In researching my character, I found out that police officers can say just about anything in interrogations. Jimmy told me a story about two suspects in a shooting death. Cops were trying to get a confession out of one of them. They took one of the suspects aside and said, “Please tell us that you had the .45, because we just got the ballistics back and it was the nine-millimeter that killed him.”
The relieved suspect said, “Yeah, yeah, I had the .45. I shot him.”
“Good, good,” said the interrogator. “You write that down.” And so he did.
Then the detectives brought the second suspect in and flipped the strategy around. He too signed a confession.
“Wait, Jimmy,” I said, “which bullet killed the guy?”
“Wendell, it doesn’t matter which bullet killed him. They both confessed to shooting a guy who died. We just got two confessions.”
A common ploy is the good cop/bad cop routine. Jimmy told a story about how he once had a murder suspect in the interrogation room. He told the suspect that he knew he was guilty, but hey, he could see why the guy did it.
“Here’s the thing,” Jimmy told him. “You’re not saying anything, and you don’t have to say anything. But the DA is going to come up with all of this shit to say why you killed him, and they’re going to put you away. Now, they can tell their story, and you can tell the truth. If you tell me the truth about how you killed him, and why you killed him, I will talk to the DA for you.”
“You’d do that?” the suspect said.
“Yeah, I’d do that,” Jimmy said.
The suspect wrote out his confession and signed it.
“The next morning I talked to the DA,” Jimmy continued. “I said, ‘Good morning.’”
“Oh man, Jimmy, that was a trick!” I said. “How can you do that?”
He said, “Listen, man, you work for the family.”
That principle came to the fore when a different detective took me to court to see a sentencing in a murder conviction. It was one of the most depressing, devastating events I’ve ever witnessed. The convicted killer was a young man, no more than twenty-five, a huge, strapping guy. The victim’s family gave testimony at the sentencing hearing.
“You’re a nothing, you killed my son, he was a thousand times better than you,” said the mother. Then the next family member took the stand. “If I could right now, I would kill you and take my punishment and spend the rest of my life in jail.” Then the next one. On and on like this.
Then the judge said it was time for the convicted man’s family to speak. Would anyone care to testify?
No one stood. No one was there for him. No one.
And I thought: No wonder.
This kid rose and faced the judge. He was sentenced to life in prison. He did not blink. He did not waver. He turned and walked through the door. His life was over.
I was heartbroken. All the loss, all the pain. I turned to the detective and said, “Man, doesn’t it just tear you up inside? How can you do this?”
Everyone involved in this case—the judge, the victim, the perpetrator—all of them were black.
“All of them are from our community,” I said. “Doesn’t that break your heart?”
“Wendell, stop. This is not our community. This is affecting our community,” the detective answered. “Our community is hard-working people who are going out every day doing the best they can, trying to raise their kids. But it’s a small percentage that’s destroying it. That criminal is not our community.”
“Don’t you understand?” I said. “He had nobody here to speak for him.”
“Yeah, I saw that. But did you see the family? Did you see all those people whose lives were destroyed? They got a lifetime sentence too, and they didn’t do anything. Their son is dead and gone, and they didn’t do anything. When you are a detective, you work for them.”
Right then and there, I said if I didn’t have to go through the boot camp experience, I would become a homicide detective. I would be one of the African American men who stood against those criminals who were destroying our community and defining it in the public eye. Ninety-nine percent of the people are decent, good, hardworking folks who are being hurt and even destroyed by that 1 percent.
Then I met the real Bunk Moreland. Oscar “Rick” Requer is his name. What a larger-than-life character he is. Rick was a pioneering black police detective who joined the Baltimore force in 1964, when black faces were scarce there—and unwelcome. I never was able to observe him work a homicide case. By the time The Wire started, Rick was in the courthouse, coasting toward retirement. But I could tell simply by being in his presence that he had the gift of being able to coax suspects into confession, like an exceptionally talented therapist.
Rick could be a good cop, and he could be a bad cop. He smoked a cigar like I did in the show. He loved to drink. There was a story—I was scared to ask him if it was true—that he had gone out and been on a bender, driving home, smoking a cigar, and flipped his car. When the police came, he rolled down his window—or rather, rolled up his window—and said, “Can I help you guys?”
His nickname was “the Bunk” because that’s what he called people he liked. It came from his time in the military: Your “bunk” was your bunkmate. For Rick Requer, there was no more endearing term.
I never talked with him once we got into the series. The first day we were shooting, I saw Rick in the distance, driving by in his Caddy, smoking a cigar. He pulled over, got out, and had a quizzical look on his face. Watching him, I got the sense that he was thinking, What the hell is that boy doing, portraying me? He doesn’t know a damn thing.
I was so intimidated by that moment that I never reached out to him again for the five years we shot the series.
