If you're interested in some of the shit that The Wire was originally based on, this is a good read:
source
Respect
Twenty years ago, detective Ed Burns helped put the notorious "Little Melvin" Williams in prison. So why would he hire him for The Wire? By Ericka Blount Danois
Melvin Douglas Williams waits in a small room off of the main entrance to the Bethel AME church on Druid Hill Avenue, wearing his signature all-black clothing. A black towel draped over his shoulder, yellow tinted sunglasses by his side. A picture of a crucified, brown skinned Jesus hangs on the wall to his left. In front of him are lockers tacked with BELIEVE stickers.
As camera crews, extras and cast from the third season of theHBO series The Wire mill around him, Williams sits in a red leather chair, self-possessed and indifferent to the confusion around him. Bethel AME is his church, but today, it's where he will work on his acting chops.
Moments later, Williams is sitting in a pew, facing stained glass windows, filming a scene in which he counsels a young man trying to get his life in order after being released from prison. Williams plays a deacon at this church, a man whose job it is to tend to wayward souls like the one now before him.
"You want a job, you've gotta work to get it," he says to the youngster, his voice musical, soft, connected. "We'll help you, but it will be your sweat."
Bibles rest in the shelving of the pews. The camera focuses on their covers, and the scene ends. People begin moving around and talking. In a few more minutes, they'll shoot the entire scene again. In one small corner of the room sits Ed Bums, a former Baltimore City homicide detective and now a producer on The Wire. Twenty years ago, Burns participated in the investigation and raid on "Little Melvin" Williams's property that confiscated $100,000 worth of furs, more than $27,000 in cash, and Williams’s prized $52,000 black Maserati Quattroporte.
A year later, in March 1985, The Sun's headline read "Little Melvin Sentenced." A federal judge had sent Williams to prison for 24 years on drug-related charges. The article was written by then-Sun reporter David Simon, who co-wrote The Corner with Burns, and is the creator and executive producer for The Wire. (Next to that article was one written by Rafael Alvarez, also a co-writer on the show.)
Two decades after Burns helped send Williams to jail, he's ended up giving the former drug kingpin his first acting job. It's only fair, considering that many of Williams' exploits have served as inspiration for Burns, Simon, and the other writers. They've even placed the 62-year-old "Little Melvin"-who is an avowed born again Christian-in the role of a deacon for the macabre, tough police drama.
Burns says that Williams isa great actor with a photographic memory. "We get a lot of guys off the street try to do this and they choke," Burns explains. "He has a calmness about him that allows him to be this character."
"LITTLE MELVIN" WILLIAMS'S REIGN OVER the city's heroin trade in the 1980s provided fertile ground for the show's writers: Stringer Bell-one of the top lieutenants to The Wire's ruthless criminal mastermind Avon Barksdale-operates a photocopying business as a front company for drug sales; one of Williams's top lieutenants, Lamont "Chin" Farmer, owned Progressive World Press on North Avenue, which was a front for the drug business. On the show, Barksdale owns a strip joint named Orlando's, which is similar to Williams's old Underground Club on Edmondson Avenue. And like Barksdale, Williams operated a very sophisticated drug ring, creating codes for pagers that seemed impossible to unravel.
Because of the ingenuity of Williams, Baltimore City detectives sought and obtained the first wiretap warrant in the country for information coming off of a pager. Burns remembers that even with the wiretap, it washard to nail down a gang as sophisticated as Williams's. "Chin [Farmerl would get a page and he'd walk a couple of blocks to the pay phone," Burns explains. "Then Melvin would get a page and walk to a phone booth. These phones would be wired up [tapped]. We'd have two machines recording it. "So Melvin says to Chin, 'How's your bank!' and Chin is saying, 'I am one mark shy of the mark,' and Melvin says, 'Meet me'--which we couldn't make heads or tails of. And then they met in Melvin's Maserati and whatever conversation they had, they had. That's how cautious they were."
A hustler at heart, Williams's initial mainstay was gambling, and his prowess earned the attention of Julius “The Lord" Salsbury, a top associate of Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky--a rarity, as strained race relations were the norm even in crime. He eventually became a godson to Salsbury, and later gained entry into the inner circles of the infamous New York based Gambino crime family.
