When Lester gives his tape of DiPasquale’s confession about selling grand jury documents to Pearlman, she gives him the hairy eyeball with a pointed comment that she knows what he and McNulty have been up to.
A very nervous Lester will soon share this info with Jimmy McNulty, and together they wonder why they haven’t been arrested yet.
Why? Politics, of course. Between the upcoming election and the complications resulting from the Marlo Stanfield investigation, they figure they have more than enough chips to barter.
Robert Ruby reports to Haynes that his review of Templeton’s published work shows it to be riddled with exaggerations, fake quotes, half-truths and manufactured sources. Gus puts Ruby’s research in a drawer, not sure yet what to do.
As expected, Marlo Stanfield is denied bail and his attorney, Levy, says he’s got to know how the cops figured out the clock code. The lawyer suspects a wire tap, but even then it doesn’t all add up.
Crossing paths with Cheese after the meeting with Levy breaks up, Marlo tells his lieutenant to track down Michael once he is out on bail.
At the courthouse, Levy tells Pearlman he has figured out the weak spots in her case against Marlo and won’t hesitate to exploit it in court. He suggests they meet somewhere and talk.
When they do, they hopscotch their way to a plea agreement deal. Pearlman plays the tape of Levy on the phone with DiPasquale. In exchange for not using it against him, she wants guilty pleas from Partlow, Cheese and Monk. Marlo, she says, can walk, as long as he stays off the street.
Curious as to why she is reluctant to bring her big evidence into an open courtroom, Levy can only conclude that the prosecutor must have some pretty big problems to hide.
Out of the loop, Jay Landsman keeps banging on McNulty to work the homeless murders harder, calling him about a man in a gray van who just tried to kidnap a homeless person. When Jimmy shows up he finds Templeton, who claims to have seen the crime outside of the Sunpapers building.
When Templeton leaves, another homeless man walks up to McNulty. It’s an undercover cop who tells Jimmy that the reporter is full of shit: there was no gray van.
Reading over Mike Fletcher’s profile of him, Bubbles still isn’t sure he wants it published. His NA sponsor, Walon, tells Bubs he may just be afraid that people will think he’s a good guy. Walon has brought Bubbles steamed crabs from the place where he works, and Bubbles, still on the fence about the story, takes them home to his sister.
Inside the paper, Haynes demands that Klebanow kill Templeton’s gray van story, another tale without confirmed sources. You may win a Pulitzer with this guy, says Gus, but then you’re going to have to give it back.
In South Baltimore, a call for a real killer of homeless men comes in: the case now has copycats picking up where McNulty left off.
McNulty shows up, saying that Daniels and Pearlman know the truth, and Bunk tells his old partner that he is responsible for the death of the man in the copycat murder.
Cornered in homicide by Rawls and Daniels, McNulty swears he had nothing to do with the fresh body in South Baltimore. The mayor knows what went on, says Rawls, and your best move is to solve the copycat murder and hope it all goes away.
Seeing a handful of business cards among the new victim’s possession, Jimmy remembers a homeless man from his various visits to skid row having a box of business cards. When he shows up, he finds that the man also has a spool of red ribbon. In the midst of cops and a media circus, McNulty easily solves his own made-up case, mirrored back to him like some kind of Baltimore multi-verse.
In the newsroom, metro editor Steve Luxenburg tells Haynes that even though the evidence against Templeton is damning – and now includes the reporter’s notebook on the serial killer, which is blank – making a stink about it may cost him his job.
Taking a deep breath, Haynes walks into Whiting’s office, ready to make his case. They are joined by Klebanow.
Bunk and McNulty interview their red ribbon, business card-hoarding homeless suspect, who confesses to killing every victim publicized by McNulty.
As Jimmy leaves, he finds Templeton waiting for him in Landsman’s office. Closing the door, McNulty goes off on the reporter, telling him he knows he lied because he made up the whole thing himself. With that, he sends a rattled Templeton back to his editors, knowing the guy can’t share this truth with a soul.
Back in the interrogation room, McNulty refuses to manipulate the mentally ill homeless man into confessing to all six murders.
Carcetti tells the press that the killer of the homeless men has been arrested, charged with the two most recent ones and is suspected of the others. At the end of the press conference, the mayor publicly credits and congratulates Cedric Daniels on the arrest and the Stanfield case.
He then announces that Daniels is his new police commissioner.
Daniels, on the advice of his ex-wife, will resign from the department before his confirmation hearings begin. The move is to avoid being leveraged by City Hall with an old file alleging corruption when he worked the Eastern District. And to avoid staining the fresh political career of the former Mrs Cedric Daniels.
As his final official act in a very brief tenure as police commissioner, Daniels promotes Ellis Carver, his old protégé, to lieutenant.
Back in the homicide unit, Pearlman tells Jimmy and Lester that they won’t be fired, but they won’t be working street police anymore either. If they want to stay, it will be desk jobs or nothing.
It is not lost on McNulty and Freamon that both Levy and Marlo dodged prosecution, adding that they only have themselves to blame.
