Just the sight of him is enough for a bag of ready-to-sell vials of cocaine to drop at his feet. This, he tells Renaldo later, is no fun.
“It ain’t what you takin’, it’s who you takin’ it from,” he explains. “How you expect to run with the wolves come night when you spend all day sportin’ with puppies?”
The Deacon tells former police major Howard “Bunny” Colvin that he has greased a job for him at the University of Maryland – where the academics are enamored of the cop who tried to legalize drugs – working with repeat violent offenders.
Colvin, now working security at a downtown hotel, passes. He changes his mind when he is prevented from arresting a hotel guest who has beaten up a prostitute because the guest brings a lot of business to the Inner Harbor.
Marlo and his assassins Chris and Snoop roll up on Bodie, Little Kevin and Michael on a corner from which Bodie has worked hard to make a modest profit. Bodie tenses but the visitors are just there, they say, to talk.
“Two choices,” says Marlo, who continues to see a valuable employee in Michael, “you start takin’ our package or you can step off.”
Bodie, who is making a go of it because the New Day Co-op dope is superior to what Marlo has on the street, also admires Michael’s mettle and tries to get him to work the afternoon rush hour shift. But Michael, having
paid back the money he needed to get back-to-school supplies for himself and his little brother – Aaron “Bug” Manigault – says he’s finished.
After the debate with Carcetti – in which the brash white boy beat the seasoned pol over the head with his inability to protect witnesses in drug and murder cases – Royce finds the challenger up eight points in the polls. Time, the mayor tells his team, to start kicking back and kicking hard.
Greggs makes “Old Face Andre’s” store for a stash house while Omar and new boy Renaldo watch the detective come and go from the building. The store had recently shown up on the wire with a call from Andre to Stanfield lieutenant Monk.
The New Day Co-op leaders – Prop Joe, Slim Charles and Fat-face Rick – wonder how to push back against an encroachment of dealers from New York. And they are certain that Marlo, whom they could use in fighting the out-of-towners, is hiding the bodies that his crew are killing around the Westside.
Bunk and Freamon are more than intrigued: victims are disappearing without giving the detectives the courtesy of leaving their bodies behind. Even Leakin Park, a legendary West Baltimore dumping ground, is empty. After checking the city sewers, Bunk tells Freamon to give it a rest.
At HQ, Rawls tells a toady by the name of Lieutenant Marimow that he’s now in charge of the Major Crimes Unit. And as such, he will chase real criminals and stay away from the lives of well-intentioned public servants. At least until after the election.
At the same time, Lieutenant Jimmy Asher (played by Gene Terinoni) – the guy who signed the subpoenas that caused so much indigestion in powerful parlors across the city – is transferred to a Siberian outpost known as the Telephone Reporting Unit.
Bunk is able to get McNulty out of the house at Beadie Russell’s – as close to a Norman Rockwell existence as Jimmy has ever known – for a beer by the railroad tracks. For old times’ sake lasts but a beer before McNulty packs it in for home.
En route to the first day of school, good friends Randy, Michael – shepherding his little brother “Bug” – and Dukie walk over to Namond’s house. Randy gives his lunch to Dukie on the way, but Namond’s mother lets everyone inside but Dukie – he’s dressed like the rag man and he smells.
First day of teaching school – the hardest job Ed Burns ever had, according to the former cop and Vietnam veteran – is a struggle for Prez.
The ex-cop needs back-up – the help of colleague Grace Sampson (played by Dravon James) to establish a minimum of order.
Herc’s reward for keeping his mouth shut, more or less, about the mayor’s at-the-desk blow job? He’s promoted to sergeant and gets a better assignment as detective than City Hall bodyguard.
Marimow, dancing to whatever tune Rawls whistles, shuts down everything that doesn’t result in pat-on-the-back statistics: no more meandering wire taps, no more subpoenas, and once and for all, the Barksdale investigation is closed.
