The Wire Read online

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Bob Colesberry

  1946 to 2004

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Introduction by David Simon

  Letter to HBO

  Barack Obama: Wire Fan by Michael A. Fletcher

  SEASON ONE

  Overview

  The Women of The Wire (No, Seriously) by Laura Lippman

  Episode Guide

  The Bunk and the Bunk

  A Snitch from a South Baltimore Alley

  Q&A with Little Melvin Williams

  SEASON TWO

  Overview

  Frank Sobotka: Union Man

  Episode Guide

  Ziggy Sobotka: Angry Prince of Goofs

  Inevitable Fates: D’Angelo, Wallace, and Dukie

  The Legend of the Orange Sofa and the Unlikely Hollywood Careers of Vince Peranio and Pat Moran

  The Rules of the Game by Anthony Walton

  SEASON THREE

  Overview

  Mayor O’Malley to The Wire: Drop Dead

  Episode Guide

  The Writer’s Ambition by George Pelecanos

  Way Down in the Hole: The Music of The Wire

  Russell “Stringer” Bell (1969–2004): American Businessman

  The Politics of Baltimore by William F. Zorzi

  Victory Undeclared

  SEASON FOUR

  Overview

  Omar’s Whistle: Jen Ralston and the Sound of The Wire

  Episode Guide

  Omar

  Dennis Lehane and the Stolen Lollipops

  David Simon on Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield

  The Foundation of a Free Society by Tom Waldron

  Felicia “Snoop” Pearson by Ann LoLordo

  An Interview with David Simon, by Nick Hornby

  SEASON FIVE

  Overview

  Cop Reporters and The Wire by Victor Paul Alvarez and Greg Garland

  Episode Guide

  Directing Episode No. 53: “Not for Attribution” by Joy Lusco Kecken and Scott Kecken

  Proposition Joe, Show-Tune Enthusiast

  Worlds Within Worlds: Cameos and Stunt Casting

  The Drunkard’s Opera: Jimmy McNulty in Life and Letters by Deborah Rudacille

  AFTERWORD

  Homage to the Quiet Man

  A Scene That Will Never Make the Bonus Disc

  Appendix I: Glossary

  Appendix II: Cast and Crew

  Acknowledgments

  Note on the Contributors

  Photo Credits & Text Permissions

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  by David Simon

  “We’re building something here … and all the pieces matter.”

  DETECTIVE LESTER FREAMON

  Swear to God, it was never a cop show. And though there were cops and gangsters aplenty, it was never entirely appropriate to classify it as a crime story, though the spine of every season was certain to be a police investigation in Baltimore, Maryland.

  But to say so nearly a decade ago, back when The Wire first premiered on HBO, would have been to invite certain ridicule. It would have sounded comically pretentious to have invoked Lester Freamon’s claim.

  As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break, that five-times-an-hour pause when writers, actors, and directors are required to juke the tale enough so that a trip to the refrigerator or bathroom does not mean a walk away from the television set, or, worse yet, a click on the remote to another channel.

  In such a construct, where does a storyteller put any serious ambition? Where are the tales to reside safely and securely, but in the simplest paradigms of good and evil, of heroes, villains, and simplified characterization? Where but in plotlines that remain accessible to the most ignorant or indifferent viewers. Where but in the half-assed, don’t-rattle-their-cages uselessness of self-affirming, self-assuring narratives that comfort the American comfortable, and ignore the American afflicted; the better to sell Ford trucks and fast food, beer and athletic shoes, iPods and feminine hygiene products.

  Consider that for generations now the cathode-ray glow of our national campfire, the televised reflection of the American experience – and, by extension, that of the Western free-market democracies – has come down to us from on high. Westerns and police procedurals and legal dramas, soap operas and situation comedies – all of it conceived in Los Angeles and New York by industry professionals, then shaped by corporate entities to calm and soothe as many viewers as possible, priming them with the idea that their future is better and brighter than it actually is, that the time is never more right to buy and consume.

  Until recently, all of television has been about selling. Not selling story, of course, but selling the intermissions to that story. And therefore little programming that might interfere with the mission of reassuring viewers as to their God-given status as indebted consumers has ever been broadcast – and certainly nothing in the form of a continuing series. For half a century, network television wrapped its programs around the advertising – not the other way around, as it may have seemed to some.

  This is not to deny that HBO is a large and profitable piece of Time Warner, which itself is a paragon of Wall Street monolith. The Wire’s 35mm misadventure in Baltimore – for any of its claims to iconoclasm – is nonetheless sponsored by a media conglomerate with an absolute interest in selling to consumers. And yet, on that conglomerate’s premium cable cannel, the only product being sold is the programming itself. In that distinction, there is all the difference.

  Beginning with Oz and culminating in The Sopranos, the best work on HBO expresses nothing less than the vision of individual writers, as expressed through the talents of directors, actors, and film crews. For a rare window in the history of television, nothing much gets in the way of that. Story is all.