What is left of the New Day Co-op – Fat Face Rick, Slim Charles, and Clinton “Shorty” Buise – talk business with Marlo, who is auctioning his drug connection with The Greek.
Asking price: $10 million.
Later, when Cheese tries to throw in with the other Co-op dealers to buy the connection with him – saying it ain’t about nostalgia or back in the day, it’s just about selling dope – Slim Charles shoots him dead: “For Joe.”
For their efforts to expose a crooked reporter, both Gus and Alma are demoted: he to the copy desk, she to a distant suburb. When Gus wonders why she was punished when she never brought up Templeton’s empty notebook, Alma tells him that she told the editors about it herself in support of him.
Bubbles reads Mike Fletcher’s profile of him while sitting on a curb, carefully folding it when he’s done and putting it in his pocket.
At a downtown office party, Levy introduces Marlo – who had told his former drug compatriots that his next move would be “businessman” – to the real-estate elite of Baltimore, including the developer Andrew Krawczyk, whom one might think had had his fill of nouveau-riche drug dealers.
[Said Malcolm Azania: “Having won back his freedom from prison courtesy of another psychopath, Maurice Levy, Marlo has no grand vision of what to do with his millions won from addiction and death – no transformative lessons have been learned.
“Instead he leaves an elite gathering of Baltimore’s powerful, in which he holds no sway, to return to his hunting grounds where he can feel alive and dominant by crushing teenagers with his fists.
“He is Milton’s Satan, preferring to rule in hell than serve in heaven.”]
As a group of drug dealers gather at Vinson’s rim shop with their money, Michael steps out of the darkness with a shotgun, puts a load of buckshot in Vinson’s leg and grabs a bag full of cash.
Michael don’t scare.
At a wake for the careers of McNulty and Freamon at Kavanaugh’s, Jimmy lays on the pool table, a stiff smirking at his own eulogies.
Holding forth, Landsman documents McNulty’s history as a troublemaker, insubordinate and general all-round pain in the ass giver of grief.
He ends, however, with this: “If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I’d want it to be you standing over me, catching the case.
“Because, brother, when you were good, you were
the best we had.”
THE DRUNKARD’S OPERA
Jimmy McNulty in life and letters
Most women have a Jimmy McNulty in their past. He’s the guy you take home from the bar and never hear from again, the lover whose idea of a date is a drink-and-dial at midnight, the husband you divorce because you finally get fed up and too tired to care.
McNulty, of course, played all of those roles with various partners over the five seasons of The Wire and the performance resonated with female viewers who have tangled with his real-life counterparts.
“I’ve had McNultys in my past, have some in my present and am working assiduously to avoid having any in my future,” says economic policy specialist Marceline White of Baltimore.
“He’s the kind of guy I loved when I was in my twenties, but now I steer clear of,” says Baltimore writer Laura Wexler. “They’re totally attractive, but they’re trouble.”
Played with brutal charm by Dominic West, McNulty is not only a familiar real-life type but also an inspired mash-up of a long line of literary heroes stretching back to the 18th century, says Tita Chico, associate professor of British literature at the University of Maryland in College Park.
“The rakish hero has been a stock character type, simultaneously attractive and dangerous, trading on the currency of temptation, the thrill of adventure, and the promise – almost never, ever fulfilled – that he’ll reform for the ‘right’ woman,” says Chico.
“This kind of hero – the one who straddles the line between the criminal and the police, and who charms and betrays women left and right, but still seems to embody a true code of honor – lingers in all manner of crime and detective fiction today.”
Dominic West tells a funny story that neatly encapsulates the allure, both sexual and literary, of the character he played with such gusto.
“I was walking down the street near my house one sunny evening and noticed an exceptionally beautiful woman walking towards me and laughing with her two friends, one of whom was reading aloud a newspaper article,” he says.
“I remember thinking how sophisticated and exotic they seemed and what a beautiful sight they made in the twilight. Just as I was falling in love with her, she suddenly saw me and said ‘Oh my God, I love you.’”
The woman, West soon realized, was the novelist Zadie Smith, acclaimed author of White Teeth, On Beauty and The Autograph Man. “She raved about The Wire,” West recalls. “I spluttered something gauche like ‘Oh … thanks very much, I love you too,’ and hurried stupidly away.”
McNulty, of course, would not have let such an opportunity pass without making a play for the beautiful writer, and it’s that brazen hedonism, coupled with his professional chops, that male fans of The Wire find both compelling and slightly repugnant.
“He is both a cool guy and a messed-up jerk,” says Baltimore novelist Michael Kimball. “Which one usually depends on how much he’s had to drink or how deep he is into a case.”
As with women, every man seems to have a McNulty in his life. “I’ve definitely had friends – exasperating ones – like McNulty. Fun to drink with, charming, self-destructive,” says Random House book editor Jeff Alexander of New York.
“The kind of guy who wonders why you’re not introducing your female friends to him, who doesn’t quite understand that – as much as you like him – you’d never wish him upon someone you were close to.”
McNulty is “the kind of guy you’d want at your bachelor party but you couldn’t trust at the wedding reception.”
Alexander points out that the aspect of the character that makes McNulty and his story arc a more contemporary literary tradition is the narrative of addiction and recovery.