And the exodus from major crimes is on.
Omar and Renaldo hit Andre’s store in an especially clever manner – after the robbery Omar buys a pack of Newports and demands the proper change – and when they’ve finished business the master tells the greenhorn: “That’s why we get up in the morning.”
Colvin, now in the warrens of academia, is asked to find at-risk young people for University of Maryland research and immediately schools the professors on the reality that by age 18, most of these folks are on an unalterable path. He suggests sixth and eighth graders instead.
Called to the carpet by Rawls for the sneaky subpoena caper, Freamon is praised for being one hell of an investigator and reminded that his career has suffered in the past for being good at what he does.
“You have a gift for martyrdom,” says Rawls to Freamon. “But I wonder, are your disciples as keen for the cross?”
Freamon falls on his sword to protect his friends and Rawls rewards him with a transfer back to the homicide unit, telling him that one day he will see it as a blessing.
Finally, how many times do you have to write “I Will Not Slice My Classmate’s Face with a Razor” on the blackboard before the teacher lets you out of the doghouse?
Chiquan, the girl who refused to sit next to Dukie because of his body odor, has felt a need to cause a ruckus all through the episode.
She then uses a piece of jewelry to reflect bright sunshine into the eyes of a student named Laetitia. When the pestering continues, Laetitia jumps up and, with a blade, gives Chiquan a wound that will take 200 stitches to close.
Nothing has prepared Prez for this; he stands flat-footed, and it is Grace who calls for an ambulance. In the chaos, Dukie gently approaches the girl who attacked, taking a mini-fan out of his pocket – a piece of junk that he found on the street and repaired – and blowing it on the face of the kid with blood on her hands.
OMAR
“Omar is who he is …”
– MICHAEL KENNETH WILLIAMS
Here it comes.
A nursery rhyme whistled through narrow streets of boarded-up rowhouses and trashed alleys, a child’s tune offered with the cool confidence of a killer so serene he can announce himself and his shotgun to the melody of “The Farmer in the Dell.”
“Hi-ho, the derry-o …”
The mouse takes the cheese, baby.
•
“Omar was my breakout character as an actor but he also let me know how deep I can go on a personal level – I went real deep with Omar,” said Michael Kenneth Williams, speaking by phone from South Africa in May of 2009, while filming a network pilot with Neve Campbell.
“The Wire is here,” said Williams, noting that he was recognized as Omar in South Africa. And Campbell, who played a coming-of-age secretary to a doomed F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Henry Bromell film Last Call, told Williams “eight out of every ten conversations” among London hipsters were about The Wire.
And near or at the top of everyone’s list of favorite The Wire characters was Omar, the stickup man with a sawed-off shotgun beneath his Wild West duster; the last of the independents, a loner with a strict code of morals that need only make sense to himself.
“I [tried to] make him believable by playing him from a sensitive perspective, not as an alpha male. I played him very vulnerable. When you hurt Omar’s feelings, he acts a certain way,” said Williams.
“In Season One he was happy and in love with Brandon. Then he went into a dark depression when they killed Brandon. He fell in love again in Season Four but went down the rabbit hole after they killed [his confidant] Butchie.
“I did a lot of research for that role,” the actor continued. “I got into levels of street life in Baltimore that the averag
e actor would never see. I went in looking for a character and I came out with family and friends.”
In a world where alcoholic cops consider diving down a flight of stairs for a disability pension and apprentice gangsters devour their childhood homeys for profit and promotion, Omar is a man of abiding consistencies for whom we can cheer.
He doesn’t use drugs or brutalize addicts; he’s even been known to give away a taste to a sister up against withdrawal. He doesn’t wear flashy clothes or jewelry. Never curses and does not turn his weapon or his wiles against “citizens” not part of the street game.
“Being on The Wire was a lot bigger for me than just playing Omar,” said Williams. “Baltimore is not a Hollywood set – the show was always about the city, about the story. We rolled up our sleeves, got to work and got to know each other.
