Pod Insights Infamous America FRANK LUCAS Ep. 6 | “American Gangster” About this episode Frank Lucas experiences a rough ride in the second half of the 1980s, and he hits rock bottom in the early 1990s. But when he is at his lowest point, one of his brothers throws him a lifeline. Frank finally leaves the heroin business, but he still struggles in the legitimate world… until he achieves worldwide fame as the subject of the Hollywood film “American Gangster,” though the movie stirs up nearly as much controversy as it does money at the box office.
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
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0:26 Speaker 01 There's a pill version of Ozempic.
0:41 Speaker 02 There were dark times ahead for Frank Lucas. He was no stranger to difficulty, but nothing like the pit he was approaching. He had been released from prison in 1981 after serving just six of a possible 70 years for conspiracy to distribute heroin. His two sentences had been reduced because he cooperated with investigators and prosecutors, like Richie Roberts, to bring down crooked cops and other dealers. But when Frank was released, he was 51 years old. He had no marketable skills. Most of his criminal connections were dead or in prison. Two of his brothers were in prison for their roles in his heroin operation. His family was scattered.
1:23 Speaker 02 His wife Julie and their daughter Francine were spending most of their time in Puerto Rico. Julie was Puerto Rican, and she found safety with her family when Frank's world fell apart. Frank's son, Frank Lucas Jr., was living in Las Vegas with famous boxer Joe Louis. Frank had tried to get the family back together, but that effort imploded when his hotel room had been raided by the DEA. Frank had gone back to selling heroin on the streets as his only way to make money. And luckily for him, he didn't have any heroin on him when DEA agents kicked down his hotel room door. Now it was March of 1984. Frank was back on his own, and he met a mysterious woman at a bar who propelled him toward his rock-bottom moment.
2:14 Speaker 02 The mysterious woman was Angelina Esperon. It sounded like there was a little bit of mutual flirtation happening as she started leading Frank down a particular path. Esperon knew who he was, and she said he was an inspiration to people like her. She was in the drug game too, but on a much smaller level. She wanted to increase her business, and she asked Frank for a small favor, nothing too heavy. She had a contact from Cuba, a guy who could help her source cocaine. But she wasn't used to making deals of that size, so she would need a guarantor. If Frank Lucas vouched for her, the deal would go much more smoothly. Frank tried to turn her down, but she was insistent, so insistent that he finally caved.
3:00 Speaker 02 If it was just a meeting and a little chit-chat, what harm could it do? Frank wasn't buying anything himself, unless maybe the right deal came along. Frank had been trying to set up a larger operation in Las Vegas when the DEA had ruined his plan. It was nothing on the scale of his previous network, but it was bigger than buying and selling on the street. Frank agreed to meet Angelina Esperon's Cuban contact. And as soon as he said yes, she set a meeting for that same day. That was March 5, 1984, and later in the day, Frank walked into a Sheraton Hotel Bar near LaGuardia Airport. Angelina Esperon was already there, and she was thrilled that he was doing her this favor.
3:44 Speaker 02 He told her it was nothing as they waited for the man from Cuba. When the man eventually arrived, Frank saw that he was a flamboyant drug runner, grinning and showing off. Frank didn't trust him. A guy like that, who was flashy and liked attention, that type of guy was trouble. Frank had seen it plenty of times before. Frank had been that guy, and it had cost him dearly. At the hotel bar, as the three of them settled in to talk and have dinner, Frank should have listened to his instincts.
4:29 Speaker 02 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 6, American Gangster.
4:55 Speaker 02 The Cuban contact offered to buy dinner, and Frank and Angelina accepted. At the table, Frank stayed pretty quiet while Angelina and the Cuban contact talked. Frank spoke up when he needed to do his part and vouch for Angelina's legitimacy, but other than that, he listened. Frank had no illusions about Angelina. He knew she was using him for her own ends, but for something relatively easy like this job, he didn't mind so much. He enjoyed the company of an attractive young woman, and it didn't matter if he wouldn't see her again after she started making real money with the Cuban deal. If she started making real money with the Cuban deal. Frank definitely didn't trust the Cuban guy.
