Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  Above all, the book is a work of immense confidence. Simon grew to know his subjects so intimately that he could claim, without hesitation, the right to say what they were thinking and feeling at any moment. This is all the more remarkable since he allowed each detective to read, and request changes to, his portions of the manuscript before publication. Nothing of substance was altered.

  Indeed, the men ended up impressed, even touched, by the way Simon had portrayed them. “That motherfucker . . . he was good,” said Landsman. “He was inside my mind. He really knew us.”

  McLarney had an even more astonishing takeaway for the subject of a nonfiction book whose author could walk away comfortable that he had told the uncompromised truth. He said, “David Simon taught me that people can be trusted.”

  Had they experienced any blowback?

  “Nah, he never blew any of us,” said Landsman, sipping his beer and slipping easily into what was obviously an old routine.

  “Well, there was that one incident. On the couch . . . ,” said McLarney.

  “Oh, yeah. But we’d never blow him back.”

  • • •

  One homicide detective who was not around the office in 1988—he was detailed to a federal investigation—was Ed Burns. Burns was the perfect Simonian character: tough, intellectual, antiauthoritarian, Irish. He grew up just outside Baltimore, the son of a once aspiring newsman who had settled for the job of type-composer at the News-American. Punished for chronic misbehavior by the nuns at his Catholic school with confinement in the basement, Ed discovered a walk-in freezer filled with ice cream: an early lesson in the pleasures of bucking the system.

  Coming out of college in the early 1960s, Burns went to work as a copy boy at the News-American. There, he had the newsroom experience of David Simon’s dreams. One of his jobs would be to roust reporters from whatever brothel or bar they’d crawled off to for the afternoon. The paper’s stairwells were so filled with discarded airplane bottles of booze, one had to be careful not to sprain an ankle.

  As the war in Vietnam escalated, Burns, eminently draftable, made a calculation that he’d be better off running toward trouble than waiting for it to come to him. He enrolled in Officer Candidate School. Not for the last time, he found himself less than impressed by the men in charge. “The dumbest fucking people I could have imagined,” he said. “And they were not only sending me to die, but to lead other people to die.”

  Again, he calculated that the best path to survival was a counterintuitive one. He quit the officer track and signed on to language school, which meant he’d be assigned as a companion and translator to a Kit Carson scout—one of the North Vietnamese defectors the army had begun using for their knowledge of local terrain. Though more dangerous, the duty also meant an earlier exit from the service and a measure of control.

  “At least I would be with somebody who knew what the fuck he was doing,” he said.

  Once in country, Burns traveled as light as possible. Alongside ammunition, his rucksack contained a few clothes, canned peaches, a container of Old Bay, and a book. He was sent to the central coast, near My Lai, where Lieutenant William Calley would soon become notorious. It was incredibly dangerous: Burns and the scout he was assigned to, a nineteen-year-old ex–NVA sniper named Ba, walked point for a platoon of men that was constantly being winnowed by casualty. Ba, said Burns, saved his life innumerable times by spotting mines and sniper traps. Once, two North Vietnamese soldiers appeared on the path fifteen feet in front of them and began firing down the American column. “Ba was like a hunting dog,” Burns said. “We went after those guys. We found them. And we killed them. Didn’t even stand them up against a tree, we just shot them.”

  Vietnam provided Burns with further education in institutional idiocy. It was also a powerful lesson in the futility of an occupying army facing an entrenched insurgency—a view he would have ample opportunity to develop further as a participant in America’s drug war. In large part, that lesson was about the expendability of soldiers on both sides; after one year, Burns rotated back to the States, while Ba stayed behind. The men never heard from each other again. “I assume he was either killed or reeducated,” Burns said.

  And, he added, he came away with another important lesson about how to deal with an enemy: “You’ve got to know ’em.”

  • • •

  Back home, Burns spent 1969 drifting. He bought a Volkswagen and drove around the country—occasionally with companions, but most often alone. The roads, he said, were filled with returning soldiers trying to get reacclimated. “That was how I cured myself of PTSD,” he said.

