American Gangster (7 page)

Frank had told me to look up Johnson, whom he refers to as “Idi Amin.”

“Judge Johnson likes me a lot. You'll see,” Lucas said. “I'm lucky for him, because if he didn't put me in jail, he wouldn't be a judge to begin with.”

When I first called his office, Johnson answered the phone with a burnished dignity befitting a highly respected, distinguished public official. “This is Judge Johnson,” he said. Yet when I mentioned the name Frank Lucas, Johnson's voice rose a couple of octaves and became notably more familiar. “Frank Lucas? Is that
mother
still living?!” A few days later, while talking in his stately chambers, the judge told me to call Lucas up.

“Get that damn old gangster on the phone,” Johnson demanded, turning on the speakerphone.

Lucas answered with his usual growl. “This is Frank. Who's this?”

Johnson mentioned a name I didn't catch, someone apparently dead, likely due to some action involving a Country Boy or two. This got Lucas's attention. “What are you talking about? Who gave you this number?”

“Top!”

“Top who?”

“Red Top!” Johnson said, invoking the name of Lucas's beloved chief dope cutter.

“What the—Red Top don't got my number.” It was at around this point that Frank figured it out.

“Judge Johnson! You dog! You still got that stick?”

Johnson reached under his desk and pulled out a beat cop's nightstick and slapped it into his open palm loud enough for Lucas to hear it. “Better believe it, Frank!”

“Stop that! You're making me nervous now, Judge Johnson!” Lucas exclaimed, before somewhat gingerly inquiring, “Hey Judge, they ever get anyone in that Gallina thing?”

Johnson laughed and said, “Frank. You know you did it.”

Ignoring Lucas's effusive denials, Johnson said, “Well, come around and see me. I'm about the only fly in the buttermilk down here.”

After he hung up, Johnson, who still has a rustic dope-weighing machine in his office, a souvenir bought on an investigation/field trip to the Golden Triangle, and says many of his recent cases can be “a snore,” added “That damn Frank. He's a pisser. He always was a pisser.”

“You know, when we were first investigating him, the feds, the FBI, DEA, they didn't think he could pull off that Southeast Asia stuff. They wouldn't let themselves believe a black man could come up with such a sophisticated smuggling operation. In his sick way, he really did something.”

The memory clearly tickled Johnson, who quickly added: “Look, don't get me wrong, Frank was vicious, as bad as they come. But what are you going to do? The guy was a pisser, a pisser and a killer. Easy to like. A lot of those guys were like that. It is an old dilemma.”

A couple of days later, Lucas and I stop for lunch at a local TGI Friday's. TGI Friday's isn't the Oak Bar, where he never tipped less than two hundred dollars, but at least it's better than Bennigan's, Lucas says, picking at his bowl of pasta and shrimp, which he pronounces “swimph.” Scowling through the glare-proof glass to the suburban strip beyond, Frank deplores “this crummy shit” he finds himself surrounded by these days.

The giant Home Depot down the road especially bugs him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn't have collected protection from a goddamned Home Depot, Frank says with disgust. “What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? That place, it's so big, you're lost once you pass the bathroom sinks. That's the way it is. You can't find the heart of anything to stick the knife into. The independent man don't stand a chance. It is a sign of the times.”

Then Frank turned to me and asked, “So what do you think? You gonna make me out to be the devil or what? Am I going to heaven or am I going to hell?”

As far as Frank was concerned, the issue of his place in the hereafter was a foregone conclusion, settled since he joined the Catholic Church while imprisoned at Elmira. “The priest there was recommending early parole if you confessed your sins, so I signed up,” he says. If this didn't pan out, Frank had backup, since he was also a Baptist. “I have praised the Lord,” Frank says. “I have praised Him in the street and I have praised Him in the joint. So I know I'm forgiven, that I'm going to the good place, not the bad.”

But what did I think, Frank wanted to know, taking another swig of his Sam Adams. How did I see it going for the Country Boy after he left this world?

It was a vexing question, like Sterling Johnson said, an old dilemma. Who knew about these things? Catch him on a good day at the home and even the Führer might have seemed a charming old guy, with hilarious stories of the
putsch
times. Frank was a con man, one of the best. He'd been telling white people, cops, and everyone else pretty much what they'd wanted to hear for two and a half decades, so why should I be different? I liked him. Liked the fuck out of him. Especially when he called his church lady, wrestling fan, ninety-one-year-old mother, which he did about five times a day.

