Big bass bonanza

With the help of Stacowski, Stavros pretends to be another guy in debt who will hopefully receive a visit from Roberts, which happens very quickly. Julie says that a couple of weeks ago, she heard an argument between Raynor, who lived in an apartment next door to her. While the show is basically a medical thriller, the cops get involved because of Victor’s criminal connections. Working in conjunction with Dr. Martin Lang from the Millionenstadt Department of Health, they track down people Victor had contact with, including Jose Mendez (Guillermo San Juan, uncredited), a young boy from the barrio who came across Victor’s body shortly after he died. Sandy” Beach (Eugene Roche) is an alcoholic cop who has been on the force for 18 years and on the sauce ever since his wife died recently. While off duty, he notices suspicious activity in a warehouse near a bar where he has just finished some heavy drinking and attempts to confront the robbers, but he gets punched out, and they steal his gun and kill Tommy Fallon, his drinking companion. Kojak’s wrath and a disciplinary hearing follow soon after, with Beach demoted to a beat cop in an area with the highest rate of crime in the precinct. This, as well as constant needling from his new superior Captain Reardon (Richard Venture), does not bother Beach, because he has worked this area before and has various contacts and informers. Beach has a reputation for complaints about excessive zeal on the job, but, as Kojak points out, also has an arrest record which would be the envy of any cop. Despite Kojak’s advice to just “coast” as a patrolman until his retirement, Beach is looking to make some big score which will get him back in the good books of the police brass. Shortly after Beach is back on the streets, the three robbers from the warehouse knock off Lower Manhattan Loan and Savings Company, a fishy outfit run by the wheelchair-bound “Superfly loan shark” Morrie Rogaz (Joseph Bova). During this robbery, Jake Baker, an enforcer, is killed and his body is later dumped by Rogaz’ men in Central Park. The slugs from Baker’s body are eventually traced to Beach’s stolen gun, which was dumped in a garbage can after the robbery where it was later found by Bunky Ott (Eddie Firestone), a local bum, who trades it to liquor store owner Max Persky (Jason Wingreen) for a bottle of booze. Later Persky tries to use the gun when chasing a robber, but Beach takes it away from him because it is unlicensed. Thus, Beach ironically comes into possession of his own gun again, which he asks a bartender to keep under the counter until later. Beach tracks down a cab driven by Roger Patton (Larry Dunn), one of the three men who robbed Rogaz’ place and, unknown to Beach, one of the three who he confronted at the beginning of the show. Rogaz sends two thugs who hide in the back seat of the cab and when Patton is finished eating at a nearby restaurant, they pop up and threaten him. Patton drives away erratically, weaving all over the street, trying to shake the two in the back seat and also attract the attention of the cops, with Beach, wearing his street clothes, in hot pursuit. The cab hits another car and rams into a building, killing Patton and seriously injuring Corky Cummings (Wayne Grace), one of Rogaz’ men. The other of Rogaz’ men escapes, shooting Beach, who ends up in the hospital. Cummings also ends up in the hospital; when Kojak interviews him, he gets nothing. Beach cannot sit still and he goes to Patton’s place, where the landlady tells him that a guy named Schuster (Tony Mumolo) has been phoning. Beach returns to the hospital, where he collapses. Patton’s place was tossed by one of Rogaz’ men, producing little other than an address book, but this leads to Schuster’s place where he is shot dead (Schuster is one of the three robbers). Beach overhears a conversation in his hospital room that Kojak is having with Stavros where Schuster’s name comes up. Beach calls the police records department and gets information about Schuster’s known associates, which includes Nathan Markowitz (Joseph Stern), a thug with a scar on his hand who was another one of the three who punched Beach out at the beginning of the show and robbed Rogaz, who is out for revenge. (Rogaz says “I want to see them gonifs laid out with pennies on their eyes.”) Beach leaves the hospital again and goes to Markowitz’ place after retrieving the gun from the bar. He gets Ozzie Turnbull (Lee Weaver), a near-blind street musician who is one of his informers, to call Rogaz and tip him off to come to Markowitz’s place. Rogaz and his men show up, one of whom shoots Markowitz dead. But Kojak and the cops also show up and grab Rogaz’ men. Unfortunately, the passed-out Beach, who was holding Markowitz at gunpoint, dies, because, as McNeil says, “he bled to death.” REVIEW: Eugene Roche, who appeared in S02E17, gives an outstanding performance as a cop who puts far too much effort into his job, only to have it turn against him. But the show has some annoying questions. For example: – Rogaz’ company is not specifically identified when the robbers enter the place, other than on a building directory which is seen for only a couple of seconds. Various connections are made to it later when Beach is talking with Ozzie. Thus, we might originally wonder exactly what kind of business Rogaz is in, other than the fact that it looks like something criminal based on the kind of people who are working there. – When the taxi is been driven crazily, the two guys in the back seat are being thrown from one side of the car to the other. But it is not so bad that the one of them who has a gun couldn’t shoot through the seat into Patton. (There is a plexiglas-like shield above the seat between the back and the driver.) To find out more information about these shields, I contacted a company which makes them, Drivershields UK Limited. John Lee from the company e-mailed me: “I do not know what the New York cab shields were made of but it sounds like they were half shields covering only the upper part of the driver.