  He had no good answer for why, after a year, he decided to join the Baltimore Police Department—another paramilitary organization with a suspect bureaucratic command structure and little chance of lasting success. The job did serve an addiction to adrenaline he’d picked up overseas. He was assigned to the Western District—“the Wild West,” it was called—and worked the five p.m. to one a.m. shift. “All the guys were young, except the sergeant, who never came out of the station. We had a good time,” he said. “I did the same thing I did walking point in Vietnam: went out with the drug squad, went out with the vice squad.”

  Burns soon proved especially adept at finding and cultivating informants—even more so when he joined the escape squad, tracking down people who had felony warrants or had escaped from prison. On the street, he was known as “Curlytop.”

  “I had a reputation: When I got you, I got you. But then I’d go to bat for you,” he said. Burns’s snitches could often look forward to double paychecks—one from the BPD and one from the Feds, who frequently piggybacked on Burns’s work. Eventually, he took to carrying three beepers to manage all his contacts from the Eastern, the Western, and the Northwestern districts.

  Among Burns’s most reliable informants was an addict named Bubbles who had an astonishing memory for faces and schemes. Generally, though, he looked for players who worked outside the drug gangs: stickup boys, lone wolves. “Guys outside the pale, who had crafted their own little niche in the world. Omar-type guys,” he called them, after the character who would become the most popular figure on The Wire.

  Arguably Burns got along better with his network of street intelligence than with his fellow cops.

  “Let me just say this,” said Terry McLarney, summing up the prevailing sentiment. “Ed Burns served his country in Vietnam. He’s very smart and a very tough guy. A real man.” He took a breath. “That said, Ed Burns could be a flaming asshole.”

  Burns was not one to socialize down at the Fraternal Order of Police hall, preferring to do his drinking in a second-floor joint in the hood, where you bought your beer in six-packs. Once he transferred to homicide in 1979, he would antagonize Landsman by eating granola and spouting radical ideas.

  “He would sit there, eating his birdseed, drinking our booze, and arguing that all cops should have four-year degrees. I’d say, ‘But then all of us would be like you! It would be a nightmare,’” Landsman said.

  “He would speak to you as though he was speaking down to you. As though you were stupid,” said Detective Marvin Sydnor, who worked with Burns as a young narcotics officer. “If you heard, ‘I’m going to kick that guy’s ass,’ you knew Ed was somewhere nearby.”

  Beyond questions of style, Burns and his partner, Harry Edgerton (a version of whom was played by Andre Braugher on Homicide: Life on the Street), had no time for the day-in-day-out, small-bore cases that occupied most of the office. They were after big game, which meant they’d often disappear from the office, working single cases, for long periods. Even those who understood the approach philosophically could feel left holding the bag.

  “It’s like there’s five guys running at you with axes,” McLarney said. “Ed takes on one. He beats him to death, but the rest of us are still stuck fighting the other four.”

  Burns, for his part, accepted such opinions with a
wry smile and undiminished scorn for most of his past workmates. “Paper pushers,” he called them, dead weight. Of one he said, “If you were lying there dead, looked up, and saw him standing over you, you’d think, ‘They’re never going to solve this.’”

  • • •

  Ed Burns’s best detective work involved the combination of a conceptual breakthrough and dogged labor. It was illegal at that time to use wiretaps as part of homicide investigations, but not if investigators could prove that a murder was part of an organized criminal conspiracy. Such investigations were long and arduous—they required finding a cooperative prosecutor and judge—but they aimed to bring down entire drug gangs rather than just individuals. The second case Burns worked in this way, while assigned to the DEA, was Little Melvin Williams, the drug lord, and it’s what brought Simon to his door.

  It was shortly after Williams’s arrest in December 1984, and Burns remembered Simon showing up at the DEA office where he was preparing material to bring Melvin before a grand jury. Simon had somehow made it past security without a badge. “I’m here from the Sun,” he announced. “I’d like to listen to some of the wiretaps.”

