The Wire Page 7

  Besides being a true anecdote right down to that three-word declaration of patriotic faith (the murder of Snotboogie was recounted by Baltimore Detective Terry McLarney and first appeared in David Simon’s book Homicide), the vignette launches The Wire with a simple premise.

  This is America. And to the extent that its institutions manage to exclude or diminish its people, they will nonetheless find a way to play. In the Baltimore ghetto, and, ultimately, in those working-class neighborhoods decaying into the ’hood for lack of opportunity, there are souls who will not be denied a turn. And this: whatever is excluded from the mainstream will eventually surface as a separate society complete with its own economy and systems of justice and education. The Snotboogies of the world may be comical and doomed and they are often dangerous. But as citizens of a parallel world under the same Stars and Stripes as the legitimate America, they must be allowed to play.

  Snotboogie’s is a simple murder, easily handled. The next day, McNulty goes to the courthouse to watch D’Angelo Barksdale – on trial for having panicked and killed a man in a drug-related dispute in the projects – beat a seemingly solid prosecution when a key witness backs up on her testimony. In the courtroom, Stringer Bell and other members of the Barksdale crime family celebrate the moment. Disgusted, Judge Phelan, hearing the case, calls McNulty back to chambers, where the detective gives the true story of the acquittal. The Barksdale organization has beat a string of killings in the projects, McNulty tells Phelan, by rewarding perjury and intimidating witnesses.

  And who in the police department, the judge inquires, is working on Barksdale?

  “No one,” says McNulty.

  Has he tipped his hand to the judge on impulse alone, or is McNulty manipulating the system to get something going that he can sink his teeth into? In what will become typical McNulty behavior, the detective has happily stirred the shit.

  The judge begins battering the police command staff with questions about the unpunished drug murders. McNulty soon finds himself in his commander’s office, where Colonel Rawls rips him robustly for talking out of turn and orders a report on the Barksdale murders for the following day.

  Here the drama becomes thematic and parallel as D’Angelo returns home after months in pre-trial detention only to have his ass chewed by the boss, his uncle Avon Barksdale.

  The murder case may have collapsed, but the need for the murder in the first place was clearly dubious; D’Angelo is not the hardest soldier in his uncle’s army, and the project killing – half self-defense but mostly panic – proved this. D’Angelo is home, but he will not be returning to the family drug business in the high-rise towers. Instead, he is demoted to the low-rise projects, The Pit.

  McNulty writes his report, as does Lieutenant Daniels, who is also ordered to provide some intelligence on the previously unknown Barksdale, as the bureaucracy begins to churn. McNulty is warned that such behavior will surely stunt his career as a detective. Detective Sergeant Jay Landsman, his boss in homicide, tells him that more shenanigans will see him walking a beat in the Western District. McNulty claims not to care, and Landsman asks where it is he doesn’t want to go.

  “The boat,” laughs McNulty, meaning the marine unit.

  Keep it up, says Landsman, and that’s what you’ll get – on the midnight shift. The well-tailored Bunk Moreland, McNulty’s partner, having earlier blamed McNulty for “giving a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck,” affirms Landsman’s judgment.

  The reports get kicked upstairs. What comes back is a special detail to investigate Barksdale, but in the most halfhearted manner. Daniels is given command of the unit, and brings his people with him. McNulty comes from homicide with another homicide detective, the hapless Santangelo, who wants little to do with the project.

  Daniels is ordered to put a charge on Avon Barksdale quickly and not to let the investigation sprawl. McNulty is dubious. Barksdale is too clever, too insulated, and too serious a trafficker to be caught so easily.

  McNulty wants to do the case properly – to follow it where it leads – but so far has few allies.

  And the violence continues. When a snitch named Bubbles sees his running buddy, a white addict named Johnny, beaten to within an inch of his life over a two-bit scam, he offers his services to Detective Kima Greggs, with whom he has worked in the past.

