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| “ | Good research. I researched you too. You think you're brilliant. You will never make senior partner. [...] And you'll never make captain either. You'll be tainted by him. He's insubordinate, unstable! How long before he loses it and takes you down with him?! | „ |
| ~ Le Zard to Goren and Eames during her arrest |
Leslie Le Zard is the main antagonist of the Law & order: Criminal Intent episode "Smile". Le Zard is an FDA official who sought career advancements by taking bribes and setting her colleagues up for the fallout.
She was portrayed by Amy Acker.
Biography[]
Le Zard fabricated her resume down to her being a graduate at Yale to get herself hired by the agency. Her go-getter demeanor masked her predisposition to cons so she could rise the ranks, throw her colleagues under the bus, and manipulate circumstances to maintain her position and lean on her most resourceful superiors. Her worst crimes involved taking bribes to look the other way with ineffective and tainted products, such as defective inhalers and poisoned mouthwash. When a dentist in the projects, Dr. Norm Goldman, was giving the mouthwash to kids to get drunk on and they started dying, Jacqueline Borden, an unstable mother of one of the kids, killed him in revenge. Finding out the bottles were tainted led to questioning of the FDA.
Le Zard got to work covering for herself immediately. As Jim Kettle was her colleague who realized the risks she ignored, she set out to kill him. Knowing the inhaler manufacturer, Bing Schorr, kept a defective inhaler in his office as a totem to his business, Le Zard swapped it for Kettle's inhaler. He then covered Jim's coat with tufts of cat hair, which killed him when he got home. Le Zard then left all the bread crumbs to lead to Marty Palin, her boss. She, all the while, misdirected the detectives by acting like she was the inside woman who wanted to bring attention to the crisis. But when she was confronted with the evidence against her, down to her fake resume, she was eventually arrested. Le Zard bitterly told Detectives Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames their careers would fail as well as she was getting dragged away.
Trivia[]
- Le Zard's crimes and the resulting consequences are inspired by FDA bribery in 1980s generic drug fraud cases; Schering-Plough's poor manufacturing of Salbutamol inhalers; the 2007 Chinese export recalls involving diethylene glycol in toothpaste; and the whistleblowing efforts by Susan Lester against Dr. Robert Fiddes for drug trial fraud.
External links[]
- Leslie Le Zard on the Law & Order Wiki
