The Wire Page 8

  The Feds informed Deputy Commissioner Burrell about it, says Fitzhugh, and nothing happened.

  episode four

  OLD CASES

  “Thin line ’tween heaven and here” - BUBBLES

  Directed by Clement Virgo

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

  Fallout from the raids includes the disability retirement of Detective Mahone, who uses Bodie’s solitary punch to end his career with pay, leaving his equally alcoholic partner, Detective Polk, abandoned and lonely.

  Meanwhile, Herc and Carver journey down to lower Prince George’s County to try to interrogate Bodie at the juvenile facility where he is locked up after the melee. Bodie defeats them by simply walking away from the facility, stealing a car, and returning home to Baltimore.

  He arrives in time to hear D’Angelo recount his apparent involvement in the earlier murder of a young woman – a girlfriend of his uncle’s who, angry at Avon’s inattention, had threatened to expose him to the authorities. D’Angelo describes the murder in detail – a recounting motivated as much by the disrespect of his underlings in The Pit as by the horror of the story itself.

  Meanwhile, Detectives Greggs and McNulty reluctantly find each other as allies, agreeing that they are eventually going to need a wiretap to make the case – a conclusion that Daniels has been loath to accept, having promised Deputy Commissioner Burrell that he would contain the case.

  Greggs hears secondhand about the stash house robbery from Bubbles, who identifies Omar as the stickup artist. She brings that information to McNulty, along with a plan to jack up Omar, perhaps catch him with a gun and pull whatever information Omar can give them on the Barksdale crew.

  Together, McNulty and Greggs pitch Daniels and the rest of the detail, whereupon Freamon chimes in: he has done his own police work, discovering that in addition to the pagers the Barksdale dealers carry, they are communicating via payphones around the projects. Watch the payphones, Freamon says, and put together probable cause for a wiretap.

  Great idea. But do they even have a pager number? Freamon pulls his notes on a number written on the stash house wall during the earlier raids, a number that had D written next to it. It’s D’Angelo’s pager. He checked.

  McNulty regards Detective Freamon as if for the first time. He had thought him to be another piece of deadwood dumped on the detail. Not so.

  At the same time, McNulty and Bunk are obliged to look into an unsolved murder as Landsman dumps old cases on the Barksdale detail, hoping for a murder clearance or two.

  The case file in question is the murder of a young woman; a witness called in months earlier to claim that a “D” had been present on the night the victim was slain. McNulty and Bunk work a scene similar to one that D’Angelo described in The Pit earlier and discover fresh evidence, though nothing that yet suggests Barksdale’s involvement.

  episode five

  THE PAGES

  “A little slow, a little late.”

  - AVON BARKSDALE

  Directed by Clark Johnson

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

  In the wake of the recent raids and stash house robbery, Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell fear a snitch among D’Angelo’s crew in The Pit. Bell tells D’Angelo to cut the pay for his people and see who is still holding cash at the end of the week.

  Arguing in court papers that nothing else has worked, the detail gets the green light to clone D’Angelo’s pager. The clone works, with the detectives receiving the same pager numbers as D’Angelo, but the numbers that come back do not, indicating that the Barksdale crew is utilizing a code.

  McNulty and Greggs get on Omar and his young lover, Brandon, attempting to follow them and pull them up on weapons charges. Instead, Omar leads them into a cemetery, then gets out of his car to confront the police. A parley ensues in which Omar refuses to snitch on Barksdale or anyone else.

  Only after McNulty surprises Omar with the news that the third member of his crew, Bailey, was murdered overnight does Omar offer anything in return, telling the detectives that if they want to know who killed the workingman – Gant – they need to look at another Barksdale shooter, who goes by the name Bird.

  Help then comes from an unlikely source as Prez, consigned to desk duty since the near riot, fiddles with a pager code and discovers how the Barksdale dealers are working the code: jumping over the five in the middle of the keypad.

  Now, the detectives can begin collecting payphone numbers, even as Daniels remains resistant to a wiretap.

  The episode concludes with two of The Pit underlings, Wallace and Poot, spotting Omar’s lover – the stickup boy Brandon – in a downtown greasy spoon and video arcade. Communication leading to Brandon’s subsequent ambush and abduction by a truckload of Barksdale muscle is all recorded on the pager logs.

  episode six

  THE WIRE

  “And all the pieces matter.” - FREAMON

  Directed by Ed Bianchi

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

  The tale resumes with the image of Brandon’s tortured body – at the hands of Stinkum and other Barksdale assassins – lying across the roof of an abandoned car in a Westside alley near the projects, a message to all about the cost of challenging Avon Barksdale. The “trophy” is on display near the vacant rowhouse where Wallace and Poot live, acting as surrogate parents to a crew of even younger waifs.

  After viewing the body, and knowing that he not only contributed to the death but profited from it when he earns the bounty for Brandon’s head, Wallace is never the same again. He begins to brood and worry.

  Back downtown, Freamon takes Prez under his wing and together they begin to monitor the pager traffic in earnest. At headquarters, Rawls gets around to reading the follow-up reports that McNulty wrote on the open Barksdale cases, including the fresh but weak evidence on the slaying of the young woman in the apartment.

