Bunk (Wendell Pierce)
Based on a real Baltimore detective, Bunk is a cigar-chomping, affable, hardworking homicide cop who rarely serves as a check on McNulty's worse impulses. Though he has his devilish side, Bunk, unlike McNulty, has managed to stay on the brass's good side -- in no small part by steering clear, whenever possible, of Daniels' investigative units. But when Bunk got stuck with the Jane Does in Season 2, he found himself working alongside the wiretap crew, trying to crack the case of the dead girls in the can. He cleared the cases -- the man responsible had himself been killed -- and headed back to Homicide, which is where we find him at the beginning of Season 3. Bunk is married to a wife we've never met, but we have seen him make plays for a number of women in bars; in one memorable moment, McNulty had to coax Bunk out of a woman's bathroom where, clad only in her robe, Bunk was carefully setting fire to his own clothes in a drunken effort to destroy any evidence that he'd been there.

Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn)
"Greggs seemed almost too admirable in the early going," writes acclaimed crime writer Laura Lippman in an essay in "The Wire: Truth Be Told." "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super-Lesbian!" (Side note: it's hard to imagine any other series' coffee-table book offering six pages to the creator's girlfriend to smack down the series' treatment of its female characters.) Indeed, Simon has ruefully referred to the women he writes as "men with tits," and in the opening episodes of "The Wire," ballsy Kima was no different. But her character deepened when, unexpectedly, she was forced into a position of weakness: in a blown buy-and-bust, Kima (ironically dressed in frilly civilianwear) got shot twice, prompting a fight for her life and, for a time, the end of her work on the street. Her partner, Cheryl, terrified of losing Kima, insisted on the move to desk work. But through the dockworkers case, with Cheryl pregnant and angry at Kima's return to action, Kima's dissatisfaction with the trappings of domesticity increased; life at home couldn't compare to the excitement and fulfillment of working a case in Daniels' special investigation unit, of which Kima is a critical member. Now, in Season 3, Kima's work life is peaking. But life with a baby isn't for her -- she can't even remember the word "fontanel" -- and ditches Cheryl and the baby late one night for a trip to a local bar and the temptation inside.

Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters)
"You're real police," a surprised McNulty said to Lester Freamon in the middle of the Barksdale case, after the pawnshop cop revealed that he'd snagged D'Angelo's pager number. Up until then, the soft-spoken Freamon had spent his time sitting at his desk, sanding antique dollhouse miniatures, but it turns out that the man was once a McNulty-like loose cannon -- exiled 13 years ago to the crappiest crap job in the department. But he proved himself on the Barksdale case, finding the only known photo of Avon Barksdale on an old Golden Gloves poster, and coaxing a sweet-natured dancer at Avon's strip club to help the investigation -- and into a relationship as well. Over the course of the unit's first two cases, Freamon also served as Daniels' conscience, letting him know when politics were getting in the way of good police work, and as Prez's mentor, helping the young screw-up realize his strengths as an officer lie in the details.

Detective Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost)
Only because he's Valchek's son-in-law did Prez keep his badge after an unfortunate incident in which he shot up his own car. As punishment, though, he was sent down to the Barksdale investigation, where he promptly drunkenly beat on a project kid so hard the kid went blind in one eye. From there on out, Prez was sentenced to life underground, logging the pager calls, listening to the wiretaps, and keeping the records for the case. But it turned out that this kind of detective work was what Prez did best, and after he cracked the code the Barksdale gang used on their pagers, the rest of the unit began to offer him some grudging respect. Prez soon became the organizational master of the team, and in both the Barksdale case and the dockworkers case, showed a flair for wiretapping, record-keeping, and code-cracking that made him proud to be a police for the first time in a long time. That pride crossed swords with his father-in-law's dismissive attitude toward the end of Season 2, when Valchek pushed the unit to a quick and unhappy bust, and Prez's fist met his father-in-law's nose. As Season 3 begins, Prez's handwritten apology has gotten him back on Daniels' team.

