Melvin Williams, who played The Deacon on The Wire, is dead. Earlier in his life, Mr Williams played a major role in the Baltimore drug trade, experiences that served as partial inspiration for David Simon’s series.
Mr Williams was serving a prison sentence for a firearms conviction as recently as 2003, as the show that was to make him famous was already wrapping up its first season.
Mr Simon, who worked as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun in the eighties and nineties, wrote about Mr Williams’s exploits in several of his articles.