19. The Ghoulish Heroin Smuggling Plan
Frank Lucas got himself a great deal for buying heroin cheap at its source in Southeast Asia, but his chief difficulty was getting it to America. He solved it by smuggling the drugs 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.
Either way, 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. 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.