FRANK LUCAS
Rap Sheet
Reign: 1970s
Business: Heroin
Region: Harlem, NY
Claim to Fame: smuggled heroin from Vietnam in the coffins of dead soldiers.
Downfall: didn’t quit when he was ahead.
Sentence: 70 years, later reduced to 15
Status: lives in New Jersey
Lesson: You can't always trust a country boy.
Case File
Frank Lucas is the subject of a blockbuster movie, also titled "American Gangster," starring Denzel Washington as Lucas and Russell Crowe as the detective and prosecutor Ritchie Roberts, who helped bring him to justice. In this episode of BET's "American Gangster," Lucas faces the camera himself and tells his story – with an assist from the real Ritchie Roberts. Growing up poor in rural North Carolina, Lucas became America’s most successful drug kingpin in the early 1970s, reportedly grossing up to $1 million a day. His career began as a driver and protégé of the legendary Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, but after Bumpy’s death in 1968, Lucas established his own connection to the ‘golden triangle’ poppy fields of Southeast Asia. As the Vietnam war raged, he shipped heroin to the United States, sometimes in the coffins of dead American soldiers. Judge Sterling Johnson, the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City at the time of Lucas’ reign, called his operation “one of the most outrageous international drug smuggling gangs ever.” Several of Lucas’s brothers, known as ‘the country boys’ became notorious dealers as well. After Lucas was brought down in 1975, he helped prosecutors like Roberts dismantle his own network, but has never revealed the whole story of what he did and why he did it – until now.
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