The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  This is the real – the fallen – world, an under-acknowledged aspect of our country, the United States, that The Wire so thoroughly, brutally, and compassionately portrays.

  This brings me to what I would argue is the true achievement of The Wire: its subtle awareness and understated indictment of the larger game that occurs off-screen. As much as I enjoy crime drama, I am always on some level wary of shows that use urban suffering as a forum for entertainment. I am constantly searching for the escape, the “letting off the hook,” that these shows give the predominantly middle-and upper-middle-class audience; the ritual purgation that allows the audience – myself included – to go on with their lives while the predominantly poor and African-American body count continues to accrue in real projects, in Bridgeport, Camden, St. Louis, Dallas, Denver, Oakland. In The Wire, there is no grand public outrage or outcry for the murders to be solved; these deaths have become so commonplace, as they have in our world, as to seem unremarkable. Even Jimmy McNulty comes to realize that the motivations behind his various quests have more to do with ambition and arrogance than they do with outrage at injustice.

  I admired The Wire’s matter-of-fact awareness that the lives of inner-city blacks – to the cops, the community, and the larger public – are not worth a dime. But the show goes a step beyond this: it is aware that these lives are also, paradoxically, worth quite a bit. The profits of the drug and sex trades travel out from the projects to banks, corporations, politicians, developers, while the unutterable suffering through which that money is made remains geographically contained. For me, the most plangent of the show’s many great lines was spoken in Season One, by the sacrificial lamb, 16-year-old Wallace: “If it ain’t West Baltimore, I don’t know it.”

  As articulated by D’Angelo in his classic set piece on the rules of chess, the pawns suffering on the game board don’t see the larger game; to them, it is all in the game. The forces that profit from the game, that allow the carnage to occur – without outrage, without fear, without shame or guilt – include us, the audience and wider public off-screen, with our own comfortable notions of justice, our own necessities, our own reasons and partial rationalizations for doing nothing to demand that it stop. The Wire’s true greatness is its chilling awareness of this fact,that the wire that links society, that ties us all together – in this case symbolized by the pen register following the trail of money and ultimate responsibility – will be allowed to trace and implicate only so far. Beyond its scope, as the old maps of the flat and undiscovered world used to caution, there be monsters.

  Anthony Walton

  SEASON THREE

  SEASON THREE OVERVIEW

  YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

  Kurt Schmoke voiced his concerns about the war on drugs in 1988 … he is a prophet without honor in this country … but a prophet nonetheless …

  DAVID SIMON ON THE FORMER MAYOR OF BALTIMORE

  Kurt Schmoke, one of Baltimore’s brighter native lights, seriously harmed his political career when, as mayor of a city plagued by narcotics and its attendant violence, he suggested that America rethink the problem as a decriminalized health issue.

  Schmoke, now dean of the Howard University School of Law in Washington, was mayor of Baltimore from 1987 through to 1999.

  He embodied the role of a progressive Baltimore health commissioner with the same name in a pair of episodes – “Middle Ground” and “Mission Accomplished” – in Season Three of The Wire, which dramatized some of what Schmoke was trying to say decades earlier.

  As for Hamsterdam, the idea preceded the name.

  “It was the result of the reporting Ed [Burns] and I did for The Corner in 1993,” said David Simon. “We would debate what might be done if the country walked away from its dysfunctional drug prohibition.

  “I think the idea of a free zone was more my argument … Ed saw problems in the approach, which we depicted as well.”

  Simon said he and Burns agree that a societal – if not legal – acceptance of the drug problem as a health issue and not a problem for law enforcement is the only way to begin.

  And that big fat war on drugs budget?

  They suggest, Simon said, “… using the resources of the drug war to economically reintegrate one America with the other … [although] the strategy of Hamsterdam may or may not be practical for a variety of tactical reasons.”

  In sketching out ways to dramatize radical reform in the American inner city, “we began calling [Bunny] Colvin’s program the Amsterdam experiment.

  “And then someon`e – I believe it might have been Ed, but I could be wrong – said the kids would mishear it and say Hamster-dam.

  “And that just killed us.”

  As swiftly as it put a serious dent into Kurt Schmoke’s career and killed Bunny Colvin’s.

  •

  Looking for new dramatic flashpoints after Season One on the streets and Season Two on the waterfront, Wire fans welcomed the insanity of Hamsterdam while looking for resolution of the established power struggles as the Neville Brothers announced Season Three with their interpretation of “Way Down in the Hole”.

  Will Bubbles – “that’s me, born fucked up …” – beat junk?

  When will Valchek get more than a punch in the face for being a world-class, rat-fucking prick?

  How long before Omar gets Stringer got?

  Season Three would see Avon return home from prison as puzzled by Hamsterdam as the runners and touts who work for Barksdale without ever having met him.

  “The Greek” set sail but not Vondas, whose cold, businessman’s ass would warm that Patterson Park bench above the streets of East Baltimore until the final credits rolled.

  Omar?

  What do you think?

