Frank Lucas Smuggled Heroin Inside the Corpses of Fallen Heroes
Frank Lucas (1930 – ) is perhaps the most famous African American crime boss, after his criminal career was the subject of Ridley Scot’s 2007 blockbuster, American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington as Lucas. While the movie took artistic license, it got the broad strokes right: he was a big wheel in the heroin trade, and was one of America’s biggest drug dealers in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Lucas was born and raised in North Carolina, and claimed he was traumatized into a life of crime after witnessing his 12 year old cousin get his brains blown out by the KKK for his “reckless eyeballing” of a white woman. After a few years of petty crimes, such as mugging drunks outside bars, he got a job at a pipe company when he was 16. His employment ended when his boss walked in on his daughter and Lucas having sex. In the ensuing fight, Lucas knocked out the outraged father with a pipe blow to the head. Then figuring in for a penny, in for a pound, he stole $400 from the company till, and fled to New York City. There, Lucas met and became the protege of Bumpy Johnson, Harlem’s crime boss. However, Lucas was given to stretching the truth, or outright fibbing, so the details of his early life, which are based on his own accounts, should be taken with a grain of salt.
When Bumpy Johnson died in 1968, he left Harlem up for grabs, and Lucas grabbed as much turf as he could. He then took to travelling, and in Thailand he ran into a US Army sergeant who turned out be a distant cousin, and who put Lucas in touch with local heroin dealers. The cousins worked out a plan to import heroin from its source in Southeast Asia, bypassing the Italian mafia which had a near total heroin monopoly at the time. The saving were huge: buying heroin at source cost Lucas $4200 a kilo. Buying the same kilo in Harlem from the mafia would have cost him $50,000.
The main difficulty was getting the drugs into the US. The cousins solved it by smuggling the drugs into the US inside the coffins of American servicemen killed in the Vietnam War. Lucas claimed that heroin bricks were stuffed inside the cadavers of the fallen. His cousin disputed that, however, and contended that the drugs were smuggled in relatively less ghoulish fashion, in the coffins but not inside the corpses.
However he actually smuggled it, Lucas smuggled a lot of heroin into the US. He claimed that he made $1 million a day from heroin at the height of his career. It was an exaggeration, but he did make a whole lot of money from heroin. He used the drug profits to buy real estate all over the country, including ranches in which he raised and bred Black Angus cattle, apartments in Miami and LA, and office buildings in Detroit.
His career ended in 1975, when his New Jersey home was raided by a joint DEA and NYPD task force, and authorities found $584,000 in cash. He was tried on federal and state drug charges, convicted, and sentenced in 1976 to 70 years in prison. As Nicky Barnes would do a few years later, Frank Lucas got out by turning state’s evidence and testifying against his former colleagues. Lucas and his family were placed in the Witness Protection Program in 1977, and between his testimony and evidence he gave the authorities, over 100 drug related convictions were secured.
He was rewarded for his cooperation in 1981 with a sentence reduction to time served plus lifetime parole, and he walked out of prison, a free man. Lucas was back behind bars in 1984, after he was caught and convicted of trying to swap some heroin and cash for a kilo of cocaine. He was sentenced to seven years, and released in 1991. He walked the straight and narrow, or at least has not been convicted of anything major, since then.