American Gangster Read online

  Once in town, Frank checked into the swank Dusit Thani Hotel, where he often spent afternoons watching coverage of the war being waged a couple of hundred miles to the east. Lucas soon hailed a motorcycle taxi to take him to Jack’s American Star Bar, on the edge of the then-notorious Patpong sex district. Offering hamhocks and collard greens on the first floor and a wide array of hookers and dope connections on the second, the Soul Bar, as Frank calls it, was run by the former U.S. Army master sergeant Leslie (Ike) Atkinson, a Country Boy from Goldsboro, North Carolina, which made him as good as family.

  “Ike knew everyone over there, every black guy in the army, from the cooks on up,” Frank says. “A lot of these guys, they weren’t too happy to be over there, you know. That made them up for business….” It was what Frank calls “this army inside the army, that was our distribution system.” According to Lucas, most of the shipments came back on military planes routed to eastern seaboard bases like Fort Bragg, and Fort Gordon in Georgia, places within easy driving distance of his Carolina ranch. Most of Frank’s “couriers” were enlisted men, often cooks or plane maintainance men. But “a lot of officers were in there, too. Big ones, generals and colonels, with eagles and chickens on their collars. These were some of the greediest motherfuckers I ever dealt with. They’d be getting people’s asses shot up in battle, but they’d do anything if you gave them enough money.”

  Acting on information given him by a woman called “Nurse” whom he met in a Mott Street restaurant in New York’s Chinatown, Lucas located his main overseas connection—a youngish, English-speaking Chinese gentleman with a buzz cut who went by the sobriquet 007. “When he drove up in a Rolls and a white linen jacket, I knew he was my man…. Double-O-Seven, that was all I ever called him because he was a fucking Chinese James Bond.” Double-O-Seven took Lucas upcountry, to the Golden Triangle, the heavily jungled point where Thailand, Burma, and Laos come together, the richest poppy-growing area in the world. By Lucas’s account, it was an epic journey.

  “It wasn’t too bad getting up there,” says Lucas, who recalls being dressed in his uptown attire, with a brim hat and tailored pants. “Maybe a ten-day thing through the bush. We was in trucks, sometimes on boats. I might have been on every damn river in the Golden Triangle. When we got up there, you couldn’t believe it. They’ve got fields the size of Newark with nothing but poppy seeds in them. There’s caves in the mountains so big you could set this building in them, which is where they do the processing…. It was beautiful, mist hanging on the green hills. I’d sit there, smoking a cigarette, and watch these Chinese paramilitary guys come out of the fog carrying these rifles that looked like they hadn’t been fired in twenty years. When they saw me, they stopped dead. They’d never seen a black man before.”

  More than likely dealing with soldiers who had fought with Chiang Kaishek’s defeated Kuomintang army in the Chinese civil war (Lucas recalls seeing Nationalist Chinese flags flying over several buildings), Frank purchased 132 kilos on that first trip. At $4,200 per unit, compared to the $50,000 that Mafia dealers were charging Harlem competitors like Nicky Barnes and Frank Moten, it would be an unbelievable bonanza. But the journey was not without problems.

  “On the way back, that’s when our troubles began,” Lucas says. “Right off guys were stepping on these little green snakes. A second later they were dead. Then, guess what happened? Them banditos. Those motherfuckers, they came out of nowhere. Right out of the trees. Stealing our shit. Everyone was shooting. I was stuck under a log firing my piece. The guys I was with—007’s guys—all of them was Bruce Lees. Those sonsofbitches were good. They fought like hell. But the banditos, they had this way of sneaking up, stabbing you with these pungi sticks. All around me these guys were getting shot. You’d see a lot of dead shit in there, man. It was like a movie. A bad B-movie. A month and a half of nightmares. I think I ate a damn dog. It was the worst meat I ever tasted in my life. Very uncomfortable. I was in bad shape, lying on the ground, raggedy and stinking, crazy with fever, barfing. Then people were talking about tigers. Like there were tigers and lions up there. That’s when I figured, that does it. I’m out of here. I’m gonna be ripped up by a tiger in this damn jungle. What a fucking epitaph…. But we got back alive. Lost half my dope, but I was still alive.”

  Embroidered at the edges or not, it is a fabulous cartoon, an image to take its place in the floridly romantic, easy-riding annals of the American dope pusher—Superfly in his Botany 500 sportswear, custom leather boots, and brim hat, clutching his hundred keys, Sierra Madre style, as he shivers in malarial muck, bullets whizzing overhead.

