Als je ondertussen nog altijd The Wire niet hebt gezien, dan gaapt er een serieus gat in
je leven. Ken je de befaamde misdaadserie van HBO wel, dan weet je dat Omar Little, de ongelooflijk
gewelddadige maar zeer moralistische overvaller in de reeks, een van de
meest treffende fictieve karakters is die ooit een shotgun in het
gezicht van een drugdealer geduwd heeft. Behalve dan dat hij niet enkel
een fictief personage is – zijn leven en stijl werden geïnspireerd op
het leven van Donnie Andrews, een voormalige overvaller, een
veroordeelde moordenaar en een allround Baltimore bad-ass. Er wordt nu een film over zijn leven gemaakt. Ben Patashnik deed daarom een fantastisch interview met hem, dat je kunt lezen na de jump. Het is wel veel tekst, maar wellicht kan je het stuk op je laptop in de zon lezen. Of zoiets. Dat mag je zelf beslissen. We willen ten slotte niet alles voor je invullen. Ok? Nou, klik maar door om het interview te lezen.

Vice: I’d like to start by talking about Omar – he’s a character who lives and dies by his code. Do you think he’s sympathetic?

Donnie Andrews:
Yeah. He had his moments. You know, I might do something or beat
somebody, then go home and think about it. Or I might take somebody’s
money, but then I’d always leave them with something. They made Omar
exactly the way I was. David [Simon] wrote “The West Side Story” [the
initial Baltimore Sun article about Donnie] after my
conviction in ’86 and they basically had everything down-pat. The gay
part they took from a guy called Billy Outlaw, he was a gay stick-up
guy.

Were there other stick-up artists like you back then?
Yeah, there was a whole gang of us. A stick-up artist… you take your
modern-day gangsters and you put them in a hat, you got the Dapper Don
who had Sammy The Bull, Al Capone had Frank Nitti. These are guys who
were enforcers, they make the gangsters – if it wasn’t for us, them
guys called gangsters wouldn’t exist. They didn’t have the muscle or
the heart that stick-up artists had, so these guys just had more heart
and were willing to take more chances.

And that was you.
That was me. We’d make the so-called gangsters, drug dealers, and whatever.

Can you trace your history back to an event that sent you down that path?
I know exactly when it was. I was nine. I had an abusive mother, and
one night she woke us up–me and my brother Kent–like, two in the
morning and made us go to the laundromat to go wash clothes, so we got
up. They used to have an old homeless guy or a wino to watch the
Laundromat so no one would break no machines, and when me and my
brother were putting our clothes in the dryer, three guys came in and
they asked the guy that was watching the machines for fifteen cents to
catch the bus. And the guy got indignant, cussed them all, “Fifteen
cents? I got fifteen cents and a handful of change but I wouldn’t give
you the sweat off my balls. You faggot motherfuckers, I’ll give you
fifteen cents to get out of my face.” 

Next
thing you know the change went up in the air and they beat him
literally to death. So me and my brother, we standing back there – my
concern is my little brother. The back door is locked, it’s got a
padlock on it so we can’t go out that way but we want to get up out of
there but we can’t without passing them. So we had to sit there, stand
there and wait until they finished beating on this guy. They looked up
and seen us there, me and my brother, and they start walking toward us.
I push my brother behind me, and they said, “Loan me fifteen cents.” I
said, “I ain’t got no money, this is my mother’s money,” and back in
the day people respected, they don’t mess with mamas so they knew I
couldn’t give them no money. Then they said, “But if you had ten cents
you’d give it to me, right?” and I said “Sure.” 

So they
left, then me and my brother, we left the clothes but we climbed over
the washing machines because the guy’s laying in the middle of the
floor in a pool of blood. I mean, a POOL of blood. We got to the door
and I got my brother out then all of a sudden the guy let out a big
fart and took his last breath. I stopped and looked at him, and right
by his head was a dime and a nickel. I made up my mind that I would
never be a victim; I would never be the prey. I’d be the hunter. If you
going to be mean you gotta be the baddest motherfucker on the street. 