5:37 Speaker 02 But then the Cuban turned the conversation toward Frank. Beyond Angelina's cocaine deal, the Cuban contact was interested in discussing heroin. He wanted to know the street value of heroin, because he had $12,000, which he was hoping to multiply. If the numbers sounded good, the Cuban would exchange the money with Frank for the right amount of heroin. Frank deflected and said he didn't carry heroin with him. The meeting ended soon afterward, and they agreed to reconvene later to discuss the details. At that point, all that had been brokered was a half kilo of cocaine for Angelina and nothing for Frank. When the group split up, Frank invited Angelina to his hotel room, but she declined by saying
6:21 Speaker 02 her brother would arrive shortly to pick her up. Frank was disappointed, but he didn't think much more about it.
6:32 Speaker 02 When Frank met the Cuban man again, Frank was willing to talk further about a possible heroin deal. Frank offered to sell an ounce of heroin for $25,000, and they negotiated from there. Frank assured the Cuban that the heroin was 35% pure, which was far stronger than the typical product on the street and could be cut multiple times to extend its lifespan. The Cuban man was impressed, and he asked if Frank knew a lot about making these kinds of deals. Frank answered, "I'd do it 365 days a year." Frank and the Cuban man parted on good terms, and Frank returned home. On the morning of March 19th, DEA agents and police officers arrested Frank Lucas for
7:17 Speaker 02 conspiracy to purchase and distribute heroin and cocaine. Angelina Esperon had been an informant who set him up. Frank was deeply embarrassed. He was 54 years old, and he was clearly no longer at the top of his game. Frank's case went to trial, and Frank's lawyers tried to persuade the jury that Frank was essentially an undercover agent who was actively informing on other drug dealers. That argument failed, of course, because there was no documentation to prove that Frank was working for a law enforcement agency, and there were no agents who could testify to Frank's role as an informant. The jury found Frank guilty, and the judge sentenced him to seven years in federal prison.
8:00 Speaker 02 This time, there would be no deals with authorities. Frank spent the rest of the 1980s in prison, most of the time in Phoenix, Arizona. Visits from old friends helped him pass the days, but it was far different from his previous experience when he was able to bribe the guards to allow him to have better food and all manner of luxuries. He heard news of his family from time to time. His wife and daughter were in Puerto Rico, and his son was going to college in Dallas, Texas. Frank was transferred to a prison in Dallas after a while, and his son made regular visits, which greatly bolstered Frank's spirits. When Frank was paroled in 1991, he stayed in Dallas with his son
8:43 Speaker 02 and under the close watch of a parole officer. Frank needed to check in with the parole officer once a week, and between check-ins, he needed to figure out a way to make money. He faced the same problem he had encountered a decade earlier when he was released in 1981. How does someone who has only worked as a drug trafficker make an honest living? Frank's son offered to help, but Frank turned him down. He didn't want the young man to get involved in any of his businesses, even if they were perfectly legitimate. Frank didn't want to stain his son's life any more than he already had. And Frank knew he had no legitimate prospects at that moment. His only choice was to go back to the only thing he knew,
9:26 Speaker 02 the thing that had landed him in prison twice, the thing that would now lead him to rock bottom.
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10:08 Speaker 02 Frank wound up flying to New Jersey regularly without informing his parole officer. He justified the trips to himself by telling himself he was going to visit his mother, who still lived in New Jersey. He did see her. He stayed with her while he was there. But there was an ulterior motive to the trips. He worked with his few remaining contacts in the area to start selling heroin on the streets yet again. He didn't have the time or the resources to build an infrastructure, but he knew how to buy and sell, just like the old days when he was starting out in Harlem in the 1940s. But it wasn't the old days, it was the dark days, the rock bottom days. Frank Lucas was 61 years old.