  “It was the most physiological thing I ever done and hope not to do again,” says Lucas, who would like it known that through all his wartime smuggling gambits, he never felt less than “100 percent true blue red, white, and blue, a patriotic American.” To this end, Lucas swears that details concerning the dope-in-the-body-bags caper have been wildly misrepresented. The story that he and Ike Atkinson actually stitched the dope inside the body cavities of dead soldiers is nothing but “sick cop propaganda” put out to discredit him, Lucas insists. “No way I’m touching a dead anything. Bet your life on that.”

  What really happened, Lucas recounts, was that he flew a Country Boy North Carolina carpenter over to Bangkok and had him “make up twenty-eight coffins identical to the ones the government was using. Except we fixed them up with false bottoms, compartments big enough to load up with six, maybe eight kilos…. It had to be tight, because you couldn’t have shit sliding around. We was very smart in that respect because we only used mostly heavy guys’ coffins. We didn’t put them in no skinny guy’s.”

  Still, of all his various Asian capers, Frank still rates “the Henry Kissinger deal” as “the scariest and the best.” To hear Frank tell it, he was desperate to get 125 keys out of town, but there weren’t any “friendly” planes scheduled. “All we had was Kissinger. I don’t know if he was secretary of state then. He was on a mercy mission on account of some big cyclones in Bangladesh. We gave a hundred thousand dollars to some general to look the other way and we was in business; I mean, who the fuck is gonna search Henry Kissinger’s plane?

  “… Henry Kissinger! Wonder what he’d say if he knew he helped smuggle all that dope into the country? … Hoo hahz poot zum dope in my aero-plan? Ha, ha, ha. Good thing he didn’t know or maybe he would have asked us for carrying charges…. Ha, ha, ha … fucking Henry Kissinger.”

  Asked how he invented these schemes, Lucas leans back in the dim light of the Japanese restaurant and, after a couple of Kirins, unleashes his most jocularly macabre smile. “When did I come up with these ideas? On September 9, 1930, at about four o’clock in the morning, that’s when. The moment I was born … Instinct, man … Everyone’s born to do something, and smuggling dope was it for me. To me that’s the thrill, more than even the money. Beating the cops. Beating the feds. Beating everybody … ha, ha, ha.”

  Back issues of the Amsterdam News from the late sixties and early seventies are full of accounts of what 116th Street was like during the reign of Frank Lucas. Lou Broders, who ran a small apparel shop at 253 West 116th, says, “We here are being destroyed by dope and crime every day … it’s my own people doing it, too. That’s the pity of it. This neighborhood is dying out.” It was Fear City time, when the feds were estimating that out of all the heroin addicts in America, more than half were in New York, 75 percent of those in Harlem. In a city that would soon be on the brink of financial collapse, the plague was on.

  In the face of such talk, Frank, who remembers the Harlem riots of the 1960s as being “no big deal” exhibits his typically willful obliviousness. “It’s not my fault if your television got stolen,” he says. “If everything is going to hell, how can I be responsible for all that? I’m only one guy. Besides, Harlem was great then. It wasn’t until they put me and Nicky Barnes in jail that the city went into default. There was tons of money up in Harlem in 1971, 1972, if you knew how to get it. And I did. Shit, those
were the heydays. That was the top.”

  To hear Frank (who never touched the stuff himself) tell it, life as a multimillionaire dope dealer was a whirl of flying to Paris for dinner at Maxim’s, gambling in Vegas with Joe Louis and Sammy Davis Jr., spending $140,000 on a couple of Van Cleef bracelets, and squiring around his beautiful mistress—Billie Mays, stepdaughter of Willie, who, according to Lucas, he’d sneaked away from Walt “Clyde” Frazier. Back home there were community businessman’s lunches and fund-raising activities for the then-young Charles Rangel. The gritty 116th Street operation was left in the hands of trusted lieutenants. If problems arose, Lucas says, “we’d have 250 guns in the street so fast your head would spin off your neck.”

  Frank was always the boss, handling all the cash, albeit idiosyncratically. His money-laundering routine often consisted of throwing a few duffel bags stuffed with tens and twenties into the backseat of his car and driving up to a Chemical Bank on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx where he knew the branch officers. Most of the money was sent to accounts in the Cayman Islands, but if Frank needed a little extra cash, he sat in the bank lobby reading the newspaper while the bank managers filled one of the duffels with crisp new hundred-dollar bills. For their part in the laundering scheme, the Chemical Bank would eventually plead guilty to 445 violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.

