The New Yorker article says Dylan misrepresented Zantzinger, making him more of a villain and less of a wealthy and influential man than he was, to make the lightness of the sentence seem like something it wasn't. But no sources are cited, so we only have his word for it.

It was written by a David Simon, who says he was a newspaper reporter in 1988 when he tried to interview Zantzinger. The Wire's creator is also named David Simon, and he was a Baltimore Sun reporter from 1983 to 1995. The online version of the Zantzinger article says nothing about the author, but clicking on his name shows it's the only one he's written for the New Yorker.

I was mistaken earlier when I said that the murder rate peaked at 276 in 2004.
A January 4, 2009 article reported 282 murders in Baltimore in 2007, and a record 352 in 1993. It also suggested that nearly all the murders in Baltimore involve drug gangs, as in the TV series.