American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  In between bitching that the mugshot of him looking “like I ain’t slept in two weeks” Lucas, who likes to point out that “biography is history,” said it figured that “the whiteboy press” only covered him in relation to his dealings with the cops. “Once they get you and think you’re tame, then it’s safe to say a bunch of shit about you.”

  One clip, however, did engage Lucas’s attention. Titled “Ex-Assistant Prosecutor for Hogan Shot to Death in Village Ambush,” the November 5, 1977, Times clip tells how Gino E. Gallina, onetime Manhattan D.A. turned Pelham Manor mouthpiece for “top drug dealers and organized crime figures,” was rubbed out “mob style … as many passers-by looked on in horror” one nippy fall evening at the corner of Carmine and Varick streets.

  Lucas reckons he must have spent “millions” on high-priced criminal lawyers through the seventies and early eighties, people like Ray Brown Sr., counselor for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and John H. Gross, a former southern District D.A. under Rudolph Giuliani, who represented Frank in a series of cases. Gino Gallina, however, was the only lawyer Lucas ever physically assaulted, the incident occurring in the visiting room of the Rikers Island prison. According to later testimony, Lucas had given Gallina $400,000 to fix a case for him, and $200,000 became “lost.” It was upon hearing this news that Frank, the Daily News wrote, “leaped across a table and began punching him [Gallina] savagely, knocking him to the floor before prison guards were able to subdue him…. Gallina wore the scars from that assault for weeks” but “significantly … filed no charges against his client.”

  For his part, Frank acknowledges “beating the dogshit out” of Gallina. He also allows that the lawyer “stole my money,” that “I told him he was a dead man if he didn’t get it back to me,” and that “the man did not deserve to live.” However, Frank pointing out that there’s no statue of limitations on murder steadfastly maintains he has “no idea, no idea at all” about how and why Gallina was killed, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

  Despite offering “little tidbits” like how he often talked boxing with Frankie Carbo and politics with Black Panther Joanne Chesimard while in prison, the Country Boy offers scant details about what he’s been up to in the past twenty-five years of his life. Whole decades are dismissed with a shrug or wave of a hand.

  What Lucas will absolutely not talk about is how he got out of jail, the stuff described in clips like the April 24, 1978, Daily News story, “Jailed Drug King Turns Canary to Cage 13 Old Pals,” or a Newark Star-Ledger piece from 1983 titled “‘Helpful’ Drug Kingpin Granted Reduced Term,” in which Judge Leonard Ronco of Newark is reported as cutting in half Lucas’s thirty-year New Jersey stretch “because of the unprecedented cooperation he has given authorities” in the making of cases against other drug offenders. This followed the previous decision by U.S. District Court Judge Irving Ben Cooper, who “granted the unusual request of Dominic Amorosa, chief of the Southern District Organized Crime Strike Force, to reduce Lucas’s forty-year New York prison sentence to time already served.”

  “I am not talking about none of that Witness Protection shit,” Frank declared in our first meeting. It was part of the oral contract between Lucas and myself. “I ask two things,” the Country Boy said evenly: “One, if they are slamming bamboo rods ’neath your fingernails with ball peen hammers, you are not to reveal my location, and two, none of that buddy-buddy crap with the cops. That is out.”

  Staying to the bargain has been frustrating since, in law enforcement circles, Lucas’s “unprecedented cooperation” is nearly as legendary as his stuffing bricks of heroin into dead soldiers’ coffins. Dominic Amorosa, long in private practice, estimates Frank made “maybe a hundred cases all told…. I don’t know if anyone made more.”

  All Frank offers on the topic is “anything I said about anyone they would have said the same about me if they had the chance.” As for anyone he gave evidence against, Lucas adds, “I’ve made my peace with them.”

  Well and good, but how was I, the journalist, supposed to explain how he, the drug kingpin, had come to serve less than nine years—barely double the time routinely handed out on shitty little possession charges under the loathsome Rockefeller drug laws, which were partially enacted in (over) reaction to big dealers like himself?

