Frank Matthews Documentary | Al Profit | American Dope

frank had more money than him matthews was the number one he would have ruled the united states he's literally fallen off the face of the earth a lot of people looked up to frank for probably all the wrong reasons in my opinion frank matthews was a much larger drug dealer than frank lucas in 1971 frank matthews first came on the police radar but only by luck well it was rather peculiar i had a report from some precinct that there was some unusual going on in the apartment building in brooklyn this was going on and kowalski comes along he was living at 130 clarkson avenue in brooklyn which incredibly could you imagine this was the same building apartment building that frank matthews was living it well this guy is complaining that there's all the parking places around his house on the weekends are all taken up by out-of-state cars all going into one apartment and he started doing some investigating and he saw that a lot of these guys were big time drug dealers that had charges against them or were being investigated coming from all over the east coast and from the midwest uh and then this was about 1970 it began uh about 18 months or so later he presented it to his superiors and that's when the investigation began special agent jerry miller and detective roger guray came to our office to break some bread with us and talk about a case they had called the frank matthews case once they got the wiretaps up on matthew's 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 with an ordinary brooklyn-based drug operation it's very huge nobody knew about this i mean you know he was developing his network he wasn't even on the radar they 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 10 years the dea quickly realized matthews was setting up 100 kilo deals down in venezuela with the french connection which would have made him one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country already at that point we got calls with unbelievable people which i won't discuss that the dea office in greensboro that i worked very closely with at the time got a phone call from a pharmacist i believe in 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 agent 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 the 1920s that gave birth to what we now know as organized crime in this country uh 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 probably in 66 or 67 the city and the whole country was really going crazy crime had doubled in a few years you had 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 were in the 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 game 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 and definitely in new york city and heroin addicts created violence against innocent civilians they'd 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 who's they 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 uh it still took a little while before he was taken seriously let's face it they couldn't believe that this black guy you know was was working in 21 states you know with this huge network and people were coming from all over the country to buy to buy dope from him in the 70s the advent of civil rights when african americans were becoming more prominent in business the drug deals wanted to do the same thing a study was done in the mid-60s on a single black and spanish harlem they found that 33 percent of the population was addicted to heroin one-third of all the men women and children and frank matthews at that time i think was probably under 30 years old was extremely bright had good leadership skills and had convened a meeting of all of the top african-american and hispanic drug dealers in atlanta georgia 1971. and i assume that this meant that he had finally gotten confident that he had locked in his contacts with the french connection down in venezuela and he was really ready to roll and his goal was to unite and form a family where they cut out the italian mafia and went right to the source of heroin and brought it in and controlled the distribution miami baltimore philadelphia and atlanta similar information was coming back some guy named matthews was behind the local organizations in those cities and he had been identified as a one of the largest if not the largest heroin trafficker in the united states there's been a lot of recent movies on lucas being the king of drugs that's not true and matthews was the number one heroin uh pioneer there was nikki bonds and all them there was nothing he couldn't touch frank i don't know why they built them up like that [ __ ] bombs was supplying new york franklin was found about 25 states had he not been his wings not been clipped in 72 he would have ruled the united states in my opinion frank matthews was a much larger drug dealer than frank lucas so here you have a black guy meeting a cuban through a puerto rican to get heroin from french gangsters the united nations of crime black power was for equality for african americans black gangsters were committing illegal crimes they're destroying the community okay so you know as they stay in the street you don't want to get this thing twisted even though the u.s economy was booming in the late 60s the inner cities were dying just as the black population started coming up to the north in mass industrial jobs started declining by the early 60s heroin is getting popular in places like harlem baltimore detroit and then around 1964 65 it was really growing it was booming like a river of money is flowing because business is so good put this together with a big pool of unemployed black males that are on the streets of the cities and you have the birth of a new industry tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people standing on the corner selling drugs and that's the world that frank matthews took over my name is clinton shorty abuse i was born and i'm a native of baltimore maryland it was a poor community we lived in poor housing from that poor housing we went to poor schools received a poor education it returned us right back into the poor community i grew up on a small tobacco farm in eastern north carolina not far from where frank lived and i actually grew up in sort of similar circumstances you know my father was a sharecropper in 1959 i went to new york as a gambler i see i used to gamble play crap cause i was what you call a solomon i had a lot of sympathy for them a lot of them were extremely intelligent we didn't have many choices so if you don't have a choice you have to take a chance they could not make money in um in the real world they were not given the education opportunities that the whites had so a lot of us took to what was available for us you know gambling trying to pimp women drug dealing i needed money i like nice clothes pretty women they paid you what a dollar fifty-five an hour and the only other way i knew to earn that type of money was in narcotics african-american parents my parents marched with dr king but that became something they wanted for their children to be able to go to college to be educated and become earners in society and the drug guys were pushing heroin well i started in the drug game counter early in the early 60s was selling what they call yellow jackets red devils so you had kids who their parents had struggled and marched and wanted to make sure they were extremely successful suddenly got involved in drugs so it was just destroying the african-american community i went to the corner of a hundred and eleventh street and seventh avenue for 65 dollars worth of dope brought it back downtown bagged it up into two dollar bags if a guy might have been a stick up guy he might stop sticking up and start selling drugs because he had a less chance of getting caught just started gravitating toward that way of life to try and understand frank matthews you have to understand the area around durham north carolina that's where he grew up at and it was a really unique time and place three of the biggest drug kingpins in the united states at that time were black and were all from north carolina it was frank lucas leslie ike atkinson and frank peewee matthews i was working at the supermarket uh he was working over the north durham all of us were trying to make a nickel and a dime to keep ourselves going i met him and we we clicked and talked and everything else and was like two homeboys durham north carolina is deep with rich black history some of the firsts in the united states of america colored negro afro-american black who did what they did came from durham durham was called the uh the black wall street we had our own shoe shine that was our own insurance companies our own banks we had our own schools we had our own fire department i'm at