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| “ | You! You couldn't keep your mouth shut. Two years in jail. You would have walked out a wealthy man! | „ |
| ~ Cleary cursing his son for turning him in. |
Roger Cleary is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "The Corporate Veil". He is the greedy CEO of a medical supply company who sells reused and faulty pacemakers to his unknowing customers, causing several deaths when the devices fail.
He was portrayed by the late Robert Milli.
Early life[]
As a young man, Cleary earned an MBA from the City College of New York and married a woman named Annette whose father ran an electronics company. He took over the business and remade it into BioNorm Industries, a medical supply company that made and sold pacemakers, and that eventually became a multimillion-dollar corporation.
He and Annette were wealthy enough to send their son Steven to MIT, Annette's alma mater, to study electrical engineering. He also employed Annette and Steven in the company, with the former acting as vice president and purchasing agent and the latter as a technician inspecting the pacemakers' leads, wires that deliver electrical signals to a person's heart.
At some point, Cleary started selling pacemakers with corroded leads to save money on manufacturing, and six patients died when their pacemakers shorted out. Cleary settled with the victims' families, including non-disclosure agreements in the contracts so the failed pacemakers were never connected to BioNorm.
"The Corporate Veil"[]
After Roberto Martinez, a 16-year-old boy with a heart condition who was fitted with a BioNorm pacemaker, dies of a heart attack, his mother and her lawyer go the Homicide Department of the NYPD's 27th Precinct claiming that the doctor who implanted the pacemaker is responsible for his death. NYPD Homicide Sergeant Phil Cerreta and Detective Mike Logan question the doctor, who says that he had no reason to believe that a BioNorm pacemaker would fail. They also question both Roger and Steven Cleary, who both accuse the doctor of selling a pacemaker he knew to be second-hand, and that Roberto died because the device's battery failed.
Eventually, Cerreta and Logan trace the pacemaker to unethical medical supply salesman Jeffrey Suiter and arrest him for fraud and second-degree murder. Suiter admits to the fraud, but he claims that Roberto died because the pacemaker's leads were corroded, not because the battery died. Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone and Assistant District Attorney Paul Robinette investigate BioNorm's supply chain and discover that the defective leads came from an in-bulk purchase from a fly-by-night company in Singapore run by a convicted con artist, and that Steven Cleary inspected the leads personally. They have Cerreta and Logan arrest him and charge him with second-degree murder.
During the trial, Cleary refuses to say whether his son inspected the faulty leads, indirectly implicating him. Stone and Robinette suspect that BioNorm knew that the corroded leads were responsible for all seven deaths, so they hold a meeting with Steven in which they threaten to charge Annette, who has the education and position in the company to know whether they were selling bad leads, with murder. Steven says that his father ignored his and Annette's advice to recall the defective pacemakers and told him that he "owed it to the family" to take the blame after their customers died. He then offers to testify against his father in return for reduced prison sentences for his mother and himself.
Stone and Robinette meet with Cleary, Annette, and Steven and threaten all of them with 25 years to life in prison for seven counts of second-degree murder. Cleary tries to bully his wife and son into keeping their mouths shut, but they refuse and condemn him for ruining their lives. Desperate, he tries to make a deal with Stone for a reduced sentence, but Stone, disgusted by Cleary's willingness to sell out his own family, declines. Cleary pleads guilty to second-degree murder, and Stone predicts that he will "die of old age and still owe the state 50 years" in prison.
