Dick Wolf is hiding something.

Exhibit A: Actor Delaney Williams appeared in last week’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, “Home Invasions,” as a defense attorney named John Buchanan.

Exhibit B: Actor Delaney Williams is perhaps best known for playing morbidly obese, assholishly sarcastic Detective Jay Landsman in HBO’s The Wire.

Exhibit C: Qtd. from the Wikipedia page, “Jay Landsman (The Wire)”:

The character is based on and named after a real homicide detective sergeant whom David Simon had met while researching the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The character is often given dialogue that the writers recall the real Landsman using. Delaney Williams was chosen for the part because of the creators’ experience of working with him in small roles on Homicide and The Corner.^[3] The real Jay Landsman can also be seen on The Wire in the role of Dennis Mello, first in an uncredited appearance in the season 2 episode “Stray Rounds”, and later as a regular cast member. The real Landsman was the inspiration for detective John Munch, a character from Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, who also made an appearance on The Wire.

Among the discrepancies between the character on The Wire and the real Jay Landsman, the most prominent is their physique: the real Landsman was the least overweight sergeant in the homicide squad,^[4] while The Wire’s version is one of the more heavyset officers on the force, often referred to as “Fat Man.”

Exhibit D: Detective John Munch (played by actor Richard Belzer)––a regular character on SVU––is suspiciously absent from last week’s episode.

Possible Conclusions: (1) Either Dick Wolf murdered Richard Belzer (or is somehow involved in a cover-up of Belzer’s death), (2) David Simon and Dick Wolf have a regular high stakes poker game in which they pay their debts to each other with fictional characters, or (3) Dick Wolf has been reading a lot of Baudrillard recently.*

*I guess that all of these could be the case, as they are by no means mutually exclusive.