Last Word

Nathan "Bodie" Barksdale and Kenny Jackson tell their versions of Baltimore's street life in The Baltimore Chronicles: Legends of the Unwired

By Jeffrey Anderson | Posted 4/29/2009

In the mid-1970s and 1980s, long before fictional drug kingpin Avon Barksdale entered the mind of The Wire's David Simon, a young man named Nathan Avon "Bodie" Barksdale was honing the dark and violent art of hustling in the Lexington Terrace projects of West Baltimore. In the early 1970s, Kenneth Antonio Jackson, who these days is a Baltimore businessman and strip-club owner, was also making a name for himself in the Latrobe Homes, across town from where Bodie Barksdale grew up. The two men have seen a great deal since then--drug dealing, violence, prison--but these days they make for an amiable, drama-free duo: Jackson, 51, is a smooth, politically connected business-school graduate with impeccable clothes; Barksdale, 48, is a gregarious survivor of numerous attempts on his life.

Now, with Simon's award-winning HBO series a wrap, Barksdale and Jackson are looking to settle a different kind of score. They have teamed up on the first of what is billed as a series of docudramas called The Baltimore Chronicles: Legends of the Unwired, based on the lives of those who they feel Simon exploited as fodder for his five-season tour de force.

To explain the series and their motivation for doing it, the two men agreed to meet one day in March at Cibo Bar and Grill in Owings Mills. Seated in a booth in a room toward the rear of the restaurant, Jackson and Barksdale and others associated with the project field questions while an entourage--including a lawyer, a camera crew, and a hulking assistant of unspecified profession--looks on.

"The Wire was one long commercial for this," Barksdale says, raising his low raspy voice an octave or two. "Can I say that?" he asks, drawing laughter from Jackson and director Bruce Brown, producer of the local late-night show Keepin' It Real and producer/writer Drew Berry, an Emmy Award-winning broadcast news director and media management consultant, formerly the general manager of Channel 2 News in Baltimore.

Scheduled for release this summer, but with distribution and financing still in negotiation, Legends of the Unwired--or, as this group calls it, Unwired--is a project undertaken by real Baltimore figures who want to tell their own stories without the institutional biases they feel Simon, a former newspaper reporter, and his writing partner Ed Burns, a former Baltimore Police detective, indulged in and profited from.

If The Wire was the epitome of art imitating life, Unwired is life coming back on art with somewhat of a chip on its shoulder. "I got motivated by [The Wire] and by knowing some of the characters that was mentioned in the show," says Jackson, the executive producer, his designer glasses and cautious demeanor lending an air of diplomacy. "Bruce and Drew had access to the professionalism we needed, and I had access to the players, so I brought 'em all together, and we came up with Unwired. I just thought [Simon and Burns] were exploiting a lot of characters in [The Wire]. Even though it's not factual, it's based on true events and true characters. We tried to show it the way we saw it."

"Realism is the main thing with that show," Barksdale adds. "You've got the cops' version and you've got the reporter's version. Here's the defendant's version, and his mother's version, and his friends' version."

Actor Wood Harris, who plays hardened gangster Avon Barksdale on The Wire, appears in the first docudrama of the series, which is based on the life of Nathan Barksdale, whose middle name happens to be Avon, but who answers only to "Bodie." The digital video, shot in high definition, opens with the off-screen voices of Jackson and Brown discussing the similarities between the real and fictional characters--and the differences that fans of The Wire never see. An ominous gangsta rap rhythm plays behind a montage of Baltimore streets as deep-voiced narrator Troy May of the R&B group the Manhattans details the extreme violence of Bodie's life, which includes him being shot 21 times--once while he lay in a hospital bed after a failed murder attempt.

Harris interviews Bodie as they walk around the terrace projects featured in The Wire. Dramatized scenes of gangland executions, torture, and revenge are intended to be realistic, though there's plenty of humanity as well. "There's more to this story than just drugs and violence," says Berry, who brings two decades of television news experience to the project.

With the first docudrama in the can, the producers of Unwired are working on three others that each follow the same format: an actor from The Wire interviews a real-life gangster who resembles the fictional character played by that actor; dramatized scenes depict events in the gangster's life; interviews of family and friends offer the personal side.

"The other characters who were popular on The Wire," Barksdale says. "We got the real guys."

According to Brown and Berry, the project is targeting cable and DVD markets, though they declined to specify what arrangements are in place. They also declined to identify the subjects of the next three docudramas in the series.

