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| “ | Okay, Karl was a bastard. He liked to kick a little ass. He yelled a lot. | „ |
| ~ Petrovich denigrating the man he had killed. |
Alex Petrovich (Ukrainian: Олексій Петрович/Russian: Алексей Петрович) is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "The Serpent's Tooth". He is a corrupt businessman with ties to the Russian Mafia who murders his business partner and his wife and tries to frame their adult sons for the crime.
He was portrayed by Jonathan Hadary.
Early life[]
Petrovich was born and raised in Kyiv, where his family had ties to organized crime. He immigrated by the United States and went into the printing business, eventually forming a partnership with Karl Jarman, the CEO of Jarman and Sons Printing; he ran the company's day-to-day business, including payroll. Unbeknownst to Jarman, however, Petrovich was in fact both embezzling from the company and using it to launder money from his family's crime syndicate.
When Jarman ran the business into debt, Petrovich made sure that the loans he took out came from the People's Bank of Brighton Beach, a front for the Russian mob, so they would take over the company when Jarman defaulted, allowing him to take over. When Jarman found out and threatened to go to the police, Petrovich came up with a new plan: kill Jarman and frame his adult sons, Greg and Nick, so he could take control of the company.
"The Serpent's Tooth"[]
Petrovich pays Sasha Osinski, one of his mob cronies from Kyiv, to break into the Jarmans' house with him and gun down Karl and his wife Evelyn, shortly before Greg and Nick return from watching a hockey game. After discovering their parents' bodies, Greg frantically calls 9-11.
NYPD Homicide Sergeant Max Greevey and his partner, Detective Mike Logan, investigate the murders, and find that Nick has gunpowder residue on his hands, which he claims is from skeet shooting. They question Petrovich, who says that he was having dinner with Osinski and his wife at the time of the murder; he also hypocritically defends Greg and Nick as "good sons". They rule him out as a suspect because of his alibi, and because he stood to inherit only 10% of the company, not a big enough sum to commit murder over. When they learn from the Jarmans' housekeeper that Karl was an abusive bully who regularly beat his sons, they arrest Greg and Nick for murder.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone and Assistant District Attorney Paul Robinette prosecute Greg and Nick, but they begin having second thoughts after Logan plays them a recording of Greg's anguished 9-11 call shortly after the murders. To make sure they are not prosecuting the wrong people, Stone and Robinette look into Petrovich's role in the company and discover that he engineered the mob loans, and that, in the event that Greg and Nick go to prison, he would take over the company while the money they had stood to inherit would go to pay off the company's debts to the mob-owned bank.
Stone drops the murder charges against Greg and Nick and has Greevey and Logan investigate Petrovich's movements on the day of the murder. They find that Petrovich parked his car two blocks away from the murder minutes before it occurred and left moments after, and that Osinski had bought the ammunition used to kill the Jarmans. Stone and Robinette arrest them both for second-degree murder.
Stone and Robinette make a deal with Osinski to testify against Petrovich in return for immunity from prosecution in New York County; neither he nor his lawyer know that Brooklyn, where he and Petrovich committed the murders, is in a different county, meaning that the deal in worthless. Osinski's testimony leads to both he and Petrovich being found guilty of murdering the Jarmans, and they are both sentenced to life in prison.
External links[]
- Alex Petrovich on the Law & Order Wiki