10:50 Speaker 02 He was breaking parole in Texas to fly to New Jersey to stay in his mother's apartment. He didn't have a gang or his old high-quality product Blue Magic. He made just enough money to survive by dealing to kids. Some of the only nice moments were when he returned to his mother's apartment in the evening, and the two of them watched professional wrestling together. In an attempt to maintain appearances, Frank regularly called his parole officer from his mother's phone to make his weekly check-in. In Frank's miserable state, it was one of those calls that pushed him over the edge.
11:30 Speaker 02 During a call with his parole officer, Frank understood how much he had been pushing his luck. The parole officer asked Frank to report to the office. Trying to buy time, Frank said that he couldn't right now. When the officer asked if he was still in the state of Texas, Frank lied and said he was. He said he could come in the next morning, first thing. The parole officer didn't buy it, he needed Frank to come to the office now. Something in Frank snapped. He'd spent the last several months feeling smaller than he ever had in his life, and the parole officer's demand sent him into a spiral. He cursed the man over the phone and said he wouldn't come in. If they wanted to see him, they'd have to catch him.
12:13 Speaker 02 He slammed the phone down, and with that, Frank Lucas was officially a fugitive. His time on the run, so to speak, didn't last long. He wasn't really running, and he certainly wasn't hiding. On the night it ended, Frank and his mother watched wrestling like they always did. At 4:00 in the morning, Frank awoke to someone knocking on the front door. He knew who it was. Only one category of person knocked on the door of a place that was harboring a criminal at four o'clock in the morning. Frank answered the door, and there stood a US marshal who said Frank was under arrest for parole violation. Frank didn't fight it. He let the marshal in and went into his mother's room to tell her that he was going away again.
12:56 Speaker 02 The marshal drove Frank to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he would be held while a parole board determined his fate. With his record, Frank worried that the punishment would be bad. He waited in jail for weeks before the parole board finally scheduled the meeting. At the appointed time, guards escorted him into a room. Frank's two sisters were there to support him. They all waited until, as Frank described them, five or six elderly white women, dressed in dainty suits and hats, walked in to pass judgment. Frank thought they looked more like they were going to a tea party than a meeting to determine his future. One of Frank Lucas's genuine skills was making strangers like him.
13:40 Speaker 02 When he wanted, he could turn on the charm. In the room with the elderly ladies of the parole board, he came across as penitent and ashamed for his actions. By that time, he really was ashamed, but he still needed to use his charm to make sure he struck the right notes. Frank's sisters said they believed that if he was released, he would go care for their mother, and he would never break the law again. The parole board conferred for only one hour before making the decision. Frank Lucas would be given six months in jail, the minimum possible sentence. Frank heaved a sigh of relief. He could do another six months, one last stint in jail, and then he would go straight. He had no idea what he would do, but he knew what he wouldn't do.
14:24 Speaker 02 He was done with the drug business for good.
14:35 Speaker 02 In early 1992, Frank Lucas walked out of jail for the last time. He was approaching 62 years old, and he was finally done with illegal activities. He was committed to going straight, but he had no idea how he would make money to survive. By that time, his brothers Vernon and Larry were out of prison, and Larry was examining a business opportunity in a completely different field. Larry had a friend who was getting into the oil business, and the friend needed investors to help him import oil from Nigeria to Texas. It was perfectly legal, and Larry asked Frank to invest. Due to Frank's troubles with the law over the past decade, he had very little money of his own, but he started a fundraising effort to find other investors, and they actually
15:20 Speaker 02 made it work. To some extent, Frank Lucas, from North Carolina via Harlem with multiple stops in state and federal prisons, was now a Texas oil man. It was modest compared to the profits from heroin, but there was no risk of a federal agent appearing at his door to search his property and take him to jail. Even with the stability, Frank ended up leaving the oil business after a few years, and he moved to Newark, New Jersey. All around Frank, during those years of transition in the 1990s, there was a resurgent interest in mobsters and gangsters from previous eras. Like many trends, it was led by Hollywood.
