The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  If the act itself were proof of insanity, then no one could be executed, which is, of course, Clarke’s intent. It allows us to believe that all people are essentially good, and that they do very bad things only when their brains misfire. If this is true, then it directly contradicts our primary cultural traditions, if not common sense. Christianity and traditional Judaism teach that all men are born sinful and need redemption. Humanists regard civilization as the remedy for our savage nature. The impulse to regard horrible criminals as “crazy” is common enough, but from a prosecutor’s perspective it’s also a cop-out. If punishing crime is a solemn social responsibility, then the worst crimes deserve the worst penalty. If you believe perfectly sane men are capable of doing horrible things, then the problem isn’t always illness. Sometimes it’s evil.

  Of course, accepting that there is evil in the hearts of men does not necessarily mean one endorses the death penalty. There are those who oppose it on moral grounds (the two-wrongs argument); on practical grounds (statistics do not show that executing killers deters murder); or on simple philosophical grounds (a flawed criminal justice system should not be empowered to carry out a final, irrevocable punishment—inevitably, mistakes will be made). I happen to agree with this last point. So does attorney general Eric Holder. Clarke may well agree with all of them. But she is less interested in winning any particular legal or philosophical argument than in actually staying the executioner’s hand, whatever it takes.

  The prosecutors I interviewed for this story respect her legal talent, which stands out even among the exceptionally talented and dedicated community of public defenders across the country who regard Clarke as a hero. Together they have played a huge role in slowing down capital punishment. But the lion’s share of the credit, proponents of the death penalty say, goes to the courts. The Supreme Court had imposed a moratorium in 1970, ruling that the death penalty was being imposed in an arbitrary manner and in ways that violated the Eighth Amendment, which forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.” For state courts, the moratorium was lifted in 1976, when the Court ruled that revised state death-penalty laws instituting more safeguards for defendants had remedied the constitutional issues. Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah a year later. Congress reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, adopting many of the new state practices, notably the bifurcated trial system that considers guilt and punishment separately. Even so, the willingness of courts under the new regime to drag out the process, post-conviction, has turned litigation of the death penalty into such a thicket that few prosecutors, state or federal, are willing to enter. Since 1988, only three people have been put to death by federal authorities—Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma; Juan Raul Garza, a drug smuggler who was convicted of three killings; and Louis Jones Jr., convicted of sexually assaulting and then murdering a young woman.

  Despite the attorney general’s personal opposition, the Justice Department decided in January to seek the death penalty once more in the Tsarnaev case. If her past pattern holds, Clarke is already deep into developing a sympathetic relationship with the young man, and is diligently assembling his life story. She has already successfully petitioned the federal court in Boston to ease the conditions of his confinement, and has tried repeatedly (most recently without success), to change the trial venue and push back the date until later in 2015. There is no sign that Clarke or her defense team had anything to do with it, but a long, extraordinarily detailed, and sympathetic account of the younger Tsarnaev’s life has appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, complete with a softly lit, romantic portrait of the big-eyed killer on the cover. By now Judy Clarke has no doubt become Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s best and perhaps only friend in the wide world.

  But what if his fuller story contradicts her central premise? From what we know now, Tsarnaev does not appear to have been mentally unstable. He seems to have been a very ordinary, dope-smoking, cell-phone-toting American teenager. He was an especially beloved member of a financially troubled but hardworking and law-abiding immigrant family in Cambridge. Of them all, he had made the smoothest transition to American life, spoke nearly unaccented English, had a wide circle of friends, and had even become a naturalized citizen. He won a college scholarship and appeared to have a bright future. He apparently fell under the influence of his violent and powerful older brother, Tamerlan, his alleged associate in the bombing, who was killed in a shootout with Boston police; but there is plenty of evidence that the younger Tsarnaev’s murderous choices were rational and deliberate, from his deepening identification with Islam and his growing anti-Americanism to his expressed approval of terrorism as an appropriate response to American military attacks on Muslims that he presumed unjust. Tsarnaev’s choices were dark and increasingly extreme, but he is hardly the only young Muslim in these times to have made them. Are they all crazy?

  Tsarnaev showed no hint of his state of mind during the jury selection portion of his trial. He sat at the defense side of the table scribbling notes that were passed to no one, fiddling with small scraps of paper, and gazing off into space. He looked like a bored teenager doing detention in the principal’s office. But what if he does resist, as Kaczynski did, being portrayed in whatever light Clarke believes will afford his best defense? What if Tsarnaev really meant the bloody screed he drew on the inside of the boat on April 19, 2013, as he hid from police, the complete text of which has not been made public, but which reportedly justified the marathon bombing as retribution for the deaths of innocent Muslims—“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims”—included the phrase “Fuck America,” and saluted his brother’s martyrdom. What if the younger Tsarnaev now seeks the end?

