The altruism spread. A number of the actors volunteered campaigning for Barack Obama’s presidential run. Sohn remained in Baltimore and became a pillar of the community. She created an initiative named ReWired for Change, which is devoted to rerouting the lives of at-risk Baltimore youths. In 2016, Wendell Pierce announced his plans to help restore Baltimore through an infusion of jobs and the development of a twenty-million-dollar apartment complex.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): Baltimore is like a second home, and the thing I love about Baltimore is the fact that it reminded me of New Orleans so much—even though y’all don’t know how to cook your crabs right. The people of Baltimore, I fell in love with. The city of Baltimore, I fell in love with. It became like a second home, and I can honestly tell you that some of the best days of my life, I look back on it, I was at my best, doing some of my best work, had so much joy in my life, being with the people doing that TV show. I would look forward to that six-month period every year.
That’s why I wanted to stay connected. It felt like home. And with the images of the riots, it wasn’t just some arbitrary streets that were burning. I knew exactly where people were. I felt like there but for the grace of God go I. I know those kids. I know the people that are involved. I know the police officers. It felt like that was my neighborhood. It felt like that was my city, just like New Orleans in the flood and Katrina. Twenty years from now somebody’s going to say, “In Baltimore’s darkest hours, what did you do, Mr. Pierce? In New Orleans’s darkest hours, what did you do, Mr. Pierce?” I knew what I responded with in New Orleans. It was very clear. We had to rebuild our lives. We had to rebuild. I felt as though that was the same thing in Baltimore. The connection is the social justice movement of the twenty-first century is economic development. If we can look at China, if we can look at India as developing markets, we can look at the West Side, East Side, and see that these are developing markets, too.
Your greatest resource that you have in a democracy is its people. That’s why I want to be a part of it. I have an idea. I really truly believe that the social justice movement of the twenty-first century is economic development. I can stop bullets with jobs. I met Ernst Valery, who is a young developer in Baltimore. As I was looking at different developers to help me in New Orleans, I built thirty houses in New Orleans to bring back my neighborhood, and I wanted to have a response to what I saw on television [during the riots]. I love the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. To speak truths to power, make demands on power. To make the necessary institutionalized changes so that they will stop hurting and killing black folk, stop treating us as suspects. That is one front of it. The other front is: I believe that we need to make a monetary economic investment in our communities, because folks are dealing with the underground economy. We all know it. Some of the violence that comes along with dealing with the underground economy, that colloquialism is true, when people say, “I’m a street pharmacist.” It’s a silly joke now, but that’s the truth. It’s somebody just trying to say, “If I’m not going to get into one economy, I’m going to get in on another.” A focus of that can be my contribution. What we’re going to do is, first of all, let’s create some jobs. The project that I’m doing, Station North, first of all, I wanted to do it in an artistic community, because I’m an artist. I don’t want people to forget that about me. I hate when people say, “Oh, he’s an activist.” I’m not an activist. I’m an actor and an American that sees my communities [as] just as valuable as everybody else’s communities and [who] has a belief that if we invest in our communities, we will have a great ROI, return on our investments.
With Ernst, I’ve discovered this project that I want to do. In Station North, we’re building one hundred ten units. It’s a twenty-five-million-dollar project now, one hundred eighty construction jobs that’ll leave about thirty-five permanent jobs. Then we’re going to have a developer’s apprentice program. It’s part of a thing called REDI, Real Estate Development Initiative. We’re going to take folks and teach them how to be developers, pay them a stipend as we get properties, and go and develop the properties. As we complete the properties, they stay in our portfolio. That’s one thing, but if they are refinanced or we sell them, then we take a portion of that profit and give it to one of the developer apprentices as an investment in their first project. That’s how you create an economic engine.
Several years after finishing the show, Michael Kostroff was walking down a New York City street when a woman excitedly approached, having recognized him as the attorney from The Wire. She wanted a lawyer, and her face fell when he responded that, no, he was just an actor. “She was excited by the possibility that I might actually be a lawyer, and she wanted to hire Levy, I guess,” Kostroff said. Likewise, Steve Earle, a Grammy Award–winning artist, is often stopped by people who thank him for helping Bubbles combat his addiction. Many are unable to leave the show behind. Others are still being introduced to it. “People still think it’s on, like, ‘When is the next season coming out?’ ” said Melvin Jackson, who played Bernard. David Simon had achieved his objective (just not HBO’s) of leaving the audience pining for more.
TRAY CHANEY (MALIK “POOT” CARR): If David Simon said, “The Wire is coming back for Season Six,” do you know what would happen to the world? Worldwide, it would be crazy.
BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): So many people want Season Six. They want to know what happens next. I think that both Ed and David have definitely said, “What happens next is what you imagine.” That’s the beauty of art that doesn’t have a closure that television shows usually do. With Law & Order, you know within the first few minutes that you’ve got a criminal and you’ve got a half an hour to solve the crime, and they will. With The Wire, it’s always the same question we all have when we finally become self-aware, which is, “How much time have I got?” That doesn’t have an answer.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there’s other arguments to be had.
