The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  A lieutenant of Meyer Lansky, Salsbury controlled the layoff for Baltimore’s lucrative illegal lottery before jumping bail and disappearing in 1970, never to be seen again.

  “You can’t come in as a guy from West Baltimore and have any better break than to have Salsbury say, ‘Respect this man,’” observed Burns.

  A math prodigy specializing in games of chance, Melvin impressed Salsbury instantly, having cost the older man dearly with those successive lottery hits. In his first stretch in prison, where Williams earned his high school equivalency, he was accused of cheating because he’d scored so high on math tests.

  “So [the teacher] made up another test right in front of me, and as fast as he would put up the problems. I would do them,” recalled Williams. “He said, ‘When did you learn that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘How did you learn that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  To hear law enforcement authorities tell the tale, by the mid-1960s when the Avenue had changed and heroin had become the dominant criminal enterprise, Williams turned from gambler to drug trafficker and became one of the most successful in the city’s history.

  Williams says he did not get involved with narcotics until he was framed by federal drug agents and Baltimore narcotics detectives, who utilized the testimony of a corrupt informant and planted a small amount of heroin on Williams when he was arrested.

  In his 1987 series of articles, Simon interviewed a former federal agent – long since fired from the job – who acknowledged that the probable cause to arrest Williams was manufactured and the drugs were likely planted by a Baltimore sergeant who later killed himself while under investigation for perjury.

  This agent, as well as others, argues that the frame-up was motivated by the fact that Williams was a large-scale trafficker who could not be caught fair-and-square.

  Williams returned to the streets in the early 1970s, built a larger and more insulated drug ring, but was again felled by a federal investigation and served another four years. Again he came home, this time caught up in Ed Burns’s protracted wiretap probe of several interconnected West Baltimore drug crews.

  Acknowledging that he had “not been a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination,” Williams is pleased to have retired from a game that buries most of its players before they hit thirty.

  Williams also nurtured and cherished a home life and the middle-class agenda that goes with it, including college for his kids.

  “It’s not easy buying your daughter’s automobiles from the visiting room [of prison], even though you’ve got more than enough money,” he said. “So you say to yourself, ‘When did I not have enough money? Why did I continue to be involved when I long ago had too much money?’”

  Because it’s not about money.

  “Calling the shots,” Williams conceded, reflecting on his legendary status in the East Coast drug trade. “It’s addictive, calling the shots.”

  Williams never drank or used drugs. He does not eat meat and has long maintained a personal discipline that made pursuing him a nightmare for investigators, who knew they would never catch him flashing money or openly associating or communicating with other suspects, much less ever being in the room with product.

  “He’s a very, very intelligent guy who knows how to listen, how to read between the lines and size people up,” said Burns. “He was a nine-to-five drug dealer who never went out after dark, whose daughter went to college.”

  DAVID SIMON: The drug game has grown beyond the small, back-alley game that you might have known in the 1950s. Now, it’s almost part of the pop culture. What are the people trying to play it now not seeing?

  MELVIN WILLIAMS: That nobody got away. They’re not seeing that at a time when I spent 26½ years in [some] of the world’s worst penitentiaries, there was still a parole board and I only did one-third of every sentence I ever had.

  But in 1987, the United States removed parole from off the planet. Now, the standard sentence they give young people for drug involvement is 30 to life, usually life.

  These kids have been [deluded]. But there’s so many of them on so many street corners that the big boys [federal agents] don’t have a chance to go after all of them, as they did back in our day. The only thing they have going for them is numbers. As each one grows to be a shark, they’re going to cut his head off.

  And when one of them slips out of the Mickey Mouse drug-dealer [phase of the game] and buys the automobile that says “I have arrived,” he identifies himself to the big boys. And the big boys are the big boys just because they are the big boys. They don’t play and they don’t miss and they’re going after kids that study no law, know nothing about protecting themselves or their family, and the end result is so [inevitable] that you could make book on it.

  DS: Ed, what do you think the players miss when they’re in the game?

  ED BURNS: I think it’s a question of culture, this is all they have. You know what the scariest place in Baltimore is today? The middle schools. Go in there and see how damaged these kids are at the age of 11, 12, 13.

  [But] when Melvin started, I’m sure he came in on a level several steps removed from the street. The kids starting out today start on the street.

  The gangs in Baltimore are neighborhood gangs, and the clever kids use their little group as a vehicle [to work the game].

  They’re always going to have muscle around them and they’re going to play the other kids, but they’re hoping to get off the street, because you get killed out there. There’s only very few people that have that intellectual capacity, that distance that allows them to marginally go up the ranks.

  In West Baltimore, you might have 20,000 kids trying out, you might have five “winners,” and by “winners” we mean people who move up the line. The difference between [Melvin’s] generation and today is that before it was semi-controlled. Murders meant something. Now it’s just your shoes are wrong, bang, you’re dead.

