Baltimore Carl calls "Little Melvin" Williams the biggest drug dealer Baltimore ever had, and says The Wire never told you that Melvin was behind a lot of the big players. He had so much work it was ridiculous. When the city burned in the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King was killed, officials went and got Little Melvin to calm the streets down, and the rioting stopped once Melvin said what he said. According to Carl, Melvin wasn't even in the drug game until police planted something on him, and his answer was: if this is what y'all want me to do, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to do it the best. Vlad met him too, through a connect at Don Diva magazine, and he says Melvin looked nothing like a kingpin. He was small, dark-skinned and soft-spoken, like a regular 9-to-5 guy. Melvin ran a car wash off North Avenue, warned young guys not to get taken away from their families, and later hosted a mixtape for Carl. His last words to Carl were about Dennis Rodman on the Bulls, a guy who scores nothing himself but stops everyone else from scoring: don't let someone with no points stop you from getting yours. Melvin Williams was born in Baltimore in 1941 and ran heroin from the 1960s into the 80s, and he is credited with helping inspire Avon Barksdale. The man who arrested him in 1984 was Ed Burns, then a Baltimore cop, who later co-created The Wire, and David Simon wrote a five-part series on him for the Baltimore Sun in 1987. Melvin went to prison in 1985 and walked out in 2003. He then played the Deacon in seasons three through five, giving advice to Bunny Colvin and Cutty. In the documentary Tapping the Wire he said he made at least "a couple hundred million" from heroin. He died in December 2015 at 73, and Simon tweeted that Melvin made him begin to rethink the drug war and that he ended it free. Carl Johnson himself sold crack in Baltimore for 17 years and was arrested in 2018 with 10 kilos of crack. He went through drug court instead of a long bid and now works as a drug counselor and runs the Baltimore Recovery Alliance. He rates The Wire about 80% accurate. The city called the man who flooded Baltimore with heroin to stop the riots, and he ended up playing a church deacon on TV. Was Little Melvin a criminal the city actually needed, or did The Wire turn a heroin king into a saint?