The interviews conducted for the oral history were all done firsthand. In some cases, I wanted to add quotes to the written passages from a particular moment in time. In those instances, the work is cited in the text. I also want to recognize a few books that proved instrumental in the creation of this one. Rafael Alvarez’s The Wire: Truth Be Told contained David Simon’s pitch letter to HBO and is home to a trove of insights concerning all things The Wire. Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (with Ed Burns) provided perspective on the creation of The Wire and are just damn good books. Lastly, Brett Martin’s Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, presented an intelligent dissection of not only The Wire, but also on the backgrounds of Simon and Burns.
Nearly every interview I conducted for this book included the subject vouching for the cast and crew of The Wire’s continued togetherness as a family. They remain a close-knit group today, another trait of the show’s unique durability. I was a stranger hoping to gain enough trust to tell their intimate and important story. I needed a path, and I am eternally grateful that several key people provided a way in for me. My chief advocate became Alexa L. Fogel, the casting director with a discerning eye. To my extreme benefit, she saw value in this project. I’m not going to lie. Many of my initial emails and phone calls requesting interviews went unanswered or unreturned—to the point where I began doubting whether this book would be doable. People responded to Alexa. I leaned on her again and again and again. She helped facilitate interviews with Idris Elba, Wendell Pierce, Michael K. Williams, Dominic West, and many others. I was on the verge of wrapping up the book and had still not made much headway in interviewing Wood Harris. She took it on herself as a mission to get him for me and, of course, made it happen. Quite simply, this project would not have gotten off the ground without Alexa’s unyielding assistance.
The same can be said of Reena Rexrode, the diligent assistant to David Simon, and Diego Aldana and Andrew Loane at HBO. They were always there to answer just one more email or phone call, expedite just one more interview request, or dig up one more old photo. Rexrode put me in touch with Simon’s inner circle, including Nina Noble, George Pelecanos, and the elusive Ed Burns. At one point, she jokingly wrote that she felt as if she worked for Simon and me—except, in retrospect, she probably wasn’t really joking. I am extremely thankful and indebted to them. Of course, this book would have been dead on arrival had David Simon declined to participate. He was giving with his time in entertaining my questions, many of which, I am sure, he has fielded countless times.
As much as I would like to take credit for it, this book was not my idea. The idea came from my wonderful literary agent, Daniel Greenberg, at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. Daniel is the best out there. I would sign with him twice if I could. The same can be said for this book’s editor, Nathan Roberson, at Crown Archetype, whom I did sign with, twice. Nathan was a wizard in wringing the excess out of Boys Among Men, a feat he capably duplicated in this book. And thank you to Tricia Boczkowski and Molly Stern for believing in this project.
I hoped to provide as many perspectives as possible from among those who experienced working on The Wire. A deep thanks to the many cast and crew members who participated in the interviews, many of whom also entertained follow-up questions. I’m mildly surprised that Burns, Pelecanos, Neal Huff, Andre Royo, and Bill Zorzi did not block my number after a while. Many of the talent’s publicists, agents, and managers helped arrange the interviews, and I would like to thank all of them and in particular: Jake Attermann, David Belenky, Roger Charteris, Janet Dickerson, Raina Falcon, Shauna Garr, Alison Golanoski, Kenny Goodman, Michael Henderson, Mark Holder, Caitlin Hughes, Jessica Kovacevic, Matt Goldman, Shelby McElrath, Chris Schmidt, Scott Schulman, Maggie Schuster, Paul Alan Smith, Don Spradlin, and Nate Steadman. Michael B. Jordan agreed to be one of the first interviews for this book, an introduction made possible by my once boss and always mentor Bill Simmons. Knowing that I had an interview with Jordan already in the can with Bill’s assistance sustained me through the early days of the unanswered interview requests, before Fogel descended like a superhero.
Another concession: I was one of the many shameful late converts among The Wire’s viewership. A journalism buddy, Stephen Clark, kept pestering me to watch this show. I was broke, fresh out of college, and did not have HBO at the time, but I finally gave in around the airing of Season 3. Thanks to Stephen for his persistence in introducing me to the show, and to Michael Becker, my roommate at the time, whom I would pester to watch just one more episode that evening after we had already consumed four or five in a row.
Long live Grantland, the home that allowed me to first experiment with oral histories, and a huge shout-out to Shea Serrano, the remarkably gifted writer and author who poured way more time and energy than I could ever have expected or hoped in marketing my first book. Some are just good people inside and out who help because it’s what they do. Shea is one of those people.
In Grantland’s ashes, I was extremely fortunate to link up with an incredible unit at Bleacher Report. Thanks to Howard Beck, Rory Brown, Bill Eichenberger, Dave Finocchio, Shauntel Lowe, Dylan MacNamara, Matt Sullivan, Christina Tapper, and Joe Yanarella.
I deeply enjoyed my wife, Tanya, finally watching The Wire in full with me while I prepared to write this book. She quickly became a convert and proved more capable than me at catching on to the show’s subtler parallels and themes. Thanks to her, as always, for her enduring love and support. She was pulled into this project as much as me, while being a mother, going through pregnancy, and working full time. I’m still amazed at all she accomplishes. Thanks to my family for your support: Mom, Michelle, Danielle, Matthew, Whitney, Dan, Dannen, Angela, George, Nicole, Jamaal, and Cadence. Danica and Jaxton, you guys are new to this world but already fill us with love and smiles. Lastly and certainly not least, thanks to my sons, Jayden and Aaron. Your laughs give me strength. Your joy brings me joy. All is for you.
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All the Pieces Matter Page 36