FRANK LUCAS Ep. 3 | “The Golden Triangle”

After Bumpy Johnson dies, Frank Lucas travels to Bangkok, Thailand and sets up a powerful heroin operation. Frank’s new gang, nicknamed the Country Boys, makes millions selling heroin in New York and New Jersey. Frank makes multiple trips to Thailand, and he claims he survives an ambush by gunmen in the jungle when he travels to the source of his heroin. As Frank’s wealth and power grow, he shows off at the epic Muhammed Ali-Joe Frazier fight in 1971, and he soon regrets his decision to step into the spotlight. Check out these great books about Frank Lucas, Bumpy Johnson, and Harlem crime: “Harlem Godfather” by Mayme Johnson and Karen E. Quinones Miller “Original Gangster” by Frank Lucas and Aliya S. King Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Mood! For 20% off of your first order, use the promo code INFAMOUS at Mood.com Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com or @blackbarrelmedia on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:11Speaker 00

  On January 18th, 1962, while Bumpy Johnson was finishing his final year of prison at Alcatraz and Frank Lucas was surviving as a petty thief and a part-time heroin dealer in Harlem, NYPD detective Eddie Egan was in Brooklyn, tearing apart wet plaster which had been recently applied to a hole in the ceiling of Joe Fuca’s basement. Joe was an elderly Italian man with mob connections, who was upstairs in his kitchen, ranting and cursing the lawman who had barged into his house with a search warrant. In Joe’s basement, weeks of exhausting surveillance were finally paying off. Detective Egan and his partner Sonny Grasso thought they might be on to something big,

• 0:54Speaker 00

  and their early hunch had grown into a task force of NYPD detectives and agents from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Now, in Joe Fuca’s basement, Egan pulled bags of white powder and guns out of a hole that had been cut into the ceiling and recently repaired with plaster. When Egan was done, the hall totaled 24 pounds of powder. The federal agent in the basement with Egan pulled out a marquee reagent testing kit. He took out a small glass vial that contained a liquid mixture of sulfuric acid and formaldehyde. Egan sifted a bit of the white powder into the vial, and the liquid turned a deep shade of purple. Purple indicated a positive reaction for opium, in this case, heroin.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Egan and the agent were hopeful and expecting such a reaction. They were not expecting the darkness of the purple color. That indicated a level of purity they had never seen. In fact, it signaled that the heroin was almost entirely pure. The bust was the score of a lifetime: 24 pounds of pure heroin in one place. That was a record. But the record only held for eight days, until Eddie Egan and Sonny Grasso walked into a basement in the Bronx.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Joe Fuca's son Tony lived with his family in a rundown apartment building a couple blocks from the Bronx River. In an old storage room in the basement of the building, Sonny and Eddie found a big steamer trunk labeled with the name Fuca. The trunk contained two suitcases, and the suitcases held 88 bricks of pure heroin. Each brick weighed about a pound. Eighty-eight pounds of pure heroin in one seizure. That dwarfed the previous record set a week earlier, and it brought the total amount of uncut heroin seized in a little over a week to 112 pounds. The estimated value of the raw heroin was $32 million in 1962, which would be $346

• 3:00Speaker 00

  million today. The street value, after it was cut to reduce purity, was something like $220 million, which would be $2.3 billion in today's money. It was an historic bust, and Detectives Egan and Grasso would be immortalized for uncovering the so-called "French Connection." During their investigation, they learned the mafia and its allies bought opium in Turkey and shipped it to laboratories in Marseille, France. The labs transformed the opium into heroin, and French smugglers brought it into New York. According to an NYPD detective of the time, the mafia had been using some version of

• 3:40Speaker 00

  the pipeline for 25 years, and it had made hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. But that operation took a hit in 1962. The bust put a major dent in the French Connection pipeline, but it was merely a speed bump for drug smugglers. As the expression goes, "When one door closes, another opens." At the same time the international authorities were targeting the French Connection, American involvement in Vietnam was ramping up. By 1965, Frank Lucas was watching TV news reports in Harlem about American soldiers becoming addicted to heroin in Vietnam. He learned that that part of Southeast Asia, known as the Golden Triangle, was famous

• 4:23Speaker 00

  for producing opium, the base ingredient of heroin. Frank's boss, legendary Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, had stonewalled Frank's idea to set up a heroin pipeline to Southeast Asia. But Bumpy died in July of 1968, and Frank was on a plane to Thailand a month later. And that was all the time that beleaguered drug cops in America had, about six years, between the takedown of one major heroin pipeline and the establishment of another. Using ingenious and macabre methods, Frank Lucas set up a heroin pipeline that made the French Connection look like child's play.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season, we're telling the story of Frank Lucas, one of the godfathers of crime in Harlem, New York, the man whose life was the inspiration for the film American Gangster. This is episode three, "The Golden Triangle."

