When life and art mix it usually spells trouble

The Wire is for the me the best television series ever to come out of the USA. Having spent successive evenings in April and May this year watching each episode of all five series one after the other there was a sense at the end of season five that this was as good as television drama gets and that the series had reached its logical conclusion.

One of the scarier characters, and this in a cast list which had very few characters who had many redeemable features, was Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson played by Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson - no really. 'Snoop' was a hit-woman for Marlo Stanfield, a drugs baron operating principally in West Baltimore.

The real life 'Snoop'  had the sort of upbringing that would be beyond the imagination of most writers, she was the daughter of two drug addicts, born prematurely and raised in a foster home. Much like her character in The Wire the real life 'Snoop' grew up working for a drug dealer in Baltimore and through this line of work she was convicted, at the age of 14, of second degree murder and sent to prison for two eight year terms, she was however released after just short of seven years.

After her release she took on several small jobs, but lost them due to her employers finding out about her criminal record, and it was through a chance meeting with a cast member of The Wire that she got her big acting break. In April this year she was arrested as part of a drugs investigation, once again the line between acting and reality being smudged in the dirt, and on Wednesday she was sentenced to seven years, with all of that time being suspended, after agreeing to plead guilty to conspiracy charges the day before the trial was to begin in court.

Pearson had tried hard to escape her drugs background, setting up youth drama clubs and working with other actors as part of the The Stay Strong Foundation, an organsiation that tries to help young people escape the cycle of drugs and violence and crime, unfortunately it seems that she couldn't escape the very thing she was helping others to escape from.