Omar Little

• 1. Introduction

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  Omar Little, the stick-up man at the center of HBO's The Wire, announced himself with a whistled tune. When he stalked a target, he whistled "A-Hunting We Will Go", a melody also known as "The Farmer in the Dell". Anyone on a Baltimore corner who heard it, or spotted him approaching, ran. Word traveled faster than he did, passed along with a shout of "Omar comin'!"

  Michael K. Williams played the character, and Omar is often named among the greatest figures in television history. That is a strange honor for a man who made his living robbing drug dealers. Why do viewers root for him? What kept him alive on streets that wanted him dead? And where did the writers find a man who was feared and tender in the same breath? Then there is the question of how a figure this formidable could possibly meet his end.

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• 2. A Strict Code

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  Josephine, the grandmother who raised Omar after he was orphaned young, gets much of the credit for his moral code. That code survived his criminal trade. Every Sunday morning he escorted her to church. He refused to harm innocent "civilians", and he usually disliked profanity, which set him apart from other street-level figures. He also had a habit of referring to himself in the third person.

  At Edmondson High School in West Baltimore, Omar sat a few years behind Bunk Moreland. His homosexuality and gentle private side cut sharply against the machismo usually attached to violent criminals. In the episode "Clarifications", his age is given as 34.

  More than 15 years of holding up dealers had taught him to survive, in his own phrase, "one day at a time". Beneath his long duster he hid a shotgun, a large-caliber handgun and a bulletproof vest. A scar marked his face. He showed exceptional skill at surveillance and as a shooter, and his plans were so carefully built that he regularly anticipated his enemies' moves and outsmarted them.

  Butchie served as Omar's guardian, his informal banker and a close friend. Omar was just as close to the partners who worked beside him.

  In 1985 Baltimore, a short prequel released online before season 5 shows how early the code took hold. Young Omar, his brother Anthony and an unidentified older boy plan a robbery at a bus stop. Omar questions whether the robbery is worth doing, then forces the older boy at gunpoint to give the money back. Anthony reacts with tired amusement, plainly used to his brother's force of character. Omar already carries his scar, though the clip never explains how he got it.

  At the end, the older boy tells Anthony that his brother is not "cut out" for this line of work. The remark is ironic, because it is Anthony who later fails. In season one, we learn he botched a jewelry store robbery, tried to shoot himself to avoid hard time, and survived with only a contact wound. The episode earned him the mocking nickname "No Heart" Anthony.

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• 3. Brandon and the Barksdales

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  The trouble began when Omar, his boyfriend Brandon and a man named John Bailey robbed a stash house. Avon Barksdale put a contract on all three, then doubled the reward once he learned Omar was gay. Bailey was killed. Brandon was tortured and mutilated, and he died rather than reveal where Omar was hiding. His body was left in a public place so it would be found quickly.

  Grief-stricken, Omar cooperated with Detectives Jimmy McNulty and Kima Greggs. His information led to the arrest of Barksdale soldier Bird, and he agreed to testify against him at trial, although it is doubtful he actually witnessed the crime. During his meetings with police, he picked up details that he used to take revenge himself. He killed Stinkum and wounded Wee-Bey Brice. To shield Omar, McNulty and Bunk had to mislead Cole, the detective assigned to Stinkum's murder.

  Proposition Joe, an Eastside drug kingpin, gave Omar his best chance at Avon. Omar handed him stolen drugs in exchange for Avon's pager number. He followed Avon to Orlando's strip club, paged him and waited for him to step into the open. Wee-Bey arrived at the wrong moment for Omar and shot him in the shoulder, and Avon got away.

  Stringer Bell then offered Omar a truce, secretly planning to kill him once his guard dropped. McNulty had wired Omar for the meeting, and Omar recognized the deception. He left Baltimore for New York City. The final scene of the first season shows him robbing a dealer in the Bronx, shrugging that it was "all in the game, yo. All in the game."

  That Bronx robbery closed the season, but a promise to testify against Bird still waited for Omar in a Baltimore courtroom.

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• 4. Testimony and Betrayal

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  Back in Baltimore with a new boyfriend named Dante, Omar went after the Barksdales and nobody else. Two stick-up artists, Tosha and Kimmy, joined his crew.

  In open court, Omar gave the false testimony against Bird that he had promised. He made no apology for who he was, and his wit won over the jury. Maurice Levy, the Barksdales' attorney, tried to discredit him by calling him a parasite who lived off the drug trade. Omar answered that Levy was just as guilty, since Levy worked closely with the organization and advised it. The jury believed Omar, and Bird went to prison for life. Assistant State's Attorney Ilene Nathan promised him a favor in return.