  If you laughed, you laughed. If you cried, you cried. And if you thought – and there is actually no prohibition on such merely because you had a TV remote in your hand – then you thought. And if you decided, at any point – as many an early viewer of The Wire did – to change the channel, then so be it. But on HBO, nothing other than the stories themselves was for sale and therefore – absent the Ford trucks and athletic shoes – there is nothing to mitigate against a sad story, an angry story, a subversive story, a disturbing story.

  The first thing we had to do was teach folks to watch television in a different way, to slow themselves down and pay attention, to immerse themselves in a way that the medium had long ago ceased to demand.

  And we had to do this, problematically enough, using a genre and its tropes that for decades have been accepted as basic, obvious storytelling terrain. The crime story long ago became a central archetype of our culture, and the labyrinth of the inner city has largely replaced the spare, unforgiving landscape of the American West as the central stage for our morality plays. The best crime shows – Homicide and NYPD Blue, or their predecessors, Dragnet and Police Story – were essentially about good and evil. Justice, revenge, betrayal, redemption – there isn’t much left in the tangle between right and wrong that hasn’t been fully, even brilliantly explored by the likes of Friday and Pembleton and Sipowicz.

  By contrast, The Wire had ambitions elsewhere. Specifically, we were bored with good and evil. To the greatest possible extent, we were quick to renounce the theme.

  After all, with the exception of saints and sociopaths, few in this world are anything but a confused and corrupted combination of personal motivations, most of them selfish, some of them hilarious. Character is essential for all g
ood drama, and plotting is just as fundamental. But ultimately, the storytelling that speaks to our current condition, that grapples with the basic realities and contradictions of our immediate world – these are stories that, in the end, have some chance of presenting a social, and even political, argument. And to be honest, The Wire was not merely trying to tell a good story or two. We were very much trying to pick a fight.

  To that end, The Wire was not about Jimmy McNulty. Or Avon Barksdale. Or Marlo Stanfield, or Tommy Carcetti or Gus Haynes. It was not about crime. Or punishment. Or the drug war. Or politics. Or race. Or education, labor relations or journalism.

  It was about The City.

  It is how we in the West live at the millennium, an urbanized species compacted together, sharing a common love, awe, and fear of what we have rendered not only in Baltimore or St. Louis or Chicago, but in Manchester or Amsterdam or Mexico City as well. At best, our metropolises are the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the sides of the pyramid that is capitalism. At worst, our cities – or those places in our cities where most of us fear to tread – are vessels for the darkest contradictions and most brutal competitions that underlie the way we actually live together, or fail to live together.

  Mythology is important, essential even, to a national psyche. And Americans in particular are desperate in their pursuit of national myth. This is understandable, to a point: coating an elemental truth with the bright gloss of heroism and national sacrifice is the prerogative of the nation-state. But to carry the same lies forward, generation after generation, so that our collective sense of the American experiment is better and more comforting than it ought to be – this is where mythology has its cost, and a cost not only to the United States but to the world as a whole. In a young and struggling nation, a moderate degree of self-elevating bullshit has a certain earnest charm. For a militarized, technological superpower – overextended in both its economic and foreign policy impulses – it begins to approach the Orwellian.

  We began writing The Wire when certain narratives were playing out within the American culture: the shocking frauds at the heart of Enron and Worldcom, outlying harbingers of the economic implosion that was still to come, as well as the institutional scandal of sexual abuse by priests and the self-preservation of the American branch of the Catholic Church. It seemed to us, back in 2002, that there was something hollow and ugly at our institutional core, and from what Ed Burns understood of the Baltimore police department and school system, and from what I had witnessed at the heart of that city’s newspaper, the institutional and systemic corruptions of our national life seemed near universal. In practical ways, America was becoming the land of the juked statistic – the false quarterly profit statement, the hyped school test score, the non-existent decline in crime, the impossible campaign promise, the hyped Pulitzer Prize.

  We were observant, but not as prescient as the state of our nation now makes us seem. Or at least, we don’t now count ourselves as prescient; the enormity of the mortgage security scandal and the Wall Street pyramid schemes that wrecked the world economy were too shameless and absurd for even our fevered imaginations. We saw that there were elements in the culture that were parasitic and self-aggrandizing, that the greed and rapaciousness of a society that exalted profit and free markets to the exclusion of any other social framework would be burdened by such a level of greed. We understood that throughout our national culture, there was a growing inability to recognize our problems, much less deal honestly with them. But, forgive us, we had no idea that the greed had become policy, that the rogue elements were not being carried by corrupted systems, but were in command of those systems. We could not have imagined Katrina and the hollow response to that tragedy. We could not have fathomed the empty lies and self-delusions that brought about the senseless misadventure in Iraq. We had a good argument, as far as we knew; but in the beginning we didn’t know how good.

  To state our case, The Wire began as a story wedged between two American myths. The first tells us that in this country, if you are smarter than the next man, if you are shrewd or frugal or visionary, if you build a better mousetrap, if you get there first with the best idea, you will succeed beyond your wildest imaginations. And by virtue of free-market processes, it is entirely fair to say that this myth, more than ever, happens to be true. Not only is this accurate in America, but throughout the West and in many emerging nations as well. Every day, a new millionaire or three is surely christened. Or ten. Or twenty.