  Before cocaine came and changed everything, there was a certain amount of charm to it. I locked up a guy one time on an escape [warrant]. His name was Peacock, and when we rode downtown and got on the elevator, he says, “Maybe you can do me a favor?”

  “Anything you want,” I said, and he goes, “Can you take this out of my back?”

  I reached around and he had a.45 in his back and I said, “Tell you what. We’ll write this up as found property,” and he said, “Thank you.”

  I was going to take him up to the office, take the handcuffs off him, and get him a coffee. If he was another type of guy, he would have pulled out the.45, blown us all away, and walked out of the goddamn building at two o’clock in the morning.

  It’s all ugly now, and ugly is not where you want to be.

  DS: You remember Peacock?

  MW: Of course.

  DS: I don’t think I ever met anybody from any side of the tracks that had as much personal discipline as you, Melvin. Where did it come from?

  MW: I grew up in a martial arts environment and all of it was designed so that you defend yourself. It didn’t have anything to do with attack. The discipline of doing push-ups on your knuckles and running after everybody else stopped – when your guts are falling out and you say, “I’m going to run for three more miles” – that’s part of where the discipline came from. I started when I was around 15.

  DS: Ed, what did the name Melvin Williams mean to you when you heard it the first time?

  EB: Melvin is unique unto himself as far as his stature in the Baltimore drug world. There were other guys that got big, but they never really left the street. Melvin was the top of the pinnacle. He was the guy you would go for.

  The drug game didn’t interest me so much as the challenge [of the pursuit]. In any occupation, if you work with a second person, there’s got to be communication. A prosecutor once told me, “Youbuildamousetrap. Every day you build a mousetrap because it’s only got to work one time. That mouse can beat you 364 days of the year, but the one time it works, it’s over
.”

  So it became about building a better mousetrap and getting the department to give you the time to do it. Not all of my wars were fought on the street. A lot of my wars were fought inside the building, saying, “This guy over here is dangerous, truly dangerous people. Just let me have the time this time to get him,” and they’d resist.

  Once a police officer aspires to rank – you would think that stopping crime would be the number one priority – crime is so far down the list you can’t find it.

  DS: Is there a way to play the game where you’re not vulnerable to enforcement?

  MW: There are people that have sold boatloads of narcotics for the last 40 or 50 years. People who transfer narcotics in boats at ports where nobody’s watching. That’s what they do. And by the time it winds up in the city, it’s been broken down eight million times.

  The kind of credibility that you have to have to communicate with those kinds of organizations has to come from the kind of past that a Melvin would have. The kids [hustling] today are disenfranchised. They can never come from the street to be anything more than what is considered trivial in New York but is special here.

  Tonight, tomorrow, and all the rest of your life, somebody is going to sell poppy illegitimately for a tremendous amount of money. Just like the New York Stock Exchange.

  Once, someone called me way back when and said, “I want you to go to [New York], just be present and take a little money with you.” I go, and I’m the only guy there who looked like me.

  Everybody has on Turkish mohair suits, top-of-the-line, $3,000 or $4,000 suits. The alligators match perfectly – burgundy with burgundy, blue with blue, black with black. The ties were the very best of silk. You’re at the top of your game.

  One guy reaches [for something], another guy brings him a vial, he puts something into the vial and shakes it and it turns blue-black, and it’s evident this is heroin.

  The man says: “I got 3,842 kilograms of that, Melvin, and you’re first because you’re the newest guy here. I’m selling these for $75,000 a kilogram – China White – you cut it 40 times and it gets stronger.”

  I reach into my briefcase and I bring out $225,000 and he takes it and balls it back up and sticks it back in my case. He says, “I don’t want to offend you because I understand you’re a martial artist,” and everybody laughs.

  He says, “You have not understood the gravity of your being here. You have been accepted. Tell me the amount of these that you want, and two streets that cross any place on the planet, and in 24 hours I’ll make it happen.”

  I told him, “I’ll take 40,’ and I gave him two streets in East Baltimore, and within 24 hours he did just what he said. He said, ‘If the material is in a vehicle, the vehicle is yours. If it’s in a U-Haul, take it out to the airport and turn it in.” And the rest is history. You become a millionaire overnight. You don’t have a choice.

  I remember going into Julius Salsbury’s office one evening, and he and three other men were sitting around talking about people that died 20 years ago, billions of dollars, people that would die 20 minutes from now, billions of dollars.

  Two of those persons were present at the Appalachian mountain meeting when they [organized crime bosses] divided the country up. I walked in, and nobody ever looked around to see who this black guy was that had just sat down or changed his thoughts.

  [Salsbury] had told them, “There’s a black kid that’s going to come in here that I love. Don’t offend me, or him, by breaking conversation or stopping whatever the nature of this conversation is all about.”

  I have never been more proud in my life.

  DS: But now, to work your way up that pyramid from the bottom?

  MW: Can’t happen. [The new guy of today] is never going to be accepted. The door is closed.