scarborough and hargett funeral home family business in durham started out in 1871. we're the fifth oldest black funeral home in the united states me just being a southern country boy i thought black and white relations was great a lot of blacks in durham had a lot of money it was very wealthy blacks in durham we had three white businesses one oriental restaurant 125 black businesses but durham in comparison to other cities in the south was not a rampant racist place no murders no hangings no legends whole atmosphere durham in the 50s and 60s gave us the incentive to uh try to achieve more and i would always use the word the godfather the godfather of the black community back in the late 1800s was the man himself washington duke of duke university the high school frank attended produced many notable people and it sent most of his graduates onto college and now i came from a family of 13 and out of our 13 12 of us went to college he came from a thriving community that produced a lot of people that really succeeded in mainstream society now why he chose to take the path he did is probably a secret we'll never know uh my classmate shirley caesar gospel c uh ernie ernie barnes the artist my classmates they got a 325 people out of my graduating class from hillside i think 300 of us went to college the briefs written for the supreme court decision of desegregation north carolina college of durham we knew we had to be the best we were taught that by our parents it wasn't unusual for young blacks in that day to want to move up and build themselves they all wanted to make it big ironically frank matthews only real conviction that we know of was for stealing chickens down in durham when he was a teenager you know i think it was spring of 1961 i know it was a real pretty saturday afternoon me and one of my partners received a call down to the old farm exchange poultry department student chicken saw a young black male running through the woods behind some houses back toward canal street in durham saw the young gentleman come up to our house on canal street and uh we approached him and we incidentally we arrested him for stealing chickens that day that i that all of us were thieves per se because all of us made a side hustle here and there but no he just got i the rumor was he got arrested for stealing chicken he may have gotten caught but he wasn't going to win the snow chickens at the pharmacy no the best thing remember we said to the judge that he was cooperative with us and being a 16 year old i think the judge slapped him on the back of his hand and he left durham probably the year after he was arrested here so frank leaves durham as a teenager and he goes to philadelphia he stays there briefly it appears he got in some kind of trouble for running numbers there but probably not convicted of anything and he left philadelphia and he goes to bedstad brooklyn becomes a barber barbershop is a perfect place to keep running numbers if you wanted to be a big time gangster where would you go you'd go to new york city he started off as a barber bedford stuyvesant met a big time numbers king because of frank's personality i guess took him under his wing and tried to get him introduced to the italians so that frank could get into the drug trade it's very unclear what happened at the meeting i believe it was with the gambino crime family and uh they turned him down for whatever reason and so frank for all intents and purposes should have been shot out of the drug trade and maybe end up as a low-ranking member of the trade like most blacks at that time at that time we really didn't believe that the ethnic backgrounds of these people in the inner cities didn't give them the power to do the things the mafia did it was a monopoly it's one of the biggest monopolies in history 95 percent of the of the heroin coming into the united states at that time uh came through the so-called french connection you had poppies in turkey you had the laboratories in marseille and you had the distribution network through montreal and new york city through the puerto rican numbers dealer frank met another contact rolando gonzalez who was cuban gonzalez got indicted in new york and fled to venezuela but before he left he sold frank his first kilo of drugs frank was off and run rolando an astute dealer too uh wanted to meet frank so gonzalez gets down to venezuela and he hooks up with the remnants of the french connection frank was going down there at one time for other people than himself then frank showed up alone and then he became so powerful that they decided to work with him frank is on his own and he's getting heroin directly from the french connection the only black guy the only non-mafia person really in the united states to be dealing directly with the french connection a drug connection was was sacred if you had a drug connection man you know you you had something going on he did go down to venezuela caracas and he was awaiting the delivery of uh 60 pounds of of heroin it was really a golden time to be a drug dealer the u.s economy was hitting on all cylinders the streets were full of money so any night of the week everybody got has on their jewelry they furs or sometimes they diamonds they cars they come up they look and hang out the women on any given night frank matthews nikki barnes phoebe kirkland uh you know all the players it was a joyous time in new york everybody was making money everybody was happy people running from this place to that place uh it was just marvelous it was a marvelous place to be and then you had a lot of nightclubs in new york that were so fabulous you had a bell cooking candle on 58th street you had a wilt smalls paradise you know because all the cuties would be there all the players would ride through and those are all in harlem you know i'm i'm a harlem knight [Music] frank was supplying the biggest drug dealers in philadelphia baltimore pittsburgh atlanta boston new haven connecticut miami new orleans all over the country uh in terms of the new york scene he's he's definitely the biggest gangster that came out of new york and he may be the biggest gangster period now i i have never seen uh uh frank with any any money or doing any deals or anything like that his relationship with me was one good friend to another good friend his word and my word he was a guy that had great leadership skills and knew how to control a product make distribution all along the east coast and control an organization through violence and intimidation because i don't know what frank did for a living but i know he was always there for me if i needed him within a couple of years he was one of the biggest drug dealers in the history of the of the country and it's really amazing i mean dea had information he was getting heroin and up to 100 kilo increments pure heroin from the french connection by the time those hit the street at say 10 purity that means 100 keys is a thousand keys and if they're twenty thousand dollars each wholesale has twenty million dollars you know we talk about frank lucas right we talk about nikki barnes they were essentially new york dealers new jersey dealers that's all i heard nikki this nicki that nikki nikki nikki i didn't really get an understanding about frank until i rose in this lifestyle he wasn't investigated he probably would have set up a truly national and then eventually an international network that would have just boggled the mind he was in a league of his own and he was a top not only an organizer but a businessman he saw himself as that he posed as a real estate developer which was a front but he bought a whole series of parcels of land where he was informed the federal highway was going to go in had that gone through he would have been a multi-multi-millionaire just on the real estate this is a story that i know to be true you know because i was there when the gentleman asked him and reminded him he had given a million dollars to a friend to hold disappeared again so when the gentleman sees him again he say frank when you gonna come get that money and franco what money he says yo man you remember you gave me the shopping bag those shopping bags that money he said i'll come get it in a week or so so how much money does he have when i first met him his name was not out there like that but that the years went like a couple years later 68 69 his name was ringing like doorbells word was in durham he was taken over the black mafia was the word in durham that was the way it was described back to us at the police department and i said not little frankie ain't nowhere in the world he could get that big and he did first time i saw him he was just like a little a country boy to me bad shirt i think it was on lennox avenue and 140 something street and i started