But that wasn't the point. Cool copy was beyond Like and Dislike, beyond Good and Evil. Frank Lucas was, and is, cool copy. Braggart and trick-ster, he was nonetheless a living, breathing historical figure, tapped into a highly specialized font of secret knowledge, more exotic and certainly less picked over than any Don Corleone. Frank was a fucking gold mine, worth at least a couple of seasons of the Black Sopranos, Old School division. The idea that a backwoods Country Boy could somehow maneuver himself into a position to tell at least a plausible lie about stashing 125 kilos of
zum dope
on Henry Kissinger's plane—much less actually do it—mitigated a multitude of sins. Plague vector or not, Lucas filled an indispensable cultural niche. Who knows, if it weren't for vicious opportunistic crumbums like Frank, Lou Reed might never have written “Waiting for My Man,” not to mention Marvin Gaye doing “Trouble Man.” On some level, morality didn't have anything to do with it.

In the end even Lucas's resounding unrepentance didn't matter. Former Essex County prosecutor-turned-lawyer Richie Roberts, who remains a great friend of Frank's despite the fact that the Country Boy once took a contract out on his life (“He busted my mom and dad, what else could I do?” Frank says), likes to tell how Lucas cried in his courtroom. “We had this woman testify,” Roberts says. “She was the mother of a drug addict. Her family had been destroyed by heroin, Frank's dope. It was really heartbreaking. A lot of people in the courtroom were crying, sobs all around.
I was crying myself. Then, I looked over at Frank. He was crying, too. Huge tears were rolling down his cheeks. There he was, Mr. Big, who had come into the courtroom like Al Capone, with Joe Louis and Johnny Sample from the Jets, this whole entourage—and he was bawling louder than anyone. I never saw anything like it.”

“There Richie goes again, telling that story about me crying,” remarks Lucas, who says, “but all I cared about was the mother. What she was going through, seeing her daughter suffer like that. It reminded me of my mom.” As for the daughter herself, Frank has no sympathy at all. “Look, I gave strict orders to all my people, no selling to kids, no selling to pregnant women. She was old enough to know what she was doing. She did what junkies do. What happened was her problem.”

Indeed, about the only flicker of remorse I'd ever seen Frank emit occurred one afternoon following a lunch we ate with one of his brothers, Vernon Lee, who is known as Shorty. Known as a particularly vicious Country Boy, Shorty, a squat, bespectacled man now in his early fifties and taking computer courses after a ten-year stretch, followed Frank to Harlem in 1965. “We came up from Carolina in a beat-up car, the brothers and sisters, Mom and Dad, with everything we owned shoved in, like the Beverly Hillbillies coming to the Land of Plenty,” Shorty recalls. Frank was still working for Bumpy at the time, not the giant deal he would become, but Shorty knew what he wanted. “Diamond rings, cars, women, those things. But mostly it was the glory. Isn't that what most men really dream of? The glory.”

Then Shorty reached across the table and touched his older brother's hand. “We did make a little bit of noise, didn't we?” Shorty said. To which Frank replied, “A little bit, all right.”

A few minutes later we dropped Shorty off at the low-rise apartment development where he was living. It was early spring then and there was still ice on the ground. Frank watched his younger brother make his way across the frozen puddles in the late afternoon light and sighed. “You know, if I'd been a preacher, they would have all been preachers. If I'd been a cop, they'd have all been cops. But I was a dope dealer, so they all became dope dealers. I don't know, I don't know if I'd done right or not.”

Later on, driving around the funky suburban landscape, Frank says if he wanted to start up dealing again, “it would take me until about this afternoon.” He says it is a rare week that someone doesn't come “looking for the connect … but that's not happening. I'm out … you know, people might see my shitty clothes, shitty car, and think, Hey, bigshot, you're nothing now. How's it feel to be down? Well, fuck them. I had my day.”

