Prop Joe, RIP

Robert Chew, who played Proposition Joe on The Wire, died yesterday aged 52.

Prop Joe was one of the few characters to appear regularly in all five seasons of David Simon’s urban drama. Chew was a mountain of a man with a world-class deadpan, always underselling the character’s juiciest lines. “Gotta say I’m proud of y’all for putting aside petty grievances and putting this thing together,” Joe intones during a meeting of the New Day Co-op, a democratic association of drug dealers whose meetings are run via Robert’s Rules of Order. “For a cold-assed crew of gangsters, y’all carried it like Republicans and shit.”

• Robert Chew
• The Wire
• TV