To Jackson and Barksdale, the project is about more than commerce--though that's certainly part of it. "With The Wire, the way they show it, the way I feel about that is they made money off my story, off my trouble, off my pain," says Barksdale, an amputee who walks with a cane. Neither he nor Jackson were consulted or involved with The Wire. Jackson, who is vague on the subject of how he came to know Bodie back in the day, says he wanted nothing to do with Simon's HBO show. Barksdale, who was incarcerated when The Wire first broke, later had a bit part, but says he wasn't satisfied with the standard day rate he was paid.

"I wouldn't call it a good working relationship with those guys, because I didn't get enough paper," Barksdale says. "But I ain't shootin' at them either, you know what I mean?"

Barksdale's life has been so violent that a dark sense of humor is second nature to him. Raised in the Lexington Terrace projects on the 700 block of Mulberry Street in the 1970s and '80s, Barksdale saw the drug game as a necessity from an early age. "It was what you did to keep from being hungry," he says. "You lived in the projects, opportunities came, and you took 'em."

Did you use drugs? "Yeah, I used 'em to pay the rent," Barksdale jokes, then, turning serious, he recalls a traumatic childhood experience that is dramatized in Unwired. "I was a bad kid, and I stole from a guy, stole his lunch as a matter of fact. He was a blue-collar guy, and he backed his truck up over my leg. I got my leg crushed and became an amputee. So it was during my pain-management program that I got introduced to opiates."

Barksdale says he resisted the drugs at first, because they made him sleepy. Plus, he says, he was a fighter who aspired to the boxing ring, and the drugs made him slow. But he says psychiatrists have diagnosed his violent tendencies to be related to persistent pain from a variety of near-fatal encounters. "When I started medicating I didn't do violence," he recalls. "By then I had made a bunch of money."

Simon's own reporting for The Baltimore Sun in the 1980s tells a less sympathetic story for Barksdale, one that closely resembles aspects of The Wire. In 1987, Simon's five-part series titled "Easy Money: Anatomy of a Drug Empire" examined the dealings of convicted heroin kingpin Melvin Williams, one of Baltimore's most notorious crime figures. In his reportage, Simon identified Bodie Barksdale as a ruthless young killer and drug addict who controlled drug distribution in the high-rise projects in the early 1980s, and who once tortured three people in an 11th-floor apartment of the George B. Murphy Homes. Barksdale says that he never tortured anyone and that Simon's image of him was overblown. "He was trying to get me jammed up," says Barksdale, referring to Simon's series of newspaper articles. "He was tryin' to get me life."

Simon the crime reporter also identified two rivals to Barksdale as Marlow Bates and Timmirror Stanfield. In The Wire, Simon the cable-show creator developed a significant plot line involving a young up and comer named Marlo Stanfield, who wages war with Avon Barksdale's crew for control of the west-side heroin trade. Bodie Barksdale takes exception to both the real and fictional depiction of his relationship with Bates and Stanfield, who appear to form the basis for the composite character Marlo Stanfield. "Marlow Bates is one of my closest friends," Barksdale says. "His family and mine are intertwined."

Barksdale has other issues with Simon and his writing partner Ed Burns, mostly in the way The Wire depicts the Baltimore Police Department. One scene in Unwired shows Barksdale describing police he knew as stick-up men, extortionists, and hit men. The Wire, he contends, treads too lightly on the police by avoiding any suggestion that they engaged in criminal activity--an unfortunate but documented fact of life in many cities, Baltimore included. "You gotta look who wrote it," Barksdale says of The Wire. "One guy who wrote it is a cop."

Barksdale's criminal bona fides cannot be disputed. Though many of his numerous criminal charges occurred when he was a juvenile, Barksdale's most notable conviction, according to The Sun series, occurred in 1985, when he was sentenced to 15 years in state prison for battery in connection with the torture incident. More recently, in 2003, he was acquitted in federal court of being a felon with a gun. But his appearance in Unwired suggests there's more to his story that cannot be told. "There's no statute of limitations on murder," he says to Harris, cutting off talk of his past.

To round out the portrait of Barksdale, Unwired features interviews with his mother, Emma Barksdale Grier, who describes her struggle to raise five boys in the projects. There are other moments that seek to add dimension to Barksdale's life. As with the Avon Barksdale character in The Wire, boxing runs deep in the real Barksdale family; ex-heavyweight contender Larry Middleton makes an appearance in Unwired and sizes up Bodie's boxing ability as a youngster.

Today, Barksdale says he tries to mentor young people, using his street credibility to open the door to their minds. "I try to keep some of them from traveling the same path I've traveled," he says, noting that he works informally with his nephew, Dante Barksdale, of Operation Safe Streets, to head off retaliatory violence in the streets.

"When I show up, it keeps some stuff from happening," he says. Barksdale also says he looks up to black business icon Reginald Lewis, and would like to see more business development in the black community. Yet he offers few details, aside from his family's interest in a West Baltimore apartment building, to illustrate his own role as a businessman.

