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The Gangster Frank Lucas Born September 9, 1930, in La Grange, North Carolina. Lucas was a country boy who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. He had almost no formal education when he moved to New York City's Harlem district in 1946.

There he entered the world of street crime. By the 1960s, he had constructed an international drug empire that spanned from New York to South East Asia. Killings, extortion, and bribery were his modus operandi. Lucas had millions in cash and property in several cities, when he was busted in 1975. Always the consummate con-man, Lucas turned states' evidence for a reduced sentence. After his incarceration, he denounced his crime activities and has tried to make amends for his past deeds, helping his daughter with a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children of incarcerated parents called "Yellow Brick Road." In 2007, Denzel Washington starred in a movie of his life of crime, American Gangster.

As with many "larger than life" personalities, the biography of Frank Lucas is shrouded in fact, mystery, and myth, much of which has been perpetuated by Lucas himself. He grew up in very poor conditions in rural North Carolina, during the depths of the Great Depression. Many Americans in the rural south were poor at this time, but most African-Americans were the poorest of the poor. Lucas spent much of his early youth looking after his younger siblings and getting into trouble. He has claimed that the one incident that sparked his life of crime was witnessing the murder of his cousin. He was only six years old when five members of the Ku Klux Klan, shrouded in sheets and hoods, showed up one night at the shack where he was living. The men killed Lucas's 13-year-old cousin on the spot, claiming he had looked at a white woman in a flirtatious way. But, like much of the folklore surrounding Frank Lucas, investigators have never uncovered evidence to support his claim.

As the oldest boy in the family, Lucas had to find ways for the family to survive. With the Depression raging on, it was difficult to obtain and hold a job, so he resorted to stealing food. Later, as he got older and stronger, he found some success mugging intoxicated customers outside the local tavern. In his later teen years, he got a job working as a truck driver for a pipe company until he was caught in the act of sleeping with the boss' daughter. In the ensuing fight, Lucas hit the father on the head with a pipe, knocking him out cold. He then stole $400 from the company till and set the establishment on fire. Fearing he would be arrested and jailed for much of his life, his mother pleaded with him to flee to New York.


Lucas and Atkinson created an "army inside the Army" of draftees and enlisted men in order to set up the international distribution system. Key military personnel had to be "bought" into the system, including high-ranking officers, both American and South Vietnamese. Lucas used a combination of charm and pricy bribes to recruit his team. As he did with nearly all parts of his enterprise, Lucas would oversee the operations personally in southeast Asia, sometimes disguising himself as an Army officer.

The plan was to send shipments of heroin on military planes to military bases on the eastern seaboard. From there, the packages would be sent to accomplices who unpacked the heroin and prepared it for sale. Hyperbole suggests that much of the dope was stuffed into the coffins of dead service men, or even stuffed into the cadavers. Lucas testified that he recruited a North Carolina carpenter and flew him to Bangkok to build over two dozen government-issued coffins with false bottoms, big enough to load in 6 to 8 kilos of heroin. But it has been reported that Atkinson only packed the smuggled heroin in furniture.


In setting up his organization back in the States, Frank Lucas combined toughness with intelligence, being very careful to make sure every detail was covered. He contracted only trusted relatives and close friends from North Carolina; people like Leslie Atkinson. He believed they were less likely to steal from him and be tempted by the vices of the city. He recruited his five younger brothers, and moved them to New York. In the city, they became known as the "Country Boys," and they controlled the territory on 116th Street between 7th and 8th avenues in Harlem.

Lucas approached marketing his product like any entrepreneur by offering value for the right price. Because he was getting nearly pure heroin directly from the source, he was able to "cut" the drug at a higher level usually between 10 and 12 percent when most street heroin was only about 5 to 6 percent. Lucas hired several young women to mix the imported heroin with mannite and quinine. To prevent theft, these women wore nothing but plastic gloves. To protect his investment, Lucas inflicted brutal violence against anyone who stood in his way, inflicting fear in adversaries and inspiring respect from friends and business partners.

Just as Lucas had planned, the money came pouring in. He often bragged that he was making a million dollars a day. There often wasn't enough space to hide the cash, so he would launder the money, personally driving large bags of bills to a bank in the Bronx where the bankers would count it and exchange it for legitimate bills. Bank executives would later plead guilty to 200 misdemeanor violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. At the height of his career, he had over $52 million in various Cayman Island banks and 1,000 kilograms of heroin on hand worth $300,000 a kilo. To "hide" the exchanged money, Lucas bought into legitimate businesses such as a string of dry cleaners and gas stations in the hopes of avoiding detection. He also owned office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles, Miami, and Puerto Rico, and a several thousand acre ranch called "Paradise Valley" in North Carolina where he had 300 head of Black Angus cattle and prize breeding bulls.

Frank Lucas arrived in Harlem in the summer of 1946. People told him to be smart and get a decent job as an elevator operator or door man at a hotel. But Lucas saw how real money was made on the streets, through illegal gambling and drugs. With each ensuing crime, he became more bold and ruthless. He first robbed a local bar at gunpoint. Then he stole a tray of diamonds from a jewelry store, breaking a guard's jaw with a slug from his brass knuckles. Feeling confident, he brazenly broke into a high-stakes crap game at local club and robbed all the players. Then, in the summer of 1966, on a crowded sidewalk, Lucas shot a local thug who reneged on a dope deal. His efforts caught the eye of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, a long-time Harlem gangster who controlled gambling and extortion operations.