  “One thing that distinguishes Omar is his absolute patience,” said David Simon. “He’s willing to endure even longer surveillance than the police do. He’s absolutely determined.”

  Finally, asked Simon, unaware when Season Three opened if there would be a Season Four: “How do we entertain the masses while at the same time laying bare the political processes through which an increasingly disenfranchised people are to seek redress?”

  City Hall was to the third season what the Port of Baltimore was to the second and the West Baltimore housing projects were to the first: the wall against which the core drama of the investigation will be thrown.

  On staff to make it ring true is William F. Zorzi Jr., a veteran Baltimore newspaperman who specialized in backroom politics and hadn’t a clue that before it was all over, TV viewers around the world would come to know his comely mug as though he were their cranky “Uncle Bill”.

  In the past, politics along the Chesapeake Bay (where early 17th-century refugees from Britain established the first Roman Catholic English colony in the New World) has nearly rivaled Louisiana as a haven for corrupt government.

  “You’re presuming dysfunction,” chuckled Zorzi, whose long tenure at the Baltimore Sun included several years covering the General Assembly in Annapolis and a stint as assistant city editor from 2000 to 2002 before leaving the paper soon after.

  “I see my job to make it as accurate a portrayal of city and state politics as possible,” he said. “Not just the machinations of what makes the city move, but the very real things that happen in the course of a citywide election.”

  And this: “I’d like to get into things that people just don’t talk about much – like the reality of race in politics.”

  As Carcetti mused: “Every day I wake up white in a city that ain’t.”

  “We’re going to see the world of City Hall and how it dovetails with the police department and the ’hood,” said Zorzi. “It’s a safe assumption that crime will be an issue.”

  Dead center in Season Three’s take on crime is Robert Wisdom, reprising his Season Two cameo as Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin, the war-weary commander of the Western District.

  “I grew up in Washington [in 1953], and when I look at Baltimore and see th
e boarded-up houses, there’s a sadness,” said Wisdom, who in 2007 appeared in the Hilary Swank movie Freedom Writers.

  “As [a black man] I can speak the language of that foreign country – the invisible America – but I don’t know the spiritual devastation.”

  To play Colvin, Wisdom said, he flipped “those feelings,” demanding the character ask himself hard questions about a job that on the surface is about helping people but became a tool for career advancement and financial security.

  “That is what feeds Colvin,” he said. “This role is asking me to find my greatness. I’m at the point in my life where I can handle this much storytelling.”

  MAYOR O’MALLEY TO THE WIRE: DROP DEAD

  “Violence and addiction were the sad facts of our past …”

  – WISHFUL THINKING FROM MARTIN O’MALLEY, MAYOR OF BALTIMORE (2000–2006)

  It’s not exactly the boxed set of DVDs the Chamber of Commerce would use to lure entrepreneurs, tourists and new residents to their fair city.

  First Homicide, followed by The Corner and then five brutal seasons of The Wire; each set in Baltimore, one darker and more desperate than the last, all from David Simon, that troublemaker with a notebook and an agenda.

  The Wire is a thinly fictionalized, meticulously researched drama in which the city of Baltimore looms larger than any actor in the ensemble cast.

  It’s no secret that Martin O’Malley, who became governor of Maryland in 2006, was an inspiration, at least in part, for Mayor Tommy Carcetti, a white councilman who splits the black vote to become mayor and, by Season Five, governor of Maryland.

  [“One of several inspirations,” said David Simon publicly about the O’Malley/Carcetti similarities, with characteristics of other local pols “whose names you wouldn’t even know.”]

  In 2004, while still mayor, O’Malley said: “Along with The Corner, [The Wire] has branded us in the national and metropolitan eye in a way that is very counterproductive to growth, hope, violent-crime reduction and recovery.”

  Echoing Omar’s taunting of Barksdale-organization defense attorney Maurice Levy, O’Malley continued, “The producers and the drug dealers are the only people who benefit from the perpetuation” of what the mayor termed “the city’s past record of drugs and violence.”

  O’Malley’s successor upon his election to the State House – former Baltimore City Council president Sheila Dixon – was not quite as aggressive in criticizing The Wire, but no more pleased.

  “Some people have the perception from outside of the city that this is what the entire city looks like and it doesn’t,” said Dixon on a January 2008 edition of the Jim Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. “It’s a small fraction of an environment here in the city.”

  Almost a year to the day after Dixon appeared on the Lehrer show, she was indicted on 12 counts of felony, theft, perjury, fraud and misconduct in office (in connection to gifts received from a former boyfriend and developer). On May 28, perjury charges were dismissed; seven other criminal charges – including theft – were left standing. Dixon’s trial begins in September 2009.

  In April of 2009, one of the hundreds of local actors sent to the set of The Wire by casting director Pat Moran – a 63-year-old self-described hustler named Harold Lee Able, Sr. – was shot in the head and killed.

  Able was murdered in East Baltimore while working as an unlicensed cab driver, known as a “hack.” A former laborer at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Sparrows Point east of the city, Able worked on Season Two of The Wire as a stevedore named “Moonshot.”