Smart, cocky, and hopelessly self-destructive, Jimmy McNulty is probably the most realistic functional alcoholic ever to appear on television. There is no sanctimony or sentimentality in The Wire’s depiction of McNulty’s alcoholism, no “my name is Jimmy and I’m an alcoholic” moment.
But the series writers grant McNulty an epiphany in Season Five when FBI profilers deliver a capsule description of the serial killer menacing the city’s homeless men:
“He is likely not a college graduate, but nonetheless feels superior to those with advanced education. He has a problem with authority, and a deep-seated resentment of those whom he feels have impeded his progress professionally. The subject has problems with lasting relationships and is possibly a high-functioning alcoholic.”
McNulty’s drunkard’s pride and sense of superiority are the character’s defining traits, a guy who always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, David Simon has said.
But pride usually leads to a beat down, as Western civilization’s oldest book points out, and that’s especially true for the tribe of alcoholics.
McNulty hits bottom three times on the show and with each humiliation he comes progressively closer to the truth about himself, perhaps most crushingly when he loses a game of sexual politics to political consultant Teresa D’Agostino in Season Three.
After retreating to the more sympathetic arms of Amy Ryan’s Beadie Russell in Season Four, he tries to sober up and wise up – only to relapse in Season Five.
“He’s got to up the ante a bit because he’s so in trouble with his job and so hateful of his bosses that he’s got to go one step further with self-destruction before he can be free of his demons,” West told Flak Magazine in 2008.
“He had to hit rock bottom, and I think this is what the serial killer angle does.”
Near the end of the series, with his career in tatters, his closest friendships all but destroyed and his last-chance relationship about to fall apart, McNulty admits the truth to Beadie and to himself.
Trying to make sense of his behavior and the emotions behind it, he says: “I don’t even know where the anger comes from. I don’t know how to make it stop. Now that I’ve done all this, I watched myself do it, I can’t even stand it.”
It’s as close as McNulty comes to a confession, paving the way for a tenuous happy ending.
In the end, the writers of The Wire offer McNulty the kind of absolution denied all but one other character, Bubbles, the recovering heroin addict whose journey most closely resembles his own.
Like McNulty, Bubs has grievously harmed not only himself but people he loves. His lonely mattress in the basement of his sister’s house, a way station on the road to recovery, is the mirror image of McNulty’s bare apartment post-divorce in Season One.
Both men need to go down into the depths before they can rise up to enjoy the fruits of normalcy – dinner in the kitchen with your family, the left-on porch light showing the way home.
Though he loses the job he both loves and hates, McNulty ends the series with his relationship and friendships intact, alive at his own wake, saluted by his fellow cops, even his longstanding nemesis Jay Landsman.
In evading the grim fate meted out to so many others, McNulty once again reveals his literary pedigree. He is a virtual ringer for the character of Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, says literary scholar Chico.
In that “fierce satire of government and judicial corruption,” she says, “Macheath is the ring leader of a criminal gang, and so on the other side of the law from McNulty, but is similar in his passion for wine and women and his strict sense of honor. In the face of true depravity – a government in cahoots with criminals – the Macheath hero is adored by all, charming and immune from being punished for any of his crimes.”
Dominic West’s ability to play this raw Baltimore Macheath so close to the bone has impressed even those familiar with his earlier theater work.
“I’ve seen Dominic playing quintessentially young English leads in plays like The Seagull on the London stage and I think his performance in The Wire is a revelation, it’s like watching a different actor,” says British theater and television director Edward Hall.
In London, where Wire-mania hit years after the series debut in the States, fans find his performance so c
onvincing they have a hard time believing he is a fellow Brit.
“I didn’t find out he was English until three seasons in,” says musician Al English. “I so believed the character that it felt weird to watch him speaking with a British accent on YouTube.
“I saw a few clips of him in a period drama, and his English accent was really quite posh. It seemed like more of a put-on than his Baltimore accent.”
The posh accent isn’t fake. West is a public schoolboy, English version.
“One of my greatest pleasures is to watch Dominic playing an Irish-American cop so convincingly,” says actor John Nettleton, who appeared with West in The Voysey Inheritance at the National Theatre in London.
“He is an Old Etonian, and usually it’s hard for Etonians to change their accents; the role he plays in The Wire is a considerable achievement for anyone from that school.”
Whatever the accent, there’s clearly a bit of the hard-living McNulty in the actor who brought him so vividly to life.
While filming in Baltimore, the actor lived at Clipper Mill apartments, an upscale complex carved out of the shell of an old textile mill in North Baltimore.
West’s next-door neighbor, Baltimore art dealer Jordan Faye Block, recalled the time the actor hosted a private party at the complex’s pool at four a.m.
“He got crazy in the pool one night with a bunch of people he brought home with him,” Block laughs. “They tried to punish him by taking away his pool provisions for a week.”
Deborah Rudacille
Sofia Alvarez in London contributed to this story.
AFTERWORD
HOMAGE TO THE QUIET MAN
“Bob’s silences were more expressive than words …”
– KAREN THORSON
It was god-awful news.
The Wire Page 41