  Finally, a witness bold enough to testify against D’Angelo Barksdale during the trial before Judge Phelan, a project maintenance worker named William Gant, is shot to death in the low-rises.

  Avon Barksdale’s reach in the projects is unquestioned.

  Even D’Angelo, watching from behind the crime scene tape, seems stunned by a murder that amounts to nothing more than sending a message. After all, the trial was over: He’d beaten the charge.

  episode two

  THE DETAIL

  “you cannot lose if you do not play.”

  - MARLA DANIELS

  Directed by Clark Johnson

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

  The tale resumes at the medical examiner’s office, where the open murder of citizen Gant has become Bunk Moreland’s problem. McNulty surmises that it was most likely a hit ordered by Avon Barksdale.

  To test the theory, he and Bunk pick up D’Angelo for a chat that offers an extraordinary window into the younger Barksdale’s soul: while admitting nothing, the young gangster feels so bad for the dead man’s family that he begins to write them a letter of apology.

  D’Angelo’s genuine, if ill-considered act of regret is interrupted only when the drug organization’s lawyer, Maurice Levy, arrives to gather him up.

  Daniels reaches out to add more manpower to his detail after realizing that Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell – the No. 2 man in the department, who handpicked Daniels for the detail and urged him not to allow the case to sprawl – has saddled him with fools and also-rans.

  The message is clear: if they give you good police, they expect good police work. But little is expected or desired from this detail, a point further hammered home by the unit’s off-site offices in the basement of the courthouse.

  Meanwhile, Greggs begins to harvest street-level information about the projects from her on-retainer snitch Bubbles. Herc and Carver, accompanied by new detail member Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski – notorious for shooting up his squad car, which might have gotten him tossed out of the department if he weren’t the son-in-law of a certain district major – sit in the courthouse basement feeling neglected.

  After a half dozen beers each, they decide to solicit information in the high-rise projects in a very irregular manner. The trio’s two a.m. visit to the towers ends up in a near riot.

  Air conditioners and old televisions are tossed out of high-rise windows and a 14-year-old project kid loses an eye when Prez, a loose cannon beyond even the few boundaries that Herc and Carver recognize, knocks him cold with the butt of his gun. Daniels is reluctantly forced to cover for the brutality.

  When Daniels refuses to bring the Gant murder (the slain witness from the recent Barksdale acquittal) to the attention of the bosses as leverage for more resources, the information surfaces in the news. Though McNulty denies being the leak, Daniels knows he will have trouble with this detail both from within and without.

  THE BUNK AND THE BUNK

  “Being a good cop is in line with Bunk’s social point of view; being a good cop is not being unfair. I think that’s why he’s a cop.”

  – WENDELL PIERCE

  Wendell Pierce is so good at portraying the Baltimore City homicide detective on which his character is based that The Wire credits might read, “Starring ‘The Bunk’ as Himself.”

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw The Wire,” Pierce told New Orleans writer Noah Bonaparte Pais. “We saw a screening, and we said, ‘OK, I guess that’s it. Nobody’s going to get into this.’

  “You never know. It’s a fragile thing. But it will be authentic.”

  Indeed.

&nb
sp; Both Pierce and the real-life Bunk – cigar-chomping Oscar “Rick” Requer – have roots that go back to Louisiana. Though the actor is about 20 years younger than the original, both are African-Americans from strong families. Each man’s father served in the military, and both might kindly be described as portly.

  And although Requer grew up in segregated, post-World War II Baltimore and Pierce came of age at the beginning of integration in the New South, both see the vast wasteland of West Baltimore as a tragedy so pronounced they feel it personally.

  “I was raised in West Baltimore, my mother still lives up there on Westwood Avenue, near North and Pulaski,” said Requer, who came on the Baltimore department as a patrolman in 1964.

  “There used to be black schoolteachers and nurses and doctors living all around there. My father worked at the post office. It’s terrible now, and a lot of the people who couldn’t get out are stuck. My mom is in her eighties, but she won’t leave.”

