I want you to get the word out that we are back up with another candidate.
| “ | Omar: So you sayin' you had nothing to do with it. Stringer: No, I can't lie. I put the motherf***ing paper out on y'all. But y'all was f***ing with my stash. Anything after that, part of the game. Omar: Maybe. But see, you went past that with Brandon. Stringer: That wasn't me. That wasn't Avon, either. Bird and them were there to see it. But another man did all the extras. All that cigarette s***, all that bulls*** with the eyes. See now, this man, he building a rep for himself and he wants you bad. The brutal s***, you know, that's his calling card. Little bow-tie wearing motherf***er from out of... NYC? |
„ |
| ~ To all the people who like to downplay how bad Stringer is… I raise you this |
Well, it’s me again. I’m back with my fifth proposal, and today I’m here with a candidate that I must admit, I never saw coming.
You see, the first villain I proposed on here was Marlo Stanfield from The Wire, and I followed him up with Sam Choksey. Both are definite keepers, and with those two out of the way I was sure that there weren’t any more PE candidates in the show. Or so I thought. Because it was recently brought to my attention that there’s someone else who has a chance at PE.
That someone is Stringer Bell.
But without wasting any more time, LET’S GET ON WITH IT, MOTHERF***ERS!!!
(see what I did there?)
What's the Work?[]
The Wire is a classic HBO series set in Baltimore, created by former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon and former BPD cop Ed Burns. It takes a deep dive into the war on drugs and how crime affects society, with each season examining a different institution and how they all connect to the big picture.
Who is Stringer Bell? What has he done?[]
Stringer Bell was a childhood friend of Avon Barksdale. They went into the drug trade together and founded the Barksdale Organization, which is the most powerful gang in the West Side by the start of the show. Avon is the leader and Stringer is his second-in-command.
Avon’s nephew D’Angelo, who works as a drug lieutenant for the Barksdale Organization, recklessly murdered someone, and while Avon and Stringer are able to get him out of trouble (thanks to some good-old-fashioned witness intimidation), they’re upset with him because it costs time and money to bail him out. As such, D’Angelo is demoted from overseeing the towers to overseeing the pit, which is less valuable turf.
One of the witnesses doesn’t back down, so Avon and Stringer have that witness killed.
This stick-up man named Omar Little robs a Barksdale Stash house with his boyfriend, Brandon, accompanying him. Avon and Stringer are of course angry with Omar, not just because he stole from them but also because he’s gay and they hate gay people. They elect to put a bounty on Omar and all the members of his crew.
Wallace, one of the dealers in the pit, spots Brandon at an arcade, who passes the word on to D’Angelo and it reaches Stringer. Barksdale enforcers Wee-Bey, Bird and Stinkum abduct Brandon and, on Stringer’s orders, torture him to death by burning him with cigarettes and gouging one of his eyes out. After he dies, they mutilate his carcass further and dump it in the pit to send a message to Omar.
Coincidentally, they put the body right outside of Wallace’s house. Wallace knew that they’d kill Brandon, but he probably thought they’d just shoot him as opposed to drawing out his suffering. Wallace feels really guilty so he eventually snitches. He goes to live with his aunt in the countryside for protection, but he comes back to Baltimore and tries to reaffirm his loyalty to the Barksdales, but Stringer has Wallace’s friends murder him for being a snitch.
The cops are able to get Avon on drug charges via a hidden camera in his office, and Avon gets sentenced to seven years in prison. D’Angelo is also arrested and takes a twenty year sentence.
With Avon behind bars, Stringer takes de facto leadership of the Barksdale Organization. He makes a deal with East Side drug lord Proposition Joe to utilize both their assets - Joe has the best drugs, and Stringer has the best territory, so they make an agreement that allows Joe’s dealers to deal in the Barksdale Towers.
Good idea on paper, but there’s one issue. Avon had hired Brother Mouzone, a highly skilled enforcer from outside Baltimore, to keep other dealers from dealing on the towers while he is away. Mouzone doesn’t know or care about the agreement and continues to carry out Avon’s assignment.
In what ultimately proves to be his downfall, Stringer decides to get rid of Brother Mouzone by manipulating Omar into killing him. Stringer meets up with Omar and admits to ordering Brandon’s death, but he says (he’s lying) that he intended it to be quick and clean and that Brandon wasn’t supposed to be tortured, even pretending that he’s disgusted with the torture. He says it was this other person named Brother Mouzone who did the torture and tells Omar where to find him.
The deception temporarily works, as Omar tracks down Mouzone and has him at his mercy, but he then realizes that Stringer had tricked him. Mouzone later realizes that Stringer had set him up.
Meanwhile, Avon and Stringer devise a plan to reduce Avon's sentence. One of the prison guards, named Tilghman, is helping smuggle drugs into the prison. They have Tilghman’s drug supply tainted, leading to a massacre in which five prisoners die, and launching an investigation into the prison drug trade. Avon makes a deal to inform on Tilghman in exchange for an early parole hearing.