you know following frank was doing a walk and talk with somebody on the street and i'm watching the movements of frank and i smack right into a car frank came over and and said these damn photographers you know with damn drivers uh honky drivers uh i'll tell you he was out in front of us all the time i hate to say it i i'd say he was definitely smarter than frank okay frank lucas yeah uh definitely you know the reports are he controlled eastern seaboard and so he was definitely a leader at a at a very young age he had this penchant for blondes befriended one bought her an apartment uh but beat the hell out of her at one time he had too much coke in him the same time he had a commonwealth wife named barbara hidden he was married and had three children frank's appetite for women was legendary he supposedly had girlfriends all over the country but he still maintained a fairly normal home life with barbara hinton and his kids and barbara hinton even hired a tutor to come into the house like you know any typical middle class mother to to help the kids after school i started teaching in brooklyn in 1968 i taught elementary school grade four at the time and around 1971 i started working for a tutoring service in brooklyn and one of the clients that we had was the what i call the matthew family and i was sent there probably because i lived and worked in the area where they lived they lived in flatbush i lived in flatbush and worked in the flatbush area so i was probably the closest tutor and i was sent to their home in the apartment on clarkson avenue as very nice boys very well behaved did the work in all honesty i don't know that they necessarily needed tutoring per se i was paid weekly yes i was paid a hundred dollars for the week so i never really got into what mr what mr matthews was doing um at one time she once mentioned to me something about we're in real estate and then i just assumed that they were in real estate rang the bell and the door opened and it actually was frank matt who now i know was frank matthews and he told me that the family would be there in a few minutes that was you know they were out whatever they were doing and i should come in by this time frank is generating unheard of amounts of cash the feds heard them on a wiretap uh it's some deal in a hotel in the bronx uh talking about having four million dollars in cash with them it was right by the 41st precinct there was a stadium motel he put four million dollars on a table at one time and he bragged about this and he says let me see if you can match this and nobody could at the time now four million dollars in cash in 1971 or two is like 25 million dollars now so those are the amounts of money frank matthews was was using uh on a on a daily basis uh the police really started to get a sense of what was going on the scope of frank's operation when they raided an apartment that proudly belonged to his lieutenant mickey beckwith in brooklyn uh they nicknamed it the ponderosa the ponderosa is where they would process the heroin and and it would this is a classic he would have them at the table with no clothes on and and they were cutting up drugs with the with the deck of cards and filling the glassine envelopes to make ten thousand twenty thousand bags uh a night the drug cutters would work uh at the ponderosa which was one on one east 56th street at the time we called the ponderosa we were bagging up cutting dope it took us an hour to get through the doors uh we finally had to break a wall down that's when we realized and and and the bosses realized that he was not just a street dealer he was an international trafficker they cut so much dope into ponderosa that when the police raided it they found a half kilo in residue just left on the floor they're mixing the drugs with paddles from canoes 2 million glassy envelopes 10 worth of heroin in each one is 25 million dollars they were going to pack up in that one location the drug cutters would work for 24 36 hours straight one dea document i saw talked about the time when one of frank's cutters died in the ponderosa because he had inhaled too much heroin and the confidential informant told him that when the police came frank came outside and told him he was gonna handle it and to leave and they did one of the dea case agents told me at the time trying to make a case on on frank matthews was like trying to arrest god so francis are playing the biggest drug dealers in most of the cities up and down the east coast philadelphia was probably his biggest stronghold he worked with people like major coxswain cadillac tommy farrington who came up with durham north carolina john pop darby who became his right-hand man and tyrone mr millionaire palmer but there are a lot of people even in the frank's organ organization that were killed and executed in philadelphia at the time philly's drug underworld was under siege by a group calling themselves the black mafia philadelphia and obvious section they cut a drug needle's head off and put his head on the outside window rail of a bar where drug drug deals hung out the black mafia were a nation of islam members that operated out of temple number 12 in philadelphia they were extorting drug dealers they were selling drugs themselves they were involved in a lot a lot of murders the black mafia you know resented the fact that frank was trying to set up franchises which what they were he was trying to franchise his operation did he pull the trigger no did violence bother him not at all and he had underlings like beckwith and pop darby and a lot of other people could have easily whacked anybody they wanted to and they did of course we know that but matthews himself was kind of a star in his own right and uh you couldn't really associate him with pulling the trigger or shoving a knife in somebody well i used to see frank at a lap was in atlantic city at the club harlem somehow uh tyrone mr millionaire palmer got enmeshed with the black mafia and a deal for a quarter million dollars of cocaine where either he paid them to do a hit on somebody or they felt like he owed them some money because the deal got messed up so on easter sunday 72 the philly black mafia finds tyrone palmer inside the club harlem in atlantic city which is someplace frank liked to hang out at but he didn't happen to be there that night but tyrone palmer was philly black mafia pulls out their guns huge shootout in front of hundreds of witnesses they killed tyrone palmer his bodyguard and three women that are with them the witnesses are also terrified no one ever comes forward so no one's ever arrested and convicted for the crime it was on an easter sunday morning we would get ready to leave out of there when uh when he got killed we had just left from that area when when a fat tie they call him but i think they killed him out of jealousy that black mafia was leaning on everybody at that time you know you if you didn't give him some money you couldn't operate in philly ain't too much change about that right now as we speak the violence got so bad that matthews uh had uh pop darby come up to new york to live so he'd be out of the way of harm down in philly and continue to run his operation from new york it got interesting when when more murders came in more murders that frank had committed or had something to do with turk scout was a senator from from baltimore and frank had him killed frank didn't trust him i don't think he was a homeboy to tell you the truth some law enforcement feel like matthew's had something to do with turk scott's death but it doesn't appear so there's actually a guy named sherman dobson who was the son of a prominent minister in baltimore who was implicated in the killing and he said he did it on behalf of black october which is a black muslim group that supposedly wanted to rid the streets of drug dealers who were harming the community now in an interesting aside sherman dobson's cousin was tamara dobson who was the star of the black exploitation movie cleopatra jones baltimore was another one of frank's strongholds and it really gives you a good idea of how big he was when you talk to two of his chief chief contacts down there big head brother and liddy jones those guys are legends in baltimore but to them frank matthews is a legend we knew that he had a a couple of contacts in in baltimore named brother carter and liddy jones i met frank matthews to a guy named reggie mason and he bought him by my house i got my drugs with nineteen thousand a kilo he had a better price than anyone for me i really riches big head brother is so well known in baltimore i mean he's been name checked on the wire all the more alone on millions i was getting big money at the time i supplied all of baltimore though for records mr jones bill jones he