The Wire Page 5

  But Obama confidently operates as a man impervious to stereotype.

  Asked what his favorite sport is, he answers basketball. On one level that seems simple enough. It even has the virtue of being genuine: the 6’2” Obama played basketball for his high school in Hawaii. He continues to run ball with his friends, and from the presidential podium he occasionally brags about the accuracy of his left-handed jump shot. He even installed a basketball hoop on an outdoor tennis court at the White House where he occasionally takes guests “to school.”

  But in America, basketball is seen as a black sport, an urban sport, and one that some people say too many black youngsters are obsessed with, sometimes to the detriment of their studies. In short, it’s a sport vulnerable to stereotype.

  But Obama holds it close, swishing three-pointers for the troops in Afghanistan, casually sitting courtside with a beer in hand as he talked trash with a playfully heckling fan at a National Basketball Association game in Washington, and going on ESPN to reveal for the world his picks for the closely watched NCAA collegiate basketball tournament.

  It is safe to say that no conventional political adviser told Obama to identify with basketball. In the old days, that would be considered bad politics. But somehow Obama eclipsed the negative views of basketball while embracing all its coolness and hipness, transforming it into good politics. Clearly, it is a new day.

  So it was when he was asked about his favorite television show during the heat of the presidential campaign. That can be a tricky question. Someone who wanted to flaunt their national security credentials might cite 24, the television show that focuses on the daring-do of fictional counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer.

  Or perhaps someone interested in health care might lift up Grey’s Anatomy, which would have the added benefit of being in line with mainstream American viewing habits. That show was Hillary Clinton’s choice.

  But Obama chose The Wire. Not only did he choose The Wire, but he also went on to say that his favorite character was Omar, the gay stick-up man who tormented the drug dealers with his bold robberies.

  “That’s not an endorsement,” Obama has explained. “He’s not my favorite person, but he is a fascinating character.” Obama went on to call Omar, “the toughest, baddest guy on the show.”

  Obama continued to be a close fan of The Wire even after the show faded from television. During his first European visit as president, Obama was in Prague to deliver a speech laying out his vision for nuclear non-proliferation, when he spotted the actor Andre Royo, who was in town filming Red Tails, about the racial trials faced by America’s first black military pilots, the Tuskegee airmen.

  In The Wire, Royo had played the part of “Bubbles,” the heroin addict turned recovering heroin addict with a sweet personality and an encyclopedic knowledge of the underside of the drug game.

  Obama turned up at the filming locale, and immediately recognized Royo.

  “I was standing on a podium and Obama points to me and says, ‘My dude from The Wire! Keep up the good work!’” Royo recalls. “And I’m like, the president of the United States just shouted me out.”

  America is a nation where many presidents have been mythologized as rural outdoorsmen. Ronald Reagan had a ranch in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. George W. Bush had a few thousand acres in Crawford, Texas, where he would retreat to ride his mountain bike and “clear brush” during 100-degree August days. Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia.

  By contrast, Obama is an urban president, America’s first urban president since John F. Kennedy. Obama may have been raised in Indonesia and sunny Hawaii, but his political identity was forged in Chicago, known as America’s “Second City” – behind New York; the City of Big Shoulders, as Lincoln’s biographer Carl Sandburg called it.

  Obama is not the only political leader who has shown love to The Wire. Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia, America’s 6th largest city, is also a huge fan of the show. The mayor brought together about 100 city leaders and ordinary citizens (who were chosen by raffle) for a City Hall screening of the series finale.

  So Obama’s love of The Wire, while maybe politically risky under the old rules, makes sense. He’s an urban guy. And the show appeals to urban sensibilities. While it never had huge ratings, The Wire enjoyed a loyal, urbane, informed following, drawn by the show’s great writing, gritty realism, and complex, morally ambiguous storylines.

  If The Wire helped change the conventions of television by altering the good–bad moralism that inhabits much of popular entertainment, Obama’s presidency is also all about the oft-mentioned change.

  During the campaign, he was cautious and never fully explained what “change” meant. But, as president, Obama has been boldly setting about changing how the US government operates.

  He wants to expand health care coverage in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 46 million people go without insurance. He wants to cap carbon emissions, in a nation that is the world’s largest emitter of ozone-producing carbon (even if China is closing fast).

  In a country where the cost of higher education has increased far faster than the salaries of most workers in recent decades, he wants government-sponsored college grants and loans to be more available.

  In a nation that for a generation worshipped at the altar of small government and free-market capitalism, even as fewer workers had pensions, job security, and pay increases outpacing inflation, he wants government to do more to lift the take-home income of average Americans.

  On the international stage, he is winding down the war in Iraq, even as he is stepping up the fight in Afghanistan. He has sought to engage America’s antagonists. He heartily shook hands with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who the Bush administration had clashed with, even as his oil-funded brand of socialism and friendship with Fidel Castro made him popular in many parts of Latin America.

  He has reached out to Iran and opened his administration to talks with North Korea. He has tried to arrest the drift in relations with a newly assertive Russia. He has made a few cautious overtures to Cuba, where a US trade embargo has held firm for more than four decades, without anything resembling an effect.