In 1975, Williams was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for narcotics distribution-on the word of what he and Burns both agree was a corrupt informant.
"His first conviction was a setup by the government." says Burns. "It was a sham; they planted drugs on him."
"But that didn't matter until I had gone to the penitentiary." says Williams about the arrest. "So I decided that since you have made me a drug dealer, I will give you a drug dealer you will never forget."
Williams was paroled in 1979, and Baltimore would never be the same.
He became Baltimore's main supplier of heroin, a substance that plagues the city in epidemic proportions to this day. At its peak, Williams's operation employed some 200 dealers and made millions of dollars a year; he owned dozens of properties and vehicles, and his gang waged a campaign of violence and intimidation throughout the city.
Federal, state, and local authorities finally arrested Williams in 1984. He would spend the next 13 years in federal penitentiaries across America.
Williams--who says he has dedicated his life to Jesus Christ, and serving God--was paroled in 1997. He was arrested in 1999 and charged with using a handgun to beat a man on a West Baltimore street (a parole violation). Facing another 22-year sentence for this violation-which would have kept him in prison well into his 80s-he wasreleased by a judge in January 2003. Within 24 hours of his release, he was re-arrested for the 1999 parole violation by federal authorities, who felt he had been unlawfully released.
Eventually, things were settled, and Williams was set free in September 2003. Soon after that, he got a phone call from David Simon and Ed Burns. They wanted to take him to lunch at Mo’s Pasta and Seafood Factory in Little Italy and talk to him about The Wire.
"They were joking with me about my photographic memory," says Melvin. "and the suggestion was that my memory would he good for remembering scripts."
So they hired him.
WILLIAMS SITSAT A SMALL WOODEN table at a warehouse in a Baltimore city neighborhood. Outside there are several young men busily working at a flea market, selling an assortment of goods including flavored ice and radial tires.
"I respect him, unlike many police officers I've met," Williams says of Burns, speaking slowly and deliberately, never cracking a smile. "He never straddled the line. Didn't fabricate evidence. He had one agenda--to put Melvin in the penitentiary. He was as honorable and as sincere at being a cop as I was at being acriminal." Many believe that Williams's sins are unforgivable. One judge told him that no matter how many times his hand has been touched by God, he will never be anything more than acriminal.
Ed Bums doesn't agree. "In my book, if you do your time, that's it." he says about any criticism for hiring Williams.
But right now, Burns can't worry about things like that. He has more immediate issues like making sure the storyline has suspense and that the dialogue sounds right, making sure it will grab the audience. It doesn't hurt that now he has a little more help to make sure things are authentic. "Melvin is very disciplined, so it was no surprise he was a good actor," says Burns.
"Hopefully." he adds, "he's staying straight." The crew is preparing to resume filming. Williams waits patiently for his cue. He's asked about how surviving his past informs what he tells to the at-risk youth he lectures regularly. "I spent 26 I/2 years in all of [America's] worst penitentiaries-to say I survived is misleading," says Williams. "I tell young people who think they have the opportunity to live my life over that the probability of success at being a criminal is almost nonexistent, and that doom is ultimately part of the process."
There is a rush of activity as everyone takes their places. One of the directors calls out, "Set, rehearsal, eight seconds, seven, six, five, four . . . Ready everybody? And . . . action!”
And Williams begins to act.
And this is something I plucked from another forum as a member sums up the series and book.
source
I was just as pleased to find out one of my neighbours is a major fan of the Wire. She's lent me the tie-in book of The Wire and I've summarised the most interesting facts I've picked up from it for you below. She also lent me the non-fiction Homicide, which I enjoyed.
Anyway, here goes....
*Season 1 and 2 spoilers follow*
The show has been about what institutions do to the individuals who serve them or are supposed to be served by them. Whatever you believe in, whatever you commit to that's larger than you or your family, will somehow find a way to fuck you.