would give me a lot of drugs but he wasn't giving me enough so i had a girlfriend named [Music] brenda brenda piggy she said i know somebody in brooklyn they get you all the drugs you want i said you know in brooklyn he said mickey make it backward he told he said well i'm gonna give him five keys just give me 22 thousand for a key i used to cut it and sell a key and hold a kid so i was making real good money he was like a shakespearean character he had so many so many elements to his personality everybody that talks about him has something different to say a friend of mine he came to see a gentleman who i was working for at the time he gave him forty thousand dollars and was supposed to meet us at a certain time to pick up his product now he's just throwing us a bone you know looking out for us young you know y'all hustling here take this money i get a little pie from y'all he forgot all about it gave us forty thousand dollars didn't come to the meet maybe four months later my man tell him y'all come get that money later on he told him keep it as his fortunes grew he became more extravagant in his taste and in his personality and in the way he treated people i owed him about 60 thousand miles at one time so i got it in my car i keep trying to get to him so when i did get him he said man what you keep calling me for i said you man you know what's up he said punk is you he said look if you broke keep it [ __ ] if you broke keep it i don't wanna hear that this business brings out the best in some people and it brings out the worst in some people a rolls royce pulled up uh from jamaica and then frank went around to the back of his car took out a kilo a kilo an unwrapped marked kilo with his fingerprints on and all and threw it over to the guy in the in the car the guy put it in the trunk of the car frank closed his trunk uh that's how that's how balls he was by the late 60s 69 70 everybody knew who he was and what he was about how could this one guy know so many people he was everywhere he was in las vegas he went to atlantic city he was in harlem uh you know he was in brooklyn and and people everywhere took to him you know they liked him and i didn't know how to get in touch with him at all but he always knew where to find me or find whatever and in those days frank would come to durham often frank would come back driving big automobiles cadillac's roll royce you know almost anything and i always dress nice even though what he was doing was wrong but you know he made it possible for a lot of people to have a lot of things and and if it wasn't for him i wouldn't finish my last year of law school because he came to durham and understood that i was in a problem and he helped me tremendously financially he financially and uh and marley he uh he talked to me and told me what what i was geared to be and what uh what he felt that i should do he trusted his his own kind the people that came out of durham a gentleman came on the police department no one called his name but he ended up marrying frank he called it frank's sister but it was actually his aunt because frank was raised by his grandmother this officer i was his sergeant anytime we worked the midnight shift he would always want to take off on saturday or friday night and go to new york i said well what are you doing in new york he said my wife's nephew owns a bunch of apartments in new york and we're going from county's rent money well but then talk was out in durham that frank was probably a drug dealer in new york city i had suspicion that the police officer that worked with me he would have had to have known something here we come to yet another unbelievable chapter and the saga of frank matthews in 71 he decided to build himself a house so he goes to this neighborhood called tote hill and staten island mrs matthews told me that within a few months they'd be moving to staten island and they have building a house on toad hill and she wanted to know if i'd be interested in coming out there and i said i would be he lived in todd hill staten island which even to this day is a very high profile neighborhood frank was the only black guy living in that neighborhood and beautiful house circular driveway i don't know i i don't know houses i know it's colonial or whatever but it's just a magnificently beautiful house from the outside of hotel i i saw something in the bathroom i never saw before which were hand-painted sinks the sinks were hand-painted there were paintings in this thing which is something i came home and told my wife i just never saw something like that before and it was just absolutely beautiful and tasteful very tasteful i'm joan diamond and my husband keith diamond worked for frank matthews um in 1972 i gave birth to twin fraternal twin sons and she was just saying oh how great it is and you know that she has young children too and being very nice to me and congratulating me that's wonderful that you had twins and about a week later after she called me i get this package came to my door and i opened it up and it was from haran and and frank matthews and it was um two covers for the cribs like quilts and pillow shams for pillows and they were magnificent they were they were beautiful they were something that you would buy like in a very expensive department store and i was like a little bit taken back that it was just this was like really like an expensive gift from just someone who is basically a stranger to me and i had just bought a new car i bought a new chevrolet malibu in 1972 and i pulled up in the car and i was walking up to the driveway and he said to me oh you bought a new car it looks like a new car and i said yes and he said to me you could probably get three thousand dollars for that car i bought the car for 4 200. it was a brand new car i said yes i guess i could get three thousand he says well bring me the three thousand dollars and you can pick any car you want in the driveway he said you could pick one of my cars so in that sense he is very nice to me it was something that i did not want to get involved with but but in that sense he was very nice to me so guess who two of his neighbors were in toad hill and when i say neighbors i don't mean around the corner i mean next door and across the street tommy three fingers lucchese founder of the luchazi crime family and big paul castellano who was the underboss of the gambinos later went on to become the boss he was killed by john daddy when gaddy took over the gambinos and why would frank want to live in a neighborhood that had two of the biggest mobsters italian mobsters at that time on the scene so we had two very angry italian mafia chieftains uh looking at his lavish outdoor parties noisy parties every night and these these lucos and oster guys were bosses and they kept very very low profiles and here's matthew showing up in his usual uh rolls royce and all kinds of things going on the italians were racist you know and they didn't like blacks especially so-called uppity blacks like frank matthews asserting themselves let alone living in their midst frank at this time was telling people that carlo gambino the head of the gambino family the head of the mafia commission had told paul castellano to give the dea information about the license plates of all the cars that were coming to frank's house and somebody was giving anonymous information in fact the intelligence was pouring in surreptitiously from somebody on that street giving the dea guys license plate datas of every license plate that showed up in the matthew's house and frankly he put the police on the boss of boston that was right we did not know who really turned that in i think maybe the agents know but i certainly did he knew after they bought the house it wasn't the place he should be he was the only black fellow living on that street some of the boys from the mob visited him and suggested that he was out of his water and they also suggested he shouldn't have a million dollar house at toad hill in staten island the mob the gambino family were involved in drugs for a long period of time dea spent a lot of time picking off various members of the gambino castellano and certainly three fingers brown would have wanted him killed the fed's overheard on wiretaps mafia members talking about having frank killed because of his entry into the heroin business and living on toad hill where he warned the italians he said touch one of my men and i'll drive down mulberry street i'll kill every whop i see so you can see it even they respected what uh before this time he would have been gone it just showed the personality of frank frank really didn't give a [ __ ] i mean he was he was fearless and he wasn't going to let a bunch of what they what at the time uh in the black uh gangster community