  All of this has happened in the first few months of the Obama presidency, even if much of it remains work in progress.

  Obama likes to say that his presidency has a chance to be transformative. That opportunity, he acknowledges, comes because the nation is at an inflection point caused by anger over the war in Iraq and an economic meltdown that has caused many Americans to rethink the “rugged individualism” and distrust of government that has long been an American hallmark.

  Looking back, Obama says, not many presidents have confronted crises of a similar scale. And the ones who did are best remembered by history. Lincoln faced down a civil war. Roosevelt steered the nation out of the Great Depression. LBJ helped drive a stake in the heart of American apartheid.

  And Reagan brought an end to an alleged American “malaise,” (attributed to Jimmy Carter for a 1979 speech in which he never used the word) that Reaganites called a product of liberalism’s excesses.

  Now Obama is leading a kind of restructuring of America. He is working to remake government, just as The Wire changed television.

  Michael A. Fletcher

  SEASON ONE

  SEASON ONE OVERVIEW

  “It’s more about class than race.”

  DAVID SIMON

  When John Waters was filming Hairspray in Baltimore in 1988, Pia Zadora reportedly complimented the filmmaker on the extraordinary authenticity of the set.

  “This isn’t a set, Pia,” Waters chuckled. “People live here.”

  People live here.

  “Like any other American city,” said Doug Olear, who played FBI Agent Terrence Fitzhugh on The Wire, “it has places that are amazing and beautiful, but a couple of miles in any direction and you can be fearing for your life … you can’t build that in a studio.”

  Of the many storytelling goals
pursued by David Simon – from journalism at the Baltimore Sun, to the books Homicide and The Corner, and, finally, creating The Wire from all that came before it – a priority was to humanize the underclass.

  To show that people don’t just die in West Baltimore, lower Park Heights, or Belair-Edison, that they often navigate extraordinary circumstances in order to live.

  Like the teenage Wallace running a half-block length of extension cord to bring electricity to the abandoned shithole where he plays grown-up to a gaggle of virtual orphans.

  Touching?

  As far as it goes – certainly in light of the fate awaiting Wallace – but some corner dealer will soon enough take an interest in the potential labor pool of un-parented children.

  Or Omar robbing drug dealers of product and profit with a shotgun he doesn’t mind using; yet a soft touch for a young mother desperate for a fix, respectfully addressing her request for heroin to “Mr. Omar.”

  A twisted act of corporal mercy, but no skin off the stickup man’s ass.

  How about Bubbles applying an ingenuity that would make him a star at any enterprise even approaching legitimacy – subprime loans, anyone? – to the Sisyphean pursuit of scoring dope?

  What was it Black Sabbath said?

  Killing yourself to live.

  Just beneath the drama, The Wire is making a case for the motivations of people trying to get by in a society in which indifferent institutions have more rights than human beings.

  That includes bureaucracies on both sides of the law; the cultures of addiction – to power, ambition, and dope – and the maw of raw capitalism.

  What is it about this epoch in which, if one commits to anything larger than oneself, one will regret it?

  Since Zadora’s comment some 21 years ago, the gentrification of neighborhoods adjoining Baltimore’s waterfront has continued with good-life gusto. Though the pace slowed during the busted housing bubble recession of 2009, it pushes on.

  At the same time, the Monster That Ate Baltimore City (perhaps the real star of The Wire, a mutant drawing strength from human despair) continued to devour neighborhoods two generations removed from the days when people with living-wage jobs resided there.

  In 1992, Mother Teresa of Calcutta marched her saints into Baltimore not to fight the dragon but to provide succor to its victims, dispatching her Missionaries of Charity to the slums of East Baltimore to work with the HIV population.

  You see these nuns in white robes with blue piping, coming and going from their Gift of Hope convent at St Wenceslaus Church on Collington Street at Ashland Avenue.

  “What we bless today is not a hospice in the technical sense, but [the] sisters’ home,” said then-Archbishop of Baltimore William H. Keeler at the dedication, “… the home the Missionaries of Charity are sharing with the sick poor.”

  Not the sick and the poor. The sick poor.

  In 2004, during a Los Angeles panel for the 21st Annual Museum of Television and Radio’s Television Festival, Sonja Sohn, who played Detective Kima Greggs, said she was often self-conscious making entertainment, however serious, out of such material.

  “I felt guilty, especially the first season,” said Sohn, who grew up in subsidized housing at the south end of Newport News, Virginia. “It reminded me too much of home.

  “… to go into it playing a cop when I grew up seeing the cops as an oppressive force who never brought order … who I never saw help anybody … that’s where my resentment comes from.

  “I grew up torn between watching some pretty fucked-up shit go down in my own house or calling the cops, who calmed things down and left.”

  To make TV out of a plague struck Sohn as somewhat exploitative.

  “This stuff needs to be divulged, but it still ends up being entertainment, and that bothers me,” she said, adding that the show was her first real break in the business. “If it’s going to be entertainment, The Wire is the best choice for it.”

