There was a fifth man … he surprised us …
Summary: Don is critically injured during a home invasions investigation
Original air date: April 24, 2009 (US)
Written by: Don McGill
Directed by: Ken Sanzel
Opening numbers:
8: Home invasions
96: Diamonds
1: Key
5th: Man
Family Concepts: (character development)
- Charlie moves into a new office, which used to belong to the head of the Mathematics Department
- Larry is at an astrophysics conference at Berkley
- Nikki likes Tom Petty, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen music
- Don was born at St. Loren’s Hospital in Los Angeles
- Alan sang the entire Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Cub Band to newborn Don as lullabies.
Episode Quotes:
- Alan: He gets a breakthrough, we get to move forty more boxes.
- Colby: So the boss is giving his new relief commander a few hours in the pilot’s seat. You have flown before, right?
David: Yes. With the same lousy navigator. - Charlie: I wanted to see the face of the man who stabbed my brother.
- Don: [to Charlie] I never wanted this life for you.
Episode Synopsis:
The FBI is asked by LAPD to join a task force to solve a series of home invasions. The burglars only take cash and jewelry and have hit seven homes so far. Don asks Charlie to work up some ideas on how to better profile the burglar crew, however Charlie gets distracted from the case when he has an inspiration with his cognitive emergence work. When Nikki shows up for the equations Charlie remembers his promise and starts working on Don’s case. His math predicts the team is made up of four individuals and they seem to be mostly after smash and grab kind of payoffs. Nikki gets a call that a van has been spotted and suspicious activity near a house in the area Charlie predicts the team is working. The FBI team enter the house and after an exchange of gunfire, the four men leave. Unknown to the FBI a fifth man is waiting nearby, he knocks out Nikki and stabs Don.
The FBI manages to lift a partial fingerprint fro the house. Charlie is convinced by Alan he can best help Don by finding the man who stabbed him and begins work to identify who left the print. He comes up with Tom Kardum, an area high school teacher praised for his work and a man with no criminal history. David and Colby are skeptical of Charlie’s identification but talk to Kardum anyway. After a few minutes of talking, Kardum is spooked by David catching him in a lie and runs. Once in custody, Liz discovers Kardum is also being questioned by LAPD for the disappearance of an investment broker named Dennis Alessi. Kardum was seen with Alessi only a few hours before Alessi disappeared.
Nikki gets a hard drive from Alessi’s secretary with the names of all of Alessi’s clients, all of the home invasion victims are on the client list. Alessi also had a special client who was not on any client list and Alessi kept a safe deposit box key for him; a key that is now missing. Liz discovers Alessi’s clients were all nearly bankrupt before Alessi took them on and now all of them are making money, Liz is convinced Alessi was laundering money through his client base and the clients don’t want to talk for fear of being arrested.
Charlie is able to analyze the client list and give the FBI a likely target for the next home invasion; his prediction is accurate and the FBI arrests the rest of Kardum’s team. Surprisingly, all of the men have clean records and all of them emigrated from the same small town in Croatia. Charlie and Amita realize the break ins had nothing to do with robbery and everything to do with the fifth man; he wasn’t part of the burglary crew, he was the target the robberies were a decoy. David and Colby talk to the most recent of the robbery victims and discover not only were Alessi’s clients used for money laundering, Alessi also used them to hide a man wanted for war crimes: Slobodan Radovic. Among the other things Radovic did in Croatia he was the leader of a group engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kardum’s village.
From video footage taken a month before at Alessi’s office, Charlie is able to have a new safe deposit box key made at CalSci. He is discovers which jewelry store Alessi used to store the box. Charlie is able to get into the box and finds several diamonds. As he is leaving, Radovic finds him and demands the diamonds back. Charlie denies he has them and before Radovic can do anything else, the rest of Don’s team is there to arrest him.