  “Well,” said Burns, “I’d love to let you listen, Mr. Simon, because then I can lock you up for ten years because it’s a violation of grand jury confidentiality.”

  Their next meeting went better. Williams had been indicted, and they met at the Towson Public Library. Burns had just checked out a stack of books that included John Fowles’s The Magus; Veil, Bob Woodward’s book about the CIA; and a collection of essays by Hannah Arendt. Simon was impressed. “I’m looking at these, thinking, ‘You’re a cop?’” he said. Burns talked differently, too. “He began to speak very delicately about the department, as though it was separate from him, in a way most cops can’t,” Simon said. Burns also hinted that the case had been forced to close early, thanks to Marty Ward’s death.

  Several interviews later, Simon’s Little Melvin story had grown into a series that would run on the Sun’s front page over five days in January 1987. It detailed not only the police work involved in the demise of Melvin’s empire—including Burns’s inspiration to clone the beepers the organization used to communicate—but also the context in which it thrived: the desperate economy of the streets and the rise of a new, even more violent generation of drug dealers waiting to fill any vacuum created by the arrest.

  What impressed Burns was that Simon took the time to interview Melvin himself, along with other members of the gang, rather than relying solely on police accounts. Indeed, even before Homicide, Simon’s interest was broadening. “David started becoming less interested in cops and more interested in robbers,” said Alvarez. “He began to identify with what The Wire would call the victims of capitalism. His argument was that factored into the axiom of capitalism is a certain percentage of the population that is simply not needed. And that as we get further into postindustrial America, that percentage grows.”

  By 1993, Burns’s twenty-year run at the BPD had come to an end and he was turning to a new career, as a public school teacher. “After five great wiretap cases, he ran out of political capital,” said Simon. “They said, ‘Man, you’re making us tired. You think too hard, work too hard.’ Of course, they didn’t say it that way. They said, ‘You’re a fucking asshole.’”

  Hearing of Burns’s retirement, Simon first suggested the Sun hire him as an investigator. Instead, another project presented itself. John Sterling, Simon’s editor on Homicide, suggested a follow-up that used the same year-in-the-life structure to tell the other side of the story, that of the participants in, and victims of, the drug culture. Simon immediately thought of Burns as a collaborator, and the two took a trip to a beach house in North Carolina, ostensibly to brainstorm, but also to feel each other out. Simon gave Burns assignments: “Let’s say you’ve got a white dope fiend coming to cop drugs. How would you write it up?”

  Burns said Simon was worried that they might not find a story. “But I had this thing: I know Baltimore’s not going to let me down. You put corn in enough heat, it’s going to pop. Baltimore is that kind of pressure cooker.”

  As if to exhibit that faith in the story-granting universe, the two chose a neighborhood corner more or less at random. For three months, while Simon worked at the newspaper, Burns began heading down to the junction of Fayette and Monroe Streets five days a week, getting the lay of the land. He immediately spotted the local heroin shooting gallery, the once nice home of a man named Blue. He also met two men who would become their main characters: Gary McCullough, a hard-luck addict, and his son DeAndre, who over the course of the year would end up in the drug game himself. The third, vital piece was DeAndre’s mother, Fran Boyd, also an addict, who was reluctant to cooperate. Burns spent weeks following her into smoky drug dens and broken-down houses until finally winning her trust. Eventually, Boyd would be one of the many Baltimoreans who looked forward to periodic checks for her work writing and recording background chatter (called “wah-wah”) for The Wire.

  When Simon took his second leave from the Sun and began coming to the corner, he brought stacks of copies of Homicide, to prove he was really an author and not a cop on an elaborate sting; to this day, signed copies can probably be found amid the debris of West Baltimore vacant houses. Like the detectives in that book, the residents of Fayette and Monroe soon came to take the writers’ presence for granted. “These people were desperate. They had no one to talk to. So if you’re there, and they’re momentarily out of the game, they’ll come and they’ll talk.” Once, a carload of armed gang members showed up, fresh off a heist of some kind, and asked Fat Curt, another regular at Blue’s shooting gallery, who the two white dudes were. “Them the writers,” Curt said, as though every corner in Baltimore came with a pair.

