The Wire Page 15

  “I knew a lot of guys growing up who got in the game and got out, and I was really hoping that D’Angelo would be one of the ones who did,” said Gilliard. “People connect to characters with a lot of heart, they attach themselves to a character who might possibly find a way out.

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have many stories like that.”

  The actor, who had a small part in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and played “Ray” on the 2009 Patrick Swayze series The Beast, said he tried to layer the character of D’Angelo.

  He had “… more dimensions than just a scared punk selling drugs … I was hoping for a better ending for him because of it.”

  The truth about Wallace was shown early in Season One when he is found playing with an action toy instead of paying attention as a corner lookout, prompting Bodie to toss a bottle at him.

  And his enthusiasm for things beyond the gangster life is affirmed when D’Angelo chastises him and Bodie for playing checkers with chess pieces. Hard-ass Bodie doesn’t give a shit.

  But Wallace wants to learn and D’Angelo is happy to teach.

  As in Season Four, when Michael tries to teach his hapless friend Dukie how to survive. They go for shooting lessons and Michael gives him a small-time job on the corner, but Dukie, who’d have made a great science nerd in any halfway supportive environment, couldn’t hang.

  Soon, Michael was paying him just to babysit his little brother.

  D’Angelo and Michael both tried to protect their weaker friends. Wallace was doubly haunted: by the tortured corpse of Omar’s lover displayed atop a burned-out car for all the world to see and the profit he made by spotting the boy in a video arcade.

  “The demise of a scared little boy who escaped by using the drugs he was selling,” said Marlene Allen, a Los Angeles social worker and fan of the show.

  In her many years of trying to help whoever might be helped (actually saving them is another, sadder story), Allen found that most kids like those on the streets of The Wire end up “in jail or dead. … D’Angelo ended in both places.”

  The deaths of D and Wallace, said Drew Johnson, an Annapolis native living in North Carolina, was punishment for “the characters each exhibiting some amount of humanity.”

  Jermaine Crawford used the exposure afforded him by The Wire to lend humanity to homeless teenagers living in conditions both similar to and worse than Dukie’s.

  His project is a documentary called Teenager Homelessness in America: A Change is Gonna Come. Crawford directs and is the on-screen narrator as the film follows five homeless young people in cities across the United States.

  “It was hard for me to separate from Dukie, hard to leave him behind when I walked off set,” said Crawford, born in 1992, raised in the Washington suburb of Mitchellville and home-schooled by his parents.

  “It was rough playing Dukie, he was very intelligent but weak. He smelled bad. Michael took care of him, but he wasn’t respected,” said Crawford. “As [Season Four] unraveled there was the realization that he was far more complicated than I thought.”

  The child of addicts who sell everything their son acquires for booze or dope, Dukie may even have been unknowable even to himself.

  Accepted wisdom in the field of recovery is the notion that the emotional maturity of an addict stops upon taking their first drink or hit of dope. If that person is like Dukie – not only young but emotionally immature for their age – the problem is near hopeless.

  Fran Boyd, a recovering addict who worked with The Wire sound editors throughout the show’s run, knew Dukie was headed down Bubbles Boulevard when the kid started borrowing money from his math teacher, Prez.

  “Oh my goodness, that hurt me so bad,” said Boyd. “But that’s how it happens.”

  episode twenty

  BACKWASH

  “Don’t worry, kid. you’re still on the clock.” - ORSEFACE

  Directed by Thomas J. Wright

  Story by David Simon & Rafael Alvarez; teleplay by Rafael Alvarez

  The episode opens with Bodie going to buy flowers for D’Angelo’s funeral. He settles on an arrangement made up to look like the high-rise project tower once under D’s control.

  Bunk and Beadie Russell tell Sergeant Landsman that they’ve cloned a port computer, which they’ve been using at Daniels’s off-site location, trying to connect dirt on the docks to the dead girls in the container.

  Landsman blows a gasket: Rawls ain’t playing and you two better not be either.

  But they are in earnest. Lester Freamon is getting good at watching the ships load and unload on the cloned computer and can tell when the checkers are losing a can on purpose.