  “You’re the writer, you’ll think of something,” was Frank’s response. Failing that, Frank suggested I could just “leave the whole fucking thing out … stop at 1975 and make everything else into a cliffhanger … if anyone asks what I been doing since then, just say I was in the oil business.”

  I’d been told this would be the most difficult part, that gangsters (or gangstas, for that matter) will go on forever about people they killed, how much dope they’d moved, but as for the inevitable “giving up”—Richard Roberts, former head of the Essex County Narcotics Task Force that would successfully prosecute Lucas, says, “In this business, everybody in this business cooperates, everybody, sooner or later”—no one wanted to talk about that.

  “The betrayal, that’s the thing you won’t hear,” said a writer well known for writing about criminals who inform on their fellows. And, soon enough, Frank Lucas, the Country Boy who insisted on blood loyalty, lost patience with my persistent attempts to get him to talk about flipping. Asked to tell “the worst thing he’d ever done,” he said balefully, “You already know the answer to that so I won’t dignify that with a reply.” Later, hoping to get him to open up, I proposed a scenario in which Frank, ever the pragmatist, faced with the extreme “pattern change” of being in the joint for the rest of his life, entered into perhaps the most intense “backtracking” trance of his long career. Was it the simple arithmetic of being in his late forties and “forward-looking” into the black hole of a seventy-year sentence that made him decide to talk?

  “Listen, I told you before,” Lucas said, stone-faced, his voice halfway between a threat and plea, “I have hurt my mother and family before with this and I will not do it again. So don’t go there, now or ever … don’t cross me, because I am a busy man and I have no time, no time whatsoever, to go to your funeral.”

  Still, I couldn’t give it up. Nicky Barnes, who’d also cooperated, making many cases, had only just been released after serving twenty-one years. How was it possible that when he was asked for a name in a repair shop, Frank said with appalling matter-of-factness, “Frank Lucas … my name is Frank Lucas.” How could he just be out there? It was a mystery.

  Finally, Frank said, “Look, you want to know what the bottom line is on a guy like me? It is that I am sitting here talking to you right now. Still walking and talking. That is all you need to know. That I am right here when I could have, maybe should have, been dead and buried a hundred times. And you know why that is?

  “Because: people like me. People like the fuck out of me.” This was his primary survival skill, said the former dope king and killer: his downright friendliness, his upbeat demeanor. “All the way back to when I was a boy, people have always liked me, wanted to do things for me. I’ve always counted on that.”

  That much had become apparent a few days earlier, when I went over to the Eastern District Federal Court to visit with Judge Sterling Johnson. During the plague year of 1976, when government alarmists claimed that junkies were stealing a billion dollars’ worth of property a year, Johnson, a former NYPD beat cop and head of the Civilian Review Board, took several congressmen and local politicians on a walking tour of 116th Street, then still Frank Lucas territory. Events of the tour were noted during a hearing of the 94th Congress Select Committee of Narcotic Abuse and Control, a group that would make many key appropriations in the nascent War on Drugs. According to the testimony, at the corner of Eighth Avenue, some of Frank’s “block workers,” in addition to “flinging their heads into windows of passing cars hawking their wares,” came over to outraged congressmen Charles Rangel, Fortney Stark, and Benjamin Gilman and told them, with all due respect, “If you’re not buying, get out of here.”

/>   Frank had told me to look up Johnson, whom he refers to as “Idi Amin.”

  “Judge Johnson likes me a lot. You’ll see,” Lucas said. “I’m lucky for him, because if he didn’t put me in jail, he wouldn’t be a judge to begin with.”

  When I first called his office, Johnson answered the phone with a burnished dignity befitting a highly respected, distinguished public official. “This is Judge Johnson,” he said. Yet when I mentioned the name Frank Lucas, Johnson’s voice rose a couple of octaves and became notably more familiar. “Frank Lucas? Is that mother still living?!” A few days later, while talking in his stately chambers, the judge told me to call Lucas up.

  “Get that damn old gangster on the phone,” Johnson demanded, turning on the speakerphone.

  Lucas answered with his usual growl. “This is Frank. Who’s this?”

  Johnson mentioned a name I didn’t catch, someone apparently dead, likely due to some action involving a Country Boy or two. This got Lucas’s attention. “What are you talking about? Who gave you this number?”

