“Something vibrant and essential to American life is passing,” said Simon. “And unless a new economic model is created to accomplish what a healthy newspaper once did, we are all bereft.”
The newsroom in-joke on Calvert Street these days?
That the obituary column will soon be renamed the “Subscriber Countdown” page.
COP REPORTERS AND THE WIRE
All George Morse ever wanted to do was to write for his hometown newspaper.
Morse, a 25-year-old J-school grad born and raised in East Providence, Rhode Island, is one of a dying breed: a young man fascinated by print journalism at a time when his classmates were seeking entry-level PR gigs.
Most of the cops in East Providence have grown to like the cub reporter, who knew about The Wire long before he filed his first police blotter.
“Before I was a newspaper reporter dealing with cops on a daily basis, I worked as an assistant manager for Blockbuster Video,” said Morse. “Somewhere around 2005 I started seeing a spike in the number of kids coming in looking for this show called The Wire.”
Despite being the kind of guy who scours the Internet for the ending to every new movie before he sees it, Morse knew nothing about the Baltimore cop show.
“I didn’t give the people looking for this show much credit. Admittedly, it was my own prejudice, but a lot of the people asking for the show came in with baggy jeans speaking slang I don’t understand.”
He changed his mind when he began covering cops. He went from student to intern to full-time reporter in his senior year at the University of Rhode Island. As a local boy he already knew some of the officers.
Most cops will tell you that the popularity of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has made their jobs harder. Juries don’t want to hear witness testimonies anymore. They don’t even need a murder weapon. They want fibers and DNA.
At the other end of the dial is The Wire.
“One day I asked one of the vice unit investigators about The Wire,” Morse said. “I wanted to know if he was a fan … how the show chalked up with reality. He told me not only was he a fan of the show, but it’s so accurate it has made his job tougher.”
Said Sergeant Diego Mello: “They’re teaching everyone our tricks.”
Like “traps”– hidden compartments – the number of which have increased in East Providence, according to police, since The Wire gained in popularity.
Morse began watching not long after becoming a newspaper reporter.
“My editor recommended it to me, another reporter did the same,” he said. “I fell in love with the show instantly and felt a twinge of guilt for the judgment I had cast on all those [video] customers I had written off as uneducated and immature.”
Then he started to get to know some real cops. East Providence may not be Baltimore, but there are drugs and where there are drugs, there is violence.
The city’s police department has a reputation for vigilance among traffickers. Mules are said to drive 20 miles out of their way to bypass the city on their way to markets in Fall River or Providence.
There are about 100 cops to police East Providence, a city of some 50,000 people, more than ten times smaller than Baltimore. But there are similarities.
Cops in East Providence are known to like a “taste” from time to time, as Bunk might say. And although there is no graveyard for beer cans on the department roof, Morse has, “on more than a few occasions … seen officers who have no business operating a vehicle stumble out of a bar and get behind the wheel.”
Shades of Jimmy McNulty.
Plenty of pot rolls through East Providence, but what really stretches the cops thin is chasing shipments of cocaine and heroin that have given the city’s section of Interstate-195 the nickname “Heroin Highway.”
“Of all the cops I talk to, few interest me as much as the vice unit,” said Morse. “Their office is filled with posters of drug paraphernalia and strange-looking bongs. There’s also a dry erase board full of quotes from suspected drug dealers and users who were caught by the vice unit.”
Quotes like this: “I get more of a high driving through East Providence than I do from heroin. Two-and-a-half-miles of pure adrenaline.”
•
Kimberly M. Vetter, 34, has been a newspaper reporter for the past decade, covering a variety of beats. She worked as an editor and reporter at newspapers in Texas before the Baton Rouge Advocate hired her in 2006 to cover the police beat in Louisiana’s capital.
Vetter says that much of what she saw on The Wire reflects her own experience covering cops in Baton Rouge, which, like virtually every American city and many of its towns, has its own corners and boys who work them.
The cops she covers have also said that the HBO drama is the only cop show they’ve seen that is “remotely accurate.”
“It’s surprising how little information [citizens] can get from police departments,” said Vetter, often called by distressed residents of crime-plagued neighborhoods.
“I think there is a wide distrust for law enforcement out in the communities, especially in poor areas of town where a lot of the crime happens.
“They say that [the police] don’t investigate crimes thoroughly. They just want to make arrests. A lot of murders [of young black men go] unsolved. People truly believe [the police] don’t care.”
Vetter heard about The Wire from a friend at work, a business reporter. She rented the DVDs and watched – from D’Angelo holding court on the orange couch to Dukie succumbing to dope – with her boyfriend.
“I literally flew through the five seasons,” she said. “I spent a lot of late nights watching it,” and was impressed by how closely what she saw on the screen mirrored her view as a crime reporter.
“You would go out for a murder or to cover a crime and the older people living in the neighborhood would say, ‘If they could just get these boys off the corner.’
“They would describe them exactly like they were portrayed on the show … all young, they should be in school.”
Vetter said Baton Rouge has a historically high murder rate, with violent crime rising since Hurricane Katrina drove tens of thousands of people west from New Orleans.