uh or dago's to refer to italians they weren't like any daggers or guineas tell him what to do just picture them all they got all these men you know soldiers behind but they couldn't even touch franking money frank had more money in their mind so you know they were jealous there's a black dude living next door to him doing that you know i think the mob is overrated and i knew some heavyweights in the mob did time with him saw him on the streets did business with them i know of deals that were put together that they couldn't even come up with the money that they were supposed to come up with to handle this they controlled the docks and stuff like that so they had ends and they were always pinching pennies what i call it you know but then there came a time when they weren't needed it was a serious uh issue that could have really created a lot of problems for somebody because they would end in violence i'm pretty sure that if frank would have stayed at uh today [Music] in the early 70s uh las vegas was a playground for uh america and especially america's gangsters of all kinds frank matthews seems to have been one of the biggest celebrities in vegas in the early 70s everywhere he went people knew him frank was great even he even took care of the guy who handed you the towels in in the men's room he'd give you a hundred dollar bill uh for doing nothing handing him a towel frank hey frank hey frank all the people got the car and they were talking to frank matthew i said god damn when i when we were walking i thought they were talking about frank sinatra hey frank hey frank maybe attend the fight maybe but he was more interested in in the hookers and and and the parties that they threw in the rooms so i was in the ring muhammad ali and jerry coy was fighting george farmer got in the ring i was talking [ __ ] to go and i leave and so i i jumped him i saw punk you can't even beat me with the [ __ ] you dumb you can't and so they locked me up so when they would take me out the door frank pulled up the lieutenant you know and then the police said let him go and so frank got me out of that just like that he took duffel bags of cash to one casino dropped him on the cashier's tables where they laundered the money for him and they took 15 to 18 percent for the for the house frank now used to take money to clean it to vape they had about 10 big suitcases they had about 10 of them filled with money they put all these suitcases in this room then they go to the fight you know we went through the fight and left the money there one night at the thunderbird hotel uh frank ran into eddie jackson and courtney brown who were the two biggest dealers in detroit and they struck up a conversation this black guy's standing at the table we got a pocket for a handful of money gambling eddie sees him over there you don't know where he is and he said what is he betting on he's out betting against it and then finally the guy said hey homie where are you from and i'm from detroit and he said i'm from new york he said my name frank frank matthews yeah man you know me no but we've got some mutual friends that know you but like all drug traffickers eventually the party's over no matter how far behind law enforcement is they eventually catch up with with the bad guy matthews was in las vegas uh during the first few days of january 1973 and at this time an indictment came out in new york against him next morning las vegas headlines new york kingpin frank matthews invests with 25 000 girlfriends so forth uh he was arrested in las vegas by local dea agents the judge leveled a bond of five million dollars which was unheard of at the time it was the biggest bond in history the five million dollar bail was the highest uh at the time uh established for a person in the united states which if you were to level that bond today it'd be 30 million dollars matthews when he was arraigned said how am i going to pay that and the irs agent said preferably in cash mr matthews and it was all over the news about a major drug dealer who was captured in las vegas and then i started getting phone calls from people i got phone calls from my parents in florida i got phone calls from friends who knew did you hear did you hear turn on the radio and it was him and my first reaction was i was disappointed because i wanted the job [Laughter] he gets down to clark county jail there's frank matthews goddamn homie they got y'all too yeah i said yeah i say man why are you telling you was hot and miller and i flew out immediately to question him and we interviewed him but he stonewalled us completely so we joking we tell we say stuff i ain't care what they talking about he put a size look here i'm a post bond half a million dollar and i'm gone he did indicate that he didn't want to talk to white prosecutors or white agents and we spoke to marshall butler then the u.s marshal for brooklyn a black marshal and he flew out to meet us marshall butler went in and spoke to him alone and frank opened up to him that he was tired of paying huge amounts of money to the lacosa nostra and a group of jewish businessmen in brooklyn who were distributing heroin we were never able to crack who the jewish businessman in brooklyn were but we had sufficient information that the bronx uh mafia guys the italians were giving matthew smaller and smaller units and overcharging him he hated that he wanted to branch out and be his own distributor a weird aspect of the the indictments was that a bunch of people in venezuela weren't dated with matthews because one of the french connection couriers was actually caught we we had indicted frank and our indictment included about 20 foreign defendants and including some customs venezuelan customs agents and jules cerini the courier who came from marseille with 22 kilos of heroin cerrini had been told that the bribes were paid and he'd have no trouble coming into caracas with his suitcases he was in fact arrested with 22 kilos and 100 percent pure heroin matthew's paid cash for it and they would have had backed up 22 kilos every month if they got away with it miller and i were requested to report to the criminal division immediately for a meeting with the cia and the general counsel told us under no circumstances is your indictment going to be presented as it is we are lopping off the entire venezuelan portion the international portion of your indictment but there are international ramifications as to things we're doing in venezuela and with the russians that we can't talk about need i say more and we said we understand and they said have a nice day you know later i went to the hard narcotic smuggling section of customs that's when i started getting a little bit of an education and understanding that all the heroin was coming from italian italian sources jewish too in 1959 the criminal landscape of america changed drastically after mob boss vito genovese was sent to prison for heroin conspiracy the mafia decided to get out of heroin which really meant they would simply import the drug with the help of their cia connections in europe and let non-family members like the jewish herbie spurling middleman that drug to black and latino dealers the biggest middleman of all was lucyrilla the mafia's point man when they decided to get back in the business around 1970. before frank matthews got his own corsican source lucyrillo supplied them along with most of new york's biggest dealers something went wrong for the mafia in 1972 though something big so big that the boss of the lucasy family tommy ryan bowley was executed in crown heights brooklyn and the orders of the mafia commission the basic issue for us is self-determination it's to be able to live in america with some degree of dignity it's to have some control over our own destiny we don't want welfare colonialism in the black ghetto we don't want white business to come in and say well we're going to do your favor today we're going to give you 300 jobs the basic issue has to do with whether or not we can control some employment for ourselves and that means we've got to have some kind of selective patronage we've got to control businesses and black communities so the mafia heroin business was in disarray and the french connection was over in this power vacuum kingpins like frank matthews and eddie jackson became some of the richest black men in america almost overnight [Music] here is an interesting fact when norris herndon heir to the atlanta life insurance company and reputedly the richest black man in america died in 1977 he was worth 23 million dollars i know for a fact that dealers like nikki barnes in new york and eddie jackson in detroit were profiting up to a million dollars a month at that time and frank matthews at that time i think was probably under 30 years old