One of the inspirations for Omar on The Wire was Anthony Hollie.
“Anthony never cursed, never raised his voice. He came out of his house one Sunday morning and there must have been six or seven guys waiting for him. If you go down the street, you can still see the pock marks, the bullet holes, where they shot, and that was a true violation, because he went to visit his mother. That was Sunday; he was supposed to have a break. Didn’t happen. They wanted him real bad, so I got him into witness protection and got him out of the city.” -Ed Burns
Hollie moved to Cincinnati and changed his name to Lovell Love. He also tried to change his life, becoming active in some of Cincinnati’s toughest neighborhoods, keeping hundreds of at-risk youth from succumbing to the streets. He began a performance group called the “Positive Peer Posse” which traveled the country reciting poetry and even won the Governor’s Award of Ohio. Hollie died of bladder cancer in 2011.