American Gangster Read online

  “Well, I guess every idiot gets to be young once,” Lucas snaps as he starts the car, driving half a block before slamming on the brakes.

  “Here’s something you ought to see,” the old gangster says, pointing toward the curbside between the Canaan Baptist Church and the House of Fish. “There’s where I killed that boy … Tango,” Frank shouts, his large, squarish jaw lanterning forward, eyes slitting. “I told you about that, didn’t I? …”

  Of course he had, only days before, in distressing specific, hair-raising detail.

  For Frank, the incident, which occurred “at four o’clock in the afternoon” sometime in “the summer of 1965 or ’66,” was strategy. Strictly business. Because, as Lucas recalls, “When you’re in the kind of work I was in, you’ve got to be for real. When you say something, you’ve got to make sure people listen. You’ve got to show what exactly you’re willing to do to get what you want.

  “Everyone, Goldfinger Terrell, Hollywood Harold, Robert Paul, J.C., Willie Abraham, they was talking about this big guy, this Tango. About six-foot-five, 270 pounds, quick as a cat on his feet…. He killed two or three guys with his hands. Nasty, dangerous mother. Had this big bald head, like Mr. Clean. Wore those Mafia undershirts. Everyone was scared of him. So I figured, Tango, you’re my man.

  “I went up to him, just talking, I asked him if he wanted to do some business. He said yes. I gave him five thousand dollars, some shit money like that…. Because I know he was gonna fuck up. I knew he wouldn’t do what he said he would and he was never, ever, going to give me my money back. That’s the kind of guy he was. Two weeks later I’m on the block, and I go talk to him. ‘Look man,’ I say, ‘you didn’t do that thing, so where’s my money?’

  “Then, like I knew he would, he started getting hot, going into one of his real gorilla acts. He was one of them silverback gorillas, strong, like in the jungle, or on TV. A silverback gorilla, that’s what he was.

  “He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch, stick his whatever in my ass, and he’d do the same to my mama, too. Well, as of now, he’s dead. My mama is a quiet church lady and I can’t have that sort of talk about her. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man should be able to say anything he wants to. It is his right. Last will and whatever. Now there’s a crowd, the whole fucking block is out there. They want to see what’s gonna happen, if I’m going to pussy out, you know. He was still yelling. So I said to him, ‘When you get through, let me know.’

  “Then the motherfucker knows I’m going to kill him. So he broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, bam, bam, bam, bam.

  “Yeah, it was right there,” says Frank Lucas thirty-five years after the shooting, pointing out the car window to the curbside to where a man in coveralls is sweeping up in front of the Canaan Baptist Church, Wyatt Tee Walker, senior pastor.

  “Right there … the boy didn’t have no head in the back. The whole shit blowed out…. That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem, but in the world.”

  Then Frank laughs.

  Frank’s laugh: It’s a trickster’s sound, a jeer that cuts deep. First he rolls up his slumped shoulders and cranes back his large, angular face, which despite all the wear and tear remains strikingly handsome, even empathetic in a way you’d like to trust, but know better. Then the smooth, tawny skin over his cheekbones creases, his ashy lips spread, and his tongue snakes out of his gatewide mouth. Frank has a very long, very red tongue, which he likes to dart about like a carny’s come-on for real good loving. It is only then the aural segment kicks in, staccato stabs of mirth followed by a bevy of low rumbled cackles.

  Ha, ha, ha, siss, siss, siss. For how many luckless fools like Tango was this the last sound they ever heard on this earth?

  Frank’s laugh translates well on tape. Listening to a recording of our conversations, my wife blinked twice and leaned back in her chair. “Oh,” she said, “you’re doing a story on Satan…. Funny, that’s exactly how I always imagined he might sound.” She said it was like hearing a copy of the real interview with a vampire.

  “After I killed that boy,” Frank Lucas goes on, gesturing toward the corner on the other side of 116th Street, “from that day on, I could take a million dollars in any kind of bag, set it on the corner, and put my name on it. Frank Lucas. And I guarantee you, nobody would touch it. Nobody.”

  Then Frank laughs again. Ha … ha … ha. He puts a little extra menace into it just so you don’t get too comfortable with the assumption that your traveling partner is simply a limping old guy with a gnarled left hand who is fond of telling colorful stories and wearing a five-dollar acetate shirt covered with faux-NASCAR logos.