“It set the bar for me on the stories I want to tell.”
•
Born in 1966, the son of a woman from the Bahamas who owned a Brooklyn, NY, daycare business, Williams was raised in East Flatbush.
“Mom worked hard,” he said of Paula Williams, now in her eighties, was “sharp as a tack,” and relocated to Pennsylvania. “I didn’t know we were poor until I left the projects.”
[The Wire, said Williams, is not “Mom’s cup of tea” and she has seen little of it. She did, however, love her son’s role in the R. Kelly ‘Trapped in the Closet’ video.]
Williams broke into show business as a street dancer and then a choreographer. Fashion photographers David LaChapelle and Steven Klein pushed him into a modeling career.
“I’m a big fucking kid – a late bloomer,” said Williams, who was cast as a lead in the Todd Solondz film Forgiveness and had a part in director John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.
No matter the role, it’s difficult to keep your eyes off of him and that tantalizing, yes-it’s-real scar snaking down his dark mug like the famous thunderbolt across the face of David Bowie on the cover of Aladdin Sane.
Williams’s fashion work caught the attention of Baltimore-educated rapper Tupac Shakur, who cast Williams to play his brother in the 1996 film Bullet, which also starred Mickey Rourke. A small part as a drug dealer in Martin Scorsese’s 1999 paramedic drama Bringing Out the Dead followed.
Not long after that, Manhattan casting agent Alexa Fogel called with an audition for a new HBO cop show set in Baltimore.
“I put myself on tape in [Fogel’s] office,” said Williams. “And then I got a call telling me to report to Baltimore.”
“You can smell the ’hood in Baltimore before you get there,” said Williams of the warren of manifold poverties in which he immediately felt at home. “The garbage baking in the sun a mile away, the piss in the [project] elevators.
“I’ve been traveling a lot lately and I go to the ’hood to meet the people and eat the food. Detroit, Chicago, DC – from Brooklyn to Compton – you’ve got variations of The Wire, the same thing, happening all over. I saw it in South Africa.
“In Baltimore, I made it my business to learn the dialect. I didn’t want to sound or dress like a New York dude. Baltimore has its own swagger and style – just a white T and a do-rag. They keep it simple and clean.”
Mild-mannered, exceedingly polite and heterosexual, Williams is distinct from the character he portrays, although he said that Omar became his alter ego after years of inhabiting the role.
To the amusement of Ed Burns, who went to the set the first day that Omar worked in front of the cameras, Williams didn’t know how to hold a shotgun much less draw it from under a desperado’s duster and stick it in some fool’s face.
“The stickup guys are mavericks,” said Ed Burns. “They’re a totally different breed” from other criminals.
Burns was a cop in his native Baltimore for some 20 years before retiring in 1992. He worked for five years in the escape-and-apprehension unit and a dozen more in homicide, specializing in violent drug gangs.
Along the way, he met stickup boys with names like Apex and Ferdinand, Cadillac and Anthony. Some – like the legend Shorty Boyd – are still out there, alive and well after decades, though most are no longer in the game. Others are long dead.
“Man, if I had a dime for every time someone in Baltimore came up to me and said he knew who my character was based on: this dude and that dude,” said Williams.
Omar, however, was created out of a little bit from each of them.
“These are guys that can’t function in an organization, who don’t like taking orders from anybody,” said Burns. “The great ones – the Anthonys and the Ferdinands – were lone wolves who had their own vast or semi-vast network of snitches working for them.
“After they’d take off a dealer, they’d parcel out some of the product to their snitch.”
Before the onslaught of cheap cocaine and crack turned the drug trade upside down in the 1980s, a relative order was imposed by organizations with a sense of discipline that’s been lost since the game trickled down to kids as young as nine and ten years old.