  Wendell Pierce, who won the role of a New Orleans trombone player in David Simon’s Treme series when The Wire went dark, grew up in a suburban-styled, middle-class subdivision of New Orleans called Pontchartrain Park, a post-war oasis built on the dreams of black war veterans with GI Bill benefits.

  So peculiar to the early 1950s was the “Negro” development that Dixieland tour buses filled with white tourists would cruise by for a peek.

  Compared to the respite of Pontchartrain Park – by God, there was even a golf course in the middle of it – the neighborhoods where The Wire is filmed came as a shock to the Juilliard-trained Pierce.

  “West Baltimore is so small and the concentration of poverty and destruction of the educational infrastructure [so intense] that it’s a mass of clinical depression just now being diagnosed,” said Pierce.

  “My parents never came right out and talked racism, but they always alluded to it this way: ‘Son, there are people in this world who do not have your best interest at heart.’”

  And such people, in Pierce’s view, do not have the best interest of a neighborhood or the city itself at heart when it comes to squeezing a buck from a system that needs people at the bottom in order to prosper.

  “Once you destroy the educational infrastructure – remember, during slavery you risked death if you learned to read – it takes just a few years for the impact to spread through a family and then the neighborhood,” said Pierce.

  Throw drugs and their attendant violence in the mix, he added, “and it’s the icing on the cake.

  “I’m not absolving personal responsibility – the people of Baltimore are the descendents of Frederick Douglass, and there’s still plenty of examples of folks who have come from those neighborhoods and have done well – but when those in the community become those who help to destroy the community, you know that people who don’t have your best interest at heart come in all colors.”

  Drugs were unheard of in West Baltimore back when Oscar Requer, a 1958 graduate of Frederick Douglass High School, was known as Obbie in the Gilmore projects before his father bought the house on Westwood Avenue.

  Around the corner stood rows of derelict wooden shacks on Bruce Street. By comparison to what once passed for African-American housing in Baltimore, the Winchester Homes projects were, in the beginning at least, an oasis not unlike Pontchartrain Park.

  “In the projects we had radiators and gas stoves,” said Requer. “Before that, you’d never lived in a brick house or had a daggone radiator.”

  Time changed the Winchester Homes, much as it did all of Baltimore’s public housing projects. Eastside and Westside, the drug trade devoured neighborhoods whole. And the radiators of Requer’s memory can occasionally be seen in metal shopping carts, being pulled by the addicts to scrapyards for blast money.

  Requer served as a homicide detective for 20 years, ending in 1998. His nickname, acquired in the department, came from his habit of addressing all he met with the simple, all-purpose moniker Bunk.

  “Solving a homicide is one of the most gratifying moments an investigator can have,” said Requer.

  Among the most notable cases of his long career, the Bunk hung a drug murder on a suspect without learning the identity of the victim, no piece of cake when you consider that a murder investigation invariably begins with the victim.

  In the early 1990s case, Detective Requer received information from a snitch that a particular gangster was responsible for a drug-related robbery and shooting of a New York drug courier. Further, the body of the courier had been rolled in a rug and left in an East Baltimore dumpster.

  The victim’s name? No clue, except that he was supposedly from the Bronx and had come to Baltimore with a delivery of cocaine.

  Requer checked the year’s case files and found something that seemed to match – a John Doe who had been discovered in an Eastside dumpster, rolled in carpeting. Working the case hard, Requer eventually found an eyewitness who corroborated the informant. When the detective finally got a line on the shooter, he learned that he was in a New York State prison near the Canadian border.

  Requer got a road car from the motor pool and made the drive, arriving at the prison and confronting his suspect with the facts as he knew them. The guilty man went slack-jawed.

  “You came all the way up here, damn near to Canada, to charge me with a murder and you don’t even know who it was that I killed?”

  Requer allowed that this was the case, and that the charging documents would allege that the man had murdered a John Doe in the City of Baltimore.

