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Stabler Had an Explosive Intervention with His Brother About Drugs on Organized Crime
Stabler's personal and professional lives overlapped as he and his fellow detectives worked on a drug smuggling case that's tied to his younger brother, Joe Jr.
Season 4 of Law & Order: Organized Crime has focused heavily on drama surrounding Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and his family, namely his two brothers and their mom.
In Season 4, Episode 9, Stabler's personal and professional lives overlapped as he and his fellow detectives worked on a drug smuggling case that's somehow tied to his younger brother Joe Jr. (Michael Trotter), who's been seen shooting heroin in a past episode.
Stabler also previously found drug residue on foil in the bathroom garbage in his home after a family dinner, and when he had it tested, it was revealed the substance was sourced from an area of Afghanistan where Joe Jr. served while in the military.
In Episode 9, Joe Jr. was confronted about his drug issues, and the result wasn’t pretty.
Stabler and his older brother, Randall (Dean Norris), broke into Joe’s hotel room, where they found rolls of cash and a stash of drug paraphernalia hidden in his locked safe. When they confronted their younger brother later on about this, the situation got heated.
Stabler and his brother Randall confront Joe Jr. about his drug issues
After Stabler and Randall revealed they'd broken into his room and safe earlier, Joe Jr. said he should call the cops. But Stabler reasoned that that was probably not such a great idea, and then asked Joe Jr. how long he's been using. Joe denied taking drugs, saying that what his brothers found did not belong to him, but a friend who asked him to hold it for him.
“We know it’s yours,” Stabler said to Joe. “We also know it comes from the same region in Afghanistan that you were deployed to.”
Joe Jr. shot back, "You guys both have lost your minds."
When Det. Stabler asked if he knew how the drugs were brought in, Joe got more upset, responding: "This isn’t even about me, is it? No, no, no, I’m just another one of those dirtbags in one of your investigations? That’s what’s happening?”
Randall tried to assure Joe that wasn't true.
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Stabler tried to calm his brother down by embracing him and saying, “We’re not trying to shame you. We want to help you.”
But Joe pushed his brother’s arms away and shouted, “I don’t want any help!”
When Randall suggested rehab, Joe rejected the idea, yelling, "I’m not a drug addict!"
Stabler yelled back at Joe that he got high in the bathroom at his home. He then grabbed his brother, demanding, "Let me see your arm."
Joe pushed Stabler away and headed for the door. When Stabler begged him not leave, Joe said, “Well, that’s Stabler family MO, isn’t it?”
Randall took Joe’s wallet out of his coat pocket, saying: “You’re not gonna get far without this.”
Without his money and his drug stash, Joe later turned to his mom for her “rainy day” fund that she kept hidden in her sock drawer. When she told Joe that she spent it, he blew up on her, upsetting his mother. In a frantic move, Joe grabbed his late father’s signed Mickey Mantle baseball before running out of the apartment his mom is staying at.
Stabler's brother's heroin issues tie into the detective's job
Meanwhile, Stabler told his boss, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), and his colleagues in the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau that heroin (his brother’s) “wound up on my desk” and that it's "pure uncut black tar heroin, and forensics traced its origins to the Helmand Province in Afghanistan.”
Bell replied: “Afghani heroin on our turf, that makes this our case.”
After further analysis of the drug, the OCCB found a stamp of a one-eyed skull on the heroin that aligned with “the insignia of a special ops command called MAR, Marine Application Regiment," according to Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), who added that the command served in Afghanistan.
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It was divulged in an earlier Season 4 episode that Joe served in Afghanistan until his dishonorable discharge.
In order to uncover possible MAR veterans that have settled in the New York area, Stabler visited a veterans’ support group, posing as an ex-military member with PTSD-type issues. He eventually admitted to man who ran the group that he was trying to trace the origins of the heroin being sold to members of the support group.
The squad traced the drugs to a veteran named Angus Boone, who has retired to his family’s honey farm on Staten Island. Stabler convinced the man who ran the veterans' support group to put in a good word for him at the farm, where he then went undercover as a troubled vet in need of a job and a place to sleep.
Stabler's goal was to "assess how dangerous they are."
Detective Bashir went missing
While Stabler was undercover, the wife of Det. Samir Bashir (Abubakr Ali) showed up at the OCCB squad's office and told his colleagues, "Sam is missing. I think something’s happened to him.”
The squad traced Bashir's phone to a bakery in Queens, where it was last active, and talked to a bakery employee there whom Bashir was last seen with on surveillance video.
The man told detectives that Bashir asked him about heroin, so he made some calls and an SUV showed up with two men who forced Bashir into the vehicle.
"Looks like there’s a lot more to this than a bunch of cowboy beekeepers," Detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez) told Bell.
To find out what will happen to Stabler and Bashir, watch Law & Order: Organized Crime on Thursdays at 10/9c p.m. on NBC or stream episodes the next day on Peacock.