You once said you had to be “the most vicious person on the street to
survive.” What was day-to-day life like as a stick-up artist?
Me and my brother, we basically had to fend for ourselves. Everything
we got, we had to steal it. Coming up in that environment, it’s like
when in Rome, you do what the Romans do. If you playing in the grass
with snakes, you got to make sure you’re a King Cobra. I did some crazy
stuff, but at the same time when I look back I regretted doing a lot of
it. But at the same time, if two or three guys were beating you and I
didn’t know you, I would jump in and help you. And that’s the way I
was, mainly because I guess sometimes I look for trouble and sometimes
trouble find me. I had a sense of justice, “OK, that ain’t right.” I’d
jump in, then they jump in, then it’s even. It was survival, but at the
same time it was building a reputation because one thing leads to
another. They might say, “OK, Donnie did this,” and the story goes on
and keeps getting embellished.

What did you have to do to build up a reputation?
When I was coming up you had to be good with your hands and people
respect you if you could fight. Number one, if you break a law you
going to jail, and you don’t have a gun in jail. So if you can use your
hands you don’t have to worry about that. Me and my brother, if you
messed with one of us you messed with both of us. And you don’t mess
with my little brother or my family. I guess going to jail was a big
thing, people look up to you after that – you come back from boys
village, training school – and so I stayed in jail, stayed in trouble.
Then when you go to jail you meet other people, other criminals and
stuff like that, they hear of you and so your name spreads. It was a
rough life.

It seems like it was another life for you – the change between then and now is huge. It’s almost like you’re an actor who used to play a certain role.
I
tell everybody, coming up the whole world is a stage and when you
living where I come from you had to be a prolific actor [laughs]. You
had to hide your emotions and you couldn’t show weakness. You show
weakness and that was it, you got all kinds of trouble. You got to keep
that mask going all the time. Now I feel like I’ve grown up, I’m a man
and I don’t have to wear that mask. When I start looking towards the
future, I never had no future when I was out there. I was just living
for the moment, and when I was a kid people tell me I ain’t never going
to reach 21. I’m 55. Whatever I did, I did it well. I relish the fact
that I’m still here and I regret some of the things that I done, but I
still gotta be proud that I made it.

Why has the story of Baltimore and the drugs trade that Homicide and The Corner depicts hit such a nerve?
I
think you have to respect the conscience of a nation. If you go out
there and you see a homeless guy and he asks you for a dollar, you turn
your nose up and walk away, and then all of a sudden somebody comes to
tell you, “You know that guy you just turned your nose up at? He just
gave someone a million dollars, that was Bill Gates!” You never know
who you’re dealing with, and at the same time you try to stay away from
stuff that don’t concern you. They just put The Wire and The Corner
out there for the world to see, and it ain’t just happening in
Baltimore, but all over the world. One guy was telling me, he’s from
some island, and he say the black kids look up to Omar, Stringer Bell.
Even though the show is a great show, why does it strike home to the
ignorant? Black kids, gang bangers, like I tell them, if you a doctor,
if you a lawyer, if you an engineer you making good money you not going
back down into the ghetto to bring them kids out, so the only ones they
look forward to is they local drug dealers, and that’s they role
models.

When you were in jail you
said you had very little to do with the mafia because they were loyal
to an organization and not each other, but still today the mob is
hugely glorified. The Wire shows a different side of things but still seems to hit a nerve.
You have women that only date bad boys, you see what I’m saying? I had
a couple of girls who had good men – they worked every day, come home,
pay the bills. But why they break up with him? “He was square, he was
easy. He let me have my way. They give me everything I want.” And I’m
like, “What? You let him go?!” Everybody is looking for that sense of
excitement: The Wire, Scarface, The Corner–it
all gives them a sense of excitement. We had a friend of ours, never
did drugs, and said to my wife, “I never did heroin but the way people
describe the high, I don’t care if I’m 8o years old, I want to try it
before I die.” Why?! If you see what it doing to communities and other
people, why you want to mess with it? That’s the curiosity in people.