D’Angelo, who had already been disillusioned with the drug trade, realizes that Avon is responsible for the massacre and tells Avon that he’s out of the game.
So what does Stringer do? He goes behind Avon’s back to have D’Angelo assassinated and his death staged to look like a suicide, simply because he thought that D’Angelo might snitch. Oh, and then he sleeps with D’Angelo’s girlfriend.
Sure enough, Avon’s scheme works, and he gets paroled. Around this time, Stringer orders a hit on Omar on a Sunday right outside of church, which endangers Omar’s grandmother and is in direct violation of the Sunday Truce (an agreement that calls off gang violence on Sundays). Keep in mind that Omar’s grandmother has no idea about her grandson’s criminal activities. Stringer also tries to order a hit on a state senator for conning him.
So anyway, Stringer starts getting into conflict with Avon because Stringer, as he puts it, wants to run his criminal operations like a businessman, whereas Avon is “just a gangster.” When Avon calls Stringer soft, Stringer reveals that he’s the one who killed D’Angelo, further damaging their friendship.
Realizing that Avon’s return is threatening his approach to running the organization, Stringer informs on Avon and gets him arrested.
At the same time, Avon has to betray Stringer as well, because Brother Mouzone comes back to Baltimore, teams up with Omar, and blackmails him into giving up Stringer’s location. Mouzone and Omar find and kill Stringer.
Mitigating Factors[]
For the longest time I thought that he cared about Avon, but upon re-evaluation, it doesn’t hold up. He’s loyal to Avon in season one, but once Avon goes to prison and Stringer takes over de facto leadership of the Barksdale Organization, the power goes to his head and his loyalty to Avon flies right out of the window, as Stringer betrays Avon and has him re-imprisoned once Avon starts to go against Stringer’s agenda. While Stringer is hesitant to betray Avon, he doesn’t show actual remorse for it nor does he do anything after the betrayal that would indicate care for Avon.
Comedy is even easier to refute. Yeah, Stringer has a number of comedic moments. Some that come to mind include him calling out Shamrock for taking notes on a criminal conspiracy, him drawing a mocking doodle of McNulty, and the “forty-degree day” speech. However, all his comedic moments happen during downtime when he isn’t doing anything evil, with his crimes being treated with gravity. So yeah, comedy is no issue at all, especially considering that there are plenty of PEs that are far more comical than Stringer is.
Heinous Standard[]
Here’s what I’m still unsure about.
For starters, there’s Marlo Stanfield, who has comparable resources to Stringer but a much higher death count at 38 confined kills (whereas Stringer has 12), and also has a habit of killing people for some of the pettiest reasons imaginable, such as a food mart security guard who wouldn’t let Marlo shoplift a lollipop.
Not to mention, Stringer’s assassination of D’Angelo is made less exceptional by Marlo’s attempted assassination of Michael Lee. Both killed/attempted to kill their own underlings on the mere suspicion that they would snitch or might have already snitched, but Marlo ordering Michael’s death is worse for a number of reasons. For starters, Michael’s a child, and he had been manipulated by Marlo into becoming a murderer for his gang and then used as a disposable pawn by Marlo. Also, while D’Angelo wasn’t going to snitch and Stringer was definitely being paranoid, Stringer seems sure that D’Angelo would have snitched, telling Avon that D’Angelo would have brought their whole empire down had he not been taken down. Marlo, on the other hand, tells Chris that he thinks Michael probably isn’t a snitch, but that he’s not willing to take any chances.
Where Stringer still stands out from Marlo is his brutal torture and murder of Brandon. What Marlo has done to Butchie is brutal (shooting out his kneecaps and then in the groin), but it only lasts for about a minute, whereas Brandon’s torture is much more drawn out. The only other death that’s similarly drawn out is the women in the crate. Which brings us to Sam Choksey, who kills an entire shipment of fourteen trafficked women, the first by beating her to death and the rest by locking them in a shipping container and hammering the air pipe shut, essentially burying them alive.
This gives Sam Choksey a slightly higher death count than Stringer, giving thirteen people a drawn-out death whereas Stringer only gave one person a drawn-out death, and there’s a resource disparity between the two since Sam is just a low-level smuggler (and a one-shot character, might I add) with nobody helping him, whereas Stringer is a powerful drug kingpin and one of the main antagonists across three whole seasons.
However, Stringer still has the worst torture in the show. The way Sam kills the women in the crate is horrific, but it isn’t torture. Sam’s goal isn’t to make the women’s deaths agonizing. He just wants them gone, and as it happens suffocating them in the crate is the easiest way to accomplish that. With Brandon, Stringer goes out of his way to inflict pain, presumably for information on Omar’s whereabouts.
Final Verdict[]
Unsure about this one. You decide.