American Gangster (6 page)

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 across 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.”

In between bitching that the mugshot of him looking “like I ain't slept in two weeks” Lucas, who likes to point out that “biography is history,” said it figured that “the whiteboy press” only covered him in relation to his dealings with the cops. “Once they get you and think you're tame, then it's safe to say a bunch of shit about you.”

One clip, however, did engage Lucas's attention. Titled “Ex-Assistant Prosecutor for Hogan Shot to Death in Village Ambush,” the November 5, 1977,
Times
clip tells how Gino E. Gallina, onetime Manhattan D.A. turned Pelham Manor mouthpiece for “top drug dealers and organized crime figures,” was rubbed out “mob style … as many passers-by looked on in horror” one nippy fall evening at the corner of Carmine and Varick streets.

Lucas reckons he must have spent “millions” on high-priced criminal lawyers through the seventies and early eighties, people like Ray Brown Sr., counselor for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and John H. Gross, a former southern District D.A. under Rudolph Giuliani, who represented Frank in a series of cases. Gino Gallina, however, was the only lawyer Lucas ever physically assaulted, the incident occurring in the visiting room of the Rikers Island prison. According to later testimony, Lucas had given Gallina $400,000 to fix a case for him, and $200,000 became “lost.” It was upon hearing this news that Frank, the
Daily News
wrote, “leaped across a table and began punching him [Gallina] savagely, knocking him to the floor before prison guards were able to subdue him…. Gallina wore the scars from that assault for weeks” but “significantly … filed no charges against his client.”

For his part, Frank acknowledges “beating the dogshit out” of Gallina. He also allows that the lawyer “stole my money,” that “I told him he was a dead man if he didn't get it back to me,” and that “the man did not deserve to live.” However, Frank pointing out that there's no statue of limitations
on murder steadfastly maintains he has “no idea, no idea at all” about how and why Gallina was killed, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

Despite offering “little tidbits” like how he often talked boxing with Frankie Carbo and politics with Black Panther Joanne Chesimard while in prison, the Country Boy offers scant details about what he's been up to in the past twenty-five years of his life. Whole decades are dismissed with a shrug or wave of a hand.

What Lucas will absolutely not talk about is how he got out of jail, the stuff described in clips like the April 24, 1978,
Daily News
story, “Jailed Drug King Turns Canary to Cage 13 Old Pals,” or a
Newark Star-Ledger
piece from 1983 titled “‘Helpful' Drug Kingpin Granted Reduced Term,” in which Judge Leonard Ronco of Newark is reported as cutting in half Lucas's thirty-year New Jersey stretch “because of the unprecedented cooperation he has given authorities” in the making of cases against other drug offenders. This followed the previous decision by U.S. District Court Judge Irving Ben Cooper, who “granted the unusual request of Dominic Amorosa, chief of the Southern District Organized Crime Strike Force, to reduce Lucas's forty-year New York prison sentence to time already served.”

“I am not talking about none of that Witness Protection shit,” Frank declared in our first meeting. It was part of the oral contract between Lucas and myself. “I ask two things,” the Country Boy said evenly: “One, if they are slamming bamboo rods 'neath your fingernails with ball peen hammers, you are not to reveal my location, and two, none of that buddy-buddy crap with the cops. That is out.”

Staying to the bargain has been frustrating since, in law enforcement circles, Lucas's “unprecedented cooperation” is nearly as legendary as his stuffing bricks of heroin into dead soldiers' coffins. Dominic Amorosa, long in private practice, estimates Frank made “maybe a hundred cases all told…. I don't know if anyone made more.”

All Frank offers on the topic is “anything I said about anyone they would have said the same about me if they had the chance.” As for anyone he gave evidence against, Lucas adds, “I've made my peace with them.”

Well and good, but how was I, the journalist, supposed to explain how he, the drug kingpin, had come to serve less than nine years—barely double the time routinely handed out on shitty little possession charges under the loathsome Rockefeller drug laws, which were partially enacted in (over) reaction to big dealers like himself?

“You're the writer, you'll think of something,” was Frank's response. Failing that, Frank suggested I could just “leave the whole fucking thing out … stop at 1975 and make everything else into a cliffhanger … if anyone asks what I been doing since then, just say I was in the oil business.”

I'd been told this would be the most difficult part, that gangsters (or gangstas, for that matter) will go on forever about people they killed, how much dope they'd moved, but as for the inevitable “giving up”—Richard Roberts, former head of the Essex County Narcotics Task Force that would successfully prosecute Lucas, says, “In this business, everybody in this business cooperates, everybody, sooner or later”—no one wanted to talk about that.

“The betrayal, that's the thing you won't hear,” said a writer well known for writing about criminals who inform on their fellows. And, soon enough, Frank Lucas, the Country Boy who insisted on blood loyalty, lost patience with my persistent attempts to get him to talk about flipping. Asked to tell “the worst thing he'd ever done,” he said balefully, “You already know the answer to that so I won't dignify that with a reply.” Later, hoping to get him to open up, I proposed a scenario in which Frank, ever the pragmatist, faced with the extreme “pattern change” of being in the joint for the rest of his life, entered into perhaps the most intense “backtracking” trance of his long career. Was it the simple arithmetic of being in his late forties and “forward-looking” into the black hole of a seventy-year sentence that made him decide to talk?

“Listen, I told you before,” Lucas said, stone-faced, his voice halfway between a threat and plea, “I have hurt my mother and family before with this and I will not do it again. So don't go there, now or ever … don't cross me, because I am a busy man and I have no time, no time whatsoever, to go to your funeral.”

Still, I couldn't give it up. Nicky Barnes, who'd also cooperated, making many cases, had only just been released after serving twenty-one years. How was it possible that when he was asked for a name in a repair shop, Frank said with appalling matter-of-factness, “Frank Lucas … my name is Frank Lucas.” How could he just be
out there
? It was a mystery.

Finally, Frank said, “Look, you want to know what the bottom line is on a guy like me? It is that I am sitting here talking to you right now. Still walking and talking. That is all you need to know. That I am right here when I could have, maybe should have, been dead and buried a hundred times. And you know why that is?

“Because: people like me. People
like the fuck out of me
.” This was his primary survival skill, said the former dope king and killer: his downright friendliness, his upbeat demeanor. “All the way back to when I was a boy, people have always liked me, wanted to do things for me. I've always counted on that.”

That much had become apparent a few days earlier, when I went over to the Eastern District Federal Court to visit with Judge Sterling Johnson. During the plague year of 1976, when government alarmists claimed that junkies were stealing a billion dollars' worth of property a year, Johnson, a former NYPD beat cop and head of the Civilian Review Board, took several congressmen and local politicians on a walking tour of 116th Street, then still Frank Lucas territory. Events of the tour were noted during a hearing of the 94th Congress Select Committee of Narcotic Abuse and Control, a group that would make many key appropriations in the nascent War on Drugs. According to the testimony, at the corner of Eighth Avenue, some of Frank's “block workers,” in addition to “flinging their heads into windows of passing cars hawking their wares,” came over to outraged congressmen Charles Rangel, Fortney Stark, and Benjamin Gilman and told them, with all due respect, “If you're not buying, get out of here.”