Then Frank said he was late. He had to go pick up his three-year-old son. Frank has several other children, including a “stockbroker in Texas” and a daughter in Georgia who's already got her MA and soon will have her Ph.D. “They're all smart but she's the really smart one,” says Frank, who says, “If things had been different” he would have studied hard and gone to MIT like he always wanted to instead of getting his GED in a federal joint in Minnesota. Of all the kids, though, Frank says his son, sharp-eyed and handsome, like a chip off the old Country Boy block, is “my heart … I really love that boy.” The other day Frank said, “You know, he can read. He's just so little and he can read. He says to me, ‘Look: C-A-R-T-O-O-N … cartoon network.'” Can you believe that? You know how long it took me to read?”

Not that parenting is a snap for the Country Boy. Frank's son, quick afoot, “gets into everything.” For sure, he is not intimidated by his gangster dad. When Frank lurches for the top drawer of the bureau, blustering about “getting my belt,” the boy just laughs. Luckily Frank doesn't have far to chase the kid. The former resident of the Regency Hotel currently resides in a two-room, haphazardly furnished apartment. The cleanup lady was due that day but didn't show, so Frank apologizes if the place is a little messy. If there is any suspicion that Lucas has held on to any of his millions, the busted chair in the corner dispels that. “Shit,” Frank says, “my living room used to be bigger than this whole damn building.”

“From the King of the Hill to changing diapers,” Lucas says in the middle of his bedroom, which just about fits his bed and dresser.

We sat around for a few hours, waiting for the kid to go to sleep, watching
The Black Rose
, an old swordfight movie with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles. Lucas, a big fan of old movies, likes Welles a lot, “at least before he got too fat.” Then, when it was time for me to go, Lucas insisted I call
him on the cell phone when I got back to New York. It was late, rainy, and a long drive. Lucas said he was worried about me. So, back in the city, driving down the East River Drive, by the 116th Street exit, I called Lucas up, as arranged.

“You're back, that's good,” the Country Boy croaks into the phone. “Watch out. I don't care what Giuliani says, New York is not as safe as they say. Not so safe at all. You never know what you might find out there.” Then Frank laughed, that same chilling haint of a laugh, spilling out the car windows and onto the city streets beyond.

The small pleasures of the Big City. From
New York
magazine, 1999
.

The couches in the lobby of the Sherry-Netherlands hotel are comfortable. The Algonquin lobby couches are pretty plush. The couches at the old Mudd Club, the erstwhile punk Mecca, were not uncomfortable. Once, I sat down on a couch in a Maurice Villency showroom and fell asleep. When I woke up, I said, “I'll take it.” The ugly thing sits in my living room to this day, covered with dog hair, never as comfortable as during that first sitting. That said, the most comfortable couch in all New York can be found in a store-front on Sixth Avenue, between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-Sixth streets.

This most comfortable couch belongs to Marta Bravo, who, along with her husband, Enrique Peña, is the proprietor of PB Cuban Cigars, an oasis of gentlemanly pleasure in the Flower District. When Marta and Enrique first opened their place on the premises of a former pizza parlor three years ago, they had no couch. “I did not think to have a couch,” says the courtly, diminutive Marta, who was born in Colombia around fifty years ago and soon moved to Santiago in the Dominican Republic, where she met Enrique, a large, smiling man with double-thick glasses. Enrique worked
as a cigar roller for several big tobacco farms around Santo Domingo before the couple came to this country in the 1970s. Here they realized their dream: to slip the pale-orange-and-gold ring of their own brand around hand-rolled Cuban-seed cigars, the only kind they sell.

To Marta and Enrique, the storefront on the heavily trafficked stretch of Sixth Avenue seemed perfect. The mural on the wall was “a good omen.” Left over from the pizza place, the painting depicts a flock of seagulls soaring over the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, and other New York landmarks. The painting celebrates a sense of giddily unabashed hometown spirit, a sentiment that Marta and Enrique, immigrants to the great metropolis, fully endorse. Still, the couple never supposed their modest premises, where the tobacco leaves are stored in the basement in big cotton-wrapped bundles, would become the marvelously serendipitous New York hangout that it has.

“We thought people would come into this small store, buy a few cigars, and then leave,” says Marta with a sly smile the Mona Lisa could only envy. But Marta, a natural hostess, was not happy to have people just come and go. “When you work hard to make something, it is a good thing to be able to see them enjoy it,” she says.