  “Top!”

  “Top who?”

  “Red Top!” Johnson said, invoking the name of Lucas’s beloved chief dope cutter.

  “What the—Red Top don’t got my number.” It was at around this point that Frank figured it out.

  “Judge Johnson! You dog! You still got that stick?”

  Johnson reached under his desk and pulled out a beat cop’s nightstick and slapped it into his open palm loud enough for Lucas to hear it. “Better believe it, Frank!”

  “Stop that! You’re making me nervous now, Judge Johnson!” Lucas exclaimed, before somewhat gingerly inquiring, “Hey Judge, they ever get anyone in that Gallina thing?”

  Johnson laughed and said, “Frank. You know you did it.”

  Ignoring Lucas’s effusive denials, Johnson said, “Well, come around and see me. I’m about the only fly in the buttermilk down here.”

  After he hung up, Johnson, who still has a rustic dope-weighing machine in his office, a souvenir bought on an investigation/field trip to the Golden Triangle, and says many of his recent cases can be “a snore,” added “That damn Frank. He’s a pisser. He always was a pisser.”

  “You know, when we were first investigating him, the feds, the FBI, DEA, they didn’t think he could pull off that Southeast Asia stuff. They wouldn’t let themselves believe a black man could come up with such a sophisticated smuggling operation. In his sick way, he really did something.”

  The memory clearly tickled Johnson, who quickly added: “Look, don’t get me wrong, Frank was vicious, as bad as they come. But what are you going to do? The guy was a pisser, a pisser and a killer. Easy to like. A lot of those guys were like that. It is an old dilemma.”

  A couple of days later, Lucas and I stop for lunch at a local TGI Friday’s. TGI Friday’s isn’t the Oak Bar, where he never tipped less than two hundred dollars, but at least it’s better than Bennigan’s, Lucas says, picking at his bowl of pasta and shrimp, which he pronounces “swimph.” Scowling through the glare-proof glass to the suburban strip beyond, Frank deplores “this crummy shit” he finds himself surrounded by these days.

  The giant Home Depot down the road especially bugs him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn’t have collected protection from a goddamned Home Depot, Frank says with disgust. “What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? That place, it’s so big, you’re lost once you pass the bathroom sinks. That’s the way it is. You can’t find the heart of anything to stick the knife into. The independent man don’t stand a chance. It is a sign of the times.”

  Then Frank turned to me and asked, “So what do you think? You gonna make me out to be the devil or what? Am I going to heaven or am I going to hell?”

  As far as Frank was concerned, the issue of his place in the hereafter was a foregone conclusion, settled since he joined the Catholic Church while imprisoned at Elmira. “The priest there was recommending early parole if you confessed your sins, so I signed up,” he says. If this didn’t pan out, Frank had backup, since he was also a Baptist. “I have praised the Lord,” Frank says. “I have praised Him in the street and I have praised Him in the joint. So I know I’m forgiven, that I’m going to the good place, not the bad.”

  But what did I think, Frank wanted to know, taking another swig of his Sam Adams. How did I see it going for the Country Boy after he left this world?

  It was a vexing question, like Sterling Johnson said, an old dilemma. Who knew about these things? Catch him on a good day at the home and even the Führer might have seemed a charming old guy, with hilarious stories of the putsch times. Frank was a con man, one of the best. He’d been telling white people, cops, and everyone else pretty much what they’d wanted to hear for two and a half decades, so why should I be different? I liked him. Liked the fuck out of him. Especially when he called his church lady, wrestling fan, ninety-one-year-old mother, which he did about five times a day.

  But that wasn’t the point. Cool copy was beyond Like and Dislike, beyond Good and Evil. Frank Lucas was, and is, cool copy. Braggart and trick-ster, he was nonetheless a living, breathing historical figure, tapped into a highly specialized font of secret knowledge, more exotic and certainly less picked over than any Don Corleone. Frank was a fucking gold mine, worth at least a couple of seasons of the Black Sopranos, Old School division. The idea that a backwoods Country Boy could somehow maneuver himself into a position to tell at least a plausible lie about stashing 125 kilos of zum dope on Henry Kissinger’s plane—much less actually do it—mitigated a multitude of sins. Plague vector or not, Lucas filled an indispensable cultural niche. Who knows, if it weren’t for vicious opportunistic crumbums like Frank, Lou Reed might never have written “Waiting for My Man,” not to mention Marvin Gaye doing “Trouble Man.” On some level, morality didn’t have anything to do with it.