When Kojak asks the landlady (Eleni Kiamos, uncredited) if junk is always stored in the room on the main floor which the medical examiner Prince (Borah Silver, uncredited) suggests was the place where Geneen’s body lay for a day, she says, “We had a new furnace put in last year, and it blocks off the storage room downstairs.” Kojak opens a door to the basement, and asks “Checked down here?” Prince says “Yeah, it’s pretty clean.” Near the end of the show, the landlady tells Trifonis that junk in this first floor room which is his has to be moved “back to the old storeroom” — which is presumably Trifores’ hideout — because the fire marshal considers the junk to be a hazard.

The total split in Zachary’s marriage is also depicted well, with him saying “You’re only allowed so many failures in one lifetime,” and his wife telling him she loves him, even while he keeps going on in a middle-aged-man rant, bellowing “Nobody hears me!” McNeil, who can’t deal with Zachary’s methods at all because of potential problems with the police brass and the press, really screams at one point because he is so fed up. Director: David Friedkin; Writers: James Duff & Gene R. Kearney SUMMARY: This show is a slice-of-life which happens on Christmas Eve. What happens to Zachary after this point is left up in the air. REVIEW: Lots of powerhouse acting in this show, which has a script among the very best, with Kojak (and Zachary) having very snappy and, at times, sarcastic dialogue. Kojak’s dialogue was pretty snappy, but the script had several inconsistencies. He says “The two animals I figured out to be the trigger men happened to have pretty good alibis.” Who is he talking about here? But Kojak soon finds inconsistencies in the account of what happened when he talks to Daly’s partner Sam Nemo (Stephen Pearlman), who was on the scene but never actually saw any of the shooting. It is also never established why Houston and Gregg are doing the stakeout in the liquor store, as if there is any special significance to this place, like it was robbed a lot recently.

Stacowski (Emory Bass), the manager of the place, is very co-operative with Kojak in finding out which of his three female employees who handle delinquent accounts pending repossession may be involved in the scheme. When Kojak tells Eloise sarcastically about the deal that they made with Curtin, he calls it “fuzzy-wuzzy-muzzy-wuzzy.” – As Adrian is being grilled by Kojak in the presence of his lawyer, he says “May I intrude in this colloquy?” – At the end of the show as Kojak is pacing in his office, there is a calendar on the wall which has 1975 at the top of it, but the month below this, February, is actually for 1974. – The show was originally broadcast in a two-hour time slot, and later broken up into two hour-long segments for syndication. When Kojak comes to arrest Trifores, Katrina says that she and Trifores were having sex at the time of the murder, which Kojak recognizes as a total lie. At the beginning of the show, Trifores is accused of murdering a hooker named Alice Geneen after a neighborhood security guard named Fuchs (Oscar Beregi) says he saw him dumping her body outside his apartment building. The neighborhood where Fuchs is working is hardly a Gated Community.