The Wire Page 11

  He doesn’t know what kind of negative chemical reaction it’s going to have on anybody; he’s interested in dollars and cents.

  In Britain, they have determined that if we put this amount in this container over this period of time, the user will never OD. You want to do that, you don’t have to worry about [anything else] because nobody can sell and make money below a dollar.

  EB: In this society, as far as the legitimate economy goes, only a certain amount of people are productive. The ones who are not productive, you have to do something with them. You could be a nice guy and educate them and take care of them and make them part of your economy, or you could say, “Go get high.”

  The addiction rate is increasing – not only in the inner city, but all over the country – because the jobs are disappearing, and if I don’t need you to work anymore, I’ll just get rid of you.

  I can’t kill you, that would be bad, so I send you down the road of addiction, which is hideous, and I’m quite content to say, “It’s your fault because you got addicted, not society’s fault.”

  And that’s the interesting thing – why don’t we do something about drugs? This war’s been going on for 30 years and they haven’t begun to do anything about it. If drugs went away, law enforcement, as it’s structured today, would take a terrible hit.

  MW: No question.

  SEASON TWO

  SEASON TWO OVERVIEW

  “Them days is gone …”

  HORSE FACE PAKUSA

  It was exciting to be an eight-year-old kid in Baltimore in 1966.

  The Orioles won their first World Series of the modern era behind the slugging of Frank Robinson, the defense of Brooks Robinson and the pitching of Dave McNally.

  Every day, something new and strange came blaring out of WCAO, the AM pop station – red doors painted black sailing through the theremin vibrations of blossom worlds – while a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow in the backyard.

  And my father – Manuel Alvarez, a tugboat man on the South Broadway waterfront – went on strike with the Seafarers International Union.

  Three local towing companies were hit, with picket lines going up outside of the City Recreation Pier in Baltimore where the tugs docked, a true seaman’s village of brothels, pickle factories, coffee wharves, and evangelical soup kitchens.

  Decades later, when the gentrification of the neighborhood was complete, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, would be filmed at the Rec Pier.

  During the strike, bay pilots trying to dock ships without the aid of tugs damaged or destroyed several piers, although vessels carrying military cargo to and from Vietnam were serviced by the tugs.

  The work was performed by all parties, from stevedores to management, out of patriotic pride. Tug crews accepted no pay for this work.

  The strike of ’66 lasted for six months.

  “I remember Mom cleaning other people’s houses for money and my parents agonizing over whether or not to apply for food stamps out of pride,” said Gregory Lukowski, who followed his tugboat mate father down to the waterfront and eventually became a Chesapeake Bay pilot.

  “Christmas was lean,” said Lukowski of 1966. “And the winter seemed extremely cold.”

  The strike ended with basic hourly wages set from $2.71 for deckhands to $3.23 for captains.

  Not much by 21st-century standards, even in the Great Recession. But it was a good buck when overtime, holiday pay – even a relic known as triple time – were factored into the crews’ salaries.

  “That strike guaranteed us a five-day workweek and put an end to the company using us as casual labor,” Dad recalled.

  “When that contract expired, we went on strike again and did better. Before it was all over, we killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”

  Today, none of the major tugboat firms in Baltimore are locally owned. When the out-of-town companies succeeded in defeating the union in the late 1980s, my father went to work in a hardware store until he was old enough to collect Social Security.

  •

  I grew up with the expectation that I would go to college and learn to do something that didn’t involve shovels or wrenches or, as the old man often said when we were doing chores around the house, “picking ’em up and putting ’em down.”

  His skilled-labor wage put us in a brick rancher in a solidly middle- class suburb where most of the other fathers worked at Westinghouse and the moms more or less stayed home. My mother kept track of inventory in the shoe department at Sears and was home before we got out of school.

  The same wage that put us in with the white-collar families paid tuition for my brothers and me at a Catholic high school. Mom still remembers “Seventy-five bucks out of every paycheck” going to the Xavierian brothers at Mount Saint Joseph High School.

  That union wage had my back as I worked my way through Loyola College. And it bought the 197°Ford Granada – bright green with white

  Landau roof – I drove to the clerk’s job I’d landed on the sports desk of the Baltimore Sun on my way to becoming a newspaperman.

  And if all of our middle-class achievements went to hell, there was always that working-class safety net: the waterfront.

  When the economy would go soft and things got tough at Bethlehem Steel or the Esskay meatpacking plant or even Westinghouse, work typically remained stable around the port.

  “There’s always something down the waterfront,” Dad would say, even though the last thing he wanted was for his boys to be pulled into the labor pool, however plentiful, along the Baltimore harbor.

  Always something has been something close to nothing for almost 20 years now.

  •

  Season Two of The Wire was about the last days of being able to follow in your old man’s footsteps to make a living.

  It was, said David Simon, a 12-episode wake for the “death of work.”

  Before HBO gave the green light to The Wire, Simon was considering this as a subject for his next non-fiction, fly-on-the-wall book: a narrative account of life on Baltimore’s diminished waterfront.