• 5:41Speaker 00

  When Bumpy Johnson died of a heart attack in July of 1968, his business was essentially in suspended animation. Like a medieval king who didn't have a son, or had too many sons, there was no clear successor when the king died. Some in Bumpy's orbit, but not all, believed Frank Lucas was the rightful heir. Whether he was or not, Frank wanted to be, and he quickly made his move to establish himself as the new leader of Bumpy Johnson's outfit. There were potentially millions of dollars on the street that Bumpy's business partners owed him, money that had yet to be collected by anyone. A week after Bumpy died, Frank Lucas got to work.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Representing Bumpy's business interests, he collected a total of around $3 million. By that point, he knew the numbers racket pretty well, and he could have continued along just fine in the old ways. But the numbers racket was not to Frank's taste. Unbeknownst to Frank, until Bumpy died, Bumpy had been a huge importer of cocaine from Peru. But while Bumpy and other Harlem gangsters focused on cocaine, Frank Lucas wanted to go after heroin. But even in 1968, six years after the disruption of the French Connection pipeline, a gangster who wanted to deal heroin still had to work with the mafia. Frank didn't want to pay upwards of $200,000 per kilo to the mob. He wanted to go directly to the source.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And by the late 1960s, the source was the Golden Triangle.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  And this is the part of Frank's story from 1968 to 1975, where fact and fiction become nearly impossible to separate. It was already a difficult task, though this is where the story could really stray into the realm of legend. But it's entertaining, so here it goes.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  The Golden Triangle of opium production in Southeast Asia was four countries: Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Burma, which is called Myanmar today. Vietnam was too dangerous, with the war intensifying by the day. So Frank set his sights on Thailand. He'd heard that Bangkok was a popular destination for US soldiers who were on leave while serving in Vietnam. Frank had no direct connections to the area or the heroin industry, so he was just gonna have to figure it out as he went along. Sometime between the middle of July and the end of August 1968, Frank flew to Bangkok and settled into a nice hotel. He asked a driver to take him to whichever bar was popular with the US soldiers.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  The driver took him downtown to a place called Jack's American Star Bar. Walking in, Frank knew he was in the right place. There were plenty of US servicemen in the bar, but the ones who caught his eye were clearly strung out or obviously high. Those guys were the breadcrumb trail that he wanted to follow. To do it right, he had to take his time. That first day, he ordered a drink and just sat at the bar and observed. Afterward, he went there every night and became a regular. Eventually, he started chatting with the servicemen. He soon learned from the soldiers that it was easy to buy small amounts of heroin, up to ten or even twenty kilos at a time. Those quantities might have seemed huge to some, but not to Frank.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  He wanted a steady supply of wholesale product, not an amount he could fit in his luggage. He wouldn't settle for anything less than one hundred fifty kilos of pure heroin. After almost a week of hanging out around the bar, Frank was growing frustrated. He didn't think he was making progress beyond some grunts who were on leave, but he was. He didn't know it, but he had already talked to the guy who would give him what he wanted. The man was Leslie Ike Atkinson, the co-owner of Jack's American Star Bar. Like Frank, he was an African-American man from North Carolina. His nickname in Bangkok was Sergeant Smack, and he and his business partner, William Jackson,