  Brother Mouzone, hired by Avon as new muscle, arrived from New York as Stringer Bell began making his own business decisions. Stringer saw danger in his secret dealings and told Omar that Mouzone had tortured and killed Brandon. Omar tracked Mouzone down and shot him once. Mouzone revealed that Omar had been fed a lie. Omar let him live, even summoning paramedics, and turned his anger on Stringer.

  During season 3, a raid on a Barksdale stash house killed Tosha, and Omar considered abandoning his war. Bunk, investigating the deaths, made him feel the weight of it with a speech about a neighborhood that had once been closer-knit and less violent. At the scene, Bunk had found children arguing over whose turn it was to be Omar. To make amends, Omar arranged the recovery of Kenneth Dozerman's service pistol, which Bunk had been assigned to find.

  Stringer then ordered two of Avon's soldiers to open fire on Omar as he walked his grandmother to church. Omar pushed her into a taxi, and she lost her best hat in the gunfire. The attack broke the long-standing "Sunday truce" between rival gangs, and it put his grandmother at risk. Omar recommitted to the war, though Kimmy dropped out. Avon was furious with Stringer and made the shooters buy her a new hat.

  Meanwhile, Mouzone captured Dante and forced him to reveal Omar's hiding place. Dante gave in, unlike Brandon, who never cracked. Mouzone proposed an alliance against Stringer. Together they ambushed Stringer during a meeting with Andy Krawczyk and killed him. Omar was left to dispose of Mouzone's gun and the shotgun that killed Stringer, and both ended up in the harbor.

  Mouzone set Dante free and returned to New York. That release was the last time Dante appears, and the series implies that Omar left him for giving him up so easily.

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• 5. Marlo's Ring

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  "How you expect to run with the wolves come night when you spend all day sparring with the puppies?" Omar asked, after the Barksdale organization collapsed and his work became easy. He feared easy thefts would make him soft. With a new boyfriend, Renaldo, he robbed Old Face Andre, a dealer for Marlo Stanfield who ran a westside convenience store that doubled as a drug front.

  At Proposition Joe's suggestion, Omar and Renaldo then held up a poker game, unaware that Marlo was playing. Omar made a point of taking a large ring from Marlo, who had earlier taken that same ring from Old Face Andre as payment of a debt. Marlo swore revenge. His right-hand man Chris Partlow talked him into a subtler plan.

  Chris killed a deliverywoman during a staged robbery at Andre's store and told Andre to call the police and falsely name Omar. Omar was arrested. Officer Eddie Walker robbed him during the arrest, taking the ring. Before the police van left, McNulty questioned him and found it out of character for Omar to have killed an ordinary citizen outside the drug trade.

  In Baltimore City's Central Booking, other inmates he had once robbed recognized him, and some wanted the bounty on his head. After one attempt on his life, Omar stabbed his attacker brutally as a warning to everyone else.

  Omar reached out to Bunk and convinced him that he would never kill a "citizen". Bunk called in the favor from Ilene Nathan to move Omar to a safer prison in Harford County. Then Bunk and Vernon Holley revisited the crime scene and pushed Old Face Andre to recant. The charge was dropped. Bunk drove Omar out of Harford County with a warning: no more killings. If Omar was caught killing again, Bunk would raise the unsolved deaths of Stringer Bell, Stinkum and Tosha.

  Once free, Omar learned that Marlo had framed him and was the man from the card game. He demanded Proposition Joe's help in robbing Marlo, and Joe agreed to tip him off when his soldier Cheese was delivering Marlo's package. Omar planned an elaborate hijacking of Joe's entire heroin shipment as it arrived at port, and it succeeded. Since he had no wish to sell drugs on the street, he sold the heroin back to Joe at 20 cents on the dollar.

  The heist made Omar a great deal of money. It also left the city's drug kingpins ready to put a contract on his head.

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• 6. The Last Hunt

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  After the heist, Omar and Renaldo moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Back in Baltimore, Marlo Stanfield had Butchie tortured and murdered but failed to learn where Omar was hiding. When word reached Omar, he came home to punish those responsible.

  His first stop was Slim Charles, whom he ambushed. Omar suspected that Slim Charles' employer, Proposition Joe Stewart, knew of the connection to Butchie and might have been behind the killing. Slim Charles convinced him of Joe's innocence, and Omar turned toward Marlo. With Butchie's friend Donnie, he went after Marlo's people, since Marlo himself had gone into hiding. Their first target was Monk.

  Marlo's soldiers spotted Omar outside Monk's apartment and baited him and Donnie into an ambush. Inside, Chris Partlow, Snoop, Michael Lee and O-Dog attacked them. Omar shot O-Dog in the leg, and Chris shot Donnie in the head. Out of ammunition, Omar leaped from a fourth-story window and broke his leg.

  He kept going, limping on a crutch he improvised from a broom. He robbed many of Marlo's corners and shot or killed several of his crew, including Savino Bratton. Each time, he destroyed the drugs and money instead of keeping them, to show his motive was vengeance, not profit. At every scene, he shouted for Marlo to meet him on the streets.

