Is ‘Dope Thief’ Based on a True Story?

In the new Apple TV+ series Dope Thief, premiering on Friday (March 14), Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura play longtime Philly friends and delinquents who pose as DEA agents to rob a house in the countryside. In doing so, however, the duo “unwittingly reveal and unravel the biggest hidden narcotics corridor on the Eastern Seaboard,” as the logline puts it.

But is the new drama based on a true story? Not exactly. Dope Thief is fiction, but it also draws from the real-life experiences of author Dennis Tafoya, whose 2009 novel the TV show is based upon. Tafoya’s author bio says his work as an emergency medical technician inspired Dope Thief’s plot.

“When I was an EMT in a Philadelphia emergency room, biker gangs used to rent farmhouses and set up speed labs in the countryside not far away,” Tafoya told Publishers Weekly in 2010. “One night, one of the labs burned, and we got calls all night from people asking how to take care of burns. A few days later, a badly burned body showed up in the woods. That stuck in my head, and ever since I’ve wondered how somebody ends up in a burning meth lab in the middle of the night, and if you’ve come to that place, is there any way back? Is it possible to create characters who get involved in that kind of life and who can still claim our sympathy?”

The realism of Tafoya’s stories is a credit to his hours spent hitting the books. “I’m a fiend for research,” the writer said in a 2010 interview with fellow novelist Michael A. Ventrella. “I want to get the details right, and I want to write about those worlds as well as I can. I did a ton of research for both Dope Thief and [subsequent novel The] Wolves of Fairmount Park. I read, go to the library, and spend thousands of hours on the internet trying to learn the things I want to know.”

That research also helps Tafoya get a feel for a place like Philadelphia, the setting for Dope Thief. “As much as I love Philly — I spend a lot of time in Philly — I still need to read a lot, to get all the little bits and pieces that make things seem real,” he said in a 2014 interview with author Jim Knipp. “That’s the stuff that I love when I read, and I think it’s what people respond to. I don’t think anybody has ever taken the time to reach out to me to say something nice about my fiction without mentioning the places that I write about.”

Development on Dope Thief’s TV adaptation got going in the summer of 2022, with Peter Craig (The Batman) coming on board as screenwriter and Ridley Scott (Gladiator II) joining the project as executive producer and director of the first episode.

Dope Thief readers can expect a different story on screen since Craig told RadioTimes.com recently that the TV show only stays faithful to the first half of Tafoya’s novel.

“People who read the book will find it interesting because they’ll find that a lot of the beginning of the book is absorbed into it, and it’s pretty true to it for that section. And then it takes all of that spirit and extends the crisis of the first half all the way and changes it to the end,” Craig said. “Whereas in the book, it’s resolved halfway through, and then there’s a second half that’s a reflection, and it’s kind of a second story that happens. The second story isn’t there in this one.”

As he scripted the TV version of Dope Thief, Craig incorporated Henry and Moura’s own traumas and life experiences into the “emotional sculpture” of the show, he told Creative Screenwriting.

Craig also referenced 1970s crime movies like Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, and the films of Sam Peckinpah like The Getaway and Straw Dogs.

“[Peckinpah] let things get really uncomfortable, and you felt like if somebody’s arm got scraped, you felt that scrape on your own arm,” Craig said.

And in another dose of realism, Craig used this “Peckinpah Effect” to ensure Dope Thief’s characters don’t get away from the criminal underworld scot-free. “I don’t want characters to just stand up and walk away from these brutal things,” he said. “I want consequences to keep accumulating through the whole show.”

Dope Thief, Series Premiere, Friday, March 14, Apple TV+