  Just so you never forget exactly who you are dealing with.

  When asked about the relative morality of killing people, selling millions of dollars of dope, and playing a significant role in the destruction of the social fabric of his times, Frank Lucas bristles. What choice did he have, he demands to know. “Kind of sonofabitch I saw myself being, kind of money I wanted to make, I’d have to be on Wall Street. From the giddy-up, on Wall Street. Making a damn fortune. But I couldn’t have gotten a job even being a fucking janitor on Wall Street.”

  Be that as it may, there is little doubt that when, on a sweltering summer’s afternoon in 1946, Frank Lucas first arrived in Harlem, which he’d always been told was “nigger heaven, the promised land,” his prospects in the legitimate world were limited. Not yet sixteen years old, he was already on the run. Already a gangster.

  It couldn’t have been any other way, Lucas insists, not after the Ku Klux Klan came to his house and killed his cousin Obedai. “Must have been 1936, because I was born September 9, 1930, and I wasn’t more than six. We were living in a little place they call La Grange, North Carolina. Not even La Grange. Way in the woods. Anywise, these five white guys come up to the house one morning, big rednecks…. And they’re yelling, ‘Obedai, Obedai … Obedai Jones … come out. Come out you nigger …’ “They said he was looking at a white girl walking down the street. ‘Reckless eyeballing,’ they call it down there.

  “Obedai was like twelve or thirteen, and he come out the door, all sleepy and stuff. ‘You been looking at somebody’s daughter. We’re going to fix you,’ they said. They took two ropes, a rope in each hand, they tied him down on the ground, facedown on the porch, and two guys took the rope and … pulled it tight in opposite directions. The other guy shoved a shotgun in Obedai’s mouth and pulled the trigger simultaneous.”

  It was then, Lucas says, that he began his life of crime. “I was the oldest. Someone had to put food on the table. My mother was maxed out. I started stealing chickens. Knocking pigs on their head, dragging them home…. It wasn’t too long that I started going over to La Grange, mugging drunks when they come out of the whorehouse. They’d spent their five or six bucks buying ass, getting head jobs, then they’d come out and I’d be waiting with a rock in my hand, a tobacco rack, anything….

  By the time he was twelve, “but big for my age,” Lucas says, he was in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a chain gang, picked up by the police after breaking into a store. In Lexington, Kentucky, not yet fourteen, he lived with a lady bootlegger. In Wilson, North Carolina, he got a truck driver job at a pipe company, delivering all over the state, Greenville, Charlotte, and Raleigh. The company was owned by a white man, and Lucas started in sleeping with his daughter. This led to problems, especially after “Big Bill, a fat, 250-pound beerbelly bastard,” caught them in the act. In the ensuing fight, Lucas, sure he was about to be killed, managed to hit Bill on the head with a piece of pipe, laying him out.

  “They didn’t owe me but a hundred dollars for the work I done, but I took four hundred and set the whole damned place on fire.” After that, his mother told him he better get away and never come back. He bummed northward, stopping in Washington, which he didn’t like, before coming to Harlem.

&n
bsp; “I took the train to Thirty-fourth Street. Penn Station. I went out and asked the police how you get to Fourteenth Street, what bus you take. I had only a dollar something in my pocket. I took the bus to Fourteenth Street, got out, looked around. I went over to another policeman on the other side of the street. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘this ain’t Fourteenth Street. I want to go where all the black people are at.’ He said, ‘You want to go to Harlem … one hundred and fourteenth street!’

  “I got to 114th Street. I had never seen so many black people in one place in all my life. It was a world of black people. And I just shouted out: ‘Hello, Harlem … hello Harlem, USA!’”

  If he wanted any money, everyone told him, he better go downtown, get a job as an elevator operator. But once Frank saw guys writing policy numbers, carrying big wads, his course was set. Within a few months he was a one-man, hell-bent crime wave. He stuck up the Hollywood Bar on Lenox and 116th Street, got himself six hundred dollars. He went up to Busch Jewelers on 125th Street, told them he needed an engagement ring for his girl, stole a tray of diamonds, and broke the guard’s jaw with brass knuckles on the way out. Later he ripped off a high-roller crap game at the Big Track Club on 118th Street. “They was all gangsters in there. Wynton Morris, Red Dillard, Clarence Day, Cool Breeze, maybe two or three more. I just walked in, took their money. Now they was all looking for me.”

