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Gordon Pratt is the main antagonist of a Homicide: Life on the Street three-part episode "The City That Bleeds", "Dead End", and "End Game", although he only appears in the third part, and one of the main antagonists of the show's third season as a whole.
He was portrayed by Steve Buscemi, who also played Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, Carl Showalter in Fargo, Tony Blundetto in The Sopranos, Randall Boggs in Monsters Inc., Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire, Dorsal Dan in SpongeBob SquarePants, Francis E. Francis in The Boss Baby, Garland Greene in Con Air, and Dwight Diddlehopper in The Simpsons.
Biography[]
Gordon Pratt was born in New York, before his family moved to Maryland. Pratt was a poor student in high school, eventually dropping out entirely. Pratt moved to Baltimore and took a job as a longshoreman. However, Pratt was discontent with his lot in life and fell into white supremacy, harboring particular hatred towards the government under the belief it had been "co-opted by minorities". Pratt virulently defended his beliefs, even getting into a bar fight and having assault charges filed against him, though he avoided capture.
When Baltimore Police Department Homicide Detectives John Munch, Stan Bolander, Beau Felton, and Kay Howard mistakenly knocked on his apartment door while trying to arrest his neighbor Glen Holton, Pratt snuck up behind them and opened fire on them. He severely injured the latter three, with Bolander and Howard nearly dying from the injuries he inflicted on them.
While police attention was initially focused on Holton, once it was established Holton was innocent Pratt was tracked down and arrested while at a massage parlor he regularly frequented. During his interrogation, Pratt taunted Black detectives Frank Pembleton and Meldrick Lewis with racist slurs. However, when Pembleton forced him to read from his copy of The Odyssey written in the original Greek and exposed he couldn't, he mocked him as a fraud before exposing Pratt's act of intellectualism as merely a mask. Pratt angrily demanded a lawyer, gleefully taunting the detectives that he would get away with his crimes and walk away a free man.
Pratt was indeed allowed to walk due to a lack of evidence. However, he was shot in the head by an unknown assailant (likely a police officer, heavily implied to be Munch) while at his apartment. Though Detective Tim Bayliss investigated Pratt's death, significant blowback from his fellow officers led to him dropping the case and Pratt's murder is left unsolved.
Personality[]
Pratt is narcissistic, and fancies himself an intellectual. In spite of demonstrating low intelligence over all, Pratt postures himself as a cultured genius to the point of pretentiousness. He owns a copy of The Odyssyey written in Greek in spite of not speaking or understanding the language, projects his own political beliefs unto Plato's work, and frequently cites outdated, nonsensical, and flagrantly racist "facts" to justify his bigotry.
Pratt's bigotry and hatred for the government comes not from any true ideals, but from his own refusal to accept responsibility for his own failings. Pratt insists that his low-paying, menial job and loneliness is the result of affirmative action, when in reality it comes from his short temper and egotism. Pratt lashes out violently against anything that exposes his delusions of grandeur, having attacked a man for calling him out on ranting about his racist views at a bar and resorting to screaming racial slurs at Pembleton when he exposes Pratt's supposed intellectualism as a ruse.
Pratt also demonstrates signs of social darwinism, as he expresses that white people (and himself especially) should run the world because they are in his eyes inherently stronger than anyone else.
