Still In The Game: The Wire’s Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson Arrested On Drug Charges

Felicia Pearson, the actress who played the drug assassin “Snoop” on HBO’s The Wire has been arrested on felony drug charges in Baltimore. According to authorities, she was involved in a massive heroin and marijuana trafficking operation, and was taken into custody at her apartment in downtown Baltimore.

All in the game? She’s just a gangster, I suppose.

And let’s be perfectly honest here: if you had to take bets on which Wire character would get caught up in actual drug dealing, Snoop would be the runaway favorite. The reason she was so great on The Wire was precisely because she seemed so authentic. Which makes sense, since, you know, she was convicted of murder at 14 years old, and grew up immersed in the exact same Baltimore streets dramatized on The Wire.

It’s why audiences always rooted for Snoop. You didn’t even have to know the backstory of how she got hired to know that more than anyone else on the show, The Wire was her real life.

And clearly, it still sort of is.

It reminds me of Melvin Williams, the legendary Baltimore gangster who served 16 years in prison, and then played “Deacon” on The Wire when he got out of jail. Melvin got clean after prison, but not that clean. Clearly, like Snoop, he’s still on the feds’ radar:

...in the predawn hours of March 3, 2005, agents came through the door of Williams’ Randallstown home, recovering $104,703 in cash, including $90,000 found above the ceiling tiles of his basement bathroom, and a device used to detect room bugs. Prosecutors began forfeiture proceedings, claiming the money was actually Rich’s ill-gotten gains, but dropped the case after Williams won a lawsuit in November 2006 to get the money back as “unlawfully seized property,” according to Garbis’ order. Facts about the cash seizure and forfeiture case against Williams were not reported in the press until now.

And when he was asked whether Williams was still involved in criminal activities, former Baltimore cop and Wire co-creator Ed Burns basically pleaded the fifth, but added that if he is, he’s not likely to get caught red-handed. Again from the City Paper:

“They kicked in his door,” Burns says of the 2005 warrant and cash seizure at Williams’ house. “But if Melvin Williams is talking drugs on the phone, he’s either senile or not the man I know. When he talks on the phone, it’s tough to catch him, because he’s extremely cautious. Whether or not he’s in the game, I don’t know. I have no idea what Melvin is up to--though I guess I should,” Burns adds, laughing.

It’s probably my favorite part of The Wire, in general. More often than not, whether we knew it or not, we wound up sympathizing with drug dealers and murderers. It helped audiences internalize the show’s mission, which more than anything else, was to reject the traditional good and evil narrative between cops and criminals. Real justice is more complicated, and if that seems like an obvious theme by now, it wasn’t before The Wire.

It’s not just that the show shined a light on the underbelly of urban America and the roots of its problems, but they showed us the characters that populate that underworld, and made them three-dimensional. And some, like Snoop and Melvin, were really real.

All of which is to say, this isn’t a TV show anymore and I should probably feel differently, but screw it. I’ll always have a soft spot for Snoop and the Deacon, and even if they’re at the center of real drug investigations now, I can’t help but root for ‘em.

Call it a testament to The Wire’s impact, or maybe just my flexible morals, but in a game without winners, we might as well root for our favorite players. With that in mind, here’s to hoping that Melvin stays careful on that phone, and that Felica Pearson has Levy on line one, ready to beat the system.