  The way he was going, Frank figures, it took Bumpy Johnson, the most mythic of all Harlem gangsters (Moses Gunn played Johnson in the original Shaft, Lawrence Fishburne did it twice, in The Cotton Club and the more recent Hoodlum) to save his life.

  “I was hustling up at Lump’s Pool Room, on 134th Street. I got pretty good with it. Eight-ball and that. So in comes Icepick Red. Now, Icepick Red, he was a fierce killer, from the heart. Tall motherfucker, clean, with a hat. Freelanced Mafia hits. Had at least fifty kills. Anyway, he says he wants to play some pool, took out a roll of money that must have been that high. My eyes got big. I knew right then that wasn’t none of his money. That was MY money … there’s no way he’s leaving the room with that money.

  “‘Who wants to shoot pool?’ Icepick Red keeps saying. ‘Who wants to fucking play?’ I told him I’m playing but I only got a hundred dollars … and he’s saying, what kind of sissy only got a hundred dollars? All sorts of shit. The way he was talking, I wanted to take out my gun and kill him right there, take his damn money. I just didn’t care what happened.

  “Except right then everything seemed to stop. The jukebox stopped, the poolballs stopped. Every fucking thing stopped. It got so quiet you could have heard a rat piss on a piece of cotton in China.

  “I turned around and I saw this guy—he was like five-ten, five-eleven, dark complexion, neat, looked like he just stepped out of Vogue magazine. He had on a gray suit and a maroon tie, with a gray overcoat and a flower in the lapel. You never seen nothing that looked like him. He was another species altogether. You could tell that right away.

  “‘Can you beat him?’ he said to me in a deep, smooth voice.

  “I said, ‘I can shoot pool with anybody, mister. I can beat anybody.’

  “Icepick Red, suddenly he’s nervous. Scared. ‘Bumpy!’ he shouts out, ‘I don’t got no bet with you!’

  “But Bumpy ignores that. ‘Rack ’em up, Lump!’

  “We rolled for the break, and I got it. And I wasted him. Just wasted him. Icepick Red never got a goddamn shot. Bumpy sat there, watching. Didn’t say a word. But when the game’s over, he says to me, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And I’m thinking, who the fuck is this Bumpy? But something told me I better keep my damn mouth shut. So I got in the car. A long Caddy I think it was. First we stopped at a clothing store; he picked out a bunch of stuff for me. Suits, ties, slacks. Nice stuff. A full wardrobe. Bumpy never gave the store guy any money, just told them to send it up to the house. Then we drove to where he was living, on Mount Morris Park. He took me into his front room, said I should clean myself up, sleep there that night.

  “I wound up sleeping there for about six months after that…. You see, Bumpy had been tracking me. He figured he could do something with me, I guess. After that night, things were different. All of a sudden the gangsters stopped fucking with me. The cops stopped fucking with me. I walk into the Busch Jewelers, look right at the man I robbed, and all he says is: ‘Hello, can I help you, sir?’ Because now I’m with Bumpy Johnson—a Bumpy Johnson man. I’m seventeen years old and I’m Mister Lucas.

  “Bumpy was a gentleman among gentlemen, a king among kings, a killer among killers, a whole book and Bible by himself,” notes the still-reverent Lucas. “He showed me the ropes—how to collect, how to figure the vig. Back then, everybody, every store, business, landlord above 110th Street, river to river, had to pay Bumpy. It was the Golden Rule: You either paid Bumpy or you died. Extortion, I guess you could call it. Everyone paid except the mom-and-pop stores, they got away for free….”

  After a while, Frank moved up. Three or four days a week he’d drive Johnson downtown, to the Fifty-seventh Street Diner across from Carnegie Hall, and wait outside while the boss ate breakfast with Mafia stalwart Frank Costello. On another occasion, around 1950, Bumpy told him to pack his bag, they were taking a trip. “We’re on the plane, he says we’re going to see Charley Lucky in Cuba. Imagine that! A Country Boy like me, going to visit Lucky Luciano!” reports Lucas, who spent his time guarding the door, “just one more guy with a bulge in his pocket.”