Development of Unwired began last July, says Brown, who also makes a cameo as the judge who sentenced Barksdale to 15 years. Like Berry, who brings a newsman's eye to the docudrama, Brown was hired for his television experience. He is quick to defend the project's attention to detail. "This was not off the cuff," he says. The producers "reviewed newspaper articles and court documents. They did interviews with different characters in Bodie's life. It wasn't all gangster stuff. We show the good and the bad. Either you're gonna love him or you're gonna hate him."

While the first installment of Unwired features Bodie Barksdale, the force behind the "Baltimore Chronicles" part of the title is Kenny Jackson, an equally legendary figure with an outlaw past that he says he left behind many years ago. As executive producer/director, Jackson says he traveled extensively to develop the project, conducting interviews inside prisons with some of Baltimore's most notorious criminals. "I got integrity in certain groups," he says.

But whereas Barksdale's past is on display in Unwired, Jackson, a behind-the-scenes player whose life is not explored in the docudrama, is more circumspect. "I'm not looking to run from my past," he says, during a telephone interview in April. "But I'm not looking to dwell on it either."

Press materials for Unwired identify Jackson as "an entrepreneur, honors business graduate and community activist dedicated to helping ex-offenders." He holds a 2007 business degree from American InterContinental University in Atlanta. He is best known as the proprietor of the Eldorado Lounge in East Baltimore, a strip club, though he has owned sports stores, a restaurant, and "major real estate holdings," according to the press kit. In the 1990s, he received public service awards and was active in a political-action committee called A Piece of J.U.I.C.E., which advocated for voting rights for ex-offenders.

Born in 1957, Jackson came up in East Baltimore's Latrobe Homes. Like Barksdale, he found trouble early in life. In 1974, at the age of 16, he was acquitted of murder charges. He took an Alford plea in 1977 on manslaughter charges, meaning he maintained his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence, and received a suspended sentence. By 1984, Jackson had faced dozens of criminal charges related to drugs and guns. "Tells you someone didn't like me," he says of his early charges. A federal gun charge landed him a two-year prison sentence in the mid-1980s.

Jackson also showed an early knack for business. By age 27, he owned a 24-hour mini-market on West Belvedere Avenue, a shoe store, a produce and carry-out stand at Lafayette Market, and ran his family's business, Kenneth A. Jackson Enterprises. He also owned rental properties in West Baltimore.

At the same time, court records, police affidavits, and Simon's reporting from the 1980s depict Jackson as a major player in the world of drug trafficking and money-laundering. Jackson declines to talk in detail about what he acknowledges is his "serious outlaw status in the past," however. And he takes exception to two depictions of him that he says are false.

One is the contention by police, contained in federal court records, that he headed a "ruthless" large-scale heroin distribution organization. The other is the contention in Simon's 1987 Baltimore Sun series--which is based on court records, law enforcement documents, and interviews with detectives--that Jackson was once a trusted lieutenant of Melvin Williams. "That's absolutely not true," Jackson says of the alleged Williams connection. "That story has been running since the 1980s and there's nothing to prove it. I had no dealings with [Williams]. We're from different sides of the city."

Jackson's scrapes with the law continued into the 1990s, when he was acquitted of murder charges in New York City in 1991. Federal tax-evasion charges against him were dismissed in 1994. If nothing else, Jackson has shown more often than not that police theories about him could not be proven. "Reputation and fact are two separate things," he says.

When pressed for an explanation of his stature in the criminal world that affords him such insight into the stories of Barksdale and others, Jackson waxes philosophical. "Bodie and I were from two separate sides of town, but the same type of place," he says. "You have a hunger to succeed and a hunger to grow. I made a lot of bad choices, but I made some good ones. And then one day I decided I wanted to live a different life. I've been fortunate to live two lives, really. Now I'm hoping to live a third, if this series takes off, which I hope it does."

One obvious intersection between Jackson's real life and The Wire is impossible to overlook, Jackson concedes. And one character in particular could be perceived as resembling aspects of his life, he says, noting a distinction not depicted in the HBO show.

In 2000, after a news story broke in The Sun, then-City Council President Sheila Dixon was criticized for supporting a city purchase of property where the Jackson family strip club once was located, on Baltimore Street. Jackson was a political contributor to Dixon, among other politicians. In season five of The Wire, which involves a fictional Baltimore Sun newsroom as a vehicle for Simon's take on the demise of modern journalism, a similar event occurs. The scene depicts an editor referring to the strip-club proprietor in question, a man nicknamed Fat Face Rick, as a "drug dealer." The scene further shows the fictional council president slamming her hand on her car steering wheel as she reads the story in the paper.

