The Wire: Season One (2002)
Follow the Drugs Shifts to Follow the Money
The Wire, the acclaimed five-season HBO series, starts off Season One with police officers in the City of Baltimore trying to solve murders by drug gangs in the inner-city projects. Each successive season shifts the primary storyline to other parts of life, such as the unemployment in the local dockyards, a failing education system, corruption in political campaigns, and finally, the printed press, however, the underlying theme across all seasons is the drug game.
In Season One, after several episodes of the police trying to identify the drug kingpin, Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) of the Towers and Low Rises, the two main distribution areas in the projects, a team of detectives is assembled to figure out who is responsible for the murders, but also who is the drug kingpin. The ‘wire’ is because the police obtain a warrant and install a wiretap on the pay phones used by the drug dealers in the Low Rises. The net result is they slowly start to identify the key players of Barksdale’s network through surveillance techniques.
However, one detective, Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), seeks to follow the paper trail by using publicly available records to determine what, if anything, Barksdale owns, i.e. the integration of his narcotics proceeds. Integration is the third stage of the three stages of money laundering, which is where the illicit funds are used in everyday life and the original source of funds has been obfuscated. In providing instructions to two other officers, Freamon believes Barskdale is using front companies, such as a night club named Orlando’s, which he considers a limited liability company or LLC, to launder the funds.
Typically, this is performed by commingling the cash proceeds of the narcotics sales on the street with the regular or irregular sales of a cash intensive-business such as a night club. Orlando’s is owned by the bartender with the same namesake, however, in reviewing public records, the address on the ownership documents matched the address of D&B Enterprises – the ‘D’ is for D’Angelo, Barksdale’s nephew, and the ‘B’ is for Barksdale. From there, Freamon instructs another officer to review the corporate records of D&B Enterprises that will identify any names or signatures in those documents just like a scavenger hunt.
When Freamon is questioned by his colleague as to what happens if they can’t find Barksdale’s name on anything, Freamon states that someone’s name must be on a piece of paper, typically a friend, cousin, girlfriend, confident, lieutenant, etc., i.e. someone he can trust. He clarifies ‘if you follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers, if you follow the money, you have no idea where the F*!% it’s gonna take you.’
To wit, Freamon and the team follow the money, but they also follow one of Barksdale’s lieutenants, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), to university where he is attending a business class. From there, Bell tries to legitimize himself and Barksdale’s drug proceeds into a real estate venture and by seeking influence with a slick local politician, Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), to make it rain.
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