How do you feel when people who read about you and your life and take the whole experience almost as tourism?
It damages the message, and it actually hurts me as a black man. When I
decided to change my life I sat down and started to study the words of
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, even George Jackson, and I
understood their message and it made me feel bad. Martin, he was a man
of peace and for me to take my violence to another life… he absorbed
all the hate he could and still remained the same. It hurts me when we
go out and vote for these politicians who say they going to make our
lives better–we organize these rallies, we say we going to do this to
make a difference, we set Friday for the rally and then when Friday
come no one shows up. “I gotta go to work, I gotta pay my bills.” It
hurt me that people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X would die so
that we could get where we at today, and to see there’s no following
through in America today. 

You
know, you got people who are pro-life but they bombing clinics–nobody
is for what they preach about and that hurts me to see that. They don’t
stick to they guns. It’s always, “Today I’m angry, tomorrow I gotta go
make some money, I don’t want to lose my job.” I had a perfect example
last year. I was trying to pull together a gang summit in Baltimore, I
had most of the gang leaders and they was willing to sit down–but I
could get nobody to back me. So I took them and said we gotta bring our
kids back home, and at first they was all for it but then the next day
they weren’t. About five of them come to me after and say, “I should’ve
listened to you man, they killed my son last week.” And I’m sorry for
their loss, but in my mind I’m thinking, “That’s what happens when you
do nothing, sit back and watch.” Like Martin say, a man who won’t stand
for nothing will fall for anything. And our community is falling for
anything and everything. Until we get together and start rebuilding our
communities, we can’t wait for our government to do anything. 

Right
now, the government is chasing all the blacks out of Baltimore city and
putting them in projects they created in the county. Now, counties that
had like one murder now have 26, and it goes up higher and higher every
year. It’s the game everybody playing. 

Is talking about yourself serving as a voice for your community?
I try to be, and at the same time people have voices but they scared to
stand up and talk. They scared the government won’t come get them, they
scared they gonna get retaliation from gang-bangers. I don’t know what
the problem is. I was a major part of it, so I’m going to do whatever I
can to try and change it. Live or die, at least I’m dying for
something. I put my life on the line every day for 33 years and didn’t
care if I lived or died, and that’s the same mentality as those kids
out there. They know for a fact that nobody care for them. 

Think
about it, you have the government building more prisons, more
prisons–but they shut down 14 schools in Baltimore. You got people
losing they jobs but the correction facilities, they still building.
That, to me, is stupid. They want to cut down on crime and get the bad
people off the streets, but they have all these bad people and then you
tell them, “You got a criminal record–you can’t get a good job, you
can’t live in public housing, you can’t get insurance.” When I came
home it took me like four months just running around the city to get my
ID. Because without ID you can’t get your Social Security card, you
need your birth certificate and it was like crazy. They tell you you
can’t get social service, but if you doing all this and you telling a
man he can’t eat, what recourse does he have but to take when he can by
stealing? You fighting crime, but you creating it. They use 9/11 as a
way to take away human rights, and the Constitution–they just twisted
it. If you want to really fight crime you can give a big dent if you
just let people work. A lot of time, I’ve got guys jobs and they work
for six weeks but then they told they got to be let go because
insurance won’t cover them because they have a criminal record. They
happy that they got a nice job that could support their family, then
three weeks later it’s totally different. It’s a lot of politics
involved.

The outreach work you do, tell me about that.
I work with gangbangers, my wife is an outreach worker for drug
programs. She goes out and does AIDS testing, I try to work with
gangbangers. But lately I’ve been backing away with them because today,
the kids see The Wire
and they think it’s show and tell. People see me and think I’ve been
home for 15 or 20 years but I’ve been home for four. They see me
driving a nice car and keeping myself up and that is impressionable to
them. I can tell them I doing like this without hurting nobody or
selling no drugs, and they think, “You got a break–how can we get that
break? We want out, can you show us how to get out?” And I got nothing
to offer them. I’m backing away because I don’t want them to think I’m
a politician, that I’m filling their heads with politics. There’s a
program in Maryland called the Innocent Program–everyone saying that
everyone in jail is innocent, but you look at some of these cases and
you just can’t see how they got convicted. Perfect example: Guy’s down
for 39 years–he had a capital murder case but the trial lasted for 45
minutes. There was five of them and three of his co-defendants said
they had no involvement, but the guy who actually did it turned on him
and he got sentenced to life. And the governor said life means life,
and we got thousands of cases like that. And there’s another girl, she
got a kid and the government say they going to take away her kid if she
doesn’t say some guy did something. So I’m really happy about doing
this, this way I’m still giving back and it makes me feel good.

