History Main / SmokescreenCrime

* ''Film/TheBatman2022'': [[spoiler:This is implied to be the case with the deaths of Bruce's parents. Initially, it is believed that Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed in a mugging gone wrong. However, Bruce uncovers that Martha was severely mentally ill and a journalist was planning to expose this despite Thomas begging him not to. In a moment of desperation, Thomas went to Carmine Falcone for help, who had the journalist killed. It is suggested that Falcone had Thomas killed to keep him from going public about Falcone's crimes, but the movie never makes this clear.]]

** "The Ho Ho Ho Job": The team learns that Hardison's nemesis Chaos is running an identity theft scheme at the mall from which their client was fired. The team stop him by shutting down the mall server, only to discover that this was all a smokescreen -- Chaos's true target is the federal depository which Hardison also shut down when he deactivated the mall server.

During an investigation, it comes to light that the crime the protagonists are investigating is merely a cover for the perpetrator's true objective, leaving the authorities chasing a false lead.

* ''Series/NineOneOne'': In "Ocean's 9-1-1", two thieves fake a chemical attack on a bank to distract from them stealing money from an armored truck parked in front of the bank. Then it is revealed that one of the two thieves used the armored truck robbery as a distraction from the theft of diamonds from the bank's vault.
* ''Series/BrooklynNineNine'': In the season 7 finale, Jake and Charles arrest a man who caused a citywide blackout by getting drunk and driving into a power substation. Jake and Charles notice that something is off when the man is not only sober but is revealed to be a recovering alcoholic who has been clean for two years. [[spoiler:It turns out that the man simply caused the blackout as a distraction so his friends could rob a bank.]]

** In "[[Recap/Daredevil2015S1E6Condemned Condemned]]", Wilson Fisk decides that [[DirtyCop Detective Christian Blake]] is a liability that he needs to get rid of. So he has a corrupt ESU sniper on his payroll gun down Blake and two uniformed cops outside an abandoned building where Matt Murdock and Vladimir Ranskahov are holed up along with a rookie cop who was overpowered and tied up by Matt. The corrupt ESU team that get sent in to "rescue" the rookie cop proceed to murder said cop as well. Thanks to Fisk's influence over the press, he's able to spin the cop killings as the work of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen (Matt) rather than targeted assassinations.
** In "[[Recap/Daredevil2015S1E10NelsonVMurdock Nelson v. Murdock]]", Leland Owlsley and Madame Gao conspire to have Fisk's girlfriend Vanessa Marianna killed because they think she's making him go soft. They do so by poisoning her champagne, along with that of several other guests at Fisk's charity gala (Vanessa survives because Fisk immediately rushes her to the hospital). As a result, it looks like Vanessa ended up the victim of an assassination attempt against Fisk himself.
** In "[[Recap/Daredevil2015S3E4Blindsided Blindsided]]", Matt visits the prison where Fisk was held to get information on Fisk's stay there. Unfortunately for him, Fisk has planned a trap for in case one of the lawyers who put him away happened to stop by the prison. After the nurse injects Matt with a sedative, Fisk remotely orders the guards and inmates to attack Matt, and orchestrate a riot in order to make it look like he got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Matt manages to escape the riot thanks to the help of several of the Albanians at the prison, who help him past the guards after providing him with the identity of the inmate Fisk paid to shank him. [[CrazyPrepared Fisk then turns out to have planned another contingency for if the riot failed to kill Matt]], as he's had [[NotMyDriver Matt's cab driver replaced with one of his henchmen]], who then proceeds to drive Matt into the river.
** Over the course of season 3, Fisk manipulates FBI agent Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter into [[CostumeCopycat wearing a Daredevil suit]] and committing a series of terrorist attacks for him. The attacks serve to discredit the real Daredevil (Matt) and those allied with him, while also providing a cover for the death of individual victims that Fisk wants dead.

** Prior to the events of season 2, Frank Castle's wife and children were killed in a gang shooting at Central Park. District Attorney Samantha Reyes had lured the gangs to the park with the intent of taking them down, but chose not to clear the area to avoid showing her hand. The twelfth episode of season 2 and [[Series/ThePunisher2017 the Punisher's own show]] reveal that Frank's former commanding officer had taken advantage of the sting to try and kill Frank to make sure he never spoke of the atrocities his men committed in Afghanistan, hoping to make it look like Frank and his family were simply collateral damage in a gang war.

* ''Series/{{Gotham}}'': The mystery of who killed the Thomas and Martha Wayne is a long-running plot thread throughout the show and the deeper Bruce digs, the more it becomes clear it wasn't a simple robbery-homicide. [[spoiler:It's ultimately revealed that the Waynes' deaths were ordered by Hugo Strange because Thomas was opposing Strange's experiments at Indian Hill.]]

** In "Point and Shoot", it turns out that the murder of the week was intended to cover up several local cops and a judge being on the take from a corrupt multinational corporation.
** In "Scorched Earth", the culprit of the week sets off a string of fires near unhoused camps in order to make the burning of a valuable house look like the work of a serial firebug.
** In "Reciprocity", Alec and Marisa learn the truth about the bombing that Marisa has been investigating all season (and which left Alex so heavily scarred): [[spoiler:Kevin Sanford accidentally killed Natalie Price, a campaign aide, and in a panic, called up Bob Caswith, an old war buddy who worked for the FBI. Caswith helped cover up Natalie's overdose, then arranged for a bombing in which she was supposedly killed.]]

** ''Series/LawAndOrderOrganizedCrime'': The episodes "Deliver Us From Evil" and "End of Innocence" deal with the vandalization and bombing of a local mosque in what appears to simply be a hate crime. However, the detectives investigate further and discover that the mosque's refugee charity was being used as a cover for a smuggling operation. The bombing of the mosque was to obscure the assassination of the imam to prevent the operation from being exposed.