David Simon sees the seasons like this
1st seaon: a dry, deliberate argument against drug prohibition, a 30 years war that's among the most singular and profound failures in the nation's domesric history
2nd season: the death of work and the betrayal of the working ckass
3rd season: the possibilities and limitations of reform
4th season: education
The stories and charcaters are often stolen from real life. In particular, the S1 Wire investigtation against Barksdale really happened, and was run by Ed Burns, homicide detective, now writer and producer on the Wire (after alienating his bosses just like MacNulty, and leaving to teach in middle schools), and his partner, Harry Edgerton (the model from Det Pemberton in Homicide: Life on the Street)
. You can read more about Edgerton in David SImon's excellent non-fiction book, Homicide. It also features the real Sgt Jay Landesman (the fat guy who is man in the middle between Rawls and MacNulty). The real Landesman plays that policeman with the grey hair and moustache who's Major Colvin's deputy. The S1 case was largely based on the investigation into Little Melvin Williams (arguably the most siginficant drugs figure in Baltimore history who is now released from jail and played the deacon in Season 3) and Lamont 'Chin' Farmer (the Stringer Bell character). The original target was Louis 'Cookie' Savage, a cocaine trafficker who'd murdered a jealous girlfriend who was going to go to the police. It featured the girl killed after answering the tap at the window. The high-rises were real, and came down in 1998. The pager code was real. The wiretap was closed down prematurely when the police had to respond to the death of a narcotics detective with a string of raids. Williams got 34 years, Savage was caught on a pinpoint wall camera cutting cocaine and got 30. Farmer got a 7 year bit, as the case was closed too soon.
The characters are composites: Barksdale is mostly based on Warren Boardley, a former kid boxer, who fought a war for the high rises leaving seven dead and many wounded before he took control. All the bodies prompted a 2 year investgation by Burns, Egerton and the Feds which sent him down for 43 years. The cops let it be known that they'd gone after him because of the bodies, and for 2 years afterwards there was almost no viiolence in the drugs bazaars of the high rises. Now the high rises are down, and replaced with low-level hiding, many residents have been moved elsewhere in the city and out to the county. The real-life Bunk says the problem has just moved elsewhere.
Bubbles was real. Sadly he died of AIDS. The red hat trick was his. His information caught a total of 500 prison escapees. The actor who was playing him won his "street Oscar" when some junkie came up to him when he saw him on the street in costume and makeup, gve him his drugs and said "Here, man. You need a fix more than I do".
McNulty's audition tape had everyone cracking up: he was acting and reacting all by himself with no feed lines to the scene where he ends up cuffing D on the orange sofa. This was becasue his English girlfriend's voice sounded hilarious doing D's voice, so he had to do it alone. They threw out the orange sofa after the pilot, and had to painstakingly recreate the orange sofa it when the show was picked up.
Carcetti's political manouevring mirrors Martin O’Malley’s successful 1998 mayoral run.
The actor who plays Stringer Bell is from Hackney.
The actor who plays Frank Sobotka isn't fat, old or Polish: it's makup, acting and a fat suit. There was a real Ziggy: he liked showing off his cock and taking his duck for a drink too. The collapsed, idle grain pier was real, but it was only after shooting wrapped on S2 did life imitate art and it was zoned to be developed into condos.
The exec producer, Bob Colesberry plaed the hapless detective Ray Cole (Cole: "I got laid last night." Bunk: "Oh yeah. ?Does your asshole still hurt?", and he died unexpectedly, hence the wake for Cole.
The actor who plays Proposition Joe is a real luvvie, and a fan of musical theatre. The real Prop Joe was shot dead in a club in 1984.
David Simon wanted to use a Tom Waits song for the theme (Down in the Hole). Tom sings it in S2 ~(it's on Frank's Wild Years). In S1 it's the Blind Boys of Alabama version.He thought about using John Hammond's version of "Get Behind the Mule" for that sense of getting up in the morning and doing your job. When they were tryiong to secure Waits' permission, they sent him a bunch of tapes, and didn't hear anything for weeks. When they got hold of him, he said he didn't know how to work the VCR, but his wife will be home soon and she knows how. He approved it the next day.