  The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was finished three years after the project began. (“Simon was very heavy into fantasy baseball one of the years,” Burns said by way of explaining why it took so long to write.) The book is as engrossing as its predecessor, but far more political.

  “It had to be,” said Simon. “Everybody agreed with the fundamental principle of Homicide: If someone is murdered, you should try to solve it. There is no ‘other hand.’ But whether we should fight the drug war or not, who’s complicit in the creation of this world . . . to answer those, you have to address modern American history. Because otherwise, looking at these broken lives . . . it’s just porn.”

  Among The Corner’s many arguments, one in particular provides the central insight that would inform The Wire: “Get it straight. They’re not just out here to sling and shoot drugs,” Burns and Simon wrote of the denizens of Fayette and Monroe.

  That’s where it all began, to be sure, but thirty years has transformed the corner into something far more lethal and lasting than a simple marketplace. The men and women who live the corner life are redefining themselves at incredible cost, cultivating meaning in a world that has declared them irrelevant. At Monroe and Fayette, and in drug markets in cities across the nation, lives without any obvious justification are given definition through a simple self-sustaining capitalism. The corner has a place for them, every last soul. Touts, runners, lookouts, mules, stickup boys, stash stealers, enforcers, fiends, burn artists, police snitches. . . . Each is to be used, abused, and ultimately devoured with unfailing precision. In this place only, they belong. In this place only, they know what they are, why they are, and what it is that they are supposed to do. Here, they almost matter.

  • • •

  The Corner was a premonition of The Wire in more concrete ways, too. By 1993, David Simon already had one foot out of journalism and into the world of television.

  Several years earlier, Barry Levinson, another Baltimorean, had read Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and sold it to NBC as a series. Tom Fontana, a veteran of MTM’s St. Elsewhere and later the creator of Oz, became the showrunner. The writers’ room was staf
fed with playwrights, including Eric Overmyer, who had been producing his work in New York, and James Yoshimura, a Japanese American writer from Chicago who drank and swore like a South Side cop.

  Production was centered at the disused City Recreation Pier in Fell’s Point, Baltimore. Simon, along with several of the detectives in the book, signed on as a consultant. It was a job that he took seriously in a multipage memo he sent to Fontana pointing out a litany of technical errors in the first several scripts. Fontana took to calling him “nonfiction boy,” and it was a point well taken; thenceforth, when cops grumbled about this or that inaccuracy on the show, Simon would defend it on the grounds of good storytelling.

  At the beginning of production, Simon had been asked if he wanted a shot at writing the pilot. “Ridiculously ignorant of the money involved,” he later wrote, he declined. He did, however, accept the assignment of writing another episode in the season. Treating the gig as a lark, he enlisted David Mills, his old Diamondback colleague and a longtime TV aspirant, to join him. The two got together at Simon’s house and wrote as a tag team, taking turns at the computer.

  The resulting episode, titled “Bop Gun,” followed a mugging gone wrong, in which a white tourist and mother of two wound up dead. It delved into the experience not only of the victim’s family, but also of the young black perpetrators. It was remarkable for that, and for a scene Simon wrote in which the grieving husband catches the homicide detectives joking callously about the murder—a well-developed defense mechanism of real cops that had never appeared on the small screen before.

  “Bop Gun” was deemed too dark to run during Homicide’s first season, but it became the first episode of its second. It helped that Barry Levinson called in a favor to get Robin Williams, with whom he’d worked on Good Morning, Vietnam, to play the distraught father. Stephen Gyllenhaal directed the episode, casting his thirteen-year-old son, Jake, as Williams’s son. The episode was viewed by 16.3 million people, more than twice as many as would see any episode of The Wire. When broadcast, it won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay for an Episodic Drama.