Lester Freamon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Lester Freamon | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| First appearance | The Detail (episode 1.02) |
| Statistics | |
| Gender | Male |
| Age | 50s |
| Occupation | Baltimore Police Detective |
| Title | Detective |
| Portrayed by | Clarke Peters |
| Created by | David Simon |
Detective Lester Freamon is a fictional character on the HBO drama The Wire played by actor Clarke Peters. Freamon is an older African American detective in the Baltimore Police Department's Major Case Unit. He is a slow and methodical detective who quietly makes major contributions to the series investigations.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Season one
When the Barksdale detail formed Freamon had been working in the pawnshop unit for over thirteen years - he was glad to be out doing some real police work again. He had been an excellent homicide detective (described by Bunk Moreland as "natural police") but had upset his superiors and been reassigned to a job they knew he would dislike, a fate which his colleague Jimmy McNulty later shared. He was initially viewed as eccentric by his colleagues because of his hobby of making dollhouse miniature furniture, from which he earned a steady stream of income. He proved himself to the detail when he found an old photo of Avon Barksdale on a boxing poster, after other detectives had tried and failed to get a picture of the drug lord, finally giving the unit a face to put to the name. He impressed his colleagues once more when he found D'Angelo Barksdale's pager number on the wall of the low rise stash house.
Freamon's calm and collected approach to police work has put him in the position of mediator between McNulty and Cedric Daniels. He has acted as a conscience for Daniels, informing him when politics are getting in the way of their investigations and convincing him to put their work above his career. He served as a mentor to Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski and Leander Sydnor.
In the Barksdale detail Freamon was a patient presence, manning the wiretaps and helping Prez discover his talent for communications work. Freamon's work at recognising patterns of pager messages and telephone calls gave several advances in the case. He found a pattern of calls requesting resupply that led to targets main stash house in Pimlico, a major break in the case. He worked with Detective Kima Greggs to find an informant in Orlando's club (a Barksdale front), eventually helping recruit Shardene Innes, whom he later began a relationship with.[1]
It was Freamon who began digging into the Barksdale organization's financial records and money trail and found their political connections. Freamon helped young Det. Sydnor to shine in the detail by assigning him tasks like following the paper trail. Freamon was instrumental in tracking the suspects following the shooting of Detective Greggs. He marshalled the detail, convincing them to return to manning surveillance posts to maintain their wiretaps. He recognised a page made immediately after the shooting by Roland "Wee-Bey" Brice and tracked this to a pay phone where he established the shooter's presence by collecting fingerprint evidence. When the police were told by D'Angelo that Wee-Bey was in Philadelphia it was Freamon who located him. He used a contact from his pawn shop days who was now working for a phone company, retired detective Roy Brown. He had Brown trace call patterns from Philadelphia to Barksdale organization members in order to pinpoint Wee-Bey's hideout, leading to his arrest and conviction.
Following the conviction of Barksdale organization members, Major Rawls viewed Freamon's effectiveness as a detective and gave him a position in Homicide, a position Freamon happily transferred back into.
[edit] Season two
After the dissolution of the Barksdale detail Freamon was moved into Major Rawls's homicide unit and partnered with Bunk in Sgt. Landsman's squad.
The pair were happy working together and quickly became recognised as the squad's best detectives. When Rawls was assigned the deaths of fourteen Jane Does from the docks, Landsman insisted that Freamon and Bunk take the case instead of Ray Cole because of this reputation.
Freamon and Bunk were detailed the officer from the Port Authority, Beatrice "Beadie" Russell. The coroner told them that the girls suffocated in the container after the air pipe was deliberately closed off. They linked the container to the ship Atlantic Light and tried to question the crew by holding the ship in port in Philadelphia. The two of them interrogated every seaman on ship and each replied in a foreign language. Bunk and Freamon eventually lost their temper with a Black seaman (whom Bunk derogatorily called "Kunta Kinte") whom they did not believe was unable to speak English. Under pressure from the ship's captain and with all of the crew refusing to speak English, they released the ship. They did learn from the first mate that the crew had been asking for cash advances while at sea and that two crewman had jumped ship after Baltimore. The coroner also told them that several of the girls had breast enhancements with implants that could be traced to a clinic in Budapest. Despite these advances they came under heavy criticism from Rawls, anxious about his unit clearance rate, for releasing the ship without getting statements. Somewhat paranoid, Freamon asked Rawls if he had assigned them the case to ruin him a second time, Rawls assured him that if he planned to harm their careers they would know about it.
Freamon was relieved when he was requested by Daniels for the Sobotka detail. He continued to liase with Bunk and Russell assisting them in the homicide investigation but his primary focus became investigating smuggling through the Baltimore ports. On Russell's advice, Freamon convinced Daniels to clone the port's computers to give them evidence of container movements. In tandem with wiretaps they were able to follow containers being moved away from the docks illegally to a warehouse linking Sobotka to "The Greek". The Sobotka investigation closed with several arrests and the murder of Frank Sobotka.