  “There was a lot about Bumpy I didn’t understand, a lot I still don’t understand,” Frank reflects. “When he was older he’d be leaning over his chess-board up there at the Lenox Terrace, with these Shakespeare books around, listening to soft piano music, Beethoven—or that Henry Mancini record he played over and over, ‘Elephant Walk.’ Then he’d start talking about philosophy, read me a passage from Tom Paine, the Rights of Man…. What do you think of that, Frank, he’d ask … and I’d shrug, because I wouldn’t know what to say. What could I say? What did I know? About the only book I remember reading was Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers.”

  In the end, as Frank tells it, Bumpy died in his arms. “We was eating at Wells Restaurant on Lenox Avenue, talking about day-to-day stuff. Chitchat. I think Billy Daniels, the singer, might have been there. Maybe Cockeye Johnny, JJ, or Chickenfoot. When Bumpy was around, there was always a crowd, people wanting to talk to him. All of a sudden Bumpy started shaking and he fell over, right up against me. Never said another word.”

  Two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the headline of the front-page account of Bumpy Johnson’s funeral in the Amsterdam News headline read, Bumpy’s Death Marks End of an Era. Bumpy had been the link back to the wild days of Harlem gangsterism, to people like Madame St. Clair, the French-speaking Queen of Policy, and the wizardly rackets magnate Casper Holstein, who reportedly aided the careers of Harlem Renaissance writers like Claude McKay. Also passing from the scene were characters like Helen Lawrenson, former managing editor of Vanity Fair (and mother of Joanna Lawrenson, who would marry Abbie Hoffman), whose tart, engrossing account of her concurrent affairs with Condé Nast, Bernard Baruch, and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson can be found in the long-out-of-print Stranger at the Party.

  Lucas says, “There wasn’t gonna be no next Bumpy. You see, Bumpy, he believed in that ‘share the fortune’ thing. Spread the wealth. I was a different sonofabitch. I wanted all the money for myself…. Besides, I didn’t want to stay in Harlem. That same routine. Numbers, protection, those little pieces of paper flying out of your pocket. I wanted adventure. I wanted to see the world.”

  A few days after our Harlem trip, watching a Japanese guy in a chef hat dice up some hibachi steak in a fake Benihana place beside an interstate off-ramp, Frank told me how he came upon what he refers to as his “bold new plan” to smuggle thousands of pounds of heroin from Southeast Asia to Harlem. It is a thought process Lucas says he often uses when on the verge of “a pattern change.”

  First he locks himself in a
room, preferably a hotel room on the beach in Puerto Rico, shuts off the phone, pulls down the blinds, unplugs the TV, has his meals delivered outside the door at prearranged times, and does not speak to a soul for a couple of weeks. In this meditative isolation, Lucas engages in what he calls “backward tracking … I think about everything that has happened in the past five years, every little thing, every nook and cranny, down to the smallest detail of what I put on my toast in the morning.”

  Having vetted the past, Lucas begins to “forward look … peering around every bend in the road ahead.” It is only then, Frank says, “when you can see all the way back to Alaska and ahead as far as South America … and decide that nothing, not even the smallest hair on a cockroach’s dick, can stand in your way”—that you are ready to make your next big move.

  If he really wanted to become “white boy rich, Donald Trump rich,” Lucas decided he’d have to “cut the guineas out from above 110th Street.” He’d learned as much over the years, running errands for Bumpy over to Pleasant Avenue, the East Harlem mob enclave, where he’d pick up “packages” from Fat Tony Salerno’s guys, men with names like Joey Farts and Kid Blast. “I needed my own supply. That’s when I decided to go to Southeast Asia. Because the war was already on and people were talking about a lot of GIs getting strung out over there. So I knew if the shit is good enough to string out GIs, then I can make myself a killing.”

  Lucas had never been to Southeast Asia, but felt confident. “It didn’t matter about it being foreign,” Frank says, “because I knew it was a street thing over there. You see, maybe I went to school only three days in my life, but I got a Ph.D. in street. I am a doctorate of street. When it comes to a street atmosphere, I know what I’m doing. I know I’m going to make out.”