The Wire Page 12

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  On hand when The Wire writing staff descended upon the neighborhood union hall in 2003 were longtime Local No. 953 business agent Richie Hughes and Steve “Steamboat” Markowski, the checkers delegate to the Baltimore district council of the ILA.

  Veteran checkers dispatcher Steve Lukiewski played himself in a late episode where Sobotka goes to the hiring hall to grab a ship to work.

  “No autographs,” Lukiewski told friends when the episode aired. “You wanna talk to me, you gotta go through my agent.”

  From their life’s work came the details of the ever-shrinking universe of Frank Sobotka and his men.

  “Help my union?” Sobotka says to FBI agents when they want him to “name names” after the union is charged with racketeering and fraud when their smuggling comes violently to light at the end of Season Two.

  “Twenty-five years we been dyin’ slow down there,” Sobotka rants. “Dry docks rustin’, piers standin’ empty. My friends and my kids like we got the cancer. No lifeline got throwed all that time.

  “Nuthin’ from nobody. And now you wanna help us. Help me?”

  Ziggy Sobotka was partly based on a South Baltimore legend named Pinky Bannon, who was known to wear a tuxedo to the docks and did indeed bring his pet duck, replete with a diamond-studded collar, to various Locust Point bars, where the bird bellied up with the rest.

  Pinky was also given to displaying his manhood with gusto: not only did Bannon dress up “Pretty Boy” in a green ribbon every St. Patrick’s Day, he once introduced it into the bell of Al Bates’s saxophone during a show. Bates never missed a beat.

  On The Wire, Pinky became Sobotka’s misguided, 20-something son.

  “Nepotism is not a bad thing,” conceded Benewicz, speaking of the generations-old tradition of bringing your boys to work alongside of you. “But sometimes it is to our disadvantage.”

  Some stories didn’t make it into the show. Like the one about a stevedore named Scobie who got into a fistfight over an apple with a monkey that a sailor had brought back from South America.

  Scobie was driving over the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the time. When a cop pulled him over for swerving, Scobie pointed to the monkey and complained, “I can’t teach this monkey any manners.”

  Once, a shipload of Brazil nuts hit Baltimore, and a stevedore with a limp, charitably nicknamed “Hoppit,” put some in his pocket to eat while he worked. It was the same pocket where he’d put his “keel,” a black paint stick.

  Before long, Hoppit’s mouth was black and he was muttering that the nuts “taste like shit.”

  And so forth.

  Though plenty of people throughout the Port of Baltimore helped writers and actors better understand their world, the heart and soul of Frank Sobotka bore no small resemblance to Walt Benewicz.

  “The thing about Frank Sobotka that most blows me away is how much people liked him,” said Bauer, who called the role the “pinnacle” of his long and busy career. “I was very conscious of not doing anything to solicit the audience’s sympathy.”

  Time and again, when the writers were uncertain about a fine point of moving cargo through the port, staff researcher Norman Knoerlein would call Benewicz for the answer.

  And in the small town that is big city Baltimore – “people here are loyal as dogs,” said casting director and Crabtown native Pat Moran – Benewicz knew Knoerlein’s mother from childhood.

  And young Norman’s calls were always returned.

  “Sobotka was excellent,” said Benewicz. “Not only did he look and act like a longshoreman, I’ve got to give him the ultimate compliment: he looked like a Polack.”

  Benewicz especially appreciated the scene in which Sobotka tried to use another man’s union card to sweat out his felonious guilt with an honest day’s work unloading a ship.

  When dispatcher Lukiewski objects, Sobotka quips, “We’re both bald and we’re both Polish, what else you need to know?”

  Bauer, an LA native unaware of any Polish heritage, didn’t audition for the part.

  Wire executive producer Bob Colesberry had produced 61*, an HBO film about Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record, and admired Bauer’s work as the team’s third outfielder.

  Long before the union boss character was named or a word of dialogue put in his mouth, Bauer was the favorite to play him.

