Hamsterdam is thriving – from college kids to fiends with no veins left to puncture scoring dope; flourishing so well, in fact, that all manner of criminals are drawn to it for easy scores.
Believing the cops have betrayed their word to keep the free zone safe – a veritable “Valley of Eden” – the dealers are extremely angry.
Bunny Colvin shows the Deacon a cleaned-up street corner and the preacher wants to know how this miracle was accomplished. Colvin then takes him to Hamsterdam.
In the zone, Bunny hears about the robbery and says the dealers are right to believe they will be protected.
“We tell ’em they have to come down here without the guns, then we fall down on providing protection,” he tells Carver, who points out the upwards of 60 kids just hanging out because they lost their corner jobs.
Colvin suggests that Carver hire them as patrolmen, to use their keen eyes and ears to look out for predators. To which the Deacon exclaims – both appalled and intrigued – “What in God’s name did you do here?”
He then damns the zone as “a great village of pain” and insists Colvin make arrangements for needle exchanges, condom distribution and drug treatment for those who want it.
At the detail, Prez has traced Bodie’s cell phone from manufacturer to a suburban Washington convenience store where Bernard bought it.
Speed-dial numbers have been traced to Bodie’s grandmother and a half-dozen other burner cells. All of the Barksdale disposable cells were bought along Interstate-95.
“They’re driving 200 miles every couple weeks out of sheer caution,” marvels Freamon. “They’re dumping phones every two weeks or so and still they’re worried about catching a wiretap.”
At the funeral of Rico, the Barksdale boy gunned down by Marlo, Avon says: “This motherfucker Marlo? Time to go deep on this nigger.”
When Stringer complains to State Senator Davis – he of the “sheee-it” tagline – that there has been no movement on the promised and paid-for permits, the pol tells him it won’t be more than a few more days.
Not only that, he promises to bring Stringer into the land of flowing milk and honey known as government procurement. And chides that impatience – “buggin’” – is a sign of the old life on the street.
With Theresa D’Agostino in the gallery, Carcetti chairs a meeting of the Public Safety subcommittee and asks Rawls and Burrell why a crime reduction in the Western accounts for half of the reduced stats citywide.
“Statistical aberration,” says Burrell before Carcetti unloads once again on the cops for not providing adequate protection to state witnesses.
Later, D’Agostino will tell him he needs to work on being more likable if he wants to get elected to anything higher than the First District of Baltimore City.
Greggs and McNulty acquire convenience-store surveillance tape south of Baltimore, hoping it has caught a Barksdale worker buying cell phones.
Later, they meet FBI Special Agent Terrance Fitzhugh (played by former Golden Gloves boxer Doug Olear) at the Detail Office and, thanks to a computer program he’s brought along, bingo: they zoom in on the Barksdale soldier who buys the burners and manage to extract a license number.
[For Olear, sharking with friend and party buddy Dominic West was always a treat – “We’d be joking right up to someone said ‘Action!’,” he said – but being directed by and working with Agnieszka Holland was an honor. Holland is a legend in Poland and her work spans 1970s Jesus Christ’s Sin to David Simon’s 2009 HBO pilot Treme.]
At a meeting of police commanders, Bunny Colvin labors to explain the Western District’s crime drop without spilling the beans on Hamsterdam.
Rawls is skeptical: “Seriously, Bunny, I already got the City Council asking questions about the eight percent. We want to please the mayor, not go to jail behind this shit.”
“Sometimes,” answers Colvin, “the gods listen, sir.”
Brianna Barksdale leans on McNulty for details of D’Angelo’s death and Jimmy tells her that however her son may have died, it wasn’t with the belt found around his neck.
“I’m sorry I brought you into the whole mess-up to begin with,” says McNulty, “because frankly nobody’s gonna do shit about it anyhow.”
Asked why he went to Donette and not to her, McNulty says: “I was looking for someone who cared about the kid. I mean, like I said, you told him to take the years.”
Avon sets out to track down Omar, using info from a social worker, while Clay Davis introduces Stringer to a suit who can toss him some minority contract money from the Board of Education contract to procure lightbulbs.