  “Not my day, is it?” the suspect replied.

  The real-life Bunk was also notable for his dry, off-the-cuff humor. On midnight shifts, he was known to favor a smoking robe and slippers, padding around the darkened homicide unit as if it were his den.

  Watching late-night westerns and gangster films on the television, he had a habit of announcing happily, whenever a shooting occurred among multiple witnesses, that the case could be easily solved with a minimum of police work.

  “There’s a dunker,” he once declared after watching Clint Eastwood shoot three men dead on a dusty main street. “Put cuffs on ’em, Bunk.”

  Requer left the homicide unit in 1998 and began working with the department’s retirement office. He worked with widows and other survivors of officers, making sure all benefits were properly paid. Not a few of the recipients are the widows or children of cops who took their own lives.

  “The job can be stressful and you always have the instrument of your own destruction right at hand,” he says.

  Pushing 70, Requer often has fishing and cold beer on his mind. He met his on-screen impersonator after Wendell Pierce had already been cast.

  On set during the filming of The Wire pilot, Detective Requer expressed some surprise that David Simon, a police reporter during a portion of Requer’s tenure in the homicide unit, had not only named a character in his honor, but had found an actor of similar stature and gruff charm. Right down to the cigar.

  episode three

  THE BUYS

  “The king stay the king.” - D’ANGELO

  Directed by Peter Medak

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

  By Episode Three, D’Angelo Barksdale is entrenched in The Pit, monitoring the youngest and least experienced of the Barksdale drug crews while trying to improve their performance. In a succinct metaphor played out in The Pit, we get a sense of the drug hierarchy and everyone’s place within that world.

  D’Angelo, finding Wallace and Bodie playing checkers with chess pieces, is incredulous that they don’t know the better game. Bodie couldn’t give a fuck, but Wallace, perhaps the last innocent on the untethered planet that is Baltimore, wants to learn.

  Piece by piece, D’Angelo catalogs how everyone in “the game” has a role and how few, if any, transcend their assigned roles. Bodie, ignorant of chess but not without pride and self-interest, is fixated on the pawns. If they make it across the battlefield to the other side, they become royalty
.

  “The king stay the king. Everyone stay what they is ’cept the pawns,” says D’Angelo. “They get capped quick. They be out of the game early…”

  “Unless they some smart-ass pawns,” says Bodie, correcting him.

  [Bodie, with heart and wit, will play out the string of a smart-ass pawn for many episodes to come.]

  The tension between D’Angelo and Bodie is exacerbated when D’Angelo appears halfhearted and weak in the eyes of his underlings. Notably, D’Angelo is blamed when he is on a food run at the moment that Omar and his stickup crew roll into The Pit to take an entire drug delivery – the “re-up” – from a stash house.

  Tension is also evident in the opposing bureaucracy, where the presence of so many weak investigators brings out McNulty’s contempt. Only Detective Freamon shows any initiative at all – locating a photo of Avon Barksdale on an old boxing poster – though for the most part, he sits at his desk sanding antique dollhouse miniatures.

  McNulty is dubious of Daniels’ insistence on trying to go up the ladder to Bell and Barksdale through street-level hand-to-hand sales via Bubbles while a detective – Leander Sydnor – comes over from the auto theft squad to go undercover on drug buys.

  The buys only implicate the lowest rungs of the organization, and the ensuing raids on the projects leave the detail empty-handed, save for the enigmatic Freamon, who uses the opportunity to look over the locations carefully, going so far as to write down phone numbers scratched on stash house walls.

  During the raids, Bodie knocks one of the detailed officers on his ass, dropping an aging alcoholic cop with a single punch, earning himself the respect of his peers and a beating at the hands of responding police, including Greggs.

  McNulty’s doubts intensify when his FBI source, Agent Fitzhugh, warns that Daniels is a dirty cop. The Bureau had looked into Daniels a few years before and found he had too much unexplained money banked away.