The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  As the episode draws to a close, the detail decodes a text message that indicates the Greeks are shutting down. They race the clock for search-and-seizure and arrest warrants while The Greek’s crew works to rid the appliance store and the warehouse of every scrap of paper and every speck of dope.

  episode twenty-four

  BAD DREAMS

  “I need to get clean.” - FRANK SOBOTKA

  Directed by Ernest Dickerson

  Story by David Simon & George Pelecanos; teleplay by George Pelecanos

  As Nick sleeps in the bed of a neighborhood girl, hungover from a night of drinking away Ziggy’s tragedy, the police raid his parents’ rowhouse in Locust Point, finding drugs and money and shaming the family.

  Detectives and FBI agents hit the warehouse and appliance shop, finding nothing but a bloodstain on the floor of the Eastern Avenue store.

  White Mike is picked up in South Baltimore, and Serge is handcuffed at home. Vondas is left on the street, if only so that he might again try to contact whoever it was that sent him the text message, ordering him to clean up.

  Sobotka visits Ziggy in prison, where he has already been smacked around by the other inmates. He asks what happened and Zig says he got tired of being the punchline to every joke.

  Sobotka tells his son that if things were that bad, he should have come to him for help, and Ziggy suggests that the union was his father’s one love.

  Meanwhile, Daniels blows a gasket and confronts Landsman when he finds out that the son of one target, Ziggy, murdered another target, Glekas, and no one from homicide thought to give the detail a call before the crime scene was swept clean.

  The Feds pass up a chance to grab Sobotka at his house in Glen Burnie because nabbing him at the union hall makes for better TV. When they do, Valchek is there to deliver a payback over a stained glass church window that now seems like a beef from a long, long time ago.

  The Feds take a shot at flipping Frank Sobotka, but do so hoping that he will detail union racketeering and corruption rather than give them chapter and verse on The Greek.

  You can help yourself and your union, they assure him.

  Sobotka tells the agents that he and his people have been dying a slow death for decades: “Now you want to help us?”

  White Mike immediately rolls for detectives and fingers Eton for dope and Serge as muscle. The Greek’s lieutenants are more disciplined.

  Bunk and McNulty sit on Vondas’s upper-middle-class house in suburbia, watch him drive away, and follow the car to a downtown parking garage. Using Russell, they follow him into a waterfront hotel and get the number of the room that he enters.

  Eventually, Vondas is seen leaving the hotel with a man in a dignified blue suit. Rather than go back to his car in the garage, Vondas and the man in the suit leave in a separate vehicle, telling a subordinate his own car is hot. The detectives lose Vondas, but go to work trying to ID the man in the suit.

  Pearlman offers White Mike probation and witness protection if he turns in his suppliers, and Russell, hearing this, wants to know why Frank Sobotka can’t get a deal as good as or better than a two-bit street dealer.

  See what you can do, Pearlman tells her, but don’t offer him anything specific.

  Russell and Sobotka genuinely like each other. When Beadie goes to help him, Sobotka says he knew it was wrong, “but in my head I thought I was wrong for the right reasons.”

  Sobotka learns that the publicity surrounding his federal charges have state legislators running for cover; there is no way his lobbyist, Bruce DiBiago, can muster votes for dredging or pier repairs.

  Come with me, says Russell. Tell your story in earnest. You’re a better man, she says, than the guys you got in bed with.

  Sobotka agrees, deciding to give up everything he has on the Greeks in exchange for moving his son to a safer lockup and leniency for the drug charges against his nephew Nick.

  But he will not give up any union members. Sobotka is urged to come back with his own attorney to formalize the deal.

  Stringer meets with Omar amid tight security and compliments him on the burdens he has heaped upon the Barksdale organization: Bird in jail; Wee-Bey there, too, for the rest of his life and a day; and Stinkum dead, all to settle the death of Omar’s lover Brandon.

  Stringer denies any personal role in Brandon’s torture and lays the responsibility for that excess on a contract killer from New York: Brother Mouzone. If it will clear the feud, Bell will point Omar in Mouzone’s direction.