  As Bumpy had once had the Palmetto Chemical Company, a roach-exterminating concern, Frank opened a string of gas stations and dry cleaners, but this did not suit his temperament. “I had a dry cleaning place on Broadway, near Zabar’s. I don’t remember what happened, but there wasn’t no one to watch the place. I had to go myself. Now, you know I ain’t no nine-to-five guy. And these old ladies kept coming in, screaming, ‘Look at this spot…. Why can’t you get this out? … shoving the damn shirt in my face. I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran out of the place, didn’t lock up, didn’t even take the money out of the cash register, just drove away.”

  Show business was more to Frank’s taste, especially after he and fellow gangster Zack Robinson put “a bunch of money” into Lloyd Price’s Turn-table, a nightclub at Fifty-second Street and Broadway that soon became a must hangout for black celebrities. “There’d be Muhammad Ali, who was a friend of Lloyd’s, members of the Temptations, James Brown, Berry Gordy, Diana Ross,” says Frank, who calls the Turntable, “a good scene, the integration crowd was there, every night.”

  In 1969, Price, a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer who’d had huge hits with tunes like “Personality” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” got the idea to make a gangster movie set on the streets of New York. “There’d been lots of gangster movies before, but not too many black gangster movies, and none of them ever had real, practicing gangsters in them,” says Price, always a sharp article when it came to cultural margins between white and black culture (now in his late sixties, he still looks good in a gold lamé suit). “We needed a guy to play the Superfly, the guy with the sable coat and the hat, so I thought, why not get Frank? He was real handsome in those days. A real presence. So he played the bad-guy romantic lead. He was a natural, really.”

  “It was like Shaft before Shaft—the first Shaft,” reports Lucas, who sees a “young and dangerous” Morgan Freeman Jr. (“You know, in that movie Street Smart, when he terrorizes that reporter”) in the prospective Frank Lucas Story. “We had this scene where I was chasing Lloyd down the street, shooting out the window of a Mercedes somewhere up in the Bronx. I put a bunch of money into the picture, seventy, eighty grand. It was real fun. Real fun.”

  Alas, never finished, the footage apparently disappeared. The Ripoff qualifies as the “great lost film” of the so-called blaxploitation genre. “A lot of strange things happened making that movie,” says Lloyd Price, who recalls a trip to the film editor’s office with Frank, whom the singer seems to regard with much affection and a touch of fear. “Frank didn’t care for the way the cut was going,” Lloyd says. “Some words were said, and then Frank is pulling out his knife. I had to tell him, Frank, man, I don’t think this is the way it is done in the movie business.”

  A drug kingpin attracts a degree of attention from the police, but according to Frank, it wasn’t the “straight-arrow types” who caused him undue problems. His trouble came from repeated shakedowns run by the infamously corrupt and rapacious Special Investigations Unit, NYPD’s “elite” detective squad. Collectively known as the Princes of the City for their unlimited authority to make busts anywhere in New York, the SIU wrote its own mighty chapter in the wild street-money days of the early seventies heroin epidemic; by 1973, forty-three of the sixty officers who’d worked in the unit were either in jail or under indictment.

  Lucas’s relations with his fellow drug dealers were more congenial. “It wasn’t one of those gang-war, fighting-over-territory things. There was plenty of customers to go around.” Disputes did come up, such as the one that, according to Special Narcotics Prosecutor Sterling Johnson, once caused Lucas to take out a contract on his famous Harlem rival, Leroy (Nicky) Barnes. Frank denies this, but says he never liked the grandstanding Barnes, who Lucas thought brought unneeded heat by doing things like appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine wearing his trademark goggle-like Gucci glasses, bragging that he was “Mr. Untouchable.” The assertion soon had then-president Jimmy Carter on the telephone demanding that something be done about Barnes and the whole Harlem dope trade.

  According to Lucas, it was Barnes’s “delusions of grandeur” that led to a bizarre meeting between the two drug lords in the lingerie department of Henri Bendel. “Nicky wanted to make this Black Mafia thing called The Council. An uptown Cosa Nostra. The Five Families of Dope or some shit. I didn’t want no part of it. Because if we’re gonna be Genoveses, then before long, everyone’s gonna think they’re Carlo Gambino. Then your life ain’t worth shit. Besides, I was making more money than anyone.

