(ThatKidInTheCorner :: Through The Wire)

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January 19, 2005

Through The Wire

It seemed realistic, but not that realistic

Among the many charms of HBO's The Wire (now on hiatus -- BOOOO!) is the detailed realism offered in its portrait of the big-city drug trade. Beyond focusing on the power struggles among the rival drug gangs or the drug dealers' relationships with their community (both legitimate and criminal), The Wire offers a view into the quotidian mechanics of selling drugs in Big City America. Viewers are shown the drug-dealing supply chain starting from the sourcing of The Package through the intermediate distributors all the way down to the street-level retail trade, complete with the local managers, their muscle, and their middle-school runners. Though the details serve mainly as a backdrop for the dramatic action, they're nonetheless a fascinating, if not essential, element of the show.

Much of the detail apparently comes from creator David Simon, whose prior life (before he became an HBO "Series Creator" artiste) included a book chronicling the West Baltimore drug trade called The Corner. This we knew (though we haven't yet read the book). What we didn't expect was just how dead-on some of the details actually are -- and how much influence the show has on the folks it's allegedly portraying.

Did Carmelo Anthony play on Avon's team against Prop Joe's crew?: there was something of an argy-bargy a few months back when an underground DVD featuring NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony surfaced in West Baltimore. The scandal was that the DVD was something of an extended warning from a drug kingpin regarding his disapproval of snitches. Hmmmm. Carmelo apparently was featured rather innocently, but it certainly doesn't flatter him to show up in some drug dealer's instructional video for beating down police informants. Perhaps the most interesting part of the story, beyond the West Baltimore connections with Carmelo, were the names of some of the folks involved:

In August 2003, a federal grand jury indicted Stewart and 31
co-defendants for their alleged involvement in the drug trafficking
enterprise. Agents also seized more than $90,000, handguns and four
luxury vehicles -- including Stewart's $100,000 Mercedes-Benz CL.

"It was a huge case," said Anthony Barksdale, acting chief of the
city's organized crime division, who spearheaded Operation Arizona.

That's right -- Anthony Barksdale, same as The Wire's first family of drug distribution. Pretty nifty.

Errr, I think this has something to do with the difference between "descriptive" and "normative": as a viewer, I always assumed that all the details on the drug trade offered by the show were nuggets taken from real-life observations. More than that, given the time it takes to get a script to the screen, even for a TV show, I assumed that all of the techniques and methods employed in the show were old news by the time I watched on a given Sunday night. Ummm, not exactly. Check out the details in this little nugget that dropped on Monday:

While announcing a crackdown on Friday of a cocaine ring, police said their investigation was hampered by the suspects' habit of switching cell phones — a technique for evading electronic eavesdropping they picked up from TV.

"Believe it or not, these guys copied 'The Wire,'" one of the investigators, Sgt. Felipe Rodriguez, said at a news conference. "They were constantly dumping their phones. It made our job so much harder."

Yikes! You're telling me that the show was actually helping the drug dealers avoid the cops? Those guys need to get Freamon on the job, no? And in case there was any doubt where they got the idea to dump their burners (dump their burners!), it turns out that the drug dealers were steady viewers:

While doing business by cell phone, the suspects often spoke to each other about "The Wire" after it aired on Sunday nights, Rodriguez said. Some of the officers listening to them also were fans.

"If we missed anything, we got it from them Monday morning," the sergeant said of the television show.

Could that be any more postmodern? The cops who use a wiretap to catch criminals are featured in a television program about cops who use a wiretap to catch criminals are able to glean information about said television program in the process of using a wiretap to catch criminals. Deconstruct that!

Posted by thatkid at January 19, 2005 4:37 PM under Stuff To Buy

January 19, 2005

Through The Wire

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