  At that point he will discover that Judy Clarke, his lawyer, his new best friend, while never leaving his side, never raising her voice or losing an ounce of compassion, may prove to be the most formidable obstacle in his path.

  The Angriest Man in Television

  Atlantic, January/February 2008

  Behold the Hack, the veteran newsman, wise beyond his years, a man who’s seen it all, twice. He’s honest, knowing, cynical; his occasional bitterness is leavened with humor. He’s a friend to the little scam, and a scourge of the big one. Experience has acquainted him with suffering and stupidity, venality and vice. His anger is softened by the sure knowledge of his own futility. And now behold David Simon, the mind behind the brilliant HBO series The Wire. A gruff fireplug of a man, balding and big-featured, he speaks with an earthy, almost theatrical bluntness, and his blue-collar crust belies his comfortable suburban upbringing. He’s for all the world the quintessential Hack, down to his ink-stained fingertips—the kind of old newshound who will remind you that a “journalist” is a dead reporter. But Simon takes the cliché one step further; he’s an old newsman who feels betrayed by newspapers themselves.

  For all his success and accomplishment, he’s an angry man, driven in part by lovingly nurtured grudges against those he feels have slighted him, underestimated him, or betrayed some public trust. High on this list is his old employer the Baltimore Sun—or more precisely, the editors and corporate owners who have (in his view) spent the past two decades eviscerating a great American newspaper. In a better world—one where papers still had owners and editors who were smart, socially committed, honest, and brave—Simon probably would never have left the Sun to pursue a Hollywood career. His father, a frustrated newsman, took him to see Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper farce, The Front Page, when he was a boy in Washington, D.C., and Simon was smitten. He landed a job as a Sun reporter just out of the University of Maryland in the early 1980s, and as he tells it, if the newspaper, the industry, and America had lived up to his expectations, he would probably still be documenting the underside of his adopted city one byline at a time. But the Sun let David Simon down.

  So he has done something that many reporters only dream about. He has created his own Baltimore. With the help of his chief collaborator, Ed Burns, a former Ba
ltimore cop and schoolteacher; a stable of novelists and playwrights with a feel for urban drama (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane); a huge cast of master actors; and a small army of film professionals shooting on location—in the city’s blighted row-house neighborhoods and housing projects, at city hall, at nightclubs, at police headquarters, in the suburbs, in the snazzy Inner Harbor, at the working docks—he has, over four seasons, conjured the city onscreen with a verisimilitude that’s astonishing. Marylanders scrutinize the plot for its allusions to real people and real events. Parallels with recent local political history abound, and the details of life in housing projects and on street corners seem spookily authentic. (A New York City narcotics detective who loves the show told me a few years ago that street gangs in Brooklyn were watching it to learn tactics for avoiding cell-phone intercepts.)

  Despite the show’s dark portrait of “Bodymore, Murdaland,” local officialdom has embraced The Wire, giving Simon and his cast and crew free rein, opening up municipal buildings, and cordoning off outdoor spaces. Many prominent citizens, including Baltimore’s former mayor Kurt Schmoke and Maryland’s former governor Robert Ehrlich, have made cameo appearances. The dress, manners, and colorful language of the show’s cast, which is largely African American, are painstakingly authentic, down to the uniquely slurred consonants and nasal vowel sounds of the local dialect, Balmerese. The Wire seems so real that I find myself, a Baltimore native, looking for the show’s characters when I pass through their familiar haunts.

  The show hasn’t been a big commercial success. It’s never attracted a viewership to rival that of an HBO tent-pole series, like The Sopranos or even the short-lived Deadwood. It isn’t seen as a template for future TV dramas, primarily because its form more or less demands that each season be watched from the beginning. Whereas each episode of The Sopranos advanced certain overarching plot points but was essentially self-contained, anyone who tries to plumb the complexities of The Wire by tuning in at mid-season is likely to be lost. If the standard Hollywood feature is the film equivalent of a short story, each season of Simon’s show is a twelve- or thirteen-chapter novel.

  Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary” fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.

  As The Wire unveiled its fourth season in 2006, Jacob Weisberg of Slate, in a much-cited column, called it “the best TV show ever broadcast in America.” The New York Times, in an editorial (not a review, mind you) called the show Dickensian. I agree with both assessments. “Wire-world,” as Simon calls it, does for turn-of-the-millennium Baltimore what Dickens’s Bleak House does for mid-nineteenth-century London. Dickens takes the byzantine bureaucracy of the law and the petty corruptions of the legal profession; borrows from the neighborhoods, manners, dress, and language of the Chancery courts and the Holborn district; and builds from them a world that breathes. Similarly, The Wire creates a vision of official Baltimore as a heavy, self-justified bureaucracy, gripped by its own byzantine logic and criminally unconcerned about the lives of ordinary people, who enter it at their own risk. One of the clever early conceits of the show was to juxtapose the organizational problems of the city police department with those of the powerful drug gang controlling trafficking in the slums of the city’s west side. The heads of both organizations, official and criminal, wrestle with similar management and personnel issues, and resolve them with similarly cold self-interest. In both the department and the gang, the powerful exploit the weak, and within the ranks those who exhibit dedication, talent, and loyalty are usually punished for their efforts.

