identity. (Ugh. I had to put aside my popcorn.) Our detectives soon find that she was Lena, a beautiful Russian mail-order bride. Her distraught American fiancee paid supposed kidnappers an $80,000 ransom to save her life. The fiancee is devastated that she was killed although he coughed up his life savings.
But Lena is actually alive! With the help of facial recognition technology, the detectives find recent pictures of her online. They discover that a Russian crime boss called The Butcher works this scam: he gets a rich man to fall in love with Lena, convinces the sucker that she's been kidnapped, then demands all his money. After the money is collected, The Butcher then murders and tattoos a different prostitute in order to convince the sucker that Lena is really dead. Similarly mutilated corpses have appeared in dumpsters around the world.
Captain Cragen goes undercover and has a "date" with Lena. In the process of talking with her, Cragen gets teary-eyed as he describes his late wife, their attempts to have children, and his drive to help save needy children. Cragen falls in love with Lena, at least a little bit. I thought this was the best part of the show. The acting in these scenes was great, and I liked backstory for our devoted Captain.
Cragen soon arrests Lena, and she spends the next few scenes toying with the Captain's heart like a kitten with a ball of yarn. But when Detective Amanda kills The Butcher (nice shot!), Lena snatches a gun off of a uniformed policeman, shoots him dead, and tries to run away. Although Cragen's eyes are haunted, he catches her and hauls her off to prison.
Verdict: C-
What they got wrong: The prostitute killings made absolutely no sense. Sure, there could be a scam where you get someone to fall in love with you, pretend to be kidnapped, and then take their ransom money. Unlikely but possible. But then why kill and tattoo another woman to make it look like you actually died? At that point, you have the guy's money. You're not getting any more money by supplying a mutilated corpse. All you're doing is upping your crime from fraud – where you might serve probation – to first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances, where you're going to jail for the rest of your life. And why rape the corpses of these dead prostitutes? Just to make the guy who was scammed even more upset and likely to help the police? I've never heard of this scam happening in real life. This was more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than a real sex crimes investigation.
What they got right: The Russian mail-order bride business is so rife with fraud that the State Department has a name for it: "Boris-and-Natasha scams." A lonely bachelor in Scranton meets doe-eyed Natasha online, falls in love, and sends her money for airline tickets to visit him. In fact, Natasha is a bearded guy named Boris, who's no longer available for online chats after he pockets the cash. The typical haul is between $2,000 and $5,000. (No mutilated corpses are necessary.)
Facial recognition technology is being used more and more by law-enforcement authorities. A friend of mine (actually my high-school prom date), Steve Russell, created a private facial-recognition company called 3VR, which is being used in many airports and hotels to provide security.
Other companies have found more recreational uses for the technology. Facebook can recognize your friends' faces and tag photos of them automatically. There's even a company that uses facial-detection programs for the patrons of local bars, so you can check out the male-to-female ratio before deciding whether to head over there.