  DS: No one on the planet can say that Melvin Williams had a conversation with law enforcement that was about anything beyond the weather. There were people who broke that code, much to your detriment. How much of the code is still intact?

  MW: When I got into a federal penitentiary, somebody at the top of each of the [crime] families, at some point when I first come through the door, would kiss me in the proximity of everybody so that everybody can see, “We don’t want this guy to have a problem.”

  There’s just so little of that going on that that’s what [an up-and-coming drug trafficker] aspires to. That’s carte blanche in jail and they wouldn’t trade that for nothing.

  DS: What do you miss the most?

  MW: In the game? I don’t miss it.

  DS: There’s got to be something.

  MW: The only reason I became involved in the drug game was I had a group around me, and the group didn’t have the same kind of gambling, thinking, and charisma that I had, so I had to find something where everybody could earn that kind of money without really being that kind of person. And drugs was the only thing at the time.

  DS: Was there nothing about it that had its charm?

  MW: It was a headache. Every day you gotta worry about Joe making a mistake. You know you weren’t going to make any, but Joe has gotten more money now than he’s ever dreamed of in life, and [women], and everybody that’s wise is always after him, so you’ve got to watch him all day, protect him all day long from his whores and his fantasies. Every day you’ve got to ride around and see who’s trying to throw a curveball at him. That’s a headache.

  DS: Who do you miss, Melvin?

  MW: When I was away, the old man that first taught me everything that I know about gambling passed away – Cherry Reds Franklin.

  We met because I had devised a way to shoot the dice; it’s called the turn down. I had found a way to shoot the turn down on every surface, including smooth concrete … to determine at least a high percentage of making my number.

  I went around to see him the next day and I went around every day after that until I became an adult and went to the penitentiary. I missed that I wasn’t there when that old guy died. He was a very light-skinned old man considered to be a grumpy old guy to everybody he had ever met.

  He never worked a day in his life and sent all of his children to college. I was the only dark-skinned person that anybody had seen him with. And he used to call me his baby. He must have passed away sometime around 1970.

  He told me, “Melvin, never place a bet – no matter how much better you are than your opponent – on something that you can’t replace.” I’ll never forget that. He also asked me if I planned to have a lot of money and fame [and power], and I said, “Absolutely,” and he said,” Then you’re planning in reverse.”

  He gave me a week to figure that out, and after that week I said, “I don’t know the answer.”

  So he told me, “Anytime you plan to have a blow job, a lottery hit, a windfall of astronomical dimension, you’re gonna like that. And you don’t never have to plan for something that you like because you’ll be delighted.

  “Plan [instead] to be going in the house in the middle of the night with your hands full of shopping bags and the stickup mob turn the corner. Plan to be sitting at the table, counting the amounts of different kinds of substances that will turn into millions of dollars and the door come off the hinge.

  “Always plan for something that you don’t like so you can stop it.”

  I never forgot that.

  DS: Ed, who do you miss?

  EB: I miss Bubbles. He was my informant and he was an amazing guy. When I left, I turned Bubbles over to guys who didn’t respect him. They didn’t like him because Bubbles made them work.

  Bubbles would call and say, “There’s an escapee out here,” and they’d go, “Hey, it’s lunchtime.” I’d have to go out to Bubbles and take money out of my pocket because they’d been cheating him.

  DS: Aside from the 26 years of lost time, are there other regrets?

  MW: The way the script was written, that’s just the way it is. That’s a long time to be removed from your family, but I’ve had some days in the penitentiary that were so de
lightful, I wouldn’t replace them with nothing. Sometimes the gates were opened and I was told, “See you,” but there ain’t nowhere that I could go.

  I’ve had some dinners and some meals prepared by people from other parts of the world that own restaurants and villas, people I am certain have never been in the presence of an African-American before, who said, “Melvin’s on a late detail and we’re not going to eat one shred of this stuff until he gets here.”

  I consider that priceless. People who have conversations that can go from billions of dollars to murder and never worry that I might repeat it. That’s the top of the line for me. I wouldn’t substitute that for anything.

  DS: There’s been an American prohibition on drugs going back for most of the last century and increasing in its fervor. What do you think about that, what you’ve seen it do to the city?

  MW: I see the country for what it is. This is a part of the world where they say, “Give us our piece and we basically don’t care what you do.” We have a lifestyle and grandkids that need to ride horses in fields that go as far as the eye can see. I need to have money that’s going to be regular and often. That [culture] governs and determines things. The changes in the community, as ugly as it appears to be, are something that nobody has been able to overcome.

  A junkie in England can go and get his shot for a dollar. Who the hell can compete with that? You want to stop drugs? Sell it legitimately.

  Make a package that has the same amount every time, rather than let somebody that has no intellectual or chemical experience make something up in a bowl in his kitchen, and when he runs out of [thinners], he reaches up in his cabinet because he needs another hundred pills and dumps something white down in it.