And I understand that Stringer is a composite character but as far as being based on Chin, let it be known that Chin would NEVER EVER NEVER have anything to do with the cops let alone snitch on anybody in his crew or anyone else for that matter. Real stand-up cat!
source
Little Melvin on HBO's "The Wire"
Baltimore Magazine, 2004
Twenty years ago, detective Ed Burns helped put the notorious "Little Melvin" Williams in prison. So why would he hire him for The Wire? By Ericka Blount Danois
Melvin Douglas Williams waits in a small room off of the main entrance to the Bethel AME church on Druid Hill Avenue, wearing his signature all-black clothing. A black towel draped over his shoulder, yellow tinted sunglasses by his side. A picture of a crucified, brown skinned Jesus hangs on the wall to his left. In front of him are lockers tacked with BELIEVE stickers.
As camera crews, extras and cast from the third season of theHBO series The Wire mill around him, Williams sits in a red leather chair, self-possessed and indifferent to the confusion around him. Bethel AME is his church, but today, it's where he will work on his acting chops.
Moments later, Williams is sitting in a pew, facing stained glass windows, filming a scene in which he counsels a young man trying to get his life in order after being released from prison. Williams plays a deacon at this church, a man whose job it is to tend to wayward souls like the one now before him.
"You want a job, you've gotta work to get it," he says to the youngster, his voice musical, soft, connected. "We'll help you, but it will be your sweat."
Bibles rest in the shelving of the pews. The camera focuses on their covers, and the scene ends. People begin moving around and talking. In a few more minutes, they'll shoot the entire scene again. In one small corner of the room sits Ed Bums, a former Baltimore City homicide detective and now a producer on The Wire. Twenty years ago, Burns participated in the investigation and raid on "Little Melvin" Williams's property that confiscated $100,000 worth of furs, more than $27,000 in cash, and Williams’s prized $52,000 black Maserati Quattroporte.
A year later, in March 1985, The Sun's headline read "Little Melvin Sentenced." A federal judge had sent Williams to prison for 24 years on drug-related charges. The article was written by then-Sun reporter David Simon, who co-wrote The Corner with Burns, and is the creator and executive producer for The Wire. (Next to that article was one written by Rafael Alvarez, also a co-writer on the show.)
Two decades after Burns helped send Williams to jail, he's ended up giving the former drug kingpin his first acting job. It's only fair, considering that many of Williams' exploits have served as inspiration for Burns, Simon, and the other writers. They've even placed the 62-year-old "Little Melvin"-who is an avowed born again Christian-in the role of a deacon for the macabre, tough police drama.
Burns says that Williams isa great actor with a photographic memory. "We get a lot of guys off the street try to do this and they choke," Burns explains. "He has a calmness about him that allows him to be this character."
"LITTLE MELVIN" WILLIAMS'S REIGN OVER the city's heroin trade in the 1980s provided fertile ground for the show's writers: Stringer Bell-one of the top lieutenants to The Wire's ruthless criminal mastermind Avon Barksdale-operates a photocopying business as a front company for drug sales; one of Williams's top lieutenants, Lamont "Chin" Farmer, owned Progressive World Press on North Avenue, which was a front for the drug business. On the show, Barksdale owns a strip joint named Orlando's, which is similar to Williams's old Underground Club on Edmondson Avenue. And like Barksdale, Williams operated a very sophisticated drug ring, creating codes for pagers that seemed impossible to unravel.
Because of the ingenuity of Williams, Baltimore City detectives sought and obtained the first wiretap warrant in the country for information coming off of a pager. Burns remembers that even with the wiretap, it washard to nail down a gang as sophisticated as Williams's. "Chin [Farmerl would get a page and he'd walk a couple of blocks to the pay phone," Burns explains. "Then Melvin would get a page and walk to a phone booth. These phones would be wired up [tapped]. We'd have two machines recording it. "So Melvin says to Chin, 'How's your bank!' and Chin is saying, 'I am one mark shy of the mark,' and Melvin says, 'Meet me'--which we couldn't make heads or tails of. And then they met in Melvin's Maserati and whatever conversation they had, they had. That's how cautious they were."
A hustler at heart, Williams's initial mainstay was gambling, and his prowess earned the attention of Julius “The Lord" Salsbury, a top associate of Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky--a rarity, as strained race relations were the norm even in crime. He eventually became a godson to Salsbury, and later gained entry into the inner circles of the infamous New York based Gambino crime family.
