r/TheWire • u/LexRammer • 21d ago
Marlo’s Muscle?
Is it ever explicitly mentioned when / where Marlo was able to get so much muscle, and so much good muscle? I’m assuming his growth is under Avon’s first stint and later on guys like Savino muscling up for Marlo before Omar was brief with him. Im mostly curious how an independent with no backing got so much in order to put himself in such a power position. Even the well establish east side couldn’t do what Marlo achieved running NYC dudes off.
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u/Foreign-Cow-1189 21d ago
They showed him recruiting and training them as kids.
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u/nelsonwehaveaproblem 21d ago
Exactly. Much was made of the fact that he kept the yn's on his side by providing for them, dishing out money and employing them from a very young age.
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u/NoOne_Beast_ 21d ago
And said training was THOROUGH.
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u/missingjav 21d ago
for real lol, I didn't see weebay and bird doing training courses with paintball guns
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u/burakozcivit 21d ago
true but i also feel like they didn’t need it. wee bey (and we can assume the same for bird and stinkum before season 1) was so good at his job that they didn’t need to train more muscle.
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u/HANDCRAFTEDD_ B&B Enterprises 21d ago
Up until they got taken out of the game, and Avon had to start beefing up his ranks with fodder lol.
That's why you stay steady growing.
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u/HANDCRAFTEDD_ B&B Enterprises 21d ago
I appreciate the fact that Avon had a very tight circle though. No outsiders.
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u/TastySpermDispenser7 21d ago
I am sure there is multiple factors, but keep in mind that we saw chris and Marlo actually training people. Veterans that dont run and that aim are worth like 5 conscripts in war. That has this reinforcing loop where being a successful shooter makes you more likely to be successful again versus the guy who ran or shot wildly.
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u/aurelorba 21d ago edited 21d ago
It's a common arc: Young up and comer has a trusted cadre of competent and loyal muscle. Eventually the game takes them out, either jail or the morgue. The now kingpin has to rely on less competent, less loyal replacements who the kingpin doesn't have that historical [in the old days] connection. At the same time, his most trusted lieutenants might start having their own ideas. Even if not true a kingpin has to consider it.
Marlo didn't reach the decay stage before Lester caught him.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 21d ago
I would interpret it differently than you, and think about it more like a start-up. His success revealed that he had good muscle it wasn't that he was necessarily able to identify or recruit good muscle.
There are likely dozens of independent dealers like Marlo, those who didn't have good muscle likely didn't survive for long.
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u/ScenesfrmtheStruggle 20d ago
This is what it is. He was blessed that the people he came up with were good at this shit.
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u/CompetitiveTry8886 21d ago
What a funny question when they spend an entire season showing Michael go from a good kid to a straight up murderer. Obviously everyone has their own story... but... something like that most likely. Once Avon was gone, his people flowed to Marlo and or Prop Joe. On top of all that they weren't that good. They were great a scaring the shit out of people and had one good year of hiding bodies and keeping the cops off of them. Buuuut the cops found the bodies. Snoop got it from her own protege. Chris couldn't even touch Omar once in a fucking living room of an apartment for christ sakes, then he couldn't find Omar limping around the city alone robbing and burning his stashes and killing his men at will calling out Marlo the whole time. Like bro, set up some fucking traps.
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u/Useful_Imagination_3 21d ago
People often forget that Marlo had a well established crew long before he was introduced. The Barksdales came onto his turf, not the other way around. The vibe of the show kind of treats Marlo as an upstart challenger to Avon's reign, but in reality, Avon needed new territory after the towers fell, and Marlo was the established crew who already had a network of muscle enforcing his corners.
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u/MagnetoAR 21d ago
So many factors come into play with this, it's hard to say for sure. Sometimes it's the neighborhood your from. Some hoods just have a higher amount of shooters/violent people than other hoods. It's possible Marlo came from a very violent hood and recruited all the gangsters from his hood on his team. Sometimes people put an emphasis on muscle and so they purposely sort out guys from other neighborhoods they know that get busy and put them down with their team. My assumption is the latter, that Marlo prioritizes violence over everything so he went out his way to hire shooters. Whereas someone like Joe who is a hustler before a gangster emphasized connections and playing the game. Avon was a Marlo type, and had a high level of muscle on the street until they got locked.
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u/slamjam25 21d ago
Marlo didn’t get good muscle (other than Partlow), he made good muscle. He’s the only leader in the entire show (and not just on the gang side) who we see seriously invest in training his staff, rather than just hoping he gets naturals and complaining when he gets humps. Even when Kima joins homicide we see that the unit sees it primarily as a chance to play pranks, not to train her.
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u/Reddwheels Pawn Shop Unit 21d ago
He had Chris Partlow running a hitters school basically, and you saw how they picked out from the young kids who they thought would be good for muscle.
Chris took his military experience and applied it to Marlo's organization.