“It’s always been high but since the hurricane, shootings happen daily,” she said. “Last year, there were 82 or 83 murders in East Baton Rouge Parish.” By early April of 2009, there were more than 20.
One notorious neighborhood a few miles south of Louisiana State University – the Gardere Lane area, with dozens of multi-unit apartments, some vacant and boarded up – has long been infested with drugs.
As a reporter accompanying sheriff’s deputies, Vetter has gone into vacant houses, the plywood pulled away, to find squatters with crack pipes. Perhaps not as eloquent as Bubbles, but certainly as befuddled as his sidekick Johnny.
Asked if there were any Stringer Bells or Avon Barksdales behind the trade, Vetter said: “You do hear about some of the bigger fish … but the local cops aren’t catching them.”
It also rang true for her that the mayor’s office, and not the chief of police, runs the police department. For political reasons, statistics are used to prove whatever best serves the administration at the moment.
Separating what is really going on from what the police say is going on is no small task. Among all fraternities, cops are among the most close-knit, complete with a “no snitching” code every bit as strong as the one on the street.
“There’s not much you can do about it unless somebody on the inside is willing to stick their neck out and tell you what’s going on.”
Vetter said that the cops who have talked to her about the show were most impressed by the way it layered every side of an issue, how The Wire is not – like an old cop car – merely black and white.
“Crime isn’t just because an individual is bad,” she contended.
And, in the way that Bunny Colvin said that an aggravated assault can be redefined as a lesser crime but it’s hard to hide a body, Vetter explained:
“The main thing I focus on are murders. They can’t mess with those.”
Watching The Wire, she said, confirmed a certain loss of innocence: “You realize that everything you thought was true is being hidden from you.”
•
Patrick O’Connell covers the police beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At 32 he, like Morse, has been a reporter since leaving college.
“The thing that is most interesting to me … is getting to go to places most people never see. I talk to a lot of friends and they’ve never been to areas I go into.”
O’Connell isn’t talking about fancy back rooms where deals are made or soirees at the country club, but “really crappy areas of St. Louis and in the county. Covering crimes takes you to these places.”
Places photographed in all their fucked-up grandeur by cinematographers like Uta Briesewitz and Russell Fine on The Wire, a show O’Connell began watching, as so many did, after his friends told him that he must.
“Once you get in you’re completely hooked by it. I liked it because it was real – more than any show I watched,” the neighborhoods reminding him of the ones on his beat, “… kind of hauntingly beautiful in a way, burned out and boarded up.”
O’Connell’s appreciation of the show, however, didn’t silence the reporter’s instinct to call bullshit when he sees it, specifically in Season Five, his least favorite.
Unlike the spot-on portrayal of cops and drug dealers and their respective bureaucracies, the final season – centered on a very real but fictional Baltimore Sun – didn’t reflect journalism as O’Connell sees it practiced in the Gateway to the West.
“Everybody I know is hyper-protective about who they are talking to, checking sources, never changing quotes,” he said.
Everybody he knows with a newspaper job steadily became a very select group as the 2009 recession accelerated the demise of an already beleaguered industry. That part of Season Five, admitted O’Connell, was right on the buy-out money.
“The lay-off stuff was almost painfully real,” he said, having seen the ranks of the Post-Dispatch thinned in the autumn of 2008.
“The idea that we need to soldier on is very realistic.”
Victor Paul Alvarez and Greg Garland
SEASON FIVE EPISODE GUIDE
“I thought, ‘You gotta love Hollywood.’ For 12 hours of work I got paid $60. When I went in later for 12 seconds, they gave me $500.”
G. JEFFERSON PRICE III, FORMER MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT FOR THE BALTIMORE SUN.
Jeff Price was just one of dozens of non-professionals given roles on The Wire, beginning with a few cameos early in the show’s run and peaking in Season Five when David Simon cast many of his former colleagues at the Baltimore Sun as reporters.
Film editor Kate Sanford said it was always a challenge to “work around” performances that could be somewhat wooden, but the tension between authenticity and scripted drama usually served the stories well.
Such was the case with Price.
“I was one of several old timers from the Sun invited to [be] extras in the scene where the buyouts and the closing of foreign bureaus are announced,” he said.
“The editor steps down and I am approached to join him in his office, where, presumably, I am to be told my jig is up. In the first try at the scene, I became confused about what I was supposed to be doing when the editor approached. I said, ‘Who? Me?’
“The production team came in and said, ‘Hey, that was great, could you do it that way again?’ I tried to explain that I was just reacting because I wasn’t sure what to do but they said it looked natural and appropriate to the moment, so there developed what became known in Price family lore as Dad’s ‘Who Me?’ scene.
“A woman who was another professional extra standing behind me hissed that I had wheedled myself into a ‘speaking role’.
“This scene was shot over and over, so many times that we did not finish until about one a. m., having started at about one p.m. the previous day.
“I went home satisfied with having had my first experience watching a movie being made. The day’s pay was $60 – which worked out to be less than minimum hourly wage, but the experience was interesting enough to make up for it.