  Bunk tells Russell that the next move is to have the dock boys persuaded that the investigation has dried up. Back in uniform, Russell cruises the docks in her patrol car just like the good old days, telling Sobotka she is off the investigation.

  Daniels tries to explain to Rawls why Bunk is ensconced in the detail office on a murder investigation, and Rawls, seizing the opportunity, pushes Daniels to take responsibility for clearing all the Jane Doe cases. Daniels balks.

  Later, at home with his wife, Marla, Daniels tries to convince her that he’s been keeping the detail narrow and focused. He won’t taint his work with a bunch of unsolved murders, telling Marla that he’s back on a career track.

  Mrs. Daniels doesn’t buy it and walks away disgusted.

  Nick begins moving the dope he got from The Greek through the corner boy, Frog. When an elderly resident looks at him from inside her screen door, Nicky is suddenly made aware that he is no longer a longshoreman, but a drug dealer.

  His conscience is comforted when he’s able to go home and tell Aimee to start looking for a two-bedroom apartment, that things have taken an upswing on the docks and he’s making some money on the side working as a foreman at a warehouse.

  Yet right outside their door, Herc and Carver, having followed Nicky home from Frog’s corner, are checking his truck tag, noting that his last name is the same name as the detail’s target: Sobotka.

  At prison, Wee-Bey tries to make a devastated Avon Barksdale feel less guilt over his nephew’s apparent suicide while Bell pays a D.C. gangster for the hit on D.

  Stringer then arrives at the wake to console Brianna, holed up with her grief in the bedroom. Next day at the graveside, Proposition Joe tells Stringer he can provide good dope, straight off the boat.

  You got the real estate, Joe reasons, I got the product.

  Stringer brings the proposition to Avon on his next prison visit, asking just enough questions to assure himself that Barksdale believes D’Angelo’s death a suicide.

  As for Prop Joe’s offer, Avon flatly refuses. We’ll get through on our own, he says.

  At the port, Sobotka glimpses the future of the waterfront during a presentation of how the state-of-the-art Rotterdam port handles cargo using robotics. The writing on the wall is clear and ominous.

  Technology also allows Freamon to ascertain that Horseface will soon be working a Talco ship called the Esmeralda.

  The detail sets up surveillance to follow whatever container might go missing. One soon does and is followed from the docks to an industrial area warehouse in Southeast Baltimore: Pyramid Incorporated on Newkirk Street.

  Whereupon the detail goes to Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman – McNulty’s booty buddy from Season One – to okay a wiretap.

  They show that every time Sobotka calls Horseface Pakusa from his cell phone, Pakusa is working a Talco ship the next day. They argue for conspiracy, suggesting that the hot containers may contain more stowaway women.

  Pearlman says they’ve got to do better than that, as prostitution doesn’t meet the standards for a wire under the law.

  Freamon goes to Daniels and works his conscience about the women who died in the shipping container: “This case needs to be worked.”

  The episode moves toward a close with an all-too-familiar alarm going off at the Clement Street Bar:
stevedore down, berth five. It’s New Charles with a crushed leg.

  And it ends with Daniels finally telling Rawls he’ll take the open murders. “But what I need from you I get,” Daniels says. “No bullshit, no arguments.”

  episode twenty-one

  DUCK AND COVER

  “How come they don’t fly away?” - ZIGGY

  Directed by Daniel Attias

  Story by David Simon & George Pelecanos; teleplay by George Pelecanos

  Daniels lets the detail know that he is now officially on the hook with Rawls for solving the Jane Doe plus 13.

  Freamon tells prosecutor Pearlman they’ve now got the drug connection needed for a wiretap: the phone at the warehouse where the hot container was trucked has been used to call at least three known dealers, including Proposition Joe Stewart. Convinced, Pearlman goes to a judge for authorization.

  McNulty calls Elena drunk from a bar payphone – please, baby; please, baby – but gets the answering machine. He responds by wrecking his car – twice.