Having set up Marlo in a honey trap – a woman who shares her charms and then makes a date with him at a carry-out called the Lake Trout – the planned hit goes bad when Marlo’s scouts notice the Barksdale crew and light up Avon’s car, hitting him.
While having his shoulder cleaned and stitched by a veterinarian, Avon unloads on Stringer, who looks on.
“You know the difference between me and you,” rues Avon bitterly. “I’m bleedin’ red and you bleedin’ green. I look at you these days, String, you know what I see? I see a man without a country.
“Not hard enough for this right here and maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there.”
In response, Stringer tells Avon that he was the one who had D’Angelo killed in prison. Enraged, Avon jumps Stringer, who subdues his friend after a short struggle.
“I took that shit off you and put it on me, because that motherfucker was out of pocket, with 20 years above his fucking head,” says Stringer. “He flips, they have you, me, Brianna. No fucking way.”
episode thirty-four
SLAPSTICK
“… while you’re waiting for moments that never come …”
– FREAMON
Directed by Alex Zakrzewski
Story by David Simon & George Pelecanos; teleplay by David Simon
Cutty is now going by his given name of Dennis, the street life behind him. As Dennis clears out a space he hopes to turn into a gym to teach kids to box, the Deacon stops by.
“All you gonna need is the permits,” says the Deacon. Dennis has no idea what he’s talking about.
Gerard and Sapper, a pair of Barksdale soldiers, see Omar leave a cab in front of his grandmother’s house and go inside. They try to get their immediate boss, Slim Charles, on the line to see if they should violate the ghetto custom of Sunday ceasefire to hit Omar.
Slim Charles doesn’t answer. Next they try Shamrock, who is with Stringer Bell, who gives the green light: “Do it.”
As Omar, in his Sunday best, escorts his grandmother to church, the boys open fire in the middle of the street, glass shattering as the cab drives away with the startled old woman, who is cut when the back windshield is blown out.
“Barksdale gotta be got,” Omar says later. “Stringer, too. This thing gotta end.”
Kimmy wants no part of it, Dante says he’s with his lover to the end, but Omar turns away from both of them, saying: “This one about me. Ain’t about no one else.”
Daniels tells the detail that a new wire on the Barksdale burner phones will be up soon. Bernard, the soldier with the disposable phone assignment, next runs west along Interstate-70 for a bag of cells. Detective Sydnor tracks his every move.
And Bubbles wears a police wire into the Sodom that is Hamsterdam, hoping to get Bodie to make a call on a burner phone for a re-up. It works like a charm and Bodie puts in an order for a new package of heroin.
On a run for Chinese food with McNulty, Prez (who in Season One was reprimanded for shooting up his police vehicle) responds to a call, shooting and killing a decorated, undercover black cop – Derrick Waggoner – he had mistaken for a criminal.
Later, at HQ, Prez is beside himself with grief. When Daniels urges him to get a lawyer, Prez answers: “No, sir, I’m done.” Quietly, Daniels puts him on suicide watch.
Avon Barksdale continues to live in the past, his differences with Bell smoo
thed but far from gone: “We gonna be back where we was, String. I can smell it, man. Just gotta get this boy Marlo and then spread out like we do.”
Avon then asks Stringer straight-up if he gave the okay to take Omar on the Sabbath.
“Sunday truce been there as long as the game itself,” Barksdale says. “I mean, you can do some shit and say what the fuck, but, hey, never on no Sunday.”
Prop Joe offers to broker a peace between Marlo and Avon. When told by Marlo’s rep that Barksdale is weak at the moment, Joe answers: “You ever know Avon Barksdale to back down from anything?”
When Carcetti’s friend and City Council colleague Anthony Gray unveils his “Gray for Mayor” bumper stickers, all Tommy can say is “nice colors.”
Gray, completely in the dark about Carcetti’s plans, invites him to run on his ticket for City Council president.
When a black teenager turns up dead in Hamsterdam, Bunny Colvin’s social experiment is more threatened than ever.
