Frank Lucas American Snitch Obituary

[Music] noted federal informant Social Security benefits thief and one-time heroin dealer for the New York mob Frank Lucas died today at age 88 a man so uneducated he couldn't count so he weighed the proceeds of his street-level heroin business before turning them into his mafia suppliers he once put a contract out on his own brother's life after many years of laying extremely low to avoid being killed by one of the many many many New York drug dealers he testified against and set up for arrest Frank Lucas got lucky when a 2002 article appeared in New York magazine written by Marc Jacobson entitled the return of Superfly which sparked a massive Hollywood interest and in 2007 to film American Gangster was released a massive success Marc Jacobson the man you could say is most responsible for Lucas escaping the roach infested tenement in New Jersey he was living in you know one set next to me in 2012 at the New York screening of my documentary the Frank Matthews story and let's just say he didn't speak too friendly of Frank Lucas now Frank Lucas was famously portrayed by Denzel Washington and it's kind of a perfect example of what's wrong with getting your historical information from Hollywood movies now Denzel is a true movie star and he was mesmerizing as Frank Lucas but the problem is the real Frank Lucas was nothing like Denzel Washington Denzel Washington is likable handsome intelligent Oh Frank Lucas really is none of those things now the three central lies form the premise of American Gangster the first lie is that Frank Lucas didn't get his heroin from the Mafia he went to Southeast Asia and got it himself well that's actually the real story of Leslie Ike Atkinson icaic Anson was a retired officer living in Thailand when Vietnam war broke out in between 1968 and 75 he and the French Connection were the two biggest dope suppliers to the US and the entire world now Frank Lucas may or may not have purchased dope from Ike Atkinson I asked itthis myself he'd never met Frank Lucas one of his middlemen may have sold him some some time we don't know it's unclear Lucas though certainly knew the story of Ikea Anson who served over 30 years in prison and was incarcerated when Lucas stole his story from Newton for the New York Magazine arc article now every single time Lucas was indicted in a drug conspiracy case the suppliers in his case as co-defendants were the Italian mafia in the third lie is that Frank Lucas was smart he wasn't it was his brother shorty who was the brains of the country boys operation I think that's the same brother he put a hit out on at one point and then there's the lie that he only informed and crooked caps well he actually didn't inform on a single cap that there's any record of who he did tell Anna's lots and lots of black drug dealers in New York off the top of my head I don't think he told on any of the Italians who he was supplied by slash worked for he did so much telling that he helped the feds rig up one of the most ridiculous drug conspiracy cases I've ever heard of he testified that three different guys one of whom was a former lieutenant of frank matthews who was the real american gangster one was i think Goldfinger and another guy and they were all getting the cutting agents the lactose quinine that was used to cut heroin back then from the same supplier now these three guys were drug dealers but they didn't know each other but thanks to Frank Lucas's testimony that they all were buying cutting agents from the same person they were rigged into the same huge conspiracy case because they bought cutting agents from the same guy and Frank Lucas told the feds about it now what is true is that his brand of heroin blue magic is possibly the single biggest selling brand of heroin in Harlem history and that's saying something but that doesn't mean he had any special heroin he just cut the heroin that the Mafia gave them less than say Nicky Barnes did his Frank Lucas talks about being bumpy Johnson's chosen successor it's well documented that bumpy's wife and many others refuted that I won't go into that he was bumpy Johnson's occasional flunky now from the late 60s to the mid 70s the country boys Frank and his brothers were one of the bigger mafia supplied heroin dealing groups in the New York New Jersey area you know he made a lot of money but for example that famous picture of him and the chinchilla coat that was taken at the alley fight well there was actually put into what Evanier Jet magazine his pictures were smaller than the pictures of the guys from Detroit that I did another documentary on Eddie Jackson and his crew the documentary is called Motown mafia Frank Lucas is is just one picture among many and the Detroit guys and some other New York guys had bigger pictures okay and Frank Lucas was nothing compared to Frank Matthews Durham North Carolina to Philly operating out of Brooklyn at his peak watch my documentary the Frank Matthews story to see who the real American Gangster was now Frank Lucas got paid nine hundred thousand dollars and a small house was a purchase form in exchange for the use of his name and life rights for the film American Gangster he quickly ran through that money and he spent the last of his years of his life still on the hustle now I'll leave you with this one last Frank Lucas story so you know just what kind of a guy he was in 2011 or so I was with Ron Shep's ik who was my partner