• 9:46Speaker 00

  had been running the bar and supplying heroin to soldiers for years. Atkinson was wary of Frank at first, but he eventually reached out to make a deal.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  As Frank told it, he left the bar one evening and a car pulled up in front of him. The Asian man inside invited Frank to go for a ride. Frank, who was now convinced that word had gotten around about him, agreed. The mystery man drove Frank to a country road overlooking the city. There, he parked and asked Frank how much heroin he wanted. Frank gave his amount, and to his surprise, the man said he'd be able to supply him with no trouble. Frank called the man by the famous code name 007 in his interviews, and the man was a shadowy figure about whom very few details are known. He was Thai, and he was, on paper, a co-owner of Jack's American Star Bar.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  At the time, businesses in Thailand were required to have at least one Thai owner, so the man filled that role for William Jackson and Ike Atkinson. And to some degree, he was a source of heroin for Jackson and Atkinson, and then Frank. According to Frank, he placed an initial order of 225 kilos of heroin. He wrote a check for $500,000 as a down payment. The full order cost $945,000, and he would pay the remainder when the distribution was finished. His connections in Bangkok would make sure the heroin was smuggled onto US military planes for transportation to America, and at that point, Frank would take over.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  When Frank returned to New York, he built a new crew to handle his new business. His gang became known as the Country Boys, a nod to his upbringing in North Carolina, and it consisted mostly of men who had once worked for Bumpy Johnson. They would handle transportation of the heroin from Maguire Air Force Base in New Jersey to Harlem, and then distribution on the streets. But the heroin had to be cut to reduce its purity.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Frank was about to bring in kilos of nearly 100% pure heroin. Average street heroin had a purity of maybe 5%. Frank aimed to have heroin with 10% purity. Frank was about to give people double the bang that they were used to, and it was still reduced by 90% from its original strength. So, the raw stuff needed to be cut with quinine powder, and Frank needed to build a cutting operation from the ground up. He recruited a woman he called Red Top to run the team who cut the heroin. The workers were all women, many of whom were the wives of Frank's gang members. Like a scene from every movie which showed the process, Frank claimed the women worked naked to ensure they didn't try to steal any of the heroin.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  After a month and a little more than a million dollars of expenses, Frank's operation was ready. His 225 kilos started arriving, and his team went to work. But before the product went out onto the streets, it needed a name. Like any good product, branding was important.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Dealers loved catchy names for their products like Mean Machine, Capone, Tragic Magic, Kill Kill Kill, Green Tape, Red Tape, Harlem Hijack, The Judge, Payback, Revenge, Insured For Life, Insured For Death, and Oh Can't Get Enough Of That Funky Stuff, which was a playful homage to the hit song Funky Stuff by one of the great all-time funk bands Cool in the Gang. One listened to the lyrics and it's easy to see why dealers crafted a name from the song. Frank Lucas called his new product Blue Magic. When his crew started selling, they settled into a regular pattern.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  The product hit the streets at around 4:00 PM each day when the beat cops changed shifts. It was completely sold out by 9:00 PM, a gross profit of $1 million in 5 hours.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Frank Lucas wasn't content to sit back and let the cash roll in. He wanted to see the transactions happen. He would climb into an old Chevy he called Nelly Bell and drive around Harlem to watch his dealers work. He had plenty of fancy cars at his disposal, but his oldest car was the best for keeping a low profile. Wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, he'd watch from behind the wheel of Nelly Bell as Blue Magic made him a multimillionaire. Word of his success soon reached his family in North Carolina, who all eventually moved up to New York or New Jersey to be closer to him. He had 5 brothers and 2 sisters, and as the oldest, he felt a duty to look after them.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  At least 2 of his brothers, Shorty and Larry, joined him in the heroin business. Shorty ran the New Jersey operation, and Larry took over the Bronx. The country boys were far from the only heroin operation in the tri-state area, but their influence grew fast and business was good. Within about three weeks, nearly all of the 225 kilos were sold. It was time for Frank to go back to Thailand to set up shipment number two. Though, for what it's worth, much later in life, Ike Atkinson vehemently denied that Frank Lucas made multiple trips to Thailand. Atkinson said that the two most famous stories in Frank's saga were lies.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  It's impossible to know if Atkinson is a reliable source, so to adapt the famous line from the man who shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the most entertaining version and qualify the hell out of it."