  “I really felt like Frank Sobotka on the second or third day of filming. It was in the church when he goes to see the stained-glass window of the waterfront and he genuflects at the altar,” said Bauer, who wore a “fat suit” and was cosmetically aged beyond his then 39 years.

  “I spent a lot of time sitting on benches looking at the water and memorizing names of ships, getting used to the tempo of the harbor,” he said. “As much as some things had changed, there was still a lot that hadn’t, and you couldn’t separate the people who lived there from it.”

  Often was the day when a local would stop Bauer on Thames Street in Fells Point (in Baltimore, the natives pronounce the “Th” in the fabled river’s name) to tell him how much they loved “Franoosh” Sobotka.

  “It created this weird, temporary intimacy,” said the actor. “They’d invite me to their kids’ baptisms and graduations. Once a guy drove by, rolled down the window, and yelled, ‘Hey, Frank! ILA all the way!’ That’s quite a leap for one hour of television.”

  In an acting career begun at the age of four, Bauer has played Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway; a variety of psychotics, a prison inmate, a Confederate soldier, and the carpenter in a stage adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

  But the role of Frank Sobotka “was the closest I’ve come to playing someone who actually lived – real heartache, real suffering, real ecstasy.

  “That’s how I felt about Baltimore,” he said, joking that he still has some harbor water in his ears from being dropped in the drink for his death scene. “I miss it.”

  Also dockside as Sobotka’s right-hand was a foulmouthed little fat man with the nickname of Horseface, a role played by Charley Scalies.

  “He had the strut of a longshoreman,” said Benewicz of Scalies, who grew up as “Charley Boy” in South Philly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the area from Second Street east to the Delaware River was home to stevedores.

  Scalies knew plenty of ethnic stevedoring families in the area; men who weren’t always liked, but were respected for their strong union and living wage.

  “They were hardworking, hard-drinking laborers who had lethal cargo hooks in their hands and expressions on their faces that told you they could just as easily use it on you as on a bale of whatever,” said Scalies.

  “When we first started shooting on the docks, I expected to meet men who fit that mold. They didn’t oblige. Bulk cargo is all but gone. Pencil and paper have given way to handheld computers, and brute force is supplied by sophisticated machinery that takes skill and training to operate.”

  In the theater, said Scalies, one of the greatest compliments an actor can give a colleague is to say that he or she is “generous.”

  “Which means when you’re working a scene together, he gives you everything you need to do your job,” he said, noting that the real longshoremen he depended on to nail the part of Horseface were likewise generous.

  “I asked how, they told me how. I asked why, they told me why. They even cared enough to tell me when I screwed up. First they did it quietly. But as we got to know each other better, they did it in loud, good-hearted fashion. Only a friend will do that to you!”

  One of Horseface’s shining moments came in retaliation for selective enforcement of traffic laws against union members when he steals Major Stan Valchek’s surveillance van off the Southeastern police district’s parking lot.

  While some of the best thieves in the world are dockworkers, heads of other ILA locals in Baltimore took exception to the way the vocation was portrayed on The Wire.

  “They said it depicted us as
nothing but a bunch of thugs and dummies,” said Benewicz.

  While Benewicz noted that life on the docks is not as freewheeling as in the days of bulk cargo, it is also true that just before filming began, a few imported luxury sedans disappeared from the Dundalk marine terminal lot and were never seen again.

  Similarly, another stevedore by the name of Champ, when asked by writers how a container might be made to disappear from the docks without leaving a paper trail, provided four different scenarios.

  “Which,” he added, “is not to say that we would do such a thing.”

  Benewicz reminded his ILA brethren that the HBO production “was bringing a lot of revenue [and union jobs] to the state of Maryland. And I reminded them that it was fiction.”

  Fiction except for the bedrock of the story: the slow, steady decline of a once-mighty port.

  “It’s always going to be a fight to keep work on the waterfront, a constant struggle,” said Benewicz, who saw membership in the checkers’ local shrink from 585 in the early 1990s to well under 200 by the time of his retirement.