  [He has a scene at the Clement Street Bar with the other veteran stevedores talking with pride and bravado about the good old days of unloading ships with muscle and not technology.]

  At the time of his death, Able had just completed a role as a gas station owner on a movie called The Sins of the Fathers.

  In 1988, there were a mere 234 murders in Crabtown. That’s right, only 234 – 191 of them by gunfire – the lowest number of homicides since just before the 1980s crack epidemic hit American cities. In 2007, there were 282 murders, closer to typical in a city where homicides have hovered near or above 300 a year for decades.

  Just before the 2004 Memorial Day holiday, the news was filled with reports of one dead and eight wounded in four unrelated city shootings in a five-hour span.

  Less than 48 hours later, three children under the age of ten were found decapitated in a Northwest Baltimore apartment.

  These are the kind of headlines – “Nine People Shot in Five Hours” said the Baltimore Sun – that obliterate a closer parsing of statistics championed by politicians.

  “Baltimore is reducing crime and overdose deaths faster than any major city in America this decade,” said O’Malley, not long before running for governor.

  Noting that he had nothing against The Wire as “art or entertainment,” he argued that the show “has done nothing to help us in that important fight.”

  By the end of 2002, according to O’Malley, Baltimore led all large American cities in reducing crime, ahead of both Chicago and New York. Yet inside the police department, district commanders were being pressured to reduce crime statistics by any means necessary, resulting in the wholesale manipulation of those statistics. Some of those commanders would tell of their plight in private conversation with Simon and Burns, and the O’Malley administration’s massaging of its crime stats became, in turn, a new theme of The Wire’s last season.

  During his tenure, the annual average of homicides went down from about 320 before he took office to 260 in his first term.

  One resident tried to help clean up her drug-plagued East Baltimore neighborhood by repeatedly calling police, testifying in court and going nose-to-nose with corners boys entrenched outside her home.

  For these acts of citizenship, she paid dearly. Her fate was the sort of atrocity that was startling even by Baltimore standards, making national headlines that trumped anything The Wire had portrayed.

  O’Malley called it his most difficult moment as mayor.

  In October 2002, Angela Dawson, her husband Carnell Dawson Sr., and five of their children died in an arson fire – gasoline was spread on the front room of their home and set ablaze – as payback for the family’s anti-crime efforts.

  Just a week and a half before, the house at 1401 East Preston Street had been firebombed for the same reason. O’Malley called the attack “barbaric.”

  “The hardest moment of this administration was going to March Funeral Home and filing by five tiny caskets,” O’Malley told the Baltimore Sun. “But the Dawson loss just strengthened my resolve.

  “The tragedy was our Alamo, it was not our Waterloo.”

  Almost immediately, police arrested 21-year-old Darrell L. Brooks and charged him with multiple counts of homicide. Brooks pleaded guilty in federal court in 2003 and was sentenced to life without parole.

  “These children will not have died in vain,” the mayor promised. “This is not the future of our city. This has to become part of our past.”

  State Senator Nathaniel J. McFadden, a lifelong resident of the Eastside, likened the attacks on the Dawson family to Al Qaeda: “We have terrorist cells of juvenile drug dealers. And it’s all over the city.”

  David Simon acknowledged that from the perspective of an elected official or the police commissioner, there isn’t much reason to be a fan of The Wire.

  “Our purpose and intention in presenting this material cannot and should not be the same as that of Baltimore’s civic leaders,” said Simon. “We are not merely trying to entertain viewers, but to speak to existing problems in a meaningful way – problems that are not confined to Baltimore, but are universal.”

  After the show’s first season, the city held up routine film production permits, and reluctant city agencies referred all filming issues to the mayor’s office.

  Similarly, a Baltimore City Council subcommittee passed a resolution critical of the show while urging new efforts to promote a more positive municipal image.<
br />
  Testifying before that committee, Simon said that he had no objection to any effort to enhance the city’s image, but that government should not be involved in either the support or criticism of any given film, book, or other narrative.

  After the second season, new leadership in Baltimore’s Film Office made getting the show made in the city less difficult, a change for which Simon credits O’Malley.

  He also contended that the department inherited by ex-commissioner Ed Norris, a New Yorker handpicked by O’Malley, was so dysfunctional and crime so overwhelming that any improvements were likely to have a good effect.

  [While superintendent of the Maryland State Police in 2003, Norris was indicted on charges of spending money from an auxiliary fund of private donations assigned to the Police Commission on a variety of personal expenses. A year later, he pled guilty to federal corruption and tax charges included in the indictment.]

  Norris was cast and appeared in The Wire before the trouble. He had a recurring role as homicide detective Edward Norris. Not the most natural of actors, he was, apart from the misallocation of the auxiliary fund – which amounted to little more than $200 – a good police administrator, said Simon.

  Norris “had been a working policeman and more than any commissioner in decades, he understood actual police work,” said Simon.

  “… after successive administrations in which police work had been de-emphasized in Baltimore, any effort at reform was comparable to a 350-pound man on a diet,” said Simon. “The first 20 pounds were easy.”