You said gangs originally formed as a protectorate for a community. Is that realistically possible to recreate?
It
takes a village to raise a child, so that community is going to have to
become that village. You can’t sit in the house and wait for it go away
because it’s going to get worse. Until people start standing up and
actually doing something about it, it’s going to remain the same. When
they come together, it going to bring about change. Some mothers have
they sons out there selling drugs, and they fighting us, saying, “Why
you trying to do this? He only making money, you just jealous.”
Jealous? Well, your son might turn my son into a drug addict, so why am
I jealous? You destroy my family! Until people realize what’s going on,
it’s going to only get worse and worse and worse. But I think if
everybody just stop relying on the police coming to do that and try to
take the community back, that’s going to make the difference. The gang
thing was just a fad, a lot of them who was in the gangs actually want
out, but out to what? That’s the whole bottom line, out to what? Police
want to tag them so they got records and there ain’t so much they can
do.

How do people treat you back home?
They don’t treat me no different. I’m not into that life no more and I
don’t want to get caught up in nothing, so if they still into that life
I stay the hell away from them. If the feds start investigating
something and people see me talking to the feds, I don’t want to be
part of no conspiracy. I tell the gangbangers, we can talk about you
problems but I don’t want to hear nothing about no murders or no
crimes. If you got issues we can deal with your issues, but all that
other crazy stuff–don’t make me no conspirator. When I changed I
changed, that’s it. I try to be the best person I can be, but somewhere
down deep Omar still there and I don’t want to see him come back out.

Before you went to jail for 18 years, there seemed to be two major
events that shaped you–the murder and the time you wore a wire for the
police. The murder has been recounted a lot, but could you tell me
about the wire?
That incident was the hardest thing in the world for me to do. But
sometimes when you making changes you have to make the hardest
decisions in the world. When the guy got… when we killed the guy, I
managed to tell one guy, Fruit Loop, to get away but I wasn’t able to
save the other guy and we had to go through with that. That was a hard
decision. You make hard decisions, and if you can make them for the bad
you can make them for the good. The time when I wore the wire, the feds
and everybody was expecting me to renege but I was at the point in my
life where it was either do or die right there. It was really, really
hard and the thing is, the good thing is, I didn’t have to testify.
That was something I didn’t know if I could go through with, so with
them copping out it was a blessing for me. I was determined to make
that change because I knew I was better than that, and to see my best
friend Shortie Smalls die, that was a turning point. Shortie always
told me my name, Donnie Andrews, that was like a basketball star and I
could be a lot better than I was. Now I see 50 or 60-year-old gang
members and dope fiends–let it go! You no longer a kid. I didn’t want
to be that dope fiend out there, people kicking you in the ass.

And wearing the wire was you showing yourself you could do that.
Yeah, and not only myself but at that point it showed a lot of people
that supported me that I was able to do that and I was for real.
Everybody was expecting the opposite. I could’ve went and said, “You
know what? If I’m going to do that then I’m going to walk away with no
sentence,” but I felt like I needed to go to prison for the crime I
committed.

You could’ve escaped without punishment?
Yeah, I could’ve bargained. Like with Sammy The Bull, five years for
21! But I said I was going to serve my time – I had three life
sentences, one with the feds and two with the state. At the time, the
feds said for the life sentence you’d do ten years and then be up for
parole. After ten years I don’t think I was at the point where I’m at
right now. The guy who made the deal with me, he reneged and said I
should spend the rest of my life and die in jail. That created the
fight for the next eight years, because if you speaking of forgiveness
you first got to forgive yourself. Because in that first ten years, I
hadn’t forgiven myself, I still carried that burden around. And I
believed doing that last eight years made me really understand the
concept of law. It made me see that everything I lived and died for
when I was coming up, that was just a pipe dream. All my friends out
there, they didn’t stick by me or send me a dime. It was a challenge,
but I forgave even the guy who crossed me on the ten because he helped
me, and if I had made a deal then I’d be back in jail now. He made me
what I am today.

BEN PATASHNIK