  “Baltimore’s not a workingman’s town anymore,” said Benewicz. “You don’t see stevedores ‘shaping up’ [waiting to be picked for work] on the corners in Locust Point like they used to.

  “This was the port that built a city. You had so many working people. And it was Baltimore’s work, things were made right here, but the work they did is gone.

  “Look at what happened to [Bethlehem Steel at] Sparrows Point – they took away health plans from the poor guys who were retired. The people who are left over at GM on Broening Highway, they’re depressed because it looks like it’s just a matter of time there, too.”

  [Time caught up with the Broening Highway plant in May of 2005 when a white Safari van was the last to roll off the assembly line. Behind it, a gang of Sobotkas and Pakusas attached two small American flags and a cardboard sign that read: The End.]

  On the Wire waterfront, just a mile or two from Baltimore’s real GM plant, the writers focused on a collapsed CSX grain pier.

  It was one of Frank Sobotka’s many fevered dreams to have the grain pier up and working again before it could be developed into condominiums.

  One of the final scenes of Season Two shows politicians and developers gathered at the site of a soon-to-be luxury high-rise known as The Grainery.

  It was apt symbolism for a waterfront where mixed-use development had already conquered the Inner Harbor and was doing the same along the outer edges.

  It was also make-believe.

  Briefly.

  Before filming ended for Season Two, local papers were announcing a proposed development for the idle CSX pier, one that would require the heavy industrial area to be rezoned.

  For condos.

  SEASON TWO EPISODE GUIDE

  “On my docks this happened …”

  FRANK SOBOTKA

  The first season of The Wire ended with drug lord Avon Barksdale going to prison; his lieutenant, Stringer Bell, moving the business from a strip club to a funeral parlor; Detective Kima Greggs recovering from a gunshot wound …

  And good money betting that Detective Jimmy McNulty’s worst nightmare – a fate worse than being alone and sober on a Friday night – would come true.

  That he would find his insolent ass riding the police boat. Naturally, Season Two opened with McNulty on harbor patrol in winter gear.

  episode fourteen

  EBB TIDE

  “Ain’t never gonna be what it was.”

  - LITTLE BIG ROY

  Directed by Ed Bianchi

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon

  In his debut as a law enforcement mariner, McNulty bitches about the cold weather as the police boat passes the rusting hulk of what is left of the Bethlehem Steel plant. He tells his partner, Officer Claude Diggins – played by real-life Baltimore marine police officer Jeffrey Fugitt, “My father used to work there … got laid off in ’73.”

  Moments later, McNulty pockets a little cash from the host on a party boat in distress instead of dragging the yacht back to the dock.

  The vessel, a yacht christened Capitol Gains, replete with black-tie partygoers from the salons of Washington, sparkles and sways long into the night as the rusting remnants of a working harbor stand idle witness.

  At the same time, Detective Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski is trying to tell his father-in-law – Major Stan Valchek of the Southeastern District – that the complexities of the Barksdale investigation made him feel like a real cop for the first time in his career.

  “I wanna work cases,” says Prez. “Good cases.”

  Valchek is only half-listening; he is entranced by pieces of a stained- glass window he has bought for the local Polish-Catholic church, an act of big-shotism masquerading as charity.

  He finally tunes into Prez and shuts him up with a succinct plan of action: Do what you’re told, in time you’ll make lieutenant and have “a career in this department.”

  Bodie, looking like a man on his way up in the Barksdale organization, drives to Philly to pick up dope contracted through Dominicans in New York. The drugs, however, are not there.

  Returning to Baltimore, Bodie is forced to go over every aspect of his trip in detail for Stringer Bell to make sure the fuck-up is not on his end.

  Meanwhile, Bunk visits McNulty on the docks to ask for help in finding the stickup artist Omar, needed for the upcoming trial of Bird in the Gant murder.