Bunk and Freamon solved the Jane Doe homicides, improving the detail's profile. Freamon linked a dismembered body to one of the crewmen who jumped ship. They theorised that the girls were prostitutes and had been working while at sea. One seaman refused to pay and ended up murdering a girl, whom he dumped overboard. To hide the evidence of his actions he stove in the airpipe to kill the remaining girls. The body was thought to be the murderer's, having been killed as punishment for killing the valuable prostitutes.
[edit] Season three
Freamon stayed with Daniels in his new Major Case Unit. Near the start of the season, he occasionally lost patience with McNulty and Kima when they refused to work on building a case against their original assigned target, a small-time drug dealer named Kintel Williamson. Later, the units focus returned to the Barksdales as they became involved in a turf war with their rival Marlo Stanfield. Freamon was instrumental in a successful attempt to sell disposable cellphones with wiretaps already authorized to a Barksdale underling named Bernard. Bernard was tasked with buying phones for the organization. Freamon went undercover as a con artist selling illegally recharged disposable phones at a discount rate, which Bernard and his girlfriend Squeak were unable to resist. The wiretaps implicated Stringer Bell in drug dealing but before he could be arrested he was murdered. Avon Barksdale himself was caught in a safehouse filled with weapons and returned to prison. [2]
[edit] Season four
Freamon became the guiding force behind the unit when Daniels was promoted to Major. The detail's new commander Lieutenant Asher was content to let Freamon pursue his own investigations. He began investigating the Stanfield drug dealing organization and set up wiretaps and quickly had key members of Stanfields organization tied to drug dealing. Freamon, believing that good suspects make better detectives, was disappointed that Stanfield's people were not as disciplined as the Barksdales.
Freamon also continued to pursue the Barksdale money trail. When he linked it to key political figures like state senator Clayton "Clay" Davis and Stringer's property developer Andy Krawczyk he put the investigation on hold. Lester planned to subpoena his target's records at election time when they could not shut down the investigation using political contacts because they were open to scrutiny. He concealed his plan from Assistant State's Attorney Rhonda Pearlman and told her that the investigation was displaced by new cases. When Pearlman realized his deception she tried to hold back the subpoenas but he persuaded her to do otherwise. Freamon knew that the subpoenas would be damaging to his colleagues careers and offered to deliver them on behalf of Greggs and Sydnor but both detectives refused to let him do so. When Rawls learned about the subpoenas he was quick to blame Freamon.
Rawls assigned Lieutenant Marimow to command Freamon's unit and his caustic leadership led Freamon to rebel. Rawls then kept Freamon from creating any additional problems by threatening to go after his colleagues in the unit. Rawls however was not as angered as Burrell was about the subpoenas and then offered him a transfer back into homicide where he felt Freamon's capabilities would be useful. Freamon returned to the homicide unit and resumed his partnership with Bunk Moreland. Together they investigate the murder of Stanfield drug dealer Fruit and find that the suspect Curtis "Lex" Anderson has disappeared.
Freamon makes a connection between the lack of murders tied to Stanfield and Lex's disappearance and begins to scour Baltimore looking for Stanfield's hidden victims. He is joined in the homicide squad by Greggs and mercilessly teases her along with the rest of the squad. Looking for the bodies, they get information from former officer Roland Prezbolewski that the Lex's body is located in a set of abandoned row houses. Checking the abandoned row homes, Freamon notices the nails used to board up one of the row houses that is different from the other nails and claims that Lex's body must be in that house. Freamon turns out to be right and then states that every body they could not find has been placed in a row house with the following set of nails in it that differ from the city issued nails. Bunk and Sgt. Landsman initially rebut this theory as they do not want to increase the city's homicide rate by over 10%. Freamon goes outside to the chain of command though informing C.I.D. colonel Cedric Daniels of his theory. Daniels then agrees stating that now is the time to pull the doors before years' end closing the homicide rate on Mayor Royce's watch. Given more patrolmen, Freamon instructs them to look for the different nails stating that a body is located inside of the given row houses with a matching nail from the gun of Stanfield's crew. As a result dozens of more bodies are found causing Freamon to have Bunk and other homicide detectives look for an eyeball witness to implicate Marlo's crew. When none can be found, Daniels puts Freamon's C.I.D. detail back on track to capture Marlo where he is then accomponied by Jimmy McNulty and other detectives from the original detail.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Dan Kois (2004). Everything you were afraid to ask about "The Wire". Salon.com. Retrieved on 2006-07-12.
- ^ Org Chart - The Law. HBO (2004). Retrieved on 2006-07-22.
- ^ Character profile - Detective Lester Freamon. HBO (2004). Retrieved on 2006-07-22.