  The story could have been set amidst the ruins of any number of manufacturing plants that once made Baltimore one of the great producers of goods in the world: the mammoth carcass of Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point shipyard or the breweries that announced one’s arrival in East Baltimore.

  Once upon a time there were even factories that made umbrellas and hats and bread and licorice.

  But the second season was set in the middle of the place that made so much of the other commerce possible: a commercial port dating back to the 17th century.

  The harbor waterscape is the star of the very first scene when McNulty, banished, not just from homicide, but from terra firma itself, rides the police boat with Officer Diggins of the marine unit.

  McNulty points out the Beth Steel Sparrows Point complex where his father worked until he was laid off in 1973. Diggins says his uncle was a supervisor there until he got the ax in 1978.

  Some 30 years ago, the largest private employer in the Baltimore area was Beth Steel.

  My grandfather, an immigrant from the Galicia region of Spain, was a shipyard worker during World War II when – to beat Hitler and Mussolini and a cat named Tojo – Liberty ships were launched almost daily.

  To slide those gray ships out of the cradle and into the Patapsco River, three shifts of unionized workers, many of them recent transplants from Carolina tobacco fields and Appalachian coal mines, worked the Beth furnaces around the clock.

  When Beth Steel went bankrupt in 2001, robbing several generations of pensioners and their widows of benefits thought to be good to the grave, my father was dumbstruck.

  In my father’s youth, it seemed as though Bethlehem Steel alone kept solvent the Highlandtown neighborhood where he grew up and a half dozen other communities around it.

  A sausage factory might come and go, but no one could imagine no more Bethlehem Steel. When the steel mill was bought several years later by a Russian company, Pop was
beyond disbelief.

  Rooskies owning Bethlehem Steel?

  For a while, and then they went belly-up too.

  Today, the largest employer in the metro area is Johns Hopkins medical system and university. For the average Baltimorean, making beds and taking blood does not pay as well as making steel.

  And while Hopkins helps their entry-level employees get high school equivalency degrees to train for better jobs, at “the Point” there was on-the-job advancement for smart workers without education.

  When my grandfather started his career at Sparrows Point – some 40 years honored by a stainless steel plaque engraved with a picture of a ship, a testimonial that hangs today in the front room of his old rowhouse where I live – he was shoveling slag for a dollar a day.

  At the time of his retirement in 1970, he was a skilled machinist with no more formal education than four or five elementary grades in the village where his father worked with oxcarts.

  •

  It’s not long in the opening episode of Season Two before the harbor patrol finds a floater. The questionable death that gets McNulty worked up about being a detective again and will, in time, play a key role in the detail’s new case.

  But the investigation and eventual wiretap, which inevitably bleeds into the drug trade, doesn’t begin with a mystery as simple as a dead body. It is launched from a stupid, ego-driven pissing match – one not far removed from the sandbox – between a pair of Locust Point Polish-Americans with bad blood between them.

  Major Stan Valchek, commander of the Southeastern District, collected money to have a stained-glass window put into the local Polish-Catholic church, one that honored police officers. A longshoremen’s union boss, Frank Sobotka, beats him to the punch with a window depicting men unloading a ship the old-school way, with brute strength.

  When neither will back off, Valchek starts turning over rocks to find out how the financially struggling union, with less than a hundred men left, has the money to commission a gorgeous window, make fat contributions to the church, and hire a lobbyist to seduce the suits in Annapolis.

  What Valcheck’s detail discovers is that some economies never suffer recession: stolen goods, narcotics, and the international smuggling of human beings, especially highly-profitable young women.

  Before filming began in early 2003, the writing staff interviewed dozens of stevedores and immigration officials, port personnel, customs inspectors, and steamship agents to get an idea of what moved through a modern port.

  We heard about men who could steal the devil’s pitchfork, others who could drink all night and work all day, and one particular dockworker whose matinee idol good looks had earned him the nickname “Horseface.”

  [The waterfront has always been a rich source of nicknames, most derived from the range of human imperfections, usually physical or otherwise. The men my father worked with on the boats had names like Ace and Pinhead; Frenchie, Din-Din, Ronnie Rotten Crotch, Joe Blow and Hercules.]

  The man who brought Horseface to life was an actor named Charley Scalies, a child of South Philly who could have been raised in any one of Baltimore’s working-class neighborhoods.

  “The actors who comprised our fictional International Brotherhood of Stevedores needed no acting to demonstrate our closeness,” said Scalies.

  “Only men will understand what happens when a group of them ‘hang out’ for 10 to 12 hours a day, day after day, week after week, meal after meal, story after story, joke after joke, fart after fart and laugh after laugh.”

  The esprit de corps carried over when the real port workers upon whom Horseface and Ziggy and New Charles and Johnny Fifty were based mingled with the actors.

  “From the stiletto cold winds of January to the hot and hazy days on the harbor in late May, we had camaraderie. Except for the fact that we were pretenders, there was no difference between us,” said Scalies.

  “In every bar scene, the directors had one hell of a time keeping us under control. We didn’t need a script. We were the script.”