• 15:52Speaker 00

  In late 1968 or early 1969, Frank said he made his second trip to Thailand. He paid the remaining $450,000 from the first shipment and placed an order for another 500 kilos. His suppliers said it was no problem, and in due time, they smuggled 500 kilos of pure heroin into the US through their military connections. Frank's crew sold it in New York and quickly expanded his network. His product, Blue Magic, was now famous, and he started selling some of it to bosses from North Carolina, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Blue Magic was a coast-to-coast product, and to make sure the supply met the demand, Frank placed larger orders.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  When he made his third trip to Thailand, he placed an order of 1,500 kilos. To Frank's surprise, his suppliers never balked. They seemed to have an unlimited source, and by the third trip to Thailand, Frank wanted to see it. He asked to see the poppy fields which yielded the opium which was turned into heroin. The Thai supplier warned Frank that it was a long and dangerous trip, but Frank wanted to go. After a brief hesitation, the supplier consented and made the arrangements. Frank claimed he set out into the jungle alongside a caravan of pack animals and Thai locals. As promised, the trip was long.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  For days, Frank and the caravan hiked up and down mountains, through valleys and across rivers. Frank had no idea how many miles they had traveled, but they eventually reached their destination, a picturesque valley that was tucked into the mountains. Frank stared at the valley and his jaw dropped. The entire floor of the valley was covered in poppy fields. The fields were covered with a mesh of dark netting to shield the plants from aircraft overhead, but which still allowed sunlight to shine through to the plants. According to his guides, the fields had been planted many years ago by anti-communist Chinese settlers. They had been supported by the CIA,

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  who didn't care what the anti-communists did with their land, as long as they helped fight Communist China. Nearby, there was a network of caves where the workers refined the poppies into heroin. Frank bought 100 kilos directly from the fields, and the kilos were packed onto 28 mules for the journey back to Bangkok. The caravan began the long, slow march out of the mountains, and they had hardly started the journey before they heard rustling noises next to the trail and the ambush began.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Gunfire erupted from the bushes as bandits attacked the caravan. The men around Frank took cover. Frank drew a pistol and ducked behind a bush. He returned fire as best he could, but it was hard to identify targets in the gunsmoke and chaos. When the smoke cleared, the bandits were gone, and so was half the heroin and all of the food. Many of Frank's guides lay dead on the ground, and now Frank was feeling the full effect of his supplier's warning about the long and dangerous journey. The caravan continued toward Bangkok, but now the survivors were forced to scavenge their food. Frank reluctantly ate bugs offered by his guides, and in less than a day, he fell horribly