In 1975, Williams was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for narcotics distribution-on the word of what he and Burns both agree was a corrupt informant.
"His first conviction was a setup by the government." says Burns. "It was a sham; they planted drugs on him."
"But that didn't matter until I had gone to the penitentiary." says Williams about the arrest. "So I decided that since you have made me a drug dealer, I will give you a drug dealer you will never forget."
Williams was paroled in 1979, and Baltimore would never be the same.
He became Baltimore's main supplier of heroin, a substance that plagues the city in epidemic proportions to this day. At its peak, Williams's operation employed some 200 dealers and made millions of dollars a year; he owned dozens of properties and vehicles, and his gang waged a campaign of violence and intimidation throughout the city.
Federal, state, and local authorities finally arrested Williams in 1984. He would spend the next 13 years in federal penitentiaries across America.
Williams--who says he has dedicated his life to Jesus Christ, and serving God--was paroled in 1997. He was arrested in 1999 and charged with using a handgun to beat a man on a West Baltimore street (a parole violation). Facing another 22-year sentence for this violation-which would have kept him in prison well into his 80s-he wasreleased by a judge in January 2003. Within 24 hours of his release, he was re-arrested for the 1999 parole violation by federal authorities, who felt he had been unlawfully released.
Eventually, things were settled, and Williams was set free in September 2003. Soon after that, he got a phone call from David Simon and Ed Burns. They wanted to take him to lunch at Mo’s Pasta and Seafood Factory in Little Italy and talk to him about The Wire.
"They were joking with me about my photographic memory," says Melvin. "and the suggestion was that my memory would he good for remembering scripts."
So they hired him.
WILLIAMS SITSAT A SMALL WOODEN table at a warehouse in a Baltimore city neighborhood. Outside there are several young men busily working at a flea market, selling an assortment of goods including flavored ice and radial tires.
"I respect him, unlike many police officers I've met," Williams says of Burns, speaking slowly and deliberately, never cracking a smile. "He never straddled the line. Didn't fabricate evidence. He had one agenda--to put Melvin in the penitentiary. He was as honorable and as sincere at being a cop as I was at being acriminal." Many believe that Williams's sins are unforgivable. One judge told him that no matter how many times his hand has been touched by God, he will never be anything more than acriminal.
Ed Bums doesn't agree. "In my book, if you do your time, that's it." he says about any criticism for hiring Williams.
But right now, Burns can't worry about things like that. He has more immediate issues like making sure the storyline has suspense and that the dialogue sounds right, making sure it will grab the audience. It doesn't hurt that now he has a little more help to make sure things are authentic. "Melvin is very disciplined, so it was no surprise he was a good actor," says Burns.
"Hopefully." he adds, "he's staying straight." The crew is preparing to resume filming. Williams waits patiently for his cue. He's asked about how surviving his past informs what he tells to the at-risk youth he lectures regularly. "I spent 26 I/2 years in all of [America's] worst penitentiaries-to say I survived is misleading," says Williams. "I tell young people who think they have the opportunity to live my life over that the probability of success at being a criminal is almost nonexistent, and that doom is ultimately part of the process."
There is a rush of activity as everyone takes their places. One of the directors calls out, "Set, rehearsal, eight seconds, seven, six, five, four . . . Ready everybody? And . . . action!”
And Williams begins to act.
And this is something I plucked from another forum as a member sums up the series and book.
source
I was just as pleased to find out one of my neighbours is a major fan of the Wire. She's lent me the tie-in book of The Wire and I've summarised the most interesting facts I've picked up from it for you below. She also lent me the non-fiction Homicide, which I enjoyed.
Anyway, here goes....
*Season 1 and 2 spoilers follow*
The show has been about what institutions do to the individuals who serve them or are supposed to be served by them. Whatever you believe in, whatever you commit to that's larger than you or your family, will somehow find a way to fuck you.