  But a supporting myth has also presided, and it serves as ballast against the unencumbered capitalism that has emerged triumphant, asserting as it does for individual achievement to the exclusion of all societal responsibility, and thereby validating the amassed wealth of the wise and fortunate among us. In America, we once liked to tell ourselves, those who are not clever or visionary, who do not build better mousetraps, have a place held for them nonetheless. The myth holds that those who are neither slick nor cunning, yet willing to get up every day and work their asses off and come home and stay committed to their families, their communities and every other institution they are asked to serve – these people have a portion for them as well. They might not drive a Lexus, or eat out every weekend; their children might not be candidates for early admission at Harvard or Brown; and come Sunday, they might not see the game on a wide-screen. But they will have a place, and they will not be betrayed.

  In Baltimore, as in so many cities, it is no longer possible to describe this as myth. It is no longer possible even to remain polite on the subject. It is, in a word, a lie.

  In my city, the brown fields and rotting piers and rusting factories are testament to an economy that shifted and then shifted again, rendering obsolete whole generations of union-wage workers and their families. The cost to society is beyond calculation, not that anyone ever paused to calculate anything. Our economic and political leaders are dismissive of the horror, at points even flippant in their derision. Margaret Thatcher’s suggestion that there is no society to consider beyond the individual and his family speaks volumes in the clarity of its late-20th-century contempt for the ideal of nation-states offering citizens anything approximating a sense of communal purpose and meaning.

  From Sparrows Point at the southeastern approaches to my city, the corporate remnant of the once-great Bethlehem Steel informs thousands of retirees that money is no longer available for their pensions. Men who worked the blast furnaces and shipyards – the very men who built Liberty ships to beat Hitler and Mussolini – are told that while they may suffer from asbestosis, they no longer have health benefits or life insurance.

  From the piers of what was once Maryland Ship & Drydock, luxury condominiums and townhomes now rise in place of industrial cranes, while the yachts and powerboats of Washingtonians speckle an inlet where the world’s great shipping lines once maneuvered. And, as predicted, the grain tower and pier that Frank Sobotka tried to salvage in The Wire’s second season did indeed fall to the developers, who have transformed it into something called Silo Point, featuring luxury housing rather than union-wage jobs.

  From Johns Hopkins University – now, by default, the city’s largest employer – comes the news that the remaining families who survived generations of poverty, neglect, and addiction in the barren ghetto just north of the East Baltimore Hospital would be moved out entirely, allowing the university to bulldoze their blocks into a biotechnology park. For most of the last century, Hopkins and city officials could find no meaningful way to connect the great research institution with surrounding communities; finally, they destroyed what remained of the village in order to save it.

  From the city school system comes year after year of failure and decay, with graduation rates of no more than 30 percent as we prepare Baltimore’s children to join an economy that has no real need for them. And with each passing election, the test scores magically rise at the third and fifth grades, before collapsing entirely two years later when the
same students – having been taught both the test and the Orwellian perfection of the slogan, “No Child Left Behind” – finally opt out and disappear from the classrooms, choosing the corners instead. From the police department, the arrest rates go ever higher as raw statistics dominate actual police work, and the numbers game ensures that the most incompetent commanders are promoted over those actually capable of investigating crime. The clearance rate for homicides – in the 80 percent range 20 years ago – is now below 35 percent.

  And from the city’s last remaining daily newspaper, a string of buyouts and attritions now leaves Baltimore’s premiere watchdog institution with 140 reporters to report on a city once covered by 500 souls. And the Baltimore Sun is not alone in its collapse; from Martin-Marietta to Koppers to Black & Decker to General Motors comes a seemingly endless string of layoffs, reductions-in-force, half-shifts and idle assembly lines. And the city empties; drive through East or West Baltimore and behold a world of boarded-up rowhouses and vacant lots.

  The new Baltimore? The Baltimore reborn?

  It is here, too, at points, certainly: new technologies, tourism, an ever-expanding service economy. And yet this Baltimore is distant from too many people, heard only as a rumor in the east and westside ghettos, in Pimlico and Brooklyn and Curtis Bay and Cherry Hill. For too many in those neighborhoods, the new Baltimore exists as vague talk about a job at a computer screen well beyond the county line, where mice scrape on pads and cursors ticktack through data streams. If you sensed the sea change and caught the wave – if you were smart enough to tear up your union card and walk away from your father’s local to start over at a community college somewhere – then you are there in that world, perhaps, and not here in this one, and maybe it is all for the better.

  But so many were left in the shallows – men and women on the streets of Baltimore who are, every day, reminded that the wave has crested, and that now, with the economic tide at an ebb, they are simply worth less than they once were, if they are worth anything at all in a post-industrial economy. Unemployed and under-employed, idle at a West Baltimore soup kitchen or dead-ended at some strip-mall cash register – these are the excess Americans. The economy staggers along without them, and without anyone in this society truly or sincerely regarding their desperation. Ex-steelworkers and ex-longshoremen, street dealers and street addicts, and an army of young men hired to chase and jail the dealers and addicts, whores and johns and men to run the whores and coerce the johns – and all of them unnecessary and apart from the New Millenium economic model that long ago declared them irrelevant.