The star, pot-smoking street sage Skinny Suge, is locked up in Western Maryland. The cameo celebrity, NBA all-star Carmelo Anthony, still plays for the Denver Nuggets, having bounced back from the bad publicity. And the two city police officers called out by name, William King and Antonio Murray, are in federal prison, probably for the rest of their lives.
Three years after the underground, profanity-laced DVD Stop Snitching became a local political prop and a national emblem of Baltimore's crime problems, the producer, Rodney Bethea, is ready to release a sequel.
Stop Snitching 2 went on sale this week. For $9.99, plus shipping and handling, buyers can "pre-order the DVD they don't want you to see," Bethea's Urly Media Web site says.
In an interview, Bethea said his intent is not to intimidate but to educate.
"What I'm doing is exposing the social conditions," he said. "There's a lack of information, a lack of hope and a lack of jobs. They're closing schools and building juvenile jails. I've documented that mentality. Through awareness, I hope to bring forth change."
Police officials aren't buying it.
"The small portion of the DVD we've seen so far makes it pretty clear that these are not people with the best interests of the community at heart," Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon and the Police Department, said in an e-mailed statement.
The trailer, which runs one minute and 19 seconds, features a middle-schooler waving a gun and taking a drag from a joint. Ronny Thomas, also known as Skinny Suge, is shown - before he pleaded guilty in January to first-degree assault - cursing at the city prosecutor and a congressman.
There's also a man firing a gun into the night sky, seemingly for no reason.
The sequel is an hourlong, unrefined look at Baltimore street culture, Bethea said. (There is a brief and somewhat inexplicable departure to the outskirts of Greensboro, N.C.)
"This is probably more raw, more graphic than the first one," Bethea said. "It's a shockumentary."
On the trailer, viewed more than 1,000 times since it was posted three weeks ago on the video-sharing site YouTube, a man dressed in black describes Stop Snitching 2 this way:
"What we gonna do on this DVD, we gonna define what snitchin' actually is."
Bethea's intended audience, "the urban hip-hop" set, is familiar with that definition, he said. But it was lost in translation, Bethea said, as the DVD's popularity - fueled by the brief appearance of Anthony - mushroomed in popularity in the mainstream.