  Inside a Korean-owned convenience store, Omar noticed a small boy named Kenard and paid him no attention. Kenard shot Omar in the side of the head, killing him. The moment echoed season 3, when Bunk saw Kenard imitating Omar at the Barksdale stash house shootout.

  News of the death met mild amusement and indifference. Bunk showed some sympathy, which he brushed aside on learning Omar had been hunting again. McNulty and Lester Freamon reacted with curiosity and turned their attention to a list of names found on the body. The newspaper printed nothing about it for lack of space.

  At the morgue, an employee suspected the identification tag on Omar's body had been swapped with that of a white man on the next table, and switched the tags back. Omar's tag listed his age as 47, which contradicts the 34 given earlier. In the finale, Michael Lee carried a shotgun while robbing a man named Vinson and shooting him in the leg, carrying on Omar's legacy.

  Afterward, the story of Omar's fall was glorified. A simple killing by a child grew in the retelling into Omar holding off an army of police, or New York gangsters, during the finale.

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• 7. Real Stick-Up Men

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  David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has said Omar was based on five Baltimore stick-up men: Shorty Boyd, Donnie Andrews, Ferdinand Harvin, Billy Outlaw and Anthony Hollie. They robbed drug dealers from the 1980s into the early 2000s.

  Donnie Andrews is the best documented. Unlike Omar, he was heterosexual. He served 18 years in prison after murdering a drug dealer. His wife, Francine Boyd, inspired the HBO miniseries The Corner. Andrews later reformed, married and helped troubled young people. In season 4 of The Wire, he played one of two men Butchie sent to help Omar in prison, in the episodes "Margin of Error" and "Unto Others". Omar meets him again at Blind Butchie's in "That's Got His Own" while planning the big robbery. Andrews died in New York City at age 58, on the 13th of December 2012, after an aortic dissection.

  Omar's fondness for Greek mythology also has a real-world root. In the season 2 episode "All Prologue", he helps a bailiff with a crossword clue, telling him the Greek god of war is Ares. He adds that the subject fascinated him in middle school. In The Corner, a nonfiction book by Simon and Ed Burns, Baltimore schoolchildren ignore most lessons but often respond to Greek mythology.

  An earlier version of the character appeared in a season 3 episode of NYPD Blue called "Hollie and the Blowfish", written by Simon. Ferdinand Hollie was a stick-up artist who boldly robbed powerful drug dealers, lived by a code of honor and was willing to help police. Unlike Omar, he stole mainly to feed his own addiction, and he had HIV. The episode refers to a dead running partner who had died of AIDS but says nothing of Hollie's sexual orientation.

  Hollie is killed by the end of the episode, and police who worked with him and chased him mourn him, as they would Omar. At the end, Detective Bobby Simone beat up the detective who leaked the information that got Hollie killed.

  Hollie's first name matches that of Ferdinand Harvin, and his last name matches that of Anthony Hollie, two of the real robbers Simon cites as inspirations.

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• 8. Playing Omar

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  Michael K. Williams won the role of Omar after a single audition. He pursued it because its contradictions would make him stand out among the many talented African American actors from Brooklyn. The part was also his first major recurring television character.

  His training came from off-Broadway theaters in New York, including the National Black Theater in Harlem. Williams used the Meisner technique to build Omar from the ground up, and he immersed himself in research on inner-city Baltimore. He also built playlists matched to Omar's emotional and psychological state. They included Lauryn Hill's "I Gotta Find Peace of Mind" and "Mystery of Iniquity", Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama", Nas's "One Mic" and The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Who Shot Ya". Williams called the playlist essential for channeling the character's inner conflict and moral complexity.

  USA Today named Williams one of ten reasons it still loved television. Critics praised Omar for standing out in a stale field of crime dramas and for the wit Williams brought to him. One commentator described him as a sawed-off shotgun-toting terror, a vulnerable jailbird and a double-crossing mastermind who outsmarts Baltimore's biggest dealers. After the first season, some compared him to a Robin Hood of Baltimore's west side projects, though a few found his contradictions a little too strange.

  The Baltimore City Paper listed him among its top ten reasons not to cancel the show and called him "arguably the show's single greatest achievement". A Comcast list of "TV's Most Intriguing Characters" said that "no character is more enigmatic and shocking than Omar".

  Williams believed audiences loved Omar for his honesty, his lack of materialism, his individuality and his adherence to his code. In January 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told the Las Vegas Sun that Omar was his favorite character on The Wire, which was his favorite show. He added, "That's not an endorsement. He's not my favorite person, but he's a fascinating character."

  The voice actor Matthew Mercer named his Pembroke Welsh Corgi Omar after the character. In an interview with voice actress Tawny Platis, Mercer called Omar Little "One of the greatest characters in modern media."

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