In the 1970s, said Burns, a drug gang called the New Day Co-op hired assassins to kill the stickup artists disrupting business. The smarter stickup boys had “good runs” in the game, according to Burns, because they knew whom not to prey on.
Others did not have the reps to keep the wolves away.
“I once watched Ferdinand walk up into a [project] courtyard and come up to a guy with his Jesse James duster coat on,” Burns remembered. “He apparently thought the guy wasn’t giving up everything he had, so then you see the shotgun slide out and shoot the guy in the leg.”
Ferdinand leaned down to take whatever else his victim had in his pockets, much as Omar would do. And then he walked out of the courtyard and into the arms of the waiting Burns and his partner.
Another thing about the men who rob drug dealers: they can often be caught on a weapons charge and, once caught, they can make excellent informants, knowing as much as they do about the city drug trade.
Williams said that over five seasons, he never had to go to Simon or Burns for direction beyond what was on the page.
“The first time I met Simon he said he was going to make [the Wire gangsters] the show’s Wild Bunch,” said Williams, referencing the 1969 Peckinpah film, one of Simon’s favorites.
Williams was not familiar with the movie – nor John Ford’s 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – which Simon also recommended.
“He told me to watch those two movies,” said Williams. “That was my research. They were thinking of killing off Omar in the first season but didn’t. And they made sure that none of the directors ever tried to tweak Omar … all I had to do was commit to the character.”
Openly gay, Omar is indifferent to societal or institutional sanction of his sexuality, just as he is without apology for his line of work.
“The character we’ve created uses everything he sees in this world, and whatever he sees, he’s going to take advantage of,” said Burns. “By now, he’s mythological.”
Most crucial to his survival, Omar sees the street as his natural habitat. Near the end of the show’s five-season run, just before his beef with new drug king Marlo reaches its climax, Omar stands on a fucked-up, deserted street corner and yells for all the world to hear.
“I’m out here in these streets every day, me and my lonesome. Where he at? Huh? Yo, you put it in his ear: ‘Marlo Stanfield is NOT A MAN FOR THIS TOWN!’”
The most focused peek into Omar’s soul was provided midway through Season Two by Omar himself.
In the harsh light of a courtroom, Omar willingly testifies against a Barksdale-employed sociopath named Marquis “Bird” Hilton.
For the court, Omar identifies Bird as the man who murdered a man named Gant, a state witness whose death launched the arc of Season One. Bird was, in fact, the shooter of Gant, but whether Omar was there to witness the murder is in question.
Armed with enough accurate information about the slaying
to make the accusation stick, Omar is on the stand not on behalf of Gant but to avenge the death of his lover.
With customary arrogance, the Barksdale organization’s house lawyer Maurice Levy tries to chip away at the credibility and nerve of Omar, who has just given his job description to the court.
“I robs drug dealers.”
At last Levy thinks he’s making a dent, reiterating, “So you rob drug dealers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You walk the streets of Baltimore with a gun, taking what you want, when you want it … willing to use violence when your demands aren’t met?”
Omar nods yes, and Levy describes him as someone who would, if he was in the mood, “shoot a man down on a housing project parking lot and then lie to the police about it.”
Omar takes offense: “I ain’t never put my gun on no citizen.”
“You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade … stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city … a parasite …”
“Just like you, man.”
“Excuse me?” sputters Levy.
“I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase.”
Neither shotgun nor briefcase could protect Omar near the end of the final season when, limping into a convenience store while on the hunt for Marlo, the legend’s final words are spoken through bullet-proof glass to an Asian cashier.
“Gimme a pack of Newports … soft pack.”
Silence and a pause.
“Let me get one of them too …”
BANG!
Blood and brain splatter against the thick plastic. The Korean grocer screams and the knees of an assassin no more than 12 years old knock as young David shakes before the fallen Goliath.
“I’m glad Omar went the way he did,” said Williams. “I’ve met kids in Baltimore who were straight-up assassins.”
The Wire Page 26