Carver asks Herc to help him move the body a few blocks away from the free zone and Herc angrily refuses. He is so mad, in fact, he makes a call to the City Desk of the Baltimore Sun.
To the Hamsterdam dealers, Bunny says: “… come tomorrow, if I don’t have a shooter in bracelets, the Hamsterdam thing is over, finished. It’s back to the corners for all of us and fuck y’all any way we can … it was good while it lasted.”
Stringer Bell will make sure that someone cops to the murder.
Brianna meets Avon and Stringer but they won’t give up the party line on D’Angelo’s death, noting that McNulty is a liar.
Losing his temper, Avon tells his sister: “The fuck you even thinking? That I had something to do with it? That I could do that to my own kin? Is that what you think? The fuck is in your head, Brie? I ain’t do nothing to D. I ain’t have shit to do with it.”
Asks Brianna: “To do with what?”
episode thirty-five
REFORMATION
“Call it a crisis of leadership.”
– PROPOSITION JOE
Directed by Christine Moore
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by Ed Burns
Brother Mouzone and his somewhat hapless right-hand-man Lamar – show up at the site where the Franklin Terrace high-rise projects once stood.
“Reform, Lamar. Reform,” says Mouzone, who has more important things on his mind, like avenging himself with the man who shot him on his last trip to Baltimore, whose name he does not know.
And Marlo and Avon continue to drop bodies on one another in their ongoing war.
At the detail, Freamon connects a disposable phone to Bodie when he uses it to call his grandmother while Daniels and Pearlman visit Judge Phelan to get the wiretap approved as soon as possible.
Ever flirtatious with Rhonda, Phelan tells her: “… give me a boilerplate affidavit with the [probable cause] from the court report. And as you get fresh numbers for new disposables, you call me any time, day or night …”
At the Western, a reporter has called and Mello relays the info to Bunny: the Baltimore Sun has been to all three free zones and is chasing quotes before going to press.
Colvin meets the reporter at Hamsterdam and lies, saying that the command staff is well aware of the project. Prosecution of the dealers will begin shortly, he says, almost begging for the reporter to hold his story for a few weeks.
Cutty goes to Hamsterdam to recruit young boxers, where Carver urges the kids to check out the gym.
Brother Mouzone discovers that he was shot by a stickup artist named Omar, an independent who is not part of any crew and happens to be gay.
D’Agostino, now on board with the Carcetti campaign, advises Tommy that he needs more black faces on his team. And she says that it is in his best interest if Tony Gray has a strong run at the job, taking votes away from the incumbent Royce.
Avon has put three new bodyguards on Stringer, their job to spy on him as much as protect him. He makes the muscle stay in the car when he meets Prop Joe in a Westside liquor store where Joe says that if the bodies don’t stop falling in the Marlo/Avon war, Stringer will be cut off from the supply of good dope.
Says Joe: “The feeling is it ain’t right for you to be at the head of our [co-op] table, when you can’t call off your dog. Call it a crisis of leadership.”
Taking the message back to Avon, Stringer says: “Prop Joe and them niggers, they took a vote … we ain’t gonna have the product to put it on the fucking corners.”
When Avon refuses to listen – despite the news that Marlo has just killed the woman they sent to seduce him before the Lake Trout assignation – Stringer makes a call to a police source.
Desperate to get a wire up on cell phones used by the Barksdale gang – who are throwing them away almost as soon as they’re purchased – the detail tries to convince Phelan of a new approach.
Asks the judge: “You want to sell drug traffickers a series of cell phones that are pre-approved for telephonic intercepts. And you want me to sign off on court-ordered taps on a bunch of phones that … have not been used for any illegal activity?”
In a word, yes. Phelan agrees.
Through Bubbles, the detail gets a line on Squeak, girlfriend of Bernard the burner boy. Bubbles’s pitch on cell phones is straight up “why pay more?”
Posing as a hustler, Freamon – in an act worthy of the British stage – sells a cautious Bernard on the deal.
