Frank Lucas

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Lore & Background

Frank Lucas was born and raised in La Grange, North Carolina, to Fred and Mahalee (née Jones) Lucas. He said the incident that motivated him to embark on a life of crime was him witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, for looking flirtatiously at a white woman. He drifted through a life of petty crime until one occasion when he got into a fight with a former employer with whose daughter he had been having an affair. In the fight, Lucas hit the father on the head with a pipe, knocking him unconscious. He then stole $400 from the company safe and set the establishment on fire. Later, Frank fled to New York City at the behest of his mother, who feared that he would either be imprisoned for life or lynched. Once in Harlem, he quickly began indulging in petty crime and pool hustling before he was taken under the wing of gangster Bumpy Johnson. Lucas' connection to Johnson has since come under some doubt; he claimed to have been Johnson's driver for 15 years, although Johnson spent just five years out of prison before his death in 1968. According to Johnson's widow, much of the narrative that Lucas claimed as his actually belonged to another young hustler named Zach Walker, who lived with Johnson and his family and later betrayed him. After Johnson's death, Lucas turned to drug trafficking, and realized that, to be successful, he would have to break the monopoly that the Mafia held over the trade in New York. Traveling to Bangkok, he eventually made his way to Jack's American Star Bar, an R&R hangout for black soldiers. There he met former U.S. Army master sergeant Leslie "Ike" Atkinson, who was from Goldsboro, North Carolina, and married to one of Lucas' cousins. Lucas is quoted as saying, "Ike knew everyone over there, every black guy in the Army, from the cooks on up." Atkinson, who was already running heroin for his own profit and had links to local opium growers, formed a partnership with Lucas. When interviewed for a New York magazine article published in 2000, Lucas denied putting the drugs inside the corpses of American soldiers. Instead, he flew with a North Carolina carpenter to Bangkok and had him make copies of government coffins with false bottoms to load with kilos of heroin. However, Atkinson, nicknamed "Sergeant Smack" by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has said he shipped drugs in hollowed-out furniture, not caskets. Whatever method he used, Lucas was able to smuggle narcotics through this direct link from Asia, thereby bypassing the Mafia's French Connection. Lucas said that he made $1 million per day selling drugs on 116th Street though this was later discovered to be an exaggeration.

Reader's Guide

Frank Lucas's significance lies in his role as an innovator in the heroin trade, bypassing traditional Mafia supply chains by establishing a direct link to the Golden Triangle. Federal judge Sterling Johnson, who was the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York at the time of Lucas' crimes, called Lucas' operation "one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever, an innovator who got his own connections outside the U.S. and then sold the narcotics himself in the street." Lucas trusted only relatives and close friends from North Carolina to handle his various heroin operations, believing that they were less likely to steal from him and be tempted by various vices in the big city. His heroin, sold under the street name "Blue Magic", was 98–100% pure when shipped from Thailand; since he did not cut it like many of his competitors, the product was extremely addictive and could be sold at higher prices. Lucas also has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million", most of it in Cayman Islands banks. His legacy is complicated by disputes over his claims—such as the coffin smuggling method and his association with Bumpy Johnson—and by the fictionalized portrayal in the film American Gangster (2007), which Lucas admitted was only a small portion true. His later cooperation with authorities led to over 100 additional drug-related convictions, but he was convicted again in 1984 for drug offenses and in 2012 for attempting to cash a federal disability benefit check twice.

Did You Know?

• Lucas claimed to have made $1 million per day selling drugs on 116th Street, though this was later discovered to be an exaggeration.
• He said his heroin, sold as "Blue Magic", was 98–100% pure when shipped from Thailand and he did not cut it like competitors.
• Lucas was convicted in 1984 for trying to exchange one ounce of heroin and $13,000 for one kilogram of cocaine.
• In 2012, while living in Newark and restricted to a wheelchair, he pleaded guilty to attempting to cash a $17,000 federal disability benefit check twice.
• Federal judge Sterling Johnson described the film American Gangster as "one percent reality and ninety-nine percent Hollywood."