  Omar takes the information and ambushes Mouzone at a run-down motel. But before finishing off the wounded hitman, Omar insists on explaining his motivation. In Mouzone’s response, Omar realizes that Stringer has played him.

  Instead of firing a last shot into Mouzone’s head, Omar dials 911, reports a shooting, and leaves.

  Still on the street, days after the raids, Nick Sobotka hasn’t turned up yet, and Herc and Carver sit on his parents’ rowhouse in Locust Point. Inside, Nick’s father, Louis, is scolding his younger brother, Frank Sobotka, for cutting moral corners with their children.

  Chastened, Sobotka heads down to the docks for a hard day’s labor, loading and unloading ships as men have done for centuries in Crabtown.

  He needs to sweat, he says, “to get clean.”

  At Ikaros restaurant, The Greek and Vondas dine alone. Vondas has lost his appetite, but not The Greek, who decides to systematically eliminate anyone who might turn on them.

  Vondas asks: If I could make sure that Sobotka and his nephew wouldn’t talk, might we spare their lives?

  He tells The Greek that if they shape the evidence against Ziggy toward self-defense, it will be enough for Frank and Nicky Sobotka to keep their secrets.

  Soon, Vondas is on a park bench with Nicky in South Baltimore to make his deal. We can do many things, he says, and we only ask loyalty in return.

  Before Sobotka can finalize his deal with the cops, Nick calls and urges him not to talk to the police. He tells his uncle The Greek has a better deal, one that will spring Ziggy.

  And so, Sobotka takes a long walk beneath the Francis Scott Key Bridge to meet The Greek and Vondas and hear them out. Frank goes alone, having forbidden Nick to accompany him.

  As Sobotka approaches, The Greek takes a phone call from Agent Koutris, who has been informed of Sobotka’s pending cooperation.

  Hanging up, The Greek turns to Vondas as Sobotka approaches and says: “Your way … it won’t work.”

  episode twenty-five

  PORT IN A STORM

  “Business. Always business.” - THE GREEK

  Directed by Robert F. Colesberry

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon

  The final episode of Season Two opens as the first episode did: with a police boat plucking a body out of Baltimore harbor.

  It’s Frank Sobotka, the Polish Don Quixote of a shrinking waterfront, staring into space with his throat cut.

  As the medical examiner’s staff rolls Sobotka into the back of their wagon, Beadie Russell wipes tears from her eyes.

  Still sitting on Vondas’s suburban home to no avail, the detail fears they have lost him and learn that Stephen Rados – to whom the Inner Harbor hotel room was rented – is not The Greek but a big-shot Washington defense attorney.

  Bell visits Brother Mouzone at the hospital, and the contract killer curtly dismisses him, telling him the arrangement with Avon is voided and he’ll handle his own problems.

  When Bell tells Avon this in prison, Barksdale is furious, and we witness the first true falling out between the childhood friends. His attempt to shore up his operation with new muscle now thwarted, Barksdale reluctantly allows Bell to take the deal with Proposition Joe, though he makes it clear that things will change once he is out of jail.

  Enraged by his uncle’s death, Nick vows to kill The Greek and every one of his people, but La-La and the other stevedores hold him back, saying he’ll only end up like Ziggy.

  Nick’s fath
er enters and tells him simply that it’s time to go, and father and son show up at the Southeastern District, where Nick turns himself in.

  Lester Freamon, who is receiving police data on headless torsos, a response to Serge’s uttered line on the wiretap, happens to be at the Southeast duty desk and takes charge of Nick Sobotka.

  Soon, Nick is seated before Pearlman, who offers him the same deal she had put on the table for Sobotka the day before. Nobody could help your cousin, says Bunk, because we’ve got the gun and he signed a confession.

  Nick cops to the smuggling, but says no one in the union knew they were bringing girls into port on the containers. He then offers what he knows about The Greek and his people and makes a game play to get Horseface out of the soup.

  “Horse don’t know shit … I’ll testify to that.”

  Shown the picture of Vondas leaving the hotel, he can’t identify the man in the suit accompanying Vondas. But he points to an older man leaving in the background: “That’s The Greek right there.”

  When Daniels tells Valchek of Frank Sobotka’s fate, the major says, “I almost feel sorry for the son of a bitch.”