And at the weekly HQ ass-rape known as the Comstat meeting, Bunny Colvin comes clean on how he reduced crime in his district, laying out Hamsterdam step-by-step from concept to that very morning.
“Don’t you see what he’s done?” says Rawls. “He legalized drugs!”
“What I did, I did knowingly and on my own,” says Colvin. “My men had nothin’ to do with it. They thought it was all part of an elaborate trap. So if you need me to fall on that sword, I’m good with that.”
“I got to give it to you, a brilliant idea,” says Rawls. “Insane and illegal, but stone fuckin’ brilliant nonetheless. After all my puttin’ my foot up people’s asses to get the numbers down, he comes along and in one stroke, gets a 14 fuckin’ percent decrease. Fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”
episode thirty-six
MIDDLE GROUND
“We don’t need to dream no more.”
– STRINGER BELL
Directed by Joe Chappelle
Story by David Simon & George Pelecanos; teleplay by George Pelecanos
Tracking Omar to a darkened street, Brother Mouzone gets to the point: how best to get an angle on Stringer Bell?
At the detail, the Bubbles burners are paying off as the wire crackles with info, but not enough to reach Stringer, who is not using the disposables. McNulty finds technology that will help grab calls from cell towers in his own backyard: there are three devices, unopened, in HQ storage.
Burrell and Rawls debate the best way to play and spin the Hamsterdam fiasco, though the mayor – also scrambling to get ahead of the curve – will make the final call.
Says Royce to his advisors: “A 14 percent decline in felonies citywide and I might be untouchable on this. We need to see if there’s some way to keep this thing going without calling it what it is.”
Upset that his raggedy-ass gym equipment might cause one of his boxing students to be hurt, Cutty asks Avon for help and is thrilled when Barksdale lays $15k on him, half-a-large more than he requested.
Burrell, puzzled that Royce has not shut down Hamsterdam and fearing he will be the fall guy when the shit inevitably hits the fan, tells Carcetti about it.
Bell, having been played by Clay Davis, shows up drunk and pissed-off at Barksdale’s safe house. While waiting, he tells Slim Charles to kill the state senator Clay Davis.
Says Charles: “Murder ain’t no thing, but this here is some assassination shit.”
Freamon grabs Bell’s private cell number from the tower and is startled to see that Stringer has been on the line t
o Bunny Colvin.
At a meeting in a graveyard, Bell betrays his childhood friend and longtime partner in crime to Colvin, giving him the address of Barksdale’s safe house where a veritable ordnance of munitions is amassed.
When Colvin suggests that Barksdale must have crossed Bell, Stringer says: “It’s only business.”
Mouzone finds Avon getting a haircut and tells him he knows that Stringer set up the hit on him via Omar.
“What you got here is your word and your reputation,” says Mouzone. “With that alone, you’ve still got an open line to New York. Without it, you’re done.”
As is the friendship between Barksdale and Bell, whose life of crime together goes back to stealing a badminton set from a toy store.
Colvin takes Carcetti on a tour of his all but crime-free district and brings him to a community meeting where residents are pleased to have their neighborhoods back. As impressed as he is with the good side of the experiment, the flip side – the reality of Hamsterdam – appalls the councilman.
At the construction site where he bitches to the contractor about the lack of progress, Stringer Bell meets his maker at the end of Omar’s shotgun and Mouzone’s sidearm.
“I thought for sure we’d be cancelled after that,” said Andre Royo, who played Bubbles. “Once you kill Stringer Bell, the party over. But the story was bigger than Stringer.”
RUSSELL “STRINGER” BELL (1969–2004)
American Businessman
“Naw, man. We’re done worrying about territory, man, what corner we got, what projects. Game ain’t about that no more. It’s about product.”
– STRINGER BELL, TALKING TO THE WALL THAT IS AVON BARKSDALE
The day the folks in charge of The Wire killed off Stringer Bell, said Michael Kenneth Williams, “was a rough day at the office.”
As Omar the stickup artist, Williams chased Bell for many weeks and months across the first three seasons of the show, catching him in “Middle Ground,” the sixth episode of Season Three.
The Wire Page 22