  In the end even Lucas’s resounding unrepentance didn’t matter. Former Essex County prosecutor-turned-lawyer Richie Roberts, who remains a great friend of Frank’s despite the fact that the Country Boy once took a contract out on his life (“He busted my mom and dad, what else could I do?” Frank says), likes to tell how Lucas cried in his courtroom. “We had this woman testify,” Roberts says. “She was the mother of a drug addict. Her family had been destroyed by heroin, Frank’s dope. It was really heartbreaking. A lot of people in the courtroom were crying, sobs all around. I was crying myself. Then, I looked over at Frank. He was crying, too. Huge tears were rolling down his cheeks. There he was, Mr. Big, who had come into the courtroom like Al Capone, with Joe Louis and Johnny Sample from the Jets, this whole entourage—and he was bawling louder than anyone. I never saw anything like it.”

  “There Richie goes again, telling that story about me crying,” remarks Lucas, who says, “but all I cared about was the mother. What she was going through, seeing her daughter suffer like that. It reminded me of my mom.” As for the daughter herself, Frank has no sympathy at all. “Look, I gave strict orders to all my people, no selling to kids, no selling to pregnant women. She was old enough to know what she was doing. She did what junkies do. What happened was her problem.”

  Indeed, about the only flicker of remorse I’d ever seen Frank emit occurred one afternoon following a lunch we ate with one of his brothers, Vernon Lee, who is known as Shorty. Known as a particularly vicious Country Boy, Shorty, a squat, bespectacled man now in his early fifties and taking computer courses after a ten-year stretch, followed Frank to Harlem in 1965. “We came up from Carolina in a beat-up car, the brothers and sisters, Mom and Dad, with everything we owned shoved in, like the Beverly Hillbillies coming to the Land of Plenty,” Shorty recalls. Frank was still working for Bumpy at the time, not the giant deal he would become, but Shorty knew what he wanted. “Diamond rings, cars, women, those things. But mostly it was the glory. Isn’t that what most men really dream of? The glory.”

  Then Shorty reached across the table and touched his older brother’s hand. “We did make a little bit
of noise, didn’t we?” Shorty said. To which Frank replied, “A little bit, all right.”

  A few minutes later we dropped Shorty off at the low-rise apartment development where he was living. It was early spring then and there was still ice on the ground. Frank watched his younger brother make his way across the frozen puddles in the late afternoon light and sighed. “You know, if I’d been a preacher, they would have all been preachers. If I’d been a cop, they’d have all been cops. But I was a dope dealer, so they all became dope dealers. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’d done right or not.”

  Later on, driving around the funky suburban landscape, Frank says if he wanted to start up dealing again, “it would take me until about this afternoon.” He says it is a rare week that someone doesn’t come “looking for the connect … but that’s not happening. I’m out … you know, people might see my shitty clothes, shitty car, and think, Hey, bigshot, you’re nothing now. How’s it feel to be down? Well, fuck them. I had my day.”

  Then Frank said he was late. He had to go pick up his three-year-old son. Frank has several other children, including a “stockbroker in Texas” and a daughter in Georgia who’s already got her MA and soon will have her Ph.D. “They’re all smart but she’s the really smart one,” says Frank, who says, “If things had been different” he would have studied hard and gone to MIT like he always wanted to instead of getting his GED in a federal joint in Minnesota. Of all the kids, though, Frank says his son, sharp-eyed and handsome, like a chip off the old Country Boy block, is “my heart … I really love that boy.” The other day Frank said, “You know, he can read. He’s just so little and he can read. He says to me, ‘Look: C-A-R-T-O-O-N … cartoon network.’” Can you believe that? You know how long it took me to read?”