with the Frank Matthew story Ron did all the original research and we were sitting in a second sentence little apartment with Ike he was doing his laundry now IKEA inson was a very nice guy when I met and he was living on his military pension because he had retired honorably from an army years before he mixed himself up in heroin business and earned himself the nickname sergeant's Mac so we're there in his apartment and the phone rings it was Richie rabbits the real-life New York cat played by Russell Crowe and American Gangster Roberts had become a lawyer just like in the movie and he spent many years as friends with Frank Lucas and he acted as as as his attorney during the period of the film the reason for the call was to tell Ike that Frank was getting a felony conviction and being put on probation for stealing his own son's social security disability checks cashing them and spending the money and women and whatever else criminals are often in our sophistic low lives and while Frank Lucas was not the American gangster but he certainly was one of the great narcissistic low-lives that ever came out of the streets Frank Lucas dead at 88 not American dope special agent Terry Miller and detective Roger Garre came to our office to break some bread with us and talk about a case they had called Frank Matthews case once they got the wiretap up on Matthews phones the feds quickly realized just how big of a fish they had caught in their net they had a wiretap going and I heard enough to know that we're not dealing here was an ordinary brooklyn-based doing operation it's very huge nobody knew about this I mean you know he was developing in his network he wasn't even on the radar they'd had no investigation going he was making millions of dollars a year and if it wasn't for one cop named Joe Kowalski that investigation might have not have started for another ten years DEA quickly realized Matthews setting up 100 kilo deals down in Venezuela with the French Connection which would have made them one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country already at that point we got calls with unbelievable people which I won't discuss after the DEA office in Greensboro that I worked very closely with at the time got a phone call from a pharmacist I believe in a Roxboro North Carolina reported to them that a black male wanted to purchase I think a 55-gallon drum of mannitol which is a cutting age that's when his name first came to my attention so a federal team was formed consisting of DEA IRS and federal prosecutors to go after Matthews much like what happened in with the prohibition of alcohol in 1920s that gave birth to what we now know as organized crime in this country the so called mafia in the 1960s there became a huge demand for drugs in this country that gave rise to a new kind of organized crime what I call drug kingpins or drug lords when Frank arrived in New York Providence 66 or 67 the city and the whole country was really going crazy crime had doubled in a few years you're at the civil rights movement the war in Vietnam and drugs in 1959 there was about a hundred thousand heroin addicts in the country by 69 there was over a million and most of them weren't in New York area it became almost like a perfect storm and I was thrown right in the middle of that in 1971 I had a front-row seat to what was really going on in the drug gang in 70 71 heroin was endemic entire blocks in Brooklyn the entire apartment houses were addicted and small $10 packages of heroin was was being used and President Nixon was furious we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States the problem of dangerous drugs President called all of us down to the White House for a meeting on his drug abuse plan he was livid with rage when I told him what was going on in Brooklyn we had a heroin problem in the country and definitely in the and heroin addicts created violence against innocent civilians they've come from Staten Island New Jersey Long Island Connecticut when you think about New York City in the 70s I mean you looked over your shoulder three or four times before you got to the train station or your car I mean it was a gangster town you know nobody wanted to go to New York City the politicians made a lot of noise the media focused on that which forced law enforcement to go after those guys that were dealing heroin and of course you couldn't have all that crime without police corruption some former pushers say police were more interested in getting their heroin than arresting them on one occasion I was dealing drugs and they came and took all my drugs and just let me go whose day the police six weeks ago in Harlem Black Panthers seized large quantities of heroin from drug peddlers and poured it into the street they refused to turn it over to police because they insisted police would only resell it to the pushers

Channel: undefined

Views: 666,941

Rating: 4.4626784 out of 5

Keywords: frank lucas american gangster dead, frank lucas al profit, frank lucas documentary, frank lucas superfly, al profit documentaries, frank matthews vs frank lucas, american gangster clip, crime dramas, frank lucas documentary full, frank lucas documentary netflix, american gangster full movie, frank lucas nicky barnes, Frank Lucas Obituary, frank lucas nicky barnes interview, american gangster, frank lucas snitch, nicky barnes documentary

Id: 0qhd6yGGxqM

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019