  And then Daniels tries to salvage Prez, as Valchek lays out the penance that his son-in-law will perform, including a formal letter of apology to everyone who witnessed the punch, an in-person apology to Valchek, and two months of midnight shift on the Southeastern desk.

  After that, says Valchek, washing his hands of the mess, I don’t give a shit.

  Bubbles calls Greggs after getting locked up for an attempt to boost drugs from a city medic wagon. He tells her and McNulty about the dispute between Brother Mouzone and Cheese that led to Cheese getting shot.

  It’s as though Stringer Bell and the Eastside boys are now “sharing” territory, says Bubbles. And the dope is good again. The apparent absurdity of this interests McNulty, and the info is good enough to get Bubbles and his sidekick Johnny out of handcuffs.

  Still pressing The Greek’s lieutenants to cooperate, Bunk and Russell go to Philadelphia and retrieve a security-camera videotape taken the night the engineer from the Atlantic Light was murdered.

  The tape – along with Serge’s famous words on the wiretap – “Did he have hands? Did he have a face?” – are used against the Russian. Serge pins the murder of the engineer on Vondas and the murder of the girls in the can on the engineer.

  Though no one will be charged, Daniels has just cleared the 14 murders for Rawls.

  On the docks, the FBI threatens to decertify the union if honest elections aren’t held soon. Which is all the prompting the dock boys need to re-elect Frank Sobotka posthumously.

  The union hall will soon enough be padlocked by federal marshals.

  Daniels and Fitzhugh inspect a container of dope abandoned on the docks by The Greek, and – as it was with Barksdale the year before – Daniels sighs, “This might have been a hell of a case.”

  Nick and his girlfriend and their daughter are ushered into a low-budget motel by the Feds until witness protection can move them to something better. With no other future in sight for him, Nick goes back to the docks where the grain pier that Frankie Sobotka so badly wanted to see up and running again to get more ships into Baltimore is being developed into condominiums.

  Leaving a hotel room, Vondas and The Greek prepare to reinvent themselves in another part of the world and share a laugh.

  “My name is not my name,” says Vondas.

  “And of course,” says The Greek, “I’m not even Greek.”

  THE RULES OF THE GAME

  Given the general customs of American filmed entertainment utilizing crime and criminals as its subject matter – gripping narratives that resolve in satisfying endings that reaffirm the audience’s sense of the fundamental justice of the world – there is no reason for anyone to watch The Wire. We, the audience, are warned from the first that there will likely be no grand victories, no vanquished enemies, no heroes riding off into the sunset in police-issue SUVs. There are rules to this “game” of the TV crime drama, and The Wire flouts all of them, bringing us into a world where those charged to serve and protect are often more concerned with career advancement and bureaucratic number-crunching than with any conventional notion of justice. Our ragtag band of hero cops are flawed far beyond the threshold of easy sympathy. The bad-guy criminals they haphazardly pursue are portrayed as being so deeply, at times poignantly, circumscribed by the mean streets to which they themselves contribute meanness that easy hatred of them is likewise difficult. The Wire is playing its own game.

  I confess to a secret life as a dedicated consumer of crime drama. From a childhood ordered by Streets of San Francisco, Hawaii Five-O, and Rockford Files, through a young adulthood of Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, and Homicide, to a maturity of CSI, NYPD Blue, and Law and Order, I have consciously, deeply, and cheerfully imbibed the rules of the genre. Throughout The Wire’s Season One I kept stubbornly waiting for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale to die: to be killed in a gruesome fashion commensurate with the sum total of the lives his criminal activities had destroyed. I actively wanted it. Barring this, I wanted him sentenced to life without parole in the Hole at Marion. Week by week, The Wire kept alive these expectations; in fact, deliberately manipulated and toyed with them; but ultimately, in the end – meaning the end of Season One – betrayed them.