was extremely bright had good leadership skills and had convened a meeting of all the top african-american and hispanic drug dealers in atlanta georgia 1971 and his goal was to unite and form a family where they cut out the italian mafia and went right to the source of heroin and brought it in and controlled the distribution he put four million dollars on a table at one time and he bragged about this and he says let me see if you can match this and nobody could at the time and he bought heroin or cocaine detective gray's story here seems to dovetail in with a story from a federal informer in early 1971 the informant said he went to a brownstone in brooklyn to chip in on a heroin purchase that elwood bynum and frank matthews were organizing with their corsican partners and friends [Music] the informant said the entire brownstone was full of cash millions of dollars in small bills a massive load of 400 kilos fresh from the labs in marseille costing probably 4 million wholesale and worth a quarter billion when it hit the streets is in the works believe it or not the heroine was smuggled across the atlantic from france to new york using underwater mines once used by the nazis to protect the coastline from allied invasion in world war ii if you raise a if you raise a bond like five million dollars i mean they're going to say well where did you get the money from well but when they went to new york 325 000 was raisable this made the law enforcement officials that were investigating them go crazy 350 000 was was ludicrous for this type of deal some of his friends in durham managed to raise the money which got him out of jail now whether frank planned to leave or not at first is is doubtful he was going to court for six months uh a big head brother in baltimore was part of the case he had to show up weekly at the federal courthouse he was going to court he was going to court on the case with with biggie in there and frank was showing up for court but one day at the courthouse he bumps into uh one of the federal prosecutors i think involved in the case and the prosecutor tells him that there's another indictment that's gonna come down on frank that carries life in 1973 frank made his last appearance in the eastern district of new york in front of judge ray deary one day as he arrived chief of criminal division ray deary now a federal judge matthew said to him as derry was going out for lunch mr mr deary am i going to get that life count i keep hearing about and he said you made frank it's very possible his plot came in when the lawyer told him you're not getting out on bail they're going to you're gonna face a life center at 8 48. the comment by dairy may or may not have had an effect we we were prepared to bring the life count uh in a superseding indictment we were getting ready to do that the masters in them they know that he ain't know about that indictment they were going to surprise him when they go to court after the dairy incident he he fled that night and the last person see him in brooklyn was detective mike bramble who spotted him blasting through a red light in his car ramble gave chase and he lost him [Music] you think of the drug traffickers of the period uh three or three of the major ones you got ike atkinson you know who eventually spent 32 years in jail he didn't jump on it never crossed my mind to take off i always felt that one of my lawyers would get me out of this nikki barnes who was in big serious trouble a few years later in new york city he didn't jump on and of course frank lucas went to trial and he didn't jump on before his conviction so it was very unusual so when the government let it slip to matthews that he had a new indictment and matthews looked around and saw a lot of his lieutenants being indicted or killed like turk scott like his friend from durham cadillac tommy farrington who got killed in philadelphia tyrone palmer got killed in philadelphia major coxswain got killed by the black mafia in philadelphia when the federal prosecutor or the judge or whoever told him that he had that life indictment coming frank was smart enough to take advantage of that uh blunder and and he dropped everything and he left he didn't want the homes to be taken of his aunt in durham a a mysterious delivery of a briefcase with all the cash necessary to meet the bond requirements was delivered to the to the insurance agency in great neck new york and they took it gladly we ran a major grand jury investigation on that very issue but the last time that they saw him in new york he came through there with bags of money they say and just trying to he didn't want him trying to win he just wanted to leave some money and leave leave his mark our office was alerted that he had jumped on a warrant had been issued for his arrest i did learn through my investigation that frank matthews had a safety deposit box at a first union national bank on main street in durham north carolina and i went to that first union bank where i knew he had a safety deposit box i walked in the front door of the bank and asked them if they had seen frank matthews and they said he just went out the back door so i ran out the back door of the bank and i did see a car leaving the parking lot and he was there obviously cleaning out a safety deposit box to make a run i was almost famous and i missed my opportunity so by one minute a massive manhunt of course was put out all around the country all around the world they had leads pouring in frank's in africa he's in athens he's in rome he's in south america he's here he's there he's in pittsburgh he's in philadelphia he's in detroit when they when they did the story in the staten island advance they said that they had agents i don't know whether it was fbi dea at the time in the bushes of his house that's what this the advance read filming his house and i used to say to everybody well they have films of me coming to his door every day with an out of shape case and leaving his house every day with an out of shape case so i sort of steeled myself in the beginning that maybe somebody would call me but no one ever called me they conducted raids they questioned people they questioned barbara hinton they questioned all the people involved in the case no good leads they never felt like they really got close to them there was information at the time of course that he had moved probably 15 to 20 million offshore he could have flown easily to the cayman islands to the bahamas that was the closest jurisdictions at that time of course in those days the money laundering laws were a lot loose it was much more difficult to investigate criminals if you use the six to one ratio for inflation uh the amount of money that allegedly that frank matthews took out of the country which is 15 million dollars would be equivalent to taking out 90 million dollars today well the intelligence picked up that he and he and sheryl brown fled immediately probably that same night when bramble saw him they flew to texas i think it was houston and that was the last sighting of him at least in this country i'm told much later he was spotted in nassau bahamas he has been spotted supposedly in parts of africa cheryl brown was frank's latest girlfriend she was uh probably 18 some people said 22 and supposedly he he left with her the cheryl brown issue was pretty strange frank met cheryl brown around 1972-73 over here at 96th street and and first avenue and it was a smart place to go to a lot of drug dealers went there and she was in there and she was young she was she was 18. and he pulled up outside with his white rolls royce and she fell in love with the car and supposedly fell in love with frank and from then on in it was frank and cheryl she was beautiful she was she was well built she had she had a beautiful body oh she was gorgeous a beautiful very attractive she had a halle berry miss about her spent a lot of time researching and looking at cheryl brown looking at some records and in the hopes that that would lead us to frank david flaherty interviewed her family members and parents and came away feeling that they were telling the truth they didn't have any idea where she was and they were pretty devastated by the fact that they lost contact with their daughter she is as mysterious as frank there's never been any sighting any evidence that she's alive or dead we know that she was very close to her parents her parents were devastated they were middle class teachers in in brooklyn they got no sense that they knew anything that uh about her that they knew anything about their daughter's disappearance i think they even had wiretaps on the brown's home there was nothing and she was very close she was very close to her parents from all accounts reason why i i think that he might not