David Simon sees the seasons like this
1st seaon: a dry, deliberate argument against drug prohibition, a 30 years war that's among the most singular and profound failures in the nation's domesric history
2nd season: the death of work and the betrayal of the working ckass
3rd season: the possibilities and limitations of reform
4th season: education
The stories and charcaters are often stolen from real life. In particular, the S1 Wire investigtation against Barksdale really happened, and was run by Ed Burns, homicide detective, now writer and producer on the Wire (after alienating his bosses just like MacNulty, and leaving to teach in middle schools), and his partner, Harry Edgerton (the model from Det Pemberton in Homicide: Life on the Street)
. You can read more about Edgerton in David SImon's excellent non-fiction book, Homicide. It also features the real Sgt Jay Landesman (the fat guy who is man in the middle between Rawls and MacNulty). The real Landesman plays that policeman with the grey hair and moustache who's Major Colvin's deputy. The S1 case was largely based on the investigation into Little Melvin Williams (arguably the most siginficant drugs figure in Baltimore history who is now released from jail and played the deacon in Season 3) and Lamont 'Chin' Farmer (the Stringer Bell character). The original target was Louis 'Cookie' Savage, a cocaine trafficker who'd murdered a jealous girlfriend who was going to go to the police. It featured the girl killed after answering the tap at the window. The high-rises were real, and came down in 1998. The pager code was real. The wiretap was closed down prematurely when the police had to respond to the death of a narcotics detective with a string of raids. Williams got 34 years, Savage was caught on a pinpoint wall camera cutting cocaine and got 30. Farmer got a 7 year bit, as the case was closed too soon.
The characters are composites: Barksdale is mostly based on Warren Boardley, a former kid boxer, who fought a war for the high rises leaving seven dead and many wounded before he took control. All the bodies prompted a 2 year investgation by Burns, Egerton and the Feds which sent him down for 43 years. The cops let it be known that they'd gone after him because of the bodies, and for 2 years afterwards there was almost no viiolence in the drugs bazaars of the high rises. Now the high rises are down, and replaced with low-level hiding, many residents have been moved elsewhere in the city and out to the county. The real-life Bunk says the problem has just moved elsewhere.
Bubbles was real. Sadly he died of AIDS. The red hat trick was his. His information caught a total of 500 prison escapees. The actor who was playing him won his "street Oscar" when some junkie came up to him when he saw him on the street in costume and makeup, gve him his drugs and said "Here, man. You need a fix more than I do".
McNulty's audition tape had everyone cracking up: he was acting and reacting all by himself with no feed lines to the scene where he ends up cuffing D on the orange sofa. This was becasue his English girlfriend's voice sounded hilarious doing D's voice, so he had to do it alone. They threw out the orange sofa after the pilot, and had to painstakingly recreate the orange sofa it when the show was picked up.
Carcetti's political manouevring mirrors Martin O’Malley’s successful 1998 mayoral run.
The actor who plays Stringer Bell is from Hackney.
The actor who plays Frank Sobotka isn't fat, old or Polish: it's makup, acting and a fat suit. There was a real Ziggy: he liked showing off his cock and taking his duck for a drink too. The collapsed, idle grain pier was real, but it was only after shooting wrapped on S2 did life imitate art and it was zoned to be developed into condos.
The exec producer, Bob Colesberry plaed the hapless detective Ray Cole (Cole: "I got laid last night." Bunk: "Oh yeah. ?Does your asshole still hurt?", and he died unexpectedly, hence the wake for Cole.
The actor who plays Proposition Joe is a real luvvie, and a fan of musical theatre. The real Prop Joe was shot dead in a club in 1984.
David Simon wanted to use a Tom Waits song for the theme (Down in the Hole). Tom sings it in S2 ~(it's on Frank's Wild Years). In S1 it's the Blind Boys of Alabama version.He thought about using John Hammond's version of "Get Behind the Mule" for that sense of getting up in the morning and doing your job. When they were tryiong to secure Waits' permission, they sent him a bunch of tapes, and didn't hear anything for weeks. When they got hold of him, he said he didn't know how to work the VCR, but his wife will be home soon and she knows how. He approved it the next day.
And I understand that Stringer is a composite character but as far as being based on Chin, let it be known that Chin would NEVER EVER NEVER have anything to do with the cops let alone snitch on anybody in his crew or anyone else for that matter. Real stand-up cat!