** In season 3, Fisk manipulates FBI agent Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter into [[CostumeCopycat wearing a Daredevil suit]] and committing a series of terrorist attacks for him. The attacks serve to discredit the real Daredevil (Matt) and those allied with him, while also providing a cover for the death of individual victims that Fisk wants dead.

** In "[[Recap/Daredevil2015S1E6Condemned]]", Wilson Fisk decides that [[DirtyCop Detective Christian Blake]] is a liability that he needs to get rid of. So he has a corrupt ESU sniper on his payroll gun down Blake and two uniformed cops outside an abandoned building where Matt Murdock and Vladimir Ranskahov are holed up along with a rookie cop who was overpowered and tied up by Matt. The corrupt ESU team that get sent in to "rescue" the rookie cop proceed to murder said cop as well. Thanks to Fisk's influence over the press, he's able to spin the cop killings as the work of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen (Matt) rather than targeted assassinations.

* ''Series/Daredevil2015'': Prior to the events of the series, Frank Castle's wife and children were killed in a gang shooting at Central Park. District Attorney Samantha Reyes had lured the gangs to the park with the intent of taking them down, but chose not to clear the area to avoid showing her hand. The twelfth episode of season 2 and [[Series/ThePunisher2017 the Punisher's series]] reveal that Frank's former commanding officer had taken advantage of the sting to try and kill Frank to make sure he never spoke of the atrocities his men committed in Afghanistan, hoping to make it look like Frank and his family were simply collateral damage in a gang war.

* ''Series/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'': In "Raw", a grisly school shooting by a white supremacist is eventually traced back to a pair of greedy white adoptive parents who put out a hit on their adopted black son so they could collect on his life insurance policy. By sheer dumb luck, the white supremacist happened to be affiliated with a terrorist group, and thus the SVU was too busy investigating their many other crimes to look at the insurance angle from the start.

* ''Series/Daredevil2015'': Prior to the events of the series, Frank Castle's wife and children were killed in a gang shooting at Central Park. Season 2 reveals that District Attorney Samantha Reyes had lured the gangs to the park with the intent of taking them down, but chose not to clear the area to avoid showing her hand. The twelfth episode of season 2 and [[Series/ThePunisher2017 the Punisher's series]] reveal that Frank's former commanding officer had taken advantage of the sting to try and kill Frank to make sure he never spoke of the atrocities his men committed in Afghanistan, hoping to make it look like Frank and his family were simply collateral damage in a gang war.

** Mr. Monk and The Sleeping Suspect" : The killer of the week finds a way to send bombs through the mail months after he deposited them with the intent of killing his siblings for their inheritance. To give himself an alibi, the killer deliberately provoked Stottlemeyer and Disher into a car chase in the hopes that he would be arrested and be in jail at the time the bombs were delivered. The plan works a little too well and the killer falls into coma after crashing his car during the chase.

** ''ComicBook/SpiderManBeyond'': Issue #88 reveals this to be the reason behind [[spoiler:Beyond's plan to coopt superheroes. By staging their own superhero battles, Beyond hopes to control the news cycle by keeping people's attention solely on fights between costumed individuals or groups while more important incidents and crimes fly under the radar. As Marcus Momplaisir points out, this plan would require Beyond to create their own supervillains for their heroes to fight, which Beyond is also doing.]]

* ''Literature/TheABCMurders'': The villain decided to murder [[spoiler:his rich, childless, soon-to-be-widowed brother, whose name and city of residence both begin with the letter C]]. To hide this fact, [[spoiler:the villain first murders people whose names and cities match A and B, respectively]].

* ''Series/{{Castle}}'': In one episode, a group of thieves break into a secure building and steal some codes. The code theft is actually a diversion for their real target: a nerve gas from a lab in the same building.

** "Mr. Monk On Wheels": The plot is kicked off by the theft of a bike which is later found in a dumpster. The bike itself was not important; the thief was hired to steal the bike's eight-digit keypad lock whose password was the same one used for a safe containing genetically-altered seeds that are worth a fortune.

* "Mr. Monk and The Secret Santa": The killer is Alice Westergren, who murders her ex-lover Terry Chasen with a bottle of poisoned wine. She starts a Secret Santa exchange and arranges for Captain Stottlemeyer to be Terry's Secret Santa. Then she delivers a bottle of port (which she knows Stottlemeyer hates) anonymously to the captain making it look like a local body shop sent it. Alice steals Stottlemeyer's intended gift to Terry and recommends re-gifting the port to him to save face, which the captain does. Terry drinks it and dies, making it look like he was the victim of a failed attempt on Stottlemeyer's life and sending the police after the completely wrong set of suspects. Only Monk realizes that the suspect isn't the killer because he passed up a much better opportunity to kill the Stottlemeyer months ago.
** A man breaks into a jewelry store by smashing through the wall of a bar, steals some items, and kills the proprietor. It's later discovered the man accidentally killed his date and the bar had a mural of them together on the wall. The man broke through the wall he and his date were painted on to destroy evidence of them being together and stole the items to make it look like a robbery. (The proprietor's death was another accident.)

** " Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine": Two years prior to the events of the episode, a woman helped her husband commit a robbery, during a driver of the armored car they targeted was killed. Racked with guilt, the women killed herself and left a suicide note that not only confessed to the crime but also stated when and where a new robbery by her husband and his accomplice. The husband shot Leland Stottlemeyer which resulted in all available police officers giving chase, including the police officers that were in the apartment from which his wife had jumped out of. This allowed the husband to sneak into the house, steal the wife's suicide note and leave a fake one that made no mention of the robbery.