16:05 Speaker 02 The iconic movie Goodfellas, released in 1990, started the trend. It was followed by popular films like New Jack City, Donnie Brasco, Casino, and a slew of others. Early in the year 2000, Mark Jacobson, a writer for Village Voice and New York Magazine, was looking for stories in that vein, crime stories set in New York, and he received a tip from Nicholas Pellegrini, the guy who wrote Goodfellas and Casino. Pledgie said to Jacobson, "If you want a good crime story, you should reach out to Frank Lucas." Jacobson had heard a story about a drug dealer who allegedly smuggled heroin into the US in the coffins of dead soldiers, but he assumed it was made up. He was astonished to hear that
16:49 Speaker 02 it may have been true. Jacobson decided to pursue the story, and he ended up contacting former Essex County Prosecutor Richie Roberts. Against the odds, Richie and Frank had become friends, and Frank had hired Richie to do legal work over the past few years. Richie Roberts gave the address of Frank's small apartment in Newark to Mark Jacobson. Jacobson knocked on Frank's door, and Frank Lucas, then 70 years old, let him in. Jacobson was struck by how sparse the apartment was. The walls were bare, and the only pieces of furniture were a high-top table and chairs that must have belonged to a bar in their past.
17:30 Speaker 02 Jacobson wanted to interview Frank, but Jacobson had to survive an interview by Frank first. Frank grilled Jacobson about the writer's knowledge of Harlem and his experience as a journalist. Jacobson passed the test, and Frank agreed to tell his life story. The result was a mammoth, 20-page story titled "The Return of Superfly" in New York Magazine. The issue hit newsstands on August 14, 2000, and it introduced Frank Lucas to a general public who generally had never heard of the formerly high-flying, heroin-smuggling, chinchilla-coat-wearing Harlem gangster. The public ate it up, and within a year, Hollywood producers wanted the story.
18:13 Speaker 02 According to Nicholas Pledgie, he took the idea to mega-producer Brian Grazer, and Pledgie took Frank Lucas along to help sell the story. Grazer loved the idea, and he bought the rights to the article. According to Frank, Richie Roberts helped negotiate the deal. Frank already knew that it could be tough to make a movie after his failed experiment with a film called "The Ripoff" in the early 1970s. He had contributed money as a producer, and he was also an actor, but the movie fell apart and never finished production. Now, nearly 40 years later, the same thing happened again.
18:56 Speaker 02 Director Antoine Fuqua was about four weeks away from filming the first shot of a movie that was called, at least at one time, True Blue. But then it all fell apart. The film was supposed to be the big reunion between Fuqua and actor Denzel Washington after they worked together on the movie Training Day in 2001. Training Day was an unexpectedly massive hit, and now it was three years later, in 2004, and they were going to re-team for the story of Harlem gangster Frank Lucas. Producer Brian Grazer had spent nearly four years moving Frank's story through the Hollywood pipeline. There were multiple script rewrites, and the budget kept growing until Universal Studios,
19:38 Speaker 02 which was supplying the money to make the film, shut down the production. Four weeks before it was supposed to start shooting, the movie was dead. Antoine Fuqua moved on to his next project, an action thriller with Mark Wahlberg called Shooter. Denzel Washington went on to do Inside Man and Déjà Vu. But producer Brian Grazer kept working to resurrect the story of Frank Lucas. Grazer was able to convince another director-actor duo to reunite for the second time. Director Ridley Scott and actor Russell Crowe had taken the world by storm in the year 2000 with their epic production Gladiator. In 2005, they filmed a small drama called A Good Year, and Brian Grazer brought them
20:22 Speaker 02 back together the following year to restart production on the Frank Lucas story. With a legendary director like Ridley Scott on board, Denzel Washington agreed to come back as Frank Lucas for the film that would be called American Gangster. The movie was an ensemble with a huge cast of recognizable actors, though it focused on two main storylines. The primary story was Frank Lucas, and the secondary story was Richie Roberts. The creative team behind the movie wanted to give the film the best chance of success by making it appeal to the largest possible audience, so they devoted more time to the Richie Roberts storyline than existed in real life.
