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AN ARGUMENT OF DISSENT
Who the fuck is this guy? Ed Burns thought after David Simon introduced himself in the winter of 1984. The moment would mark the beginning of a collaboration neither could have foreseen, one that would mature into a groundbreaking book and culminate in a revolutionary television show. But first impressions? Burns joked – well, partly anyway – that he hoped to arrest Simon. Somehow, Simon had finagled his way beyond security and into the Drug Enforcement Administration offices as Burns readied material for a grand jury preparing to bring an indictment against Melvin ‘Little’ Williams, a disciplined drug trafficker who had successfully flummoxed Baltimore law enforcement for years. Simon told Burns that he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and had permission to follow the case. Burns and his partner, Harry Edgerton, both Baltimore police detectives, had finally pinned the elusive Williams through the use of a wiretap. Simon expressed interest in being able to listen in on the wire. ‘I’d love to take you in there, but if I do, that’s a ten-year offense and I’d love to lock you up,’ Burns said. He stiff-armed Simon’s request, but agreed to meet with him later to discuss the case.
Who the fuck is this guy? David Simon thought after meeting Burns a second time. Not much time had passed when they greeted one another at the Baltimore County Public Library branch in Towson. Simon had already surmised that Burns did not behave like any typical detective he had come across. He now eyeballed the book titles Burns prepared to check out, Bob Woodward’s Veil: Secret Wars of the CIA and The Magus, by John Fowles, among them. ‘I read all the time, and it impressed him,’ Burns recalled. ‘I don’t think David reads anywhere near as much as I do, but a cop reads? My God. I know a lot of cops who read. It was no big deal, but David was a good guy and he had a passion.’
That passion unfurled into the canvassing five-part series that Simon wrote on the making and inner workings of Williams as a Baltimore drug trafficker kingpin. For Simon, his life’s purpose had been achieved by working at a newspaper. His father, Bernard, had once been a journalist who devoted the bulk of his working days as a public relations director for B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world. His mother, Dorothy, spent time working for an organization that aided students from underachieving public schools to find better education. Simon attended the University of Maryland, where he wrote for the student newspaper, The Diamondback. He joined the Sun after graduating, reporting on crime. To him, being a newspaperman and bringing accountability to influencers meant something. ‘I grew up in a house where we argued politics,’ Simon recounted. ‘We argued sociology. We argued culture. We argued. It was not personal. Arguing was how you got attention in my family.’ One of Simon’s enduring memories is debating politics with his two uncles as a boy, the moment climaxing with him flatly telling his uncle Hank that he was in the wrong. ‘Who knew he had a brain?’ Uncle Hank retorted.
Reading Simon’s 1987 Sun series, entitled ‘“Easy Money”: Anatomy of a Drug Empire,’ is akin to viewing the organs of The Wire’s first-season wiretap investigation. Williams was a self-made entrepreneur who imported the bulk of Baltimore’s heroin influx as the city’s honest economic opportunities shifted and dwindled. ‘An imperious, intelligent man who chooses words with care,’ Simon wrote. ‘Melvin Williams refuses to be stereotyped. Street sales of narcotics were routinely punctuated by murderous violence, but Williams was a family man, devoted to an eleven-year marriage and two young daughters.’
Williams conducted most of his business through his number two, a consigliere named Lamont ‘Chin’ Farmer. Farmer orchestrated both a simple and intricate communication system involving the use of beepers. He also headed a print shop and took business courses at a community college, à la Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell.
Simon’s series meticulously captured Williams’s life and downfall – not only as a drug kingpin, but also as a respected figure in the community, where, as Simon wrote, ‘he was hailed as Little Melvin, the Citizen, speaking at the request of National Guard officials during the 1968 riots, urging a restless crowd to go home.’ Burns appreciated that Simon showed all facets of the case and offered a depiction of Williams that was beyond a caricature. ‘When the case came down, he wrote a very good article because he went out and saw some of the gangsters and it was a most balanced article,’ Burns said. ‘I liked that.’
Simon spent Christmas Eve 1986 on an overnight shift with the Baltimore Police Department ...
