Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930
in
La Grange,
North Carolina and raised in
Greensboro, North Carolina["Frank Lucas, Between Issues" Metro Magazine, 8 November 2007.]) is a former
heroin dealer and organized crime boss who operated in
Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was particularly known for
cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in
the Golden Triangle. Lucas boasted that he smuggled heroin using the coffins of dead American servicemen,
["The Return of Superfly" New York Magazine, 14 August 2000.][www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/americangangster.php] but this claim is denied by his South East Asian associate,
Leslie "Ike" Atkinson.
His career was dramatized in the 2007 feature film
American Gangster.
Early life
Lucas claims that the incident that sparked his motivation into the life of crime was witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the
KKK, for apparently "reckless eyeballing" (looking at a Caucasian woman), in
Greensboro, North Carolina.
He drifted through a life of petty crime until one particular occasion when he engaged in a fight with a former employer and, on advice of his mother, fled to
New York.
In
Harlem he indulged in petty crime and pool hustling before he was taken under the wing of gangster
Bumpy Johnson.
His connection to Bumpy has come under some doubt, however. Lucas claimed to have been Johnson's driver for 15 years, although Johnson spent just 5 years out of prison before his death in 1968. And according to Johnson's widow, much of the narrative that Lucas claims actually belonged to another young hustler named Zach Walker, who lived with Bumpy and his family and later betrayed him.
[Pg 159, 221.]
