The man who created the iconic cable series “The Wire” wants the drug dealer who supplied the narcotics that killed star Michael K. Williams to be freed from jail.
David Simon petitioned the judge in the case to have leniency with one of the drug dealers, Carlos Macci, who is 71 years old, frail, and living an uncouth life of “desolation” and desperation.
Simon reasoned to the judge that Williams, who was discovered dead by a family member after overdosing on heroin laced with fentanyl, would want Macci to get a break. He said that Williams always took full responsibility for his own addiction and never blamed anyone else.
Simon said he and Williams had numerous conversations about his propensity to consume illegal narcotics.
“Mike was always aware that addiction and the impulse toward addiction would remain a constant in his life,” Simon wrote to Manhattan Federal Court Judge Ronnie Abrams, according to the British-based news outlet BBC.
“He spoke of it to me bluntly at points and he never discounted the threat. At the same time, in all of his addressing of these struggles, Michael always declared that he was responsible for himself, that the decision whether to use or to cease using would always be his own.
“When one of his previous sources of supply — not a dealer, but a co-user — was discovered to have some proximity to our film sets, Michael insisted that the matter was to be addressed by changes in his own behavior rather than anything punitive to anyone else. I never failed to see him take responsibility for himself and his decisions.”
Simon continued in the three-page letter submitted by Macci’s attorney, saying: “I know that Michael would look upon the undone and desolate life of Mr. Macci and know two things with certainty,” Simon wrote.
“First, that it was Michael who bears the fuller responsibility for what happened.
“And second, no possible good can come from incarcerating a 71-year-old soul, largely illiterate, who has himself struggled with a lifetime of addiction and who has not engaged in street-level sales of narcotics with ambitions of success and profit but rather as someone caught up in the diaspora of addiction himself.”
Macci was arrested in February 2022, and later plead guilty to narcotics conspiracy in April 2023 along with Hector Robles, 57, and Luis Cruz, 56. He is scheduled to be sentenced later in July 2023.
The thing against Macci is the fact that the trio continued to sell the toxic mix of heroin and fentanyl on the streets of Brooklyn, New York — “in broad daylight,” according to prosecutors, even after they were aware that Williams had died from the drugs they gave him.