still be around is grab the girl the girl when she's 23 years old and you also know that they put a tap on that their mother's phone for five years and they never heard of nothing from her that's the part that makes me think that something happened to her you know what i mean because she would probably got wrestlers and homesick lonely and wanted to get back to her family and they never heard from her either way i i don't know what frank had in the back of his mind with any woman but i do know that she was with him that's all i could say she did leave with them she went to texas we were told by an informant that she went to texas with them and took a plane from texas out of there whether they had phony passports and he could buy anything he had the money to buy anything including a passport for her and him so he did he did take her out i'm not 100 confident that she left with frank never had anybody who could corroborate the fact that she was with frank a lot of the chief lieutenants uh within the organization that were suspected of being tied to frank's organization people like mickey beckwith um brother carter liddy jones they bought his name up in my team i got 30 years on that liddy jones and big head brother from baltimore got long terms 20 30 years in prison pop darby and philly didn't get out until 84. all of these lieutenants those 18 and all were indicted in 1975 after frank had fled they were convicted except for marcella steele she was found innocent uh his aunt they tried me i went i got busted also i received 18 and a half years that's what i did 18 and a half years old day for a day his wife barbara hidden who by all accounts played an active uh role in the organization you know i read uh intelligence reports where she was suspected of handling the money barbara knew the trade she was the money counter she was she was keeping the money she kept track of all the money he made she spoke to barbara and all the other people in the case we never had a real substantial lead out of it i'm not i can't say whether she was helpful or not but we never got anything out of her i know barbara hinton personally wonderful she was from florida well he gave her a decent piece of money gave a million dollars barbara hinton was convicted but she got off in a technicality yeah she they use her statement against her from the grand jury and she's supposed to get immune from prosecution i know they tried to pump these guys for information while i was doing my case they pulled me new york new york d.a pulled me to [ __ ] the new york in 7-8 they were still loyal to frank and they didn't tell anything they called and tried to get me to tell if i knew anything about frank and i told him if i did know i wouldn't tell you you didn't offer me nothing all this time why you want to offer me something man i don't did my time just leave me alone of course his property was seized by the government and that beautiful mansion uh with gold-plated faucets marble floors uh was sold and the furnishings inside the house were sold for for five thousand there were no informants you say why well one of the reason i think was that you don't have the draconian sentences like you have today which forces prisoners uh to make deals to stay out of prison for the rest of their life you know his lieutenants were getting something like 5 to 12 years in prison and you know they could do the time and plus frank's personality you know he and reputation for violence you know he was liked but he was also feared from what i gathered uh from those who knew him closely uh to me was some fear in there too because you never knew what you say may come back to haunt you but he was reported everywhere he was reported in asia in africa in europe he managed to remain free not because the cops weren't trying i mean they did everything they had you know posters uh they had public service announcements eventually they set up a special task force in a couple of years that worked around the clock trying to find them mike pizzi a former united states marshal i was the chief deputy for the eastern district for many years and i was in charge of the frank matthews investigation and we we went out and did what you typically do looking for a fugitive you go to all the old haunts and talk to all the old friends and relatives and people and babysitters and we followed every lead we we developed and unfortunately we never had a solid lead on frank matthews well frank matthews disappeared almost 40 years ago and it's been an active case ever since he's literally fallen off the face of the earth case is still open it's active if we get leads we will follow up on them we have had leads over the past few years but nothing uh nothing's panned out we we went out into the areas that we knew and probably knew as well as anybody and in particular in the bedford stuyvesant area where marshall butler had had lots of folks who we spoke to well there warned a lot of people in his old haunts in north carolina who were very cooperative sad to say he was a bit of a legend uh seems like a lot of people looked up to frank for probably all the wrong reasons we did not have a lot of success in talking to folks in the north carolina area it seemed like people were afraid to talk about in fact uh that's what one of the guys said he said if we ever said anything against him or whatever [Music] we would be killed and my our family would be killed and i've gone into durham and i've talked with some people and they indirectly say oh you shouldn't be doing this because you know frank may get word of it and he may get upset so there's still that element you know frank has become like kaiser sose right i mean in the usual unusual suspects he's everywhere and nowhere i mean it's it's really amazing the guys from the south down here and everything like that they said no man this guy ain't man this guy was connected and he got money and hell they don't want to catch it they said he might we might put dozer them in jail and everything like that why haven't the authorities caught them i mean they've caught most of the gangsters uh you know that have fled uh wedding bozier fled after six was caught after 16 years and here he is in the open living in santa monica california and everybody believed he was somewhere else matthews is now a lot a lot longer but his facial features will have changed with age and her facial features and bulger was out in public going to las vegas casinos we knew he was in spain bulger was a bulge was a thug and uh was not a brilliant businessman matthews was a pioneering giant in the field of distribution of heroin fugitives you know get caught for a variety of reasons okay they anger somebody so there's people are motivated to to to to turn them in it could be money it could be somebody that has a pending case and they realize this is the information that'll make that case go away so it's a variety of reasons why we in law enforcement get information money is one of them sometimes we'll get information has nothing to do with money there's i mean the quote there's honor among these i mean these a lot of these people hate each other you know i can tell you that countless times we've arrested a guy before we got it back to manhattan a 45-minute ride they can't wait to set up the leader of the organization in the early 90s lou rice of the dea reinvigorated the investigation he felt like he had info that matthews was in philadelphia well i don't want to go into the nature of the investigation but we we've had information periodically we were looking in different places in different cities in the u.s especially on the east coast we thought we were getting close at one point thanksgiving uh flaherty and several of his folks his deputies from new york actually conducted a surveillance over the holidays in north carolina i wouldn't want to get too specific where exactly we were but i could tell you that he didn't show up for thanksgiving dinner supposedly frank matthews had been a big cocaine abuser some people say but some people say they never saw music and the feds claimed they had information that he had developed a bad hurt his his major cocaine abuse did major damage and he had heart palpitations and there was more than rumor that he had a heart transplant in houston we actually sent a small task force with david flaherty in charge and we followed through on a series of leads that seemed like they were real they seemed reliable and when we were ready to leave texas we decided that we had no verification of the information obviously i thought it was alive because we would have not put the focus the spotlight back on to philadelphia and then several years later in new york so obviously i think he's alive obviously that was reinforced when the