Wunmi Mosaku is the latest to join HBO’s new limited series We Own This City. She joins previously cast Jamie Hector, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Rob Brown, McKinley Belcher III. Larry Mitchell have recently been added to, Jon Bernthal, and Josh Charles.
Reinaldo Marcus Green is set to direct and executive produce the series.
The series comes from the team behind “The Wire.” David Simon and George Pelecanos are writers and executive producers of the new series alongside Ed Burns and Bill Zorzi. Simon created The Wire and worked with Pelecanos, Burns, and Zorzi on the series.
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The series is based on Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s book We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption.
The six-hour limited series chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. The force was a plainclothes unit that went completely rogue. They began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a relentless drug war and mass incarceration in Baltimore spun wildly out of control.
The series will explore the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.
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Mosaku will play an attorney assigned to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which was investigating policing practices in Baltimore prior to the Gun Trace Task Force criminal investigation. Focused on creating a voluntary, monitored federal consent decree aimed at reform, Steele’s work centers on the systemic reasons police corruption and bad behavior are excused by Baltimore City prosecutors, judges and the police department itself.
Britt-Gibson will play Jemell Rayam, one of the most brazen offenders caught up in the eventual federal corruption case. Brown plays Maurice Ward, another plainclothesman with the task force who was among the first to cooperate with prosecutors. Belcher will portray Momodu “G Money” Gondo, an 11-year BPD veteran and member of the task force, implicated in robberies, overtime fraud and other corrupt acts and was involved in protecting a heroin operation run by Antonio “Brill” Shropshire. Mitchell will play Detective Scott Kilpatrick of Baltimore County’s Narcotics Unit, who with David McDougall began the casework on drug overdoses that set the GTTF probe in motion.
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Hector plays Sean M. Suiter, a Baltimore City Homicide detective who was caught up in the GTTF case and called to testify before a federal grand jury. Tragically, Suiter finds he can’t outrun his past. Bernthal stars as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, one of 8 task force members charged with operating it as a widescale racketeering enterprise circa 2017. He is perhaps the central figure in the sprawling federal corruption case.
Simon, Pelecanos and Burns also executive produce with HBO’s former President of Miniseries Kary Antholis, Nina K. Noble and Green. Zorzi is the co-executive producer, with Dwight Watkins also writing.
Production for We Own This City will kick off production in July.