• 19:22Speaker 00

  sick. He was unable to walk, and his guides carried him on a makeshift stretcher. As the days passed, he became convinced that this was how he was gonna die, not from a bullet on a street in Harlem, but from sickness in the jungles of Thailand. But Frank didn't die. During the return trip, he eventually recovered enough to walk. By the time he reached the city limits of Bangkok, he estimated he had lost 20 pounds from malnutrition and exertion. He was in bad shape, but he was alive. Again, it's impossible to know the truth of the jungle adventure or if it happened at all. But what's not in question is that Frank's heroin business was booming, though it was not all smooth sailing.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  For a year, from the second half of 1968 to the second half of 1969, Frank's heroin operation raked in millions of dollars per week, and he employed hundreds of enforcers on the streets to protect his territory. But the first new problem for the business started showing itself in the second half of 1969. America was slowly ending combat operations in Vietnam and withdrawing its troops. For the time being, Frank's suppliers could still use US military planes to ship the heroin, but finding space on the crowded aircraft and keeping the drugs hidden from searches would become increasingly difficult as the years rolled on.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  And as Frank and his team updated their strategies to make sure the heroin kept flowing through the pipeline, Frank faced his second new problem: himself. Frank had lived in Harlem for 25 years, and for the majority of that time, he had been mostly anonymous as a petty thief and a small-time operator in Bumpy Johnson's crew. But in the space of a year and a half, he had gone from a small-time operator to a multimillionaire kingpin.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Frank Lucas was now well-known in Harlem and to some other dealers in other cities, but he was still anonymous to federal narcotics agents. His heroin pipeline to Thailand had worked so well that he remained off of the radar of upper-level drug investigators. That was partially because his success was so fast and so recent, and partially because he didn't live a flashy lifestyle, until 1970. On October 26th, Frank took a trip to Atlanta to see a boxing match, Muhammad Ali versus Jerry Quarry. The fight was called "The Return of the Champion." Ali had been effectively banned from boxing for three and a half years for refusing to enter the military when he was drafted for service in Vietnam.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  But in 1970, with America's combat operations winding down, Ali was back in the ring. Frank dressed nice for the fight, but he didn't overdo it. He wasn't trying to impress anybody, and as it turned out, he was in the minority on that score. Many of the dealers from California were wearing mink fur coats in spite of the Atlanta heat. Seeing Frank in a modest suit, the other dealers started to joke about him, and basically said he was small-time. The comments got under Frank's skin. He vowed he would go big for the next event, which turned out to be on his home turf of New York.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Muhammad Ali won the fight in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry in a somewhat disappointing fashion for all involved. The fighters were fairly evenly matched through two rounds. Then about halfway through the third, Ali threw a punch that badly cut Quarry over his left eye. Blood poured from the wound, but Quarry continued to fight until the bell rang to end the round. When a doctor saw the severity of the cut, the fight was over. Ali won, but it wasn't satisfying. Five months later, it was a whole different story, at least for the spectators. In March of 1971, Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  That was the heavyweight epic everyone wanted to see. Both fighters were undefeated, and it was going to be a spectacle that transcended boxing. With an event like that, Frank Lucas wanted to make a splash. Six weeks before the fight, he went to a furrier to buy a custom-made coat. At first, the furrier offered to make him a floor-length mink coat. Frank refused. Everyone had mink fur coats by that point. Frank wanted something special, something that would make him stand out. After some discussion, they settled on a coat and a matching hat made from chinchilla fur. The coat cost $100,000, and the hat cost another $25,000.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Today, the total would be just shy of $1 million, for a coat and a hat. When the big night arrived, March 8, 1971, Frank Lucas showed up to the Garden in style.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Frank stepped out of a limousine, wearing the chinchilla coat over a tailored suit with a hat on top. Crowds cheered, even though nobody knew who he was. They saw a man in a stylish fur coat and assumed he was some kind of celebrity. After all, it was the biggest fight in years. The Garden was packed with famous actors, politicians, musicians, and business moguls. Frank quickly discovered he liked the attention. People were impressed, or intrigued, or both. Frank was settling into his ringside seat when he saw Frank Matthews, a fellow New York gangster who also happened to be from North Carolina. Frank ran a barber shop in Bed-Stuy, a numbers racket in Philadelphia,

• 25:18Speaker 00

  and a cocaine business all over the Northeast. Frank Matthews' cocaine pipeline went from New York to Cuba to Colombia, and he became so successful that he was nicknamed "Black Caesar." Frank Lucas and Frank Matthews were friendly but not friends, and tonight they were competitors. As soon as they spotted each other, they began betting on the fight. Starting at $100,000, they kept upping the ante until they reached half a million. Frank was strutting more than he ever had in his life, and people were starting to notice. Countless photographers snapped his picture that night. And soon, local law enforcement and federal agents started to wonder about the guy in

• 26:00Speaker 00

  the outlandish coat who had ringside seats for a massive sporting event and was making bets with a notorious gangster. And yet, the man was not a celebrity, and he was not known to upper levels of law enforcement. Agents had heard of a gang called the Country Boys, and they knew of a potent brand of heroin called Blue Magic. And they had noticed a curious trend at the same time they were learning those names. Many of the old-guard heroin dealers in Harlem had been turning up dead in abandoned buildings. Agents knew a lot, but they didn't know the identity of the person who led the operation which seemed to dominate Harlem almost overnight. Except now, maybe they did.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Maybe he was the guy in the $100,000 coat and the $25,000 hat. Federal narcotics agents would soon learn the name Frank Lucas. And the early 1970s would become a desperate time for Frank Lucas, Frank Matthews, and all the powerful gangsters in Harlem.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Next time on Infamous America, Frank Lucas pursues legitimate businesses to try to hide his money. But to put it simply, he's too big to hide. A federal task force descends on New York with the intent of wiping out all the prominent gangsters. It's Newton's Law of Gravity: What Goes Up Must Come Down. Next week on Infamous America.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Research for today's episode would not have been possible without The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson, Harlem Gangster by Mayme Johnson and Karen E. Quinones Miller, and Original Gangster: The Real-Life Story of One of America's Most Notorious Drug Lords by Frank Lucas and Aaliyah S. King. This series was researched and written by Robert Teamstra. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.