agents and the police officer went out and talked to various people and and picked up uh evidence that uh that we were able to accumulate back then you know but he's a very smart guy and he's going to be difficult to catch but difficult doesn't mean impossible you know you talk with law enforcement officials they sound hopeful he's going to make a mistake all that but it's really whistling in the dark unless he showed up in a police station one day and said here i am you've been looking for me you've been looking for me uh take me ran into young frank matthews while he was in custody i believe at the time he was in custody for stealing a car we found that to be incredibly odd if hopefully someone's father had run off with 15 million i would have thought he would have made some arrangement to take care of his family but it didn't appear to us to be the case my recollection was that he was being pretty honest with us and that he really didn't know where his father was i just never saw a negative interaction between him and the children so i would assume any father would would somehow try to you know connect with his children especially his sons especially some with his name frank jr so yes i think it's kind of odd that he never did maybe he would have i really don't know once it ended it ended for me i was out of the picture he also had a brother who was another one of frank's children who was apparently having a problem with some drug abuse issues um i thought that was a little strange why didn't his father send him some help within the last two or three years we got a tip that there was a look alike very much would have been the same age same height same physical features as frank matthews who today would be about 67 years old in north carolina where matthews is known to have family and friends and we followed up on that lead and we found that individual and it just wasn't him people thought that this could have been the guy and we've developed those leads but obviously it wasn't because we don't have him in custody what would happen to frank matthews if he came back and turned himself in i mean come on this is almost 40 years later a lot of witnesses are dead uh i i tried to use the records of the trial that followed of all of his subordinates and they're missing and you talk to law enforcement they don't want to admit it but there's there's a challenge if they bring frank matthews to trial if he ever turned himself in or if they ever if they ever captured him the generation of people that were uniquely familiar with his investigation are retired no longer around i came on dea in 1974. frank matthews was always already a fugitive okay so i didn't i wasn't involved in his investigation and arrest under matthew's case not having one viable responsible person tell us for certain that they've saw they've seen him and we've had no verification of a siding that became a challenge that was insurmountable i want to think he's alive a lot of them officers that arrest people and this and that and everything like that probably help them get get the hell out of the country uh i wouldn't be surprised he's probably down on the coast of bel side in the spring and nobody would pay him in detention where he is today god only knows i'll tell this his body never turned up cheryl brown's body never turned up no bones were ever located it's very very unusual in cold case homicide cases where her body never turns up he's very he's covered his path very well if he died of natural causes or in a car accident or something of that effect his fingerprints would have eventually gone into a car in his database and it would have been matched up and then we could have proven either through autopsy or death certificate there have been many informants both lcn lakos and ultra types that supposedly you know killed him or had him eliminated because he was a threat to la cosa nostra he was well known as a drug dealer and he was held in five million dollars bail if the guinness hit frank they would have knew about it because they snitched so much them guinness told on john got it and that would have came out and frank wasn't even dealing with the [ __ ] guinness you know all that matters somebody said oh yeah he got a guinea connection but frank wasn't dealing with that as man many informants as possible not one of them came forward and told us that they wiped them out there's a theory he left the country but nobody can say where he went so i if he had stayed in the united states the entire time it would have been much likelier that he would have encountered law enforcement in some capacity we are still interested in him he is still part of the martial service history we are still actively looking for him but we've never been able to substantiate a sighting we've never been able to substantiate anything i don't have any idea like vanishing off the planet earth i think he's alive i think he's alive somewhere he made a lot of money and he's uh you know dialed it down a lot and and leading a uh a normal life a life such as if he was in the witness protection program not very visible and not very public he could be in south america he can be another part of the country he could be in the south somewhere you know i i would think in the u.s i would think in the us you can blend in easy it's a system he knows very well uh the communities he can go with with money and live a middle class existence and you can blend in if you obey the rules of the of the town and the neighborhood and be and you want to become a solid citizen but top dobby says frank is alive i said what made you think he said look frank is in nascar i said i said what he said yeah and then he said you won't know him i said well give me i don't know he done like that i said i said well i just like that he said yeah i mean people speculate plastic surgery may be dead but i i didn't get that information doing good you're over and after somewhere i think he's alive and i say this unequivocally because he's a smart person and he's got the homeboys protecting him and marcela protecting him and durham north carolina protecting him uh i think he's alive i think frank was the biggest guy that ever existed in jobs and herron if he went into business and started his own company it would have been successful other than drugs i know it at mcdonald's he would own 20 mcdonald's and and open up franchises and and he would know how to operate them but those of my generation no he's not forgotten they they still wonder as you look around you see people is he in that number who's watching you or you speaking to you never will know you ain't gonna find nobody like him not not where they got the system now they ain't gonna let nobody get like that though yeah you know they got too many snitches and two men conniving jealous they got a set up that you ain't gonna get like that no more he was a soldier yeah [ __ ] bond all them frank lucy they couldn't touch it he could make it anywhere and every time somebody get in trouble they would say i'm gonna do a frank mathews if frank turned up today i don't know if they'd really have a case against him they could probably lock him up for a few years for jumping bail but a drug conspiracy from 40 years ago i mean the police are all retired half the people involved are dead the people that they would try to squeeze to get them to turn against frank they already have served 20 years in prison they haven't the feds have no trump cards to play [Music] do i think he's dead or alive if he's alive i mean he pulled off the greatest getaway of all time but even if he's not alive he got away from them for a little while and he did beat the system uh whether he's alive or not i doubt very seriously we'll ever know all of the agents who work on the case to this day believe he's still alive i don't see how he can be alive he's alive and that's it you always think about your friends and people that you care about no matter what no matter where they are i think about him sometime now as to what he's doing and i don't know whether he's alive or dead if he's alive i wish him the best if he's dead he's in my prayers and um and and that's all i have to say

Channel: Al Profit

Views: 3,693,542

Keywords: frank matthews documentary full, al profit documentaries, frank matthews, nicky barnes, frank matthews update, al profit frank matthews, motown mafia, ron chepesiuk, american gangster, al profit, frank lucas, al profit motown mafia, al profit american dope, al profit frank lucas, bumpy johnson, troy reed, philly black mafia, frank matthews documentary, philadelphia black mafia, organized crime, black organized crime, frank matthews 2020

Id: IIDk-5i9C8U

Length: 83min 36sec (5016 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020