Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams ran one of Baltimore's largest heroin operations for two decades — four separate convictions, more than twenty years in federal prison combined. Then, after a religious conversion, he became a community figure and, unexpectedly, an actor: he played "The Deacon" in HBO's The Wire, a show whose creators had crossed paths with him years earlier as a reporter and a police detective.
This episode covers the full arc — the 1967, 1974, 1984, and 1999 cases, the 2003 resentencing that freed him, his Wire years, and the 2005 wiretap incident that complicates the redemption story more than most retrospectives mention.
Reportage from public records and press coverage. Open cases: charged or alleged unless stated as convicted.