  There are heroes in The Wire, but they’re flawed and battered. The show’s most exceptional police officers, detectives Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon, find their initiative and talent punished at almost every turn. Their determination to do good, original work disturbs the department’s upper echelons, where people are heavily invested in maintaining the status quo and in advancing their own careers. The clash repeatedly lands both of them in hot water—or cold water; at the end of the first season, the seasickness-prone McNulty is banished to the city’s marine unit. What success the two attain against Baltimore’s most powerful criminals is partial, compromised, and achieved despite stubborn and often creative official resistance.

  One measure of the complexity of Simon’s vision is that the powerful obstructionists in The Wire aren’t simply evil people, the way they might have been in a standard Hollywood movie. While some are just inept or corrupt, most are smart and ambitious, sometimes even interested in doing good, but concerned first and foremost with their next promotion or a bigger paycheck. They are fiercely territorial, to a degree that interferes with real police work. In the premiere episode, the very idea of a separate squad to target the leadership of the city’s powerful drug gangs—which one would assume to be a high law-enforcement priority—is opposed by the police department. It’s imposed on the commissioner by order of a local judge, who’s outraged when a witness at a murder trial in his courtroom fearfully recants her testimony on the stand. To spite the judge, the commissioner staffs the unit with castoffs from various police divisions. Some of the castoffs are so alcoholic or corrupt they’re useless, but some—like the lesbian detective Shakima Greggs; or the patient, wise Freamon; or the ballsy, streetwise McNulty—are castoffs precisely because of their ability. In Simon’s world, excellence is a ticket out the door.

  In one of the show’s most interesting set pieces, a remarkable police major, “Bunny” Colvin, frustrated by the absurdity of the city’s useless drug war, conducts a novel experiment. Without the knowledge of his superiors, he effectively legalizes drugs in West Baltimore, creating a mini-Amsterdam, dubbed “Hamsterdam,” where all of the corner dealers are allowed to set up shop. By consolidating drug dealing, which he knows he cannot stop anyway, Colvin eliminates the daily turf battles that drive up the murder rates and dramatically improves life in most of his district. Calm returns to terrorized neighborhoods, and his patrolmen, freed from their cars and the endless pursuit of drug-dealing corner boys, return to real police work, walking beats, getting to know the people they serve. The sharp drop in his district crime stats shocks the department’s leadership and makes Colvin’s peers jealous—and suspicious. They assume he’s cooking the books.

  Again, it’s a tribute to the depth of Simon’s imagination that this experiment isn’t presented as a cure-all. He doesn’t minimize the moral compromise inherent in Hamsterdam. Many addicts see their severe health problems worsen, and the drug-dealing zone becomes a haven for vice of all kinds. Decent people in the community are horrified by the officially sanctioned criminality and the tolerance of destructive addiction. The unauthorized experiment ends ignobly when news of it reaches the ears of a Sun reporter. City Hall reacts to the story with predictable horror, scurrying and spinning to escape blame. Colvin loses his job, and the city goes back to the old war, which is useless but politically acceptable.

  Story lines like these reflect the truth about Baltimore; Mayor Schmoke’s own promising political career crashed and burned some years ago when he had the temerity to suggest a less punitive approach to the city’s drug problem. But they don’t reflect the complete truth: like Dickens’s London, Simon’s Baltimore is a richly imagined caricature of its real-life counterpart, not a carbon copy. And precisely because the Baltimore in The Wire seems so real, down to the finest details, the show constitutes an interesting study in the difference between journalism and fiction. Simon’s first book, Homicide, was a critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, from which some of the themes, characters, and even stories of The Wire are drawn. (It was also the basis for the 1990s NBC show Hom
icide: Life on the Street.) Which raises the question—if your subject is the real world, why deal in fiction?

  The answer has something to do with Simon’s own passions and his deeply held political beliefs. “I am someone who’s very angry with the political structure,” he said in a long 2006 interview with Slate. “The show is written in a twenty-first-century city-state that is incredibly bureaucratic, and in which a legal pursuit of an unenforceable prohibition [the war on drugs] has created great absurdity.” To Simon, The Wire is about “the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism. Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. But I don’t live in Westwood, LA, or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore.”

  This is a message—a searing attack on the excesses of Big Capitalism—that rarely finds its way into prime-time entertainment on national TV. It’s audacious. But it’s also relentlessly … well, bleak. “I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Street, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with notable clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”