Frank Sobotka: The Wire's union man

The Wire's Frank Sobotka

By Tristan Pagan

The Wire is a crime drama about the drug trade in Baltimore and the war on drugs failing to stop it. It is about systems and the people crushed by them.

Season 2 of The Wire is considered the black sheep of the show. The first season was critically acclaimed for its great characters and showing more nuance than your average cop shows. So it is jarring when the second season decides to focus on the failing Baltimore docks. This is also what makes the show so great. 

There are many tragic characters in the show, but we are gonna talk about one of my favorite characters: union man and human trafficker Frank Sobotka. The story of Frank Sobotka adds so much depth to this fictional Baltimore. He shows why people get into the drug trade. When we first meet Frank, he comes off as a caring union man. Partying with his workers at the bar and flirting with the shore cop Beadie. This is before both us the audience and Beadie find the thirteen dead girls in one of the cargo ships. 

You see, the docks are dying. Companies do not want to work with Batimore due to the crime and the politicians refuse to do anything to fix it. It has been slowly declining the past thirty years and is on its last legs. Frank is desperate to save his docks that he has turned to help smuggle drugs, guns, and women for the international criminal organization The Greeks. He is using the money they pay him to pay his workers and lobby politicians to revitalise the docks. This shows that people turning to selling drugs and crime is usually more of a class and economic issue than them just being bad people. This is a core theme of every season, but is expanded in Season 2. 

In any other era in American history, Frank would be respected and his power and influence would be strengthened greatly. Now after the government has negated the docks and basically killed the union, he is forced to work with criminals he hates. Another thing that makes this tragic is he really does care about all the union staff. One of my favorite scenes is when a dock worker comes in telling him that he has not been getting enough work to get by and is late on getting paid. Frank tells him to take the day off and gives him money to go to the bar. The bartender pays the dock worker when he gets there and describes Frank as a “good man” to Frank’s son. When the police start investigating him for drugs they say the money was hard to track because he uses none of it to enrich himself and they had to trace it back to anonymous political donations. He is also genuinely disturbed to find the 13 girls in the cargo ship and offended when the police imply he did it on purpose. 

This is not to say he is a flawless man by any means. He is so busy running the union, he basically missed his son Ziggy growing up. This would later contribute to his downfall. He manages to evade the investigation into the human trafficking for a while. It all comes crashing down after his son Ziggy shoots two members of the Greeks. After this, Frank loses everything he cares about. The police take all his money and start arresting the Greeks. Ziggy signs a confession and in one of the most tragic scenes in the series his lawyer tells him the lawmakers have cut all ties with him days before they were going to vote on a bill to bring more cargo to the docks. The picture above is the face Frank makes when his lawyer tells him that. The face of a man who just spent years working towards something, only to see it vanish in an instant. He is convinced by Beadie to help the police in agreement of giving Ziggy a lighter sentence. After his confession, his nephew Nick tells Frank that the Greeks have offered to get Ziggy out of jail scott free. All they want is his loyalty. Frank begrudgingly agrees. Seconds before he arrives, the Greeks are informed he has talked to the police and decide to kill him. What makes it worse is that in the next episode it is revealed that Frank had self-defense wounds. He went out fighting.

Frank is a great character. He is a working man in an automated world. He cares too much for his union, and that leads to his downfall. His death is not just the death of the docks, but the death of Baltimore’s working class.