One day, I was sitting in a Baltimore barbershop and someone said, “Hey, man, aren’t you that actor that plays Bunk? I know the real Bunk. He’s retiring. You better be there.”
It was almost like a threat. I thought, Oh God, that’s the same look Bunk gave me five years ago. I figured that he was going to take his retirement party as an opportunity to dress me down for how badly I had made him look for the past five years.
So I screwed up my courage and showed up at the party to get what I had coming. I knew Bunk was going to dress me down in front of all his colleagues and tell me what a dishonor I had done to him, to his family, and to the black men of the Baltimore police department who had worked so hard to be detectives.
I walked into the hall and saw him across the room. There he was, the real Bunk, looking at me with that quizzical look again. It took a lifetime to make my way across the crowded room to say hello. When I stood in front of him, he gave me a hard look, then melted.
“Bunk!” he said. “You came! Everybody, look, Bunk is here!”
He hugged me hard and held me tight. “Oh, you made me famous, boy! I can’t believe you here!”
I felt like the Prodigal Son come home. I had to speak to the crowd, of course. I turned to him and said, “Bunk, how did I do?”
“Oh, boy, you did good. You made me famous,” he said. Receiving his blessing was like hearing from my own father. To have that from the real Bunk was one of the greatest gifts you could give me.
I knew how hard it was for Rick Requer to work through the ranks of the Baltimore Police Department. I was proud of how The Wire depicted how black men chose to join the force. Almost all the black detectives and beat cops I met told me that they entered police work to defend their own communities.
They knew that what was happening in their neighborhoods wasn’t right. They knew the Miss Annes and Mr. Joes, the law-abiding, hardworking folk, especially the working poor, who were trying to hold their families together against impossible odds. It was that 1 or 2 percent of hoodlums who made life miserable for everybody else. These black men became police officers because they wanted to get those crimin
als out of their neighborhoods. They didn’t reflect the majority of the decent people just trying to get by.
As I heard those stories, I realized: Wow, that’s Pontchartrain Park. I didn’t grow up like that—Pontchartrain Park was crime-free—but I knew that all these officers came from wonderful neighborhoods that had once been like my own, but that were being ruined by such a small number of folks there.
Here’s an inside story of how the storytelling genius of David Simon and his writing staff bore witness to some complicated truths about black police officers and the criminals they fight—and ultimately, to searing truths about human nature rarely seen on television, either in drama or on the news.
The Wire’s writers kept everything close to the vest. They never wanted the actors to know what was coming. They would never tell us, which could be incredibly frustrating. We felt sometimes like they didn’t trust us not to reveal spoilers. But David held the line because he wanted us as actors to be in the moment, to experience as authentically as possible what our characters faced as the arc of their stories took startling turns.
I look back on it and find that strategy, and the discipline with which David and his team followed it, very impressive. We would knock heads often over it, but I’m glad David didn’t budge. As an actor, I’d literally not know what was coming in the next script. But that’s how life is, too.
In the third season, Bunk is searching for a gun used in a crime. I was so frustrated dealing with this story line because it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I was bitching on set one day to another cast member and really getting on my high horse about it.
“I don’t know where this gun is going, and all these great story lines are playing out around me, but Bunk is going nowhere,” I griped. “I know all these black men who became cops because it’s their neighborhood, and they know the criminals, they know their neighbors.
“It reminds me of my girlfriend’s father,” I continued. “He’s a doctor who came out of Oklahoma. He knew he had to keep it together because there was so much threat from outside of his community. During segregation, there was a sense of unity to survive. Even back then, in the thirties, the thugs would say, ‘Hey, schoolboy, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re going to make it out. You’re going to college.’ Even the thugs had a sense of community. And that’s why, to this day, black men become police officers: that sense of community.”
George Pelecanos, one of the writers, was sitting back listening to my sour social-justice soliloquy and took me aside.
“Wendell,” he said, “the gun is going to lead you to Omar.”
“What?!” I said. Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) was the show’s seminal villain, the one person that people feared in the hood.
“The gun is going to lead you to Omar,” he repeated. “I heard what you were saying just now. Do you mind if we develop some of that?”
And this was the genesis for what stands as one of the most powerful scenes in the entire series.
After a botched robbery and deadly firefight that has all the marks of an Omar operation, Bunk loses his cool when he sees little kids on the street pretending to be the criminal kingpin. When Bunk tracks down Omar, he reminds the coldhearted killer that they come from the same neighborhood—even the same school. Bunk says that he tried to be hard too, back in the day, but the real thugs knew he wasn’t one of them.
“Shit, they knew I wasn’t one of them,” says Bunk, puffing his cigar. “Them hard cases would come up to me and say, ‘Go home, schoolboy, you don’t belong here.’ Didn’t realize at the time what they were doing for me.”
Then his barely suppressed rage catches fire.
“As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community,” Bunk growls. “And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar, calling you by name, glorifying your ass. Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.”