  If Avon Barksdale was the villain in The Wire’s first season, then it would follow that Jimmy McNulty was the hero, the knight-errant whose self-appointed task was to set the corrupt city of Baltimore to rights. Such was my expectation: McNulty was the Percival who, however bumbling, would ultimately attain his goal, be granted a sight of the grail of perfection and heal the unhealed wound of the land. He failed spectacularly in his role as triumphant hero just as Avon failed in the role of vanquished villain. Judged by the rules of TV crime drama, the show was a monumental failure. “Monumental” being the operative term. The Wire was only masquerading at the form, deliberately turning its conventions inside out in the service of a different end.

  Drama was first defined in Aristotle’s Poetics as the “imitation of action in the form of action.” “Action” (praxis), as Aristotle meant it, referred to human life as it is actually lived and experienced: reason, emotion, desire, suffering. This is where The Wire, I think, begins to expand and redefine its genre. As literary critic Francis Fergusson wrote of great drama in The Idea of a Theater, “the realm of experience it takes for its own is the contingent, fallible, changing one which is this side of final truth, and in constant touch with common sense.” Its elements of composition are not qualities of feeling or abstract concepts, “but beings, real people in a real world, related to each other in a vast and intricate web of analogies.” The Wire was not interested in McNulty’s ultimately futile quest so much as it was in probing the unhealed wound itself: in fingering the jagged grain of Baltimore; beyond that, of the human suffering in America’s urban core.

  TV crime drama has its origins in the western, in America’s mythic Wild West and the novels and movies that engendered and sustained this myth. The traditional western rests on a belief in a world that is in essence innocent, albeit eternally menaced by evil: the hero plays a role in purging a specific threat. The Wire by contrast assumes a fallen world. There is no specific threat. Corruption is the state of things. Or rather, innocence, not evil, is the threat to the status quo, because when you set off a chain of events in innocence, a nice word for “ignorance,” you have no way of knowing, or even suspecting, how much damage you might cause.

  Jimmy McNulty and D’Angelo Barksdale occupy roughly the same positions in their respective chains of command; both rage in various ways, both suffer, against the strictures of the hierarchies in which they find themselves, but both lack any real power to effect change. They are the catalysts of the chain of events in Season One – D’Angelo, through the crime that sets the scene for the opening trial, Jimmy, through his outrage at the result of this trial and “mouthing off”to the judge (
who has his own motives for setting the hunt for Avon in motion) – but both are ultimately horrified by the changesoff” to they do effect, the trail of wreckage and bodies they leave in their wake. D’Angelo is unable to look at crime-scene photos when finally in custody; Jimmy, looking back toward the end, says, “What the fuck did I do?”

  What Jimmy did (and stubbornly did again in Season Two) was simply to shake one thread of the “vast and intricate web” of relationships by which the city generally, seamlessly, runs itself; and in so doing, to make the invisible visible, before it inevitably settles back into place. No one is above or below this web, no one is immune. The Wire casts its unblinking eye on the upper and lower echelons of cops and criminals: each of them suffers, in various ways, from the malady of the city; even Avon Barksdale is perpetually menaced by competitors and by his own crew.

  In the beauty and fullness of the show, Wallace, a lovely boy stranded at the bottom rung of the drug trade, is granted his challenges and trials of soul; the addict and informant Bubbles, motivated by love and a sense of responsibility, has moments of dignity; even Omar, the pitiless stalker of the pitiless, is shown to have human qualities and impulses. Every character is granted his reasons; The Wire, again to quote Fergusson, “catch [es] the creature in the very act of creating those partial rationalizations which make the whole substance of lesser dramas.” There is no abstract principle of justice operating in this world, only real people; there is no good and evil, but there is right and wrong; actions do have consequences: lives are broken, shattered, lost, or saved, in a game that has no end.

  I am, along with being a lover of crime drama, also a student of true crime: corporate malfeasance, from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to Enron and Worldcom; political corruption, with a special fascination for the morass of greed, brutality, and inhumanity that went into the making of my home city, Chicago; police corruption, from Boston to New York City to Los Angeles; and drug crime, having lost relatives and childhood friends to what might be termed “the game.” In none of these various permutations of crime is there ever an end to the human cost involved; in none, given the vast interwoven chain of cause and effect, and the ultimate mystery of context or fate versus individual free will, can the journey of one individual, one Percival, stand for or redeem the whole.