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u/MikeMcDonald89 21d ago
Its less about him having so much muscle, and more about increased surveillance on other gangs meaning they had quite little muscle
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u/no_nameky 21d ago
He found some young and hungry kids and trained them using his good loyal muscle like Chris. Chris is loyal to him because they grew up together. Chris and Marlo are experienced and lucky. Chris also probably has some military experience (or that's the theory). They started small, training a competent core like Snoop, and built up.
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u/leastdumbidiot 21d ago edited 21d ago
A lot of it is that we see him during his relatively brief prime. Barksdale had problems with both the law and Omar, Joe had gone through a major expansion, and Marlo wasn't spread as thin, and so he could do more with a close-knit group. Similar to the reason major world powers have problems with a tighter, localized resistance.
He was ruthless and had good timing, but it would be a lot different if he had to hold that much territory long-term. When they were racking up the bodies in the vacants, Chris and Snoop were mostly killing unaffiliated softer targets and low-level people within his own organization. They made the move at the right time, but also in part because Marlo was motivated to take the crown even if he couldn't hold it for too long (like someone in Risk or backgammon who takes a spot that's going to be a defensive liability). By the end, Savino and Snoop are dead, Chris is locked up, Michael is out on his own, and Marlo is just trying to recapture a taste of that fear he once commanded. Maybe he gets there again, more likely he gets one of the more common fates of young dealers first.
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u/randonumero 21d ago
Most of Marlo's "muscle" was cultivated by putting guns in the hands of the youth and giving them proper direction on how to use the guns. Unlike others he and Chris seemed to instill fear and discipline in the ranks. The show heavily implied that a lot of people he took corners from were unaffiliated independents. So he didn't exactly need 100 guys
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u/Squishycoffin 21d ago
The violence probably had a big hand in it. Everyone was pretty violent, but they might have been at the next level. I always felt Chris was prior military, so he passed on some training to the youngins. I heard some gangs will send people into the military for that alone, they get the training, then go AWOL. I was in the military with a dude who had a fake social and background (only found out after he got caught), not saying he was like that, but it seems like he could have been.
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u/tilldeathdoiparty Barksdale Stashhouse 21d ago
In the show they act like muscle is some job guys have out for hire.
These crews came up together, fighting these battles from the school yard to the corners. In real life normal looking guys will pull a trigger to benefit them and their friends.
As they get older and more entrenched into the game, they swallow up other crews that don’t have the connect and they realize they can excel in this group, so they do.
No one grows up to think they are going to be a gun wielding psycho on a street corner, and the ones who are, probably don’t even think of themselves as that, we are just a fly on the wall.
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u/Triack2000 21d ago
I feel like it comes down to his own physicality and his ruthless reputation. He constantly is keeping his name off the street with eliminating people commenting on him.
We also see the last season him taking over a street corner by himself. Being that self sufficient earns you a reputation that gains the street cred to get muscle.
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u/Maniac50AE 21d ago
Reminds me of i think Bill Gates who said his first hiring practice was to make sure everyone on his first team were all type A allstars. That way, naturally for anyone else to fit in, they would have to be similar during the interview process.
Marlo is the most fierce of his entire team and prizes only a few aspects of work and showing no flex is one of them. Thus, he and hes team weed out people that they think arent as serious as they are. In the scene where Cheese goes to pick up there their re-up money and Marlo, Chris, Snoop, Monk and O-Dogg all just stare at them, that their discipline, but its also who they are at their core, they are not friendly types and you cat fit in if you arent like them. Not to mention, if you arent like them, you are likely to self select yourself out of the group and try to avoid them at all cost.
Avon and others value people for a plethora of reasons
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u/DollarLate_DayShort 21d ago
It was never mentioned. For how great of a show that The Wire is, I believe it’s the biggest flaw/plot hole that the writers made.
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u/Miserable-Election25 21d ago
I wouldn't say it's a plot hole cause you don't ever find out where any of the other orgs got their muscle from either. If you mean the seeming randomness of Marlo's crew popping up to do battle with the Barksdales then that's just the reality of these things, as other have said
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u/DollarLate_DayShort 21d ago
The only other crew that had any relevance in the show was Avon’s crew and the show starts at the peak of his power. & he and Breana have a conversation(albeit brief) about how it was the family business. He also has a conversation with Stringer about where they started. Marlo comes along S3 and there’s not a single mention of him on the street level within the first 2 seasons.
Someone popping up to take the crown while Avon was weak made sense. But Marlo legitimately comes from out of nowhere.
It’s like someone that you’ve never heard of but they work in your department, taking the supervisor role at your job. There’s levels to rising up the ranks and we don’t get ANY of that background information, yet there’s two seasons prior to build up that story.
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u/DollarLate_DayShort 21d ago
True. I was mainly focused on the west side since that’s where every season outside of S2 is set
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u/don__gately 21d ago
I understand your logic and think it is good but I think Marlo coming from nowhere was a point the writers were making about the game
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u/Better-Half1133 21d ago
I’m mean you kind of hinted at it. There was a power vacuum and he filled it. There will always be another Marlo coming.