  Realizing there is enough to charge D’Angelo Barksdale with the murder (but not enough to convict), Rawls wants to bring whatever charges he can, which would cause Barksdale’s crew to change their patterns, jeopardize any chance at a wiretap, and end the detail.

  Daniels asks Rawls to hold back. Rawls refuses and the struggle goes before Burrell, where Daniels fights for his detail – more aggressively, perhaps, than Burrell had expected when he gave the posting to Daniels.

  As Daniels turns a corner and fights for the importance of the case beyond simple drug busts, Omar gets in touch with McNulty.

  Brandon’s brutal torture and murder has persuaded him to offer what he knows about the Barksdale organization – to the point of lying about being an eyewitness to the Gant murder and naming Bird as the shooter.

  And a promise to avenge his lover’s death through means that will not involve the police.

  episode seven

  ONE ARREST

  “A man must have a code.” - BUNK

  Directed by Joe Chappelle

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

  With probable cause established, the wiretaps on several project payphones are up. Coupled with surveillance on those phones, the detectives are able to monitor midlevel communications of the Barksdale organization. They do so to the point of catching a resupply of drugs to The Pit, supervised by Stinkum, whom they let go in the hope he will lead them up the ladder.

  The move raises Avon’s suspicions and Stringer Bell decides to change the pattern, disabling the payphones closest to The Pit, where the arrest occurred, and ordering D’Angelo to use phones some distance away.

  Bunk and McNulty find another witness to the Gant murder, while the other homicide investigator assigned to the detail, Detective Santangelo, is told by an angry Rawls – jilted by McNulty and embarrassed by Daniels – to bring him dirt on McNulty.

  When Santangelo objects that it is not his job to destroy another cop, Rawls notes that Santangelo has done piss-poor police work in homicide and
gives him an ultimatum: bring back dirt on McNulty or clear one of his many open cases.

  Bunk and McNulty, with Omar as a “witness,” arrest Bird as the shooter of Gant, at the same time clearing an additional murder given up by Omar almost as a casual favor, a murder in which Santangelo was the primary detective.

  His ass saved by his fellow detectives, Santangelo resists Rawls and tells McNulty that the commander is out to destroy him.

  episode eight

  LESSONS

  “come at the king, you best not miss.” - OMAR

  Directed by Gloria Muzio

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

  As Stinkum and Wee-Bey prepare to murder a rival dealer to extend Barksdale territory onto fresh corners, Omar emerges from the shadows with a shotgun blast, killing Stinkum and wounding Wee-Bey to avenge Brandon’s death.

  The whole point of letting Stinkum walk away from the re-up bust in the previous episode is now moot, his murder weakening the case built so far against the Barksdale group.

  The hit by Omar comes after a wild party among the crew, at which one of the dancers from a Barksdale-owned club overdoses. When her body is found in a back room, it is rolled in a rug, a death that will work to the advantage of detectives when they are ultimately able to turn another dancer – D’Angelo’s lover, Shardene – into an informant.

  Using the wiretap, the detectives target what they believe will be another re-up. Instead, they catch the aide to West Baltimore state senator Clay Davis taking a bag of cash from a project dealer. The reaction from police HQ is swift and virulent.

  Called to the deputy commissioner’s office by Burrell, who seems to know everything that happens inside the detail as it occurs, Daniels is ordered to return the cash to the aide and write up the car stop as unfounded.

  He does so, and McNulty again challenges him, asking if Burrell has anything on Daniels himself, angering the lieutenant as it hits home. When Burrell presses harder, ordering Daniels to take down the wire, Judge Phelan – McNulty’s original patron – intervenes, threatening the deputy commissioner with contempt of court.

  Back on the street, Wallace sinks into depression and addiction, unwilling to work The Pit or leave his bedroom as gossip about whether he’s cracking up buzzes along the wiretap.

  episode nine

  GAME DAY

  “Maybe we won.” - HERC

  Directed by Milcho Manchevski

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David H. Melnick & Shamit Choksey

  As Barksdale and a rival Eastside dealer, Proposition Joe Stewart, are gathering ringers for an annual Eastside-Westside neighborhood basketball game, the detectives press their investigation.

  Freamon sends Prez and Sydnor in search of the paper trail on Barksdale’s assets and influence, and they bring back information on front companies and real estate holdings west of the downtown. There are also a number of political contributions to incumbent state officials.

  Detectives, using the overdose death of her friend as emotional leverage, press Shardene into service as an informant inside Barksdale’s club. At the same time, McNulty overhears talk on the wiretap about Wallace being upset and distant since Brandon’s murder – a weak link to be exploited.

  As Herc and Carver take in the basketball game, it dawns on them that Barksdale, thus far unseen by police since the investigation began, may be in attendance. Daniels calls for surveillance, but Barksdale is quickly onto them.

  There is further trouble within the detail when Herc and Carver, having seized money from Wee-Bey in an earlier car stop, fail to turn in all of the cash. They luck out when sloppiness and not corruption is suspected.

