Over the past several months, I've watched all five seasons of The Wire and American Gangster. One of the most obvious differences between the portrayals of big-city crime is how much more of a role police corruption plays in American Gangster. Richie Roberts makes clear that his foremost enemies weren't Frank Lucas and his gang, but the cops who took his money. The police of The Wire, which certainly couldn't be accused of white-washing the uglier aspects of inner-city life, were conspicuously not paid by Avon Barksdale. They were often incompetent, they were drunks, they were socially dysfunctional, and they descended into brutality from time to time, but the cops in The Wire didn't sell themselves to the dealers.
I don't know to what extent that is accurate, if in Baltimore the cops really aren't corrupt in that way, but I suspect it is basically true. (Anyone with more expertise, feel free to comment.) And I suspect that it's pretty similar in most big American cities, but again I don't know. For all the problems in America's police departments today, this represents a huge improvement in the decades since Lucas ruled New York (and his criminal counteparts dominated other cities). This is in stark contrast to present-day Mexico, where a certain portion of the police is a tool of organized crime in virtually every big city of the country. With the Justice Department naming Mexico's cartels as the biggest criminal threat to the US, it would be useful for city and state governments to consider how well protected and well supervised the police are.
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I have no particular expertise here but would say that a) Beat cop corruption is hardly unheard of in the US. I live in NYC and it's not particularly rare to see dirty cops in the pages of the Post. Higher-level corruption, I agree, is much less common. b) The only Simon & Burns book I've read is "The Corner": corruption is not a dominant theme, but it is certainly present and helps breed cynicism among the addicts to complement the disdain elicited by police brutality. c) Unless one enjoys a pure distillation of every played-out gangster-movie trope with zero new narrative elements added, American Gangster is frackin' awful.
You say it's in the Corner, which is based on the same experience that the Wire is pulled from, so it makes me wonder why Simon and Burns didn't have one episode that dealt with dirty police.
As far as American Gangster, yeah it was derivative and Ridley Scott's not the best director in the world, but it had been a while since there was an update on the formula. It was worth a matinee.
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