Frank Lucas

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frank Lucas, an American drug dealer, operated in Harlem, New York City. He was renowned for avoiding middlemen in the drug trade and purchasing heroin straight from his supplier in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. As seen in the feature film American Gangster, which exaggerated parts of his life, Lucas boasted that he trafficked heroin using the coffins of deceased American military. Leslie "Ike" Atkinson, a friend from Southeast Asia, disputes this assertion.

Lucas was found guilty of drug trafficking in 1976 and given a sentence of 70 years in prison; however, after turning informant, his family was put into the Witness Protection Program. His prison terms from the federal and state governments were commuted to time served plus a lifetime parole in 1981. He was found guilty of narcotics offenses in 1984, and in 1991, he was allowed to leave prison.

early years

Fred and Mahalee Lucas reared Lucas in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was born in La Grange, North Carolina. He claimed that the event that inspired him to lead a life of crime was seeing his 12-year-old cousin killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Goldsboro for allegedly "reckless eyeballing" a Caucasian woman. Until he got into a battle with a former boss whose daughter Frank had been having an affair with, he had been drifting through a life of minor criminality. Lucas struck the father with a pipe during the altercation, rendering him unconscious. Then he grabbed $400 from the business till before setting the place on fire. Later, at the request of his mother, who believed that he would either be lynched or sent in prison for life, Frank fled to New York City. He rapidly got involved in small-time crime and pool hustles after arriving in Harlem before being brought under the mobster Bumpy Johnson's wing. Johnson had barely five years out of jail prior to his death in 1968, hence Lucas' claim that he drove Johnson for 15 years has since been called into question. Johnson's widow claims that most of the story Lucas claimed to have written actually belonged to Zach Walker, another young hustler who lived with Johnson and his family before betraying him.

Criminal history

After Johnson passed away, Lucas went out and about and realized that, in order to succeed, he would have to end the Italian Mafia's stronghold in New York. He eventually found his way to Jack's American Star Bar in Bangkok, Thailand, a popular R&R spot for black servicemen. Here, he met a former American. Leslie "Ike" Atkinson, an army sergeant from Goldsboro, North Carolina, was wed to a Lucas relative. "Ike knew everyone over there, every black soldier in the Army, from the cooks on up," Lucas is reported as adding.

In an interview for a 2000 New York magazine piece, Lucas vehemently denied burying the drugs among the bodies of American soldiers. As an alternative, he travelled to Bangkok with a carpenter from North Carolina and:

Yes, we succeeded...ha, ha, laugh Who the hell is going to open the casket of a dead soldier? Aw, shucks. . . We asked him to create 28 duplicates of the official funeral caskets. . . except that we fitted them with artificial bottoms that were large enough to hold six to eight kg. . . It needed to be tight. You were not able to slide around. Ike utilized heavy folks' coffins, which shows how wise he was. He did not place them with any slim men. . ."

[Frank Lucas]

Whatever method he used, Lucas smuggled the drugs into the United States with this direct link from Asia, claiming to make $1 million per day selling drugs on 116th Street though this was later found to be an exaggeration. Federal judge Sterling Johnson, who was the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York at the time, has said he shipped drugs in furniture, not caskets. I aspired to have Donald Trump's wealth, and by God's grace, I succeeded.

He claimed his heroin, "Blue Magic," was 98-100% pure when shipped from Thailand. Lucas has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million," most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Add to this, "maybe 1,000 keys of dope on hand" with a potent high, and Lucas thought his North Carolina relatives and close friends were less likely to steal from him and be tempted by various vices in the big city.

With such a large profit margin, he was able to purchase real estate around the nation, including office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles, and a ranch in North Carolina where he kept 300 Black Angus cattle, including a breeding bull worth $125,000.

Although he owned several mink and chinchilla coats and other accessories, Lucas much preferred to dress casually and corporately so as not to draw attention to himself. When he was arrested in the mid-1970s, all of Lucas' assets were seized. Lucas claimed later that he had met Howard Hughes at one of Harlem's best clubs in his day.

My lawyer told me they couldn't take the money in the offshore accounts, and I had all my money stored in the Cayman Islands, but that's BS; they can take it. If you got something, hide it, because they can go to any bank and take it. The properties in Chicago, Detroit, Miami, North Carolina, Puerto Rico — they took everything.

[Frank Lucas]

Releases and Arrests

In January 1975, a task force made up of 10 agents from Group 22 of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and 10 detectives from the New York Police Department's Organized Crime Control Bureau raided Lucas' home in Teaneck, New Jersey. Lucas claimed that the officers conducting the search left with the entire $11,000,000 temporarily stored in his attic, and that only 5% of the money was actually discovered.

Images in the media

U.S. Gangster

Denzel Washington portrayed Lucas in the crime thriller American Gangster, which was based on his life. During the making of the movie, Lucas was frequently present on set and offered tips, such as how to carry a gun.

Additionally, Lucas's former defense attorney Richie Roberts criticized the film for portraying him in a custody battle while in real life Roberts never had a child and for portraying Lucas as a seemingly noble person. In an interview with MSNBC, Lucas expressed his excitement about the film and amazement at Washington's portrayal, though he admitted only a small portion of it was true, much of it fabricated for narrative effect.

Former DEA agents Jack Toal, Gregory Korniloff, and Louis Diaz filed a lawsuit against Universal, claiming the events in the film were fictionalized and that the film defamed them and hundreds of other agents. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. described the film as "one percent reality and ninety-nine percent Hollywood," adding that the real-life Lucas was "illiterate, vicious, violent, and everything Denzel Washington was not."

There is no proof to support Lucas' claim that he once used coffins to ship heroin, according to his biographer Ron Chepesiuk. As presented in the movie, many of Lucas' other claims, including that he was Bumpy Johnson's right-hand man, triumphed over the Mafia and Nicky Barnes, and was the brains behind the Golden Triangle heroin connection of the 1970s, have also been questioned.