  The parcel of Baltimore central to Season One was a fictional housing project, the Franklin Terrace high-rises, modeled on the actual Lexington Terrace and George B. Murphy Homes that once ringed the western edge of downtown.

  The eight towers and adjoining low-rise buildings were addresses for some of the worst bloodletting in the city’s storied criminal history.

  [An early municipal nickname – Mobtown – stuck to the city after pro-Southern locals fired upon Union troops from the 6th Massachusetts Regiment moving through Baltimore at the start of the Civil War.]

  Many plotlines from The Wire’s first year are rooted in a case from the 1980s investigated by writer/producer Ed Burns when he was a city homicide detective.

  “Most of Season One came from the Little Melvin Williams and [Lamont] ‘Chin’ Farmer case,” said Burns. “The murder that left the girl [answering a tap at the window] dead in Episode Four – that all came out of the Williams investigation.”

  The original target in the state and federal prosecution was a cocaine trafficker named Louis “Cookie” Savage, suspected of ordering the murder of a jealous girlfriend who’d threatened to turn the player in.

  A nearly two-year investigation led not only to Savage, but through cloned pagers and wiretaps, the legendary Williams, one of the most significant wholesale narcotics brokers in Baltimore history, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

  A line was also drawn to Williams’s elusive, Stringer Bell-like lieutenant, Lamont “Chin” Farmer.

  [Released from his last prison term in 2003, Williams played a preacher called “The Deacon” in Seasons Three through Five. His casting angered many in Baltimore, who found it the ultimate and perverse glorification of a drug lord responsible for countless deaths.]

  As in Season One’s investigation of the Barksdale gang, a federal wiretap compromised the Williams organization. Detectives carrying pagers took to rooftops with binoculars to watch specific payphones.

  A key break came when Burns and his partner Harry Edgerton figured out the beeper codes.

  The moment is delivered in Episode Five – “The Pager” – by Detective Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski. Stuck on desk duty, Prez applies a passion for supermarket “word find” puzzles to the telephone keypad.

  In the drama and in real life, the dealers were sending numbers that could be decoded by jumping over the five at the center of the keypad.

  “It dawns on you: ‘Motherfuckers, isn’t this brilliant!’” said Burns. “Figuring it out was one thing, but creating it was a stroke of genius.”

  By the time informants were engaging principal targets in attempted transactions, detectives were ordered to prematurely close out what Burns called “a gem” of an investigation.

  In December of 1984, a city narcotics detective, Marcellus “Marty” Ward, was killed when an unrelated undercover operation went awry.

  Authorities responded by immediately using evidence from the Williams probe to stage a series of raids, an angry and emotional response to Ward’s death that prevented the wiretap from revealing additional facets of the organization helmed by Williams and Farmer.

  Williams was sentenced to 34 years on a combination of drug charges and parole violations, while Savage – caught cutting cocaine on a pinhole wall camera similar to that used by detectives to spy on Avon Barksdale – got 30 years.

  Chin Farmer, who Burns regards as one of the true geniuses in the history of Baltimore’s drug trade, skated on the likelihood of a seven-year sentence because the case shut down too early.

  In the wake of the convictions, Baltimore’s relatively stable drug culture was turned upside down in the 1980s by the arrival of cheap cocaine, soon followed by the crack epidemic.

  The Terrace and the Murphy Homes became 24/7 drug markets beyond the capacity of the city to police. The Eastside high-rises – Lafayette Courts and Flag House – were equally impenetrable.

  By the time a cop chased a kid across an open courtyard, the kid was inside the tower taking the stairs three at a time. By the time that same office
r followed up the stairwell, bolts would begin locking on doors, the drugs would disappear, and both the suspect and contraband could be in one of a hundred apartments on more than a dozen floors.

  The value of the high-rises to the drug trade became public in the mid-1980s in a turf battle over Lexington Terrace and the nearby Edgar Allan Poe Homes that was known as the War Against the Downers.

  Waged throughout the summer of 1986 by a 24-year-old dealer named Warren Boardley against brothers Alan and Spencer Downer, the battle left seven dead and twice as many wounded before Boardley had control of the Terrace and Poe.

  While Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell are fictional composites, Avon Barksdale bears more than a passing resemblance to Warren Boardley.

  Once an adolescent boxer, Boardley was sentenced to a 43-year prison term after a two-year investigation by Burns, Edgerton, and federal agents.

  Having fought brutally to secure the towers as his own, Barksdale is loath to give the territory up, even when Stringer Bell reasons convincingly that product, and not territory, is the key to success.

  Boardley also staked his reputation on primacy in the high-rises, and, much like the Barksdale crew, his organization attracted police attention not for drug traffic but the bodies that fell over his insistence on monopoly.

  After Boardley’s arrest in late 1988, Burns and other cops walked through Lexington Terrace talking to the myriad dealers still working the stairwells and courtyards.

  They let it be known that Boardley did not go down for drugs but for the murders which revealed his business. For two years after the Boardley investigation, said Burns, the Terrace remained an open-air drug bazaar while violence fell dramatically.

  And thus the argument behind Season One: law enforcement can only make a ripple upon the baser human appetites. And not even the best police work can stem the traffic of illegal drugs.