That scene is brought up to me more than any other—by police officers, by guys who meet me and say, “Hey, man, I’m in the game. I remember that scene you had with Omar.”
Every time that happens, I’m reminded all over again about the impact The Wire made on everyone who saw it. I especially love it when black police officers tell me that that scene, and this series, finally told the truth about what police work means to them. This is why The Wire is taught in universities. It was—it is—art that reveals the human condition with unflinching honesty. This was a show about cops and drug dealers and politics and journalism in one American city. But in their worlds is the entire world. In their time and place are eternity and the universe.
This is what art can do.
What made The Wire real art, not mere entertainment, was that David kept pushing his writers and actors through layers and layers of moral ambiguity, searching for a truth that would never be entirely graspable, because human nature is ultimately a mystery. The series is about how individuals lose themselves within institutions, whether it’s a police officer within the division, a neighborhood kid joining a drug gang, or an idealistic politician succumbing to corruption and becoming cynical. Audiences who loved The Wire thought it was speaking to them, even if they knew nothing about the bureaucracies and social hierarchies dissected by the show. Those viewers may not have known any cops, crooks, politicians, teachers, or newspapermen, but everybody knows what it’s like to have your idealism sucked out of you by life.
Not long ago, I received a message from a Baltimore teacher who chose to teach in the city because of The Wire, and who teaches the show to students. Season four, which brought the Baltimore public school system into the series, is in my opinion the best social examination of adolescence in the inner city ever depicted on television.
There are some moments that season that are so true and heartbreaking, they leave you wondering what you’re doing with your life. There’s a scene in which one kid is sent to the principal’s office and sees a bunch of computers that have been sitting in boxes, unopened, because nobody within the institution cares about those kids, their education, or their future.
In another plotline, Sergeant Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) persuades an eighth-grader, Randy (Maestro Harrell), to come forward and be an informant, promising him police protection. When criminals firebomb Randy’s row house and put his foster mother in the hospital with second- and third-degree burns, the boy bitterly reproaches the detective: “You gonna look out for me? You promise? You got my back, huh?”
There is nothing Carver can say.
In that season, Zenobia Dawson is one of the most foulmouthed, violent students in the school. I had nothing to do with that character, so I never spoke with Taylor King, the young actress who played Zenobia. I met her at the season-four wrap party. A beautiful young woman came up to me and said, “Mr. Pierce, I’m a big admirer of your work. I’m graduating this year and going to Brown on a scholarship.”
This girl was so impressive, but I didn’t recognize her. I asked her what character she played. She told me Zenobia.
“No, no, baby,” I said, “Zenobia is the girl who can barely read. She’s the girl who slices another girl’s face open for sitting in the wrong seat. You can’t be the one who plays Zenobia.”
“Mr. Pierce,” she said, “that really was me.”
I thought, This is part of the problem. We should be telling Taylor King’s story. She is the image of a young black girl in Baltimore we never see. I went home angry and discouraged, determined to leave this fucking show. We’re part of the problem, not the solution. I meditated on all the professionally accomplished black folk who had stopped me over the years on the streets of Baltimore and asked me why we showed only the worst part of life in the city.
The insight that allowed me to come back for the final season is that I realized that none of this was meaningless, none of it was gratuitous. The heartbreak and anger seas
on four left me with came out of the humanity it revealed in those street corner kids from West Baltimore whose coming-of-age struggle was a major theme of that year’s show. If you watched that season of The Wire, you would never be able to pass a corner kid again, in the toughest of neighborhoods anywhere in the country, and not see in him a spark of humanity.
It’s not that The Wire sentimentalized these kids. You hold them accountable for their bullshit, but you have empathy for them in spite of it. That season revealed how fragile the lives of inner-city kids are, amid a level of poverty, violence, and chaos scarcely imaginable to most Americans. You see how only one element added or removed from their existence could make all the difference in their ultimate fate in life.
It’s not by chance that black American men between eighteen and twenty-four are both the main perpetrators and the main victims of violent crime in our cities. Black and white, liberal and conservative, rich and poor—we all drive by those corner kids and reject them without ever really seeing them. These kids, they’re ours. How do we know that one of them might not be the next Louis Armstrong, who was once a juvenile delinquent until he was given a chance? How do we know that one of these street kids might not cure cancer, if given the chance?
I hope that when they see the ongoing tragedy of inner-city Chicago, of New Orleans, of Newark, people will think back to The Wire and wonder: How did Michael (Tristan Wilds) succumb to it, and how did Namond (Julito McCullum) get out? All these stories are playing out every day in the inner cities of America. And they are all in the fourth year of The Wire.
This is life. This is art. This is The Wire. And it is forever.
Because David Simon gave me the chance to be part of something great and enduring, I will always consider him family. An actress said to me once, shortly after the series ended, “Wendell, I hope you realize that The Wire was your Godfather.”
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