  Finally, Omar robs another stash from a Barksdale crew and uses it to pay Proposition Joe for a pager number for Avon Barksdale. He uses that number to ambush Barksdale outside the strip club. If not for Wee-Bey’s timely return from a food run, it would have been curtains for Avon.

  A SNITCH FROM A SOUTH BALTIMORE ALLEY

  “PROPERTY OF BUBBLES”

  In March of 1992, a peculiar obituary appeared in the Sun newspaper of Baltimore.

  No services were listed. Nor survivors. And certainly not a worthy charity to which the bereaved might send donations. The dead man wasn’t even identified by the name his mother gave him.

  It was the obit of a 48-year-old police informant who went by “Bubbles” if you knew him in Baltimore, “Possum” if you ran across him in New York, and “Larry Johnson” if you were the police department payroll clerk processing vouchers.

  The obit was written by the paper’s cop reporter, David Simon, who stood on his head to get such unorthodox fare in the paper. To get Bubbles to tell his life story, all he had to do was cough up $20.

  For the better part of three decades – when he wasn’t shooting dope, running hustles, or stealing outright – Bubbles collected $50 to $100 of taxpayers’ money for each felon he gave to the police, all of them wanted on warrants and many of them escapees. Sometimes the cops paid him out of their own pockets.

  Back in his prime in the 1970s, Bubbles was the best police informant in Baltimore, working on commission for the Feds, state authorities, and street cops. He is the con who perfected the red hat trick that his cinematic alter ego, played by Bronx-born-and-raised Andre Royo, would perform with élan on The Wire.

  Royo wanted to act from the time he was a kid and saw the power that comedy and drama had on his no-nonsense father, a bongo-playing, Cuban-American construction worker named Louie.

  “He loved Fred Astaire,” said Royo, “and he’d act out John Wayne scenes. I wanted to be involved in anything that could make this serious dude emote.”

  As for Bubbles, Royo said: “I was intimidated when they asked me to play a street junkie; when you’ve never done drugs like that, you don’t want to be a cliché.

  “At first I was a little superior to the role, thinking a junkie was different from people addicted to other things, thinking they were bad people … When I’d see junkies begging on the subway in New York they got on my nerves.

  “But I went out of my way to meet some of them … to try and find a common thread I could hang on, but I found there isn’t one. The drug affects everyone in different ways; they’re human beings and most of them were just happy to talk to someone trying to depict them as human beings.”

  Over the course of The Wire’s five seasons, junkies in Baltimore – where heroin has been entrenched since as far back as the 1930s – came to see Bubbles as their very human hero.

  Enjoying a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes at a restaurant co-owned by his wife Jane – Canele in the Atwater Village neighborhood – Royo said street addicts hanging around the on-location sets of The Wire often came to his trailer between shots.

  “They’d give me pointers, like how a junkie would never throw a half-smoked cigarette away. So I went to the director and said, ‘We gotta do that one again.’”

  After the day’s shooting was over, however, Andre would clean up, change his clothes and hop in a car. A Teamster would drive him back home, leaving Bubbles behind until the next day’s call.

  “The junkies would see that and it would hurt them,” said Royo. “One of them said, ‘I wish it was that easy.’”

  By Season Five, after years of pushing stolen scrap metal through the streets of Baltimore, Bubs managed to shake out the junk for the last time in his sister’s basement.

  “I didn’t think living in the basement carried that much weight [for the story] until I saw it on the screen,” said Royo, finishing off the meatloaf special with an ice cream sundae.

  “But in the end, he got to walk up the stairs. Bubbles earned the right to sit down at the dinner table … a little hope.”

  •

  The real Bubbles carried his role with pride.

  “I’m a watcher,” said Bubbles a month before his death from AIDS, gaunt face bobbing, one of his dark, stick legs stretched over a table in a rowhouse apartm
ent on Harlem Avenue in Northwest Baltimore.

  “I can watch people and tell things about them. I can look at a face and remember it. I would go round a-rabbing, or in my truck, or I’d ride my bicycle even, and all the time, I’d be seeing what’s up.”

  When Bubbles sussed that something was up, it was up. His information led some 500 escapees back to prison.

  “Always dead-on,” said a homicide detective at the time. “If he told me right now to go kick in a door, I’d kick in that door.”

  Bubbles was born on an alley street in South Baltimore where Oriole Park at Camden Yards has stood since the year of his death. He tried heroin for the first time at 15, got sick, and tried it again.

  By 17, he was shooting dope just about every day and working as an a-rabber, the Baltimore term for men who sell produce on the streets from a horse-drawn cart.

  Before he turned to snitching, Bubbles was a “sneak-thief,” shimmying through roof caps and skylights of stores in South Baltimore and Pigtown, grabbing what he could and breaking out through a window to confuse police as to how he got in.

  One night in the late 1950s, a crew Bubbles had trained and worked with broke into a pawnshop on South Charles Street. They came down through the skylight but forgot to break a window on the way out to distract attention from the point of entry. A detective noticed the open skylight.

  “He asks around and finds out that I’m always coming down the skylights,” remembers Bubbles. “So he comes by my house and I tell him it ain’t me, and he says to me, ‘Okay, but then you know who it was.’”