21:05 Speaker 02 And they boosted the friendship of the pair beyond its actual level. The movie was released in November 2007. It was a decent financial success and received mostly good reviews from viewers and critics. Curiously, Frank Lucas backed away from the big star-studded movie premiere. His car took him to the venue and it circled the block multiple times, but ultimately, he went home. Frank claimed later that he was overwhelmed by guilt that night. Guilt that he had built fame and fortune off of a drug that had killed so many people. Richie Roberts and journalist Mark Jacobson had another theory. They thought Frank didn't go to the premiere because he was afraid someone would take a shot at him.
21:49 Speaker 02 The film portrayed several events, like the infamous trip into the jungles of Thailand, which were loudly disputed by people around Frank. A few of those critics would make their voices heard shortly after the release of the movie. But to finish off the reunions which were associated with the film, there was a big one in 2007. That year, Mark Jacobson succeeded in getting Frank Lucas and rival gangster Nicky Barnes to sit in the same room together for a follow-up article to Jacobson's story about Frank. Nicky Barnes had been released from prison in 1998, and when the two old Harlem gangsters got back together, it was the first time they had spoken in more than thirty years.
22:34 Speaker 02 With the American gangster film, Frank Lucas's legend and legacy were secure. As always happens, the great movie mind trick was successful. Even though viewers knew they were watching a Hollywood movie and that it was a fictionalized and dramatized version of real events, they allowed themselves to believe that they just watched a true story. Like all movies that are associated with a true story, there are elements of the film which are fairly accurate to real life, elements which are heavily exaggerated versions of the real events, and elements which are completely fictional. The added complication with American Gangster was that no one knew the true story. Frank Lucas was notoriously unreliable.
23:16 Speaker 02 He loved telling stories, and he loved to make himself the hero of those stories. He had no problem embellishing or outright lying to make the story help him in some way. So when the "true story" was already a mystery, and then the movie pushed the envelope even further, there were lots of people who were not happy.
23:37 Speaker 02 Immediately after the film came out, a group of retired DEA agents sued the producers for implying that Frank's testimony led to the arrest of corrupt DEA agents. The lawsuit was unsuccessful. Ike Atkinson, the man whom Frank said was his primary heroin contact in Thailand, questioned many of the details in both the film and the article that inspired it. Atkinson said Frank bought heroin from the mafia like everyone else. He said Frank's reputation as the guy who came up with the idea of bypassing the middleman to go straight to the Golden Triangle for heroin was nonsense.
24:18 Speaker 02 And Atkinson also cast severe doubt on the fantastical parts of Frank's story, such as the gunfight in the jungle while coming back from the poppy fields. A year after the movie was released, Atkinson's criticism was joined by Mayme Johnson, Bumpy Johnson's widow. She was in her 90s, but she was still sharp, and she was deeply offended by the way Frank Lucas had been talking about her husband. She said Frank mischaracterized his relationship with Bumpy, stealing details from the real relationship between Bumpy and Flash Walker, the young man whom Bumpy took under his wing. Frank had claimed to be Bumpy's right-hand man, but Mayme Johnson said Frank was just a country boy with delusions of grandeur who looked up to Bumpy.
25:03 Speaker 02 All of Frank's biographers agreed Frank was a good storyteller, but not a reliable truth-teller. The reality of Frank's story was obscured by exaggeration, tall tales, and boasting. Nobody really believed he smuggled heroin on Henry Kissinger's plane. He may not have smuggled heroin from Southeast Asia at all. He may have sourced it from the mafia like everyone else in Harlem. At the end of the day, all the stories from those eras came from people who had their own agendas. They're all a mix of truth, half-