"I wasn't consulted on that," Jackson says. "I don't think that they should have did it. I didn't think that situation should have been put in The Wire. But they did it. So this is our way of being able to do exactly what they did. Today, you got the internet, videos, DVDs. You can get your side of the story out any time."

Jackson says that fans of The Wire are the target audience for Unwired, "and probably some additional people that are interested in my story and [Bodie's] story, and Baltimore."

Though none of Kenny Jackson's actual biography is in Unwired, given David Simon's journalistic fascination with Bodie Barksdale and other figures who resemble characters in The Wire, fans of the show might wonder if Jackson is the inspiration for a particular character (aside from the Fat Face Rick vignette, obviously plucked from the headlines).

Jackson doesn't deny the possibility. He acknowledges that his business acumen and his recent business degree from AIU lead to comparisons between him and fictional character Stringer Bell, the financially and politically enterprising partner of Avon Barksdale. In fact, season three of The Wire even shows the drug kingpin Bell taking business classes at a local community college while Det. Jimmy McNulty spies on him. Jackson recalls that police made their presence known to him years ago when he was taking classes at Baltimore City Community College.

But a key distinction between him and Bell exists. "In my life, I can see a transition from one lifestyle to another," Jackson says. "But that doesn't sell." (In Unwired, Bodie Barksdale talks of another man who he thinks is the real life version of Stringer Bell, and claims he was not a friend at all. Barksdale does acknowledge, however, that there is a little Kenny Jackson in Stringer Bell after all.)

Reached via e-mail while on location in Europe, David Simon rejects any notion that Bodie Barksdale or Kenny Jackson or anyone for that matter is a model for any character in The Wire. "It seems that Mr. Jackson and Mr. Barksdale feel it was our obligation to tell an empirical truth about the history of the drug trade in Baltimore, or at least their version of that truth and further, to consult them about their version of that truth," Simon writes. "Given that The Wire is fictional, we are at a loss to respond intelligently. Specifically, Nathan Barksdale and Kenny Jackson do not exist in the world of The Wire. And indeed, if we are writing fiction, aren't we trying at points to avoid empirical truth entirely?"

Jackson only half buys it. "How does he explain real life characters, names, events, and locations inside a fictional story?" Jackson says of Simon, conceding that the resemblance between fictional characters and real life figures boils down in some instances to as many as four real people serving as the basis for one composite character. In the case of former Baltimore homicide detective Oscar "Bunk" Requere, the resemblance to The Wire's "Bunk" Moreland seems more direct: both are heavyset, well-dressed detectives who like cigars and fine scotch. "It was brilliant," Jackson says, offering Simon a tip of the hat. "He was so crafty the way he did it. He was able to move all the characters around and tell one story."

Of course, Jackson also sees signs of Simon's storytelling brilliance in his news reporting from two decades ago. He just doesn't agree with much of it. Listening to a passage read to him from a 1987 story in The Baltimore Sun, in which Simon describes a friend of Jackson's as a longstanding member of the "west-side narcotics fraternity," Jackson laughs and says, "He does have a way with words, doesn't he?"

Arts Editor Bret McCabe notes: Approximately one week following the publication of "Last Word," the April 29 feature story about Nathan "Bodie" Barksdale and Kenny Jackson's docudrama project, The Baltimore Chronicles: Legends of the Unwired, former Sun reporter/The Wire creator David Simon contacted City Paper to contest one aspect of the story. In the first paragraph, Barksdale is introduced as "Nathan Avon 'Bodie' Barksdale"--how he and his mother refer to him in the Unwired footage.

Simon consulted his own reporting files on Barksdale, and discovered that in all his police documents, arrest records, and court papers Barksdale is referred to only as "Nathan Barksdale"; in some cases the documents even include the abbreviation "NMN"--"no middle name."

He's correct: In none of the court and legal documents City Paper used in the fact-checking of this article does "Avon" appear as Barksdale's middle name. Furthermore, as the assigning story editor, I never challenged the name that Barksdale used in Unwired.

The inconsistency matters: Since the publication of the City Paper story, Barksdale appeared on the cover of a summer issue of Don Diva magazine (issue 38) as "Nathan Avon Barksdale," Unwired was named "Best Docudrama" at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival program in Los Angles in July, and it was picked up for a March 2010 DVD release re-titled The Avon Barksdale Story: Legends of the Unwired.

City Paper got back in touch with Barksdale through his lawyer to request verification of his middle name, documentation which we have permitted them more than ample time to produce and which has yet to materialize.

As such, City Paper is unable to verify that Barksdale's legal given middle name is "Avon