  “Anyway, I was shopping with my wife at Henri Bendel’s on Fifty-seventh Street, she’s in the dressing room, and who comes up? Nicky fucking Barnes! ‘Frank … Frank,’ he’s going … ‘we got to talk … we got to get together on this council thing.’ Talking that solidarity shit. I told him forget it, my wife is trying on underwear, can’t we do this some other time? Then before he leaves, he says, ‘Hey Frank, I’m short this week. Can you front me a couple of keys?’ That’s Nicky.”

  Asked if he ever thought about quitting when he was ahead, Lucas says, “Sure, all the time.” He says his wife, Julie, whom he met on a “backtracking” trip in Puerto Rico, always begged him to get out, especially after Brooklyn dope king Frank Matthews jumped bail in 1973 and disappeared, never to be heard from again. (“Some say he’s dead, but I know he’s living in Africa, like a king, with all the fucking money in the world,” Lucas sighs.) “Probably I should have stayed in Colombia. Always liked Colombia. But I had my heart set on getting a jet plane, learning how to fly it … there was always something. That was the way I was, addicted to action, addicted to the money….”

  For Lucas, the end, or at least the beginning of the end, came on January 28, 1975, when a strike force of the DEA feds and NYPD operatives, acting on a tip from two low-level Pleasant Avenue guys, converged on the house where Frank was living at 933 Sheffield Street in leafy Teaneck, New Jersey. The raid was a surprise. In the ensuing panic, Lucas’s wife, Julie, screaming “Take it all, take it all,” tossed several suitcases out the window. One of the suitcases hit a hiding DEA agent square on the head, knocking him out. The case was later found to contain $585,000, mostly in rumpled twenty dollar bills. At the time it was the second largest “cash retrieval” in DEA history, behind only the million dollars dug up in the Bronx backyard of Arthur Avenue wiseguy Louie Cirillo. Also found were several keys to Lucas’s safe deposit boxes in the Cayman Islands, deeds to his North Carolina land, and a ticket to a United Nations ball, compliments of the ambassador of Honduras.

  “Those motherfuckers just came in,” Lucas says now, more than twenty-five years later, as he sits in a car acro
ss the street from the surprisingly modest split-level house where, prior to his arrest, he often played pickup games with members of the New York Knicks. For years Lucas has contended that the cops took a lot more than $585,000 from him when he was busted. “585 Gs … shit. I’d go to Vegas and lose $485,000 in a half hour.” According to Frank, federal agents took something on the order of “nine to ten million dollars” from him that fateful evening. To bolster his claim, he cites passing a federally administered polygraph test on the matter. A DEA agent on the scene that night, noting that “ten million dollars in crumpled twenty-dollar bills isn’t something you just stick in your pocket,” vigorously denies Lucas’s charge.

  Whatever, Frank doesn’t expect to see his money again. “It’s just too fucking old, old and gone.”

  Then, suddenly snickering, Lucas addresses my attention to the trunk of a tree in the front yard of the house. “See that little gouge there, where it goes in? Aretha Franklin’s car made that dent. I think maybe King Curtis was driving. They had come over for a party and just backed up over the grass into it.”

  “Funny,” Lucas says, looking around the innocent-seeming suburb, “that tree has grown a lot since then, but the scar’s still there.”

  A few days later I brought Lucas a copy of his newspaper clip file, which almost exclusively details the Country Boy’s long and tortuous interface with the criminal justice system following his Sheffield Street arrest, a period in which he would do time in joints like Otisville, Sandstone, Trenton, Rahway, Lewistown, Tucson, Elmira, the Manhattan Correctional Center, and Rikers. Squinting heavily, Lucas silently thumbed through yellowed, dog-eared articles that had heads like “Country Boys, Called No. 1 Heroin Gang, Is Busted,” “30 Country Boys Indicted in $50 million Heroin Operation,” “Charge Two Witnesses Bribed in Lucas Trial; Star Murder Trial Witness Vanishes.” There was also an October 25, 1979, story in the New York Post titled “Convict Lives It Up with Sex and Drugs,” which quotes a Manhattan Correctional Center prisoner named “Nick,” convicted hit man killer of five, who whines that Lucas had ordered prostitutes up to his cell and was “so indiscreet about it I had to have my wife turn the other way … he didn’t give one damn about anyone else’s feelings.”