“Afterward, I went off on an assignment in Central America and when I got back I got a call from the Wire people asking if I would mind coming in to do a voice over for my moment of glory.
“I said, ‘Look, I spent 12 hours on that set for 60 bucks and it was interesting enough, but I don’t want to do it again. I don’t have the time.’
“They said, ‘This’ll only take a few minutes and we’ll pay you $500!’ I went over to their studio near Television Hill and true to their word it took exactly 12 seconds.”
episode fifty-one
“MORE WITH LESS”
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”
– BUNK
Directed by Joe Chappelle
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon
When someone lies on a polygraph test, the needle soars like a Geiger counter finding uranium in the desert and is said to “blow the box.”
When a kid too dumb to know better submits to Bunk Moreland’s photocopy lie machine, a piece of paper emerges emblazoned with the word: FALSE.
The machine, says Sergeant Landsman, is never wrong.
Police surveillance of Marlo’s al fresco lair – including McNulty and Officer Dozerman – continues as Stanfield and Snoop tell a dealer that the new split on the package is 60/40 with the dealer on the short end.
Marlo and his people all know they are being watched.
At Western District roll call, Sergeant Ellis Carver can barely maintain order as the room of officers bitches and moans about lack of overtime – not to mention what’s already due them – and shitty equipment.
Mayor Carcetti hears from Commissioner Burrell and his deputy Bill Rawls that with the current budget cuts, there’s no way they’ll be able to deliver a drop in crime. Carcetti is stymied; all the money is going to the schools.
Rawls says they could save some money by suspending the investigation into the bodies in the vacant houses, but Carcetti doesn’t want the inevitable bad publicity that would surely follow. In private, Norman Wilson is pressed by the mayor to speak his mind: You should’ve swallowed your pride and taken the governor’s money when it was on the table.
On the corner, Duquan “Dukie”Weems – having dropped out of school after being promoted to the ninth grade – is running Michael Lee’s new corner, but none of the other boys respect him, particularly a kid named Spider.
Once Dukie is bounced – smarting from being demoted from a corner boy to a nanny for Bug – Spider falls in line.
The city budget crunch hits Lieutenant Cedric Daniels at work and at home: the investigation into the bodies in the vacant houses is on ice and he can no longer use a department vehicle in his off-hours.
On the loading dock behind the Baltimore Sun newspaper, city editor Gus Haynes discusses lay-off rumors with reporters Roger Twigg (named after a real-life Sun police reporter), and general assignment reporter Bill Zorzi (played by a former Sun reporter of the same name).
Back inside, Gus is dismayed to see Michael Olesker and Laura Lippman (two longtime journalists at the real Sun playing themselves) looking out a window at smoke rising across town, seasoned newshounds watching a fire like a couple of tourists.
“The Sun TV critic [David Zurawik, a fan of the show until Season Five] went out of his way to say how horrible we were playing ourselves,” said Lippman, who left the paper to become one of the country’s major mystery novelists.
“There have been dozens of ‘stunt’ cameos on The Wire over the years – the former governor, the former mayor, the former police commissioner – and I don’t think we were any worse than the worst.
“But when the show went into the newsroom, it clearly struck a nerve, not just at the Sun, but at newspapers throughout the US. I guess some people g
ot their feelings hurt, which is amusing to me.
“It turns out that a lot of reporters are much bigger babies than the public figures they cover,” said Lippman.
Carcetti meets with City Council President Nerese Campbell and the US Attorney, hoping for federal resources to pursue the bodies in the vacant houses. In exchange, the prosecutor wants the city to turn the investigation into political corruption by state senator Clay Davis over to federal authorities.
Passing the buck, Carcetti insists it’s the call of Maryland State’s Attorney Rupert Bond (played by Dion Graham), who wants to handle it himself.
Greggs and Dozerman watch Marlo go into a Holiday Inn with a woman and assume it’s a booty call. Inside, however, Marlo sends the woman to their room while he attends a meeting of the New Day Co-op drug cartel, of which Proposition Joe Stewart is the nominal head, already in progress.
Joe’s pitch is for an Eastside dealer, put out of business when Johns Hopkins Hospital knocked down blocks of slum houses for expansion, to pick up territory along Route 40 and a black neighborhood near the old steel mill called Turners Station.
If Marlo has 99 problems, however, a Co-op ain’t one of them and he ruffles feathers with an impolitic proposal, leading Slim Charles to tell Joe not to “sleep on Marlo.”
Bubbles, hanging on to a fragile sobriety, is living in his sister’s basement. Each day when she goes to work, however, he has to leave until she returns.
State’s Attorney Bond, hot to nail Clay Davis, agrees to go to the mayor with Daniels when he learns that shutting down the case into the bodies in the vacant houses also impacts the Davis investigation.
As Pearlman, Daniels and Bond talk at the courthouse, Chris Partlow – played by native Marylander Gbenga Akinnagbe, a college wrestler at Bucknell – asks how to get to the clerk of the criminal court.
The Wire Page 35