  And then, a first glimpse of the man at the center of the new investigation: Frank Sobotka, secretary-treasurer of the checkers’ local of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores.

  Sobotka is obsessed, to the point of blurring his own lines of conduct, with getting the C&D Canal dredged to get larger ships back into Baltimore. It’s the only way, he argues, to save the beleaguered port and the union.

  Sobotka greets his nephew Nick and tells him there is “one on the way” for The Greek. A moment later, Sobotka strides across the cargo terminal to deal with his son, Ziggy, who has lost a container of rush cargo, demonstrating that nepotism has its limits.

  At police headquarters, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels is rewarded for pushing the previous investigation beyond what the brass wanted: he’s buried in the basement evidence-control unit.

  Visiting St Casimir Roman Catholic Church, Sobotka drops by with a generous donation to see the stained-glass window that he and the union have donated: a beautiful portrait of stevedores unloading a ship the old- fashioned way.

  It is decidedly not the image of a noble police officer helping a child that Valchek had secured. Sobotka asks the priest’s help in lobbying Maryland’s veteran Senator – Barbara Mikulski, a Polish-Catholic – to support dredging the canal.

  The priest obliges and asks when Sobotka last made confession.

  Detective Kima Greggs is on desk duty in the property unit, having promised her girlfriend that she will stay off the street after being wounded. Herc calls her pussy-whipped and Greggs knows it’s true.

  That night, at a Locust Point gin mill called the Clement Street Bar, HQ for stevedore oldtimers, Ziggy makes fun of their fairy tales, ordering all hands starboard to prevent the bar from capsizing with its cargo of bullshit.

  Finally, Ziggy climbs a stool and whips out his formidable cock, calling it bulk cargo that the graybeards could never have handled.

  The next morning, McNulty finds the body of a woman floating in the harbor. He may not know the aft from the stern, but he is once again a “murder police.”

  When McNulty expresses skepticism that the dead woman jumped from the Francis Scott Key Bridge, The Greek’s stray container is discovered by port police officer, Beatrice Russell.

  It is stuffed with the bodies of an additional 13 women, all dead.

  Season Two is launched.

  episode fifteen

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  “They can chew you up, but they gotta spit you out.”

  - MCNULTY


  Directed by Ed Bianchi

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon

  The show opens with Officer Beatrice “Beadie” Russell, a single mother working as a port police officer after bumping up from tunnel toll-taker, walking investigators through a warehouse of body bags: the women from the container.

  No one from the various agencies present wants the case. The deaths are assumed accidental, that the stowaway women suffocated when the container’s air pipe was accidentally crushed during the journey.

  Russell gets the case by default.

  At Little Johnny’s on South Clinton Street, the waterfront diner that The Greek uses to conduct business, Frank Sobotka reads the riot act to The Greek’s main lieutenant, Spiros “Vondas” Vondopoulos.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you people want and don’t want. All I know is, I got a can full of young girls suffocating on my docks!”

  Vondas: “Now you wanna know what’s in the cans?”

  Vondas explains that his driver did not take the can with the women off the dock because he never got the sign that no one was watching.

  When that didn’t happen, and Vondas doesn’t know yet why, the driver was told to leave.

  In prison, Avon Barksdale learns from his sister Brianna that their New York-based, Dominican drug connection was busted by the DEA. Which makes clear why the shipment that Bodie was supposed to mule down from Philadelphia was missing.

  Until the Dominicans can be sure that their legal problems don’t stem from Barksdale’s earlier arrest – that Barksdale is not turning state’s evidence – they will not do business.

  Barksdale ponders where to go for product. At the same time, he’s working to keep his nephew and fellow inmate, D’Angelo – who took a 20-year sentence for the family – within reach.

  “D” has taken to getting high in prison and doesn’t want anything to do with his uncle or his uncle’s influence. Avon tells his sister to ensure that D’Angelo’s girlfriend, Donette, brings their son to the lockup once a week to see D’Angelo and keep his spirits up.