THE WEST SIDE
Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris)
Avon Barksdale is a different kind of TV kingpin: the quiet kind. "It's not a rap video," says Simon on his DVD commentary. "Flash brings police. The guys who are the most serious, moving-weight drug dealers in Baltimore ... they would roll up on a corner and you wouldn't be able to tell them from the other five or six guys standing with them." But Barksdale's cover got blown when his nephew D'Angelo got off a murder rap thanks to a last-second change of heart from a witness. McNulty, pissed to see a slam-dunk case end in acquittal, mouthed off to the judge about Avon, and the next thing Avon knew, his phones were tapped, his lieutenants were getting hauled in, and his second-in-command, Stringer Bell, could barely keep his street business, with Omar robbing his stash all the time. Avon's revenge -- the torture and death of Omar's lover -- came back to bite him when Omar killed one of his men, dimed another for a murder, and came within seconds of killing Avon himself. Wiretaps and hidden cameras eventually caught up with Avon, and though the cops never pinned a murder rap on him, they did lock him up for a few years on drug charges. In Season 2, Avon ran his prison, ate KFC whenever he wanted, and got his sentence lowered for cooperation in the investigation of a crime he himself instigated. Throughout his term, Barksdale reached out to his nephew D'Angelo, and was heartbroken when D'Angelo apparently hanged himself in the prison library. When news came through that Proposition Joe was making a move on Barksdale turf, Avon called down from NYC the scary Brother Mouzone to crack some heads -- unaware Prop Joe's people were in the West Side on Stringer's invitation, since Stringer had all the territory but none of the good dope. As Season 3 begins, Avon is happily counting the days until his release, unaware of the extent to which Stringer has changed the way his organization works.

Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba)
Charismatic, ruthless, and Six Sigma certified, Stringer Bell runs the Barksdale gang with a combination of murderous rage and MBA theory. Despite being responsible for the deaths of many, Stringer escaped prosecution in the initial Barksdale raids when the witness who could tie him to Omar's lover's death, young Wallace, was killed. In Season 2, Bell made a number of moves without Avon's knowledge: Facing a severe shortage of product, he reached out to Proposition Joe, offering him a few project towers in exchange for access to his high-quality supply. He told Omar that Brother Mouzone was responsible for his lover's murder in an attempt to light Avon's man up. And, most damning of all, when he believed that D'Angelo was drawing away from the family and the organization, Stringer had D'Angelo killed -- and had the death made to look like a suicide.

Maurice Levy (Michael Kostroff)
"I'll probably have my B'nai B'rith membership revoked," over the character of Levy, Simon jokes in his DVD commentary. But Levy, the venal, complicit attorney for the Barksdale clan, is based on several drug lawyers Simon and his frequent writing partner (and former BPD cop) Ed Burns knew in the 1980s and 1990s. Levy is a masterful defense attorney who feigns ignorance of his clients' dirty deeds while keeping the organization as street-legal as possible.

Bodie (J.D. Williams)
We've watched Bodie grow up through the first two seasons of "The Wire," going from an anonymous foot soldier in the Barksdale army -- the kind of kid who, on his first trip out of town, didn't understand why his favorite Baltimore radio station was fading out and some other station was fading in -- to a trusted corner man. Originally stationed to the low-rises to which D'Angelo got exiled after his initial acquittal, Bodie became a project legend when he slugged a cop during a bust, walked out of juvenile detention, and hitched back to Baltimore. When it became clear that Wallace was a liability to the crew, Stringer Bell gave Bodie the responsibility of rubbing the boy out. But things started going awry for Bodie in Season 2; his crew got into a turf battle with another, and when a bystander was killed, the police cracked down on the corners. Then Bodie failed to adequately dispose of the guns. Now, in Season 3, Bodie, who is much more comfortable busting shit up than making business propositions, is having trouble brokering a relationship with Marlo.

Poot (Tray Chaney)
Poot is Bodie's right hand. He was Wallace's best friend, and the scene in which Bodie and Poot shot Wallace was one of the hardest to watch in the whole series. As Bodie pointed the gun at a crying Wallace, and told him to "be a man," but couldn't pull the trigger, it was Poot's cry of "Do it!" that finally got Bodie to fire. Then Poot silently took the gun and, with tears in his eyes, finished the job.

Marlo (Jamie Hector)
We don't know much about Marlo yet; he's a corner man for another drug crew near Barksdale territory. He rejected Bodie's overtures for a business partnership in no uncertain terms -- his words were cool, but the golf club he likes to swing around drove the point home.

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