  With his hand still bleeding, he picks up a waitress from an all-night diner, later confessing to Bunk that if Elena won’t take him back, ain’t nothing worth living for but police work.

  Bunk and Freamon plead McNulty’s case to Daniels, who goes to bat for him with Rawls, reminding the colonel that he took the open murders with a promise that he would get whatever he needed. Rawls reluctantly agrees.

  On the docks, Horseface and the boys egg on Ziggy to take his best shot at Maui, the much larger longshoreman who’d played a practical joke on Sobotka the Younger by sending him fake paternity papers.

  “His ass is candy,” Horse assures him. “You? You’re a legend, a legend of the docks.”

  Ziggy ends up atop a container stack – “You motherfuckers gave me bad advice!” he screams at his baiters.

  Down from the mountain of stacked containers, Ziggy goes to see Mr. Diz, an old man in the neighborhood who raced pigeons with his grandfather in the old days.

  He buys a live duck and asks the old man why they don’t fly away. Because, says Diz, their wings are clipped.

  Nick now rolls in a new truck. He hands Ziggy his share of the dope profits but Ziggy, still bitter about being marginalized, responds by throwing the fat wad of cash out the window.

  Soon, he’s drinking down at Clement Street with his pet duck, for whom he has bought a diamond choker necklace. Every time Zig orders a round, the bird gets one, too.

  Monitoring calls to and from the warehouse and the cell phone of one of The Greek’s men – Serge Malatov – Prez notes that this crew isn’t “as careful as Barksdale’s people were.”

  “This ain’t West Baltimore,” says Greggs. “They’re on their phones because they don’t expect us to be on ’em.”

  There are slip-ups on the police side of things as well; the next time Frank Sobotka goes to pay his overdue cell phone bill, he finds that his account has been flagged: do not disconnect for nonpayment.

  Prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman and the detectives make plans to raid the brothel discovered by Greggs and Prez. Newly arrived in the detail, McNulty is tapped for a role he was born to play: It Takes A Whore to Catch a Whore.

  In the projects, Barksdale’s business is “slower than a white man in slippers,” but across the street, where independent dealers have set up shop, business is booming.

  By now, Sobotka is good and spooked: first by the flag on his cell phone and again when he learns that Beadie Russell lied about being taken off the homicide investigation.

  On a day when The Greek has two cans to be smuggled off the docks, Sobotka tells Horseface to process one of the dirty cans as legit cargo and hide it in the stacks.

  He then “smuggles” a clean can off the cargo terminal to see if the police follow it. They do, and Sobotka calls Spiros Vondas with his fears, demanding a meeting with The Greek.

  Serge delivers the can to an appliance store only to find it is not filled with Russian vodka but curtain rods, baby dolls, and dollar-store crap. The angry phone call that results is clocked by the detail’s wiretap.

  Sobotka and Nick meet The Greek at Johnny’s diner, and Nick realizes that the real chief is the old man who was at the diner counter during so many other meetings with Vondas.

  The Greek tells Sobotka to lose more clean cans and deliver them to the warehouse, to see if the cops are really onto them, and if so, that they’ve got nothing to hide.

  When Nick says they need to be paid no matter what they’re moving off the docks, The Greek balks. And when Sobotka insists, saying he needs money for the union’s lobbying effort, the old man has a change of heart, saying, “I want you should be happy.”

  THE LEGEND OF THE ORANGE SOFA AND THE UNLIKELY HOLLYWOOD CAREERS OF VINCE PERANIO AND PAT MORAN

  “If Simon has the nerve to write this stuff, we have the obligation to put the story together.”

  – PAT MORAN

  The drama of The Wire generally takes place at the center of your TV screen.

  It is there that the ideas of the writers and producers – be it Jimmy McNulty feeling up a mannequin to charm his estranged wife, Stringer Bell sipping tea while plotting to import drugs into Baltimore or the millionaire drug lord Marlo Stanfield shoplifting 50 cents worth of lollipops – are animated.

  Even on a sprawling show as finely woven as The Wire, the story is almost always front and center.