  Easy for an actor to say.

  In the reporter-style interviews with people from all corners of the port, The Wire staff learned that what moves through a modern port – in Baltimore, mostly foreign automobiles – is less important than how it moves.

  Machines, including robots in some foreign ports, have replaced thick arms and strong backs on the waterfront, moving more cargo more cheaply and efficiently, yet at a great cost in jobs.

  This is the indifferent windmill against which Frank Sobotka tilts, believing that the money he’s getting to smuggle containers of contraband off the docks can be used to save a way of life that has largely passed from the city, the port, his union, and his family.

  He gets in bed with gangsters to do right by men who maybe stole a case of Scotch and a TV set now and again – sometimes a container of appliances – but who nonetheless have mortgages and car payments and remember a way of life that went back before their great-grandfathers’ day.

  It is a relationship, like virtually all in Sobotka’s life – including the one with his half-ass son Ziggy – that spirals beyond his control.

  With an anger that simmers and boils throughout his various ordeals, all geared toward turning back the clock on a story that only moves forward, Sobotka delivers a shoebox full of cash to a lobbyist named Bruce DiBiago.

  With money from smuggling, Sobotka hired Bruce to get legislation passed to rebuild the port’s grain pier and maybe get the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal dredged and widened.

  He wants both for the same reason: more ships, more cargo, more work.

  “Down here it’s still ‘Who’s your old man?’ till you got kids of your own and then it’s ‘Who’s your son?’ But after the horror movie I seen today – piers full of robots! – my kid will be lucky if he’s even punching numbers five years from now.

  “It breaks my fuckin’ heart that there’s no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront.”

  Yet again, a fundamentally decent person – a mere human being – will have their heart cut out by giving it and their loyalty to an institution they believed would reward such fidelity.

  The foolishness of such faith is twice shown in moments of reflection for Nicky Sobotka, Frank’s nephew and cousin to Ziggy.

  The first is when Nick has waded deep into the drug trade, delivering packages and getting paid on the white marble steps of an old woman who likely is a widow of a Beth Steel worker, a woman who could easily be his grandmother.

  Though she is a stranger to Nick, she shames him with a look of disgust. Otherwise decent young men have gone to hell right along with a neighborhood where working people took pride in their homes –particularly the well-scrubbed white marble steps where drugs are now being sold – and their families.

  These are neighborhoods where the streetcar line shot straight to Sparrows Point, where houses rarely went on the market because they were handed down to a relative.

  The next time we see the old lady’s house, there’s a For Sale sign on it.

  At the very end, in the closing montage of Season Two, Nicky stares at an idle crane, closes his eyes, and sees visions of Baltimore’s rusting and neglected industry interspersed with soft, slow-motion shots of people being tossed aside.

  Black drug slingers and the addicts they service go about their business in the projects; the white sons of steelworkers and longshoremen, young men without union cards or those who have stopped paying dues to a union that no longer gets them work, emulate the project dealers and work their own neighborhood corners.

  And the underworked stevedores, perhaps a year or less away from complete idleness, are lost in liquor and aimless talk of “them days” that are gone.

  FRANK SOBOTKA: UNION MAN

  “It was impossible for me to separate my character from the town. That’s what I was trying to honor …” - Chris Bauer

  Some 65 years ago, Walt Benewicz was born into the life to which Chris Bauer paid tribute as a headstrong waterf
ront union boss.

  The son of a stevedore and the grandson of a stevedore, Benewicz grew up in the Locust Point neighborhood of South Baltimore, hard by Fort McHenry, back when the port supported most of the families and businesses there.

  Walt’s father, a one-time boxer nicknamed Flash, died in an accident on the docks. His grandfather passed the same way, leaving Benewicz’s grandmother to support the family – and send young Walt to Catholic school – on what she made running a grocery store on Locust Point’s Hull Street.

  In those days, when a stevedore died on the job, the neighborhood flag was flown at half-mast and the family got about $200, maybe a little more when the hat was passed at the local gin mill.

  Before retiring a few years after Season Two of The Wire aired, Benewicz served as president of the “checkers” Local No. 953 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, which has its offices on the same street where his grandmother’s grocery once stood.

  [On the show, the ILA became the IBA: the International Brotherhood of Stevedores.]

  In waterfront parlance, a “checker” is a longshoremen responsible for documenting all cargo that is loaded and unloaded on a ship, a job once done with clipboard and pencil that is now fully computerized.

  Benewicz and his union brothers provided many of the anecdotes that helped make Season Two of The Wire authentic. And it was a composite of the best traits of men like Benewicz – blended with a liberal dollop of their shortcomings and honest mistakes – that Chris Bauer drew upon in his portrayal of Frank Sobotka.

  “There is a citizenry of Frank Sobotkas out there,” said Bauer, cast in 2009 as small-town Louisiana cop Detective Andy Bellefleur on HBO’s True Blood vampire drama.

  “They want to be the best man they can be – Frank Sobotka was living a life of service – but sometimes the circumstances of their lives prevent them from seeing clearly who that best man is.”