  “The most intricately plotted drama on television,” said the Miami Herald.

  That leaves a lot of space to be filled in the margins. Which is where Vince Peranio and Pat Moran, who worked respectively as the show’s art director and the on-location casting director, do some of their best work.

  “Vince,” said Moran of her old friend in the spring of 2009, “can make anything look like anything.”

  But they love Baltimore best, having devoted their careers – from the films of John Waters and Barry Levinson, through Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner and The Wire – to the marginal metropolis they love.

  “The Wire was harder than any of them, hardest show I ever worked on,” said Moran. “It had more characters than a Chinese novel and it was accurate.”

  And accuracy is paramount when portraying the Queen City of the Patapsco River drainage basin, royalty that never takes time to put on make-up and is often found walking down the street in hair curlers and bedroom slippers.

  “If you just concentrate on the people in the center, the film falls apart,” said Moran from her office in an old broom factory on the Canton waterfront. “All the people you see in the background, the ones who don’t speak, that’s very much a Baltimore reality.”

  Said Peranio, a historian of all things Crabtown: “All of us who worked on The Wire can safely say that [viewers] are seeing ‘the real.’”

  Moran handed out business cards to people hanging around the set in neighborhoods where the show is filmed, asking folks to call if they’re interested in being extras.

  “Talent detectives,” she said. “When it comes down to the corner, nobody can fill that space but people from the corner. These kids know what goes on down there and it makes the show better.

  “We’re not there to exploit them, but to tell their story … what we portrayed was not racially ambiguous kids who could have played a sitcom. We cast Baltimore.”

  One of Moran’s great finds was Washington actor S. Robert Morgan, the blind actor who portrays the barkeep Butchie, both bank and mentor to Omar.

  “Here we are doing Greek tragedy and Pat Moran brings us the physical manifestation of an ancient seer,” said David Simon, who said he was thrilled with Morgan’s work.

  Heavy-set drug supplier Proposition Joe Stewart – the Eastside’s logical and understated answer to Avon Barksdale – is played by a true son of the Eastside, Patterson High School: Robert F. Chew from the class of 1978.

  Chew, whose great-great-grandfather was Korean, teaches and performs at the Arena Players theater group. A fan of sitcoms from TV’s golden
age, Chew appeared as “Prop Joe” in all five seasons of The Wire.

  “And he was spectacular,” said Moran. “I’ve known him a long time.”

  The Baltimore School for the Arts has been a strong resource, sending both students and teachers.

  “Stinkum [Brandon Price] went there,” said Moran.

  Maria Broom, who plays Marla Daniels, estranged wife of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, teaches at the downtown high school.

  Built into the city’s old Aleazar Hotel, the arts school is also where Moran found Corey Parker Robinson – Detective Leander Sydnor – when he was still a teenager and she was casting Homicide.

  Others, like Butchie, have come from that town about a 40-minute drive south of Baltimore that Moran calls Dullsville, better known as the nation’s capital.

  More than a few walk-ons would seem to stop by the casting office after visting their probation officer.

  “On any of David Simon’s pet projects, we’ve hired many felons, certainly drug dealers or people with drug dealing somewhere in their life,” said Moran. “A few murderers, too, but they’re all really nice to me.”

  A cream puff typecast as a tough cookie because of her gruff, blunt demeanor, a bit of a bark and fire-engine-red hair, Moran has cowed more than a few acknowledged killers during auditions.

  Her rasp of “state your name” and demand that all actors “stay on book” in each audition and callback are an essential rite of passage for local actors.

  “When they sit in that [casting] chair, I’m not interested in their past,” she said. “If you get the part, follow the rules. If you can’t, we’ll find someone else.”

  Asked if giving a little work to kids from neighborhoods as rough as anything Dickens wrote about might have saved a few lives, Moran eats the question in one bite: “I’m not Mother Teresa.”

  More than once, especially when civic leaders are riding him for broadcasting the city’s ills over every hill and dale in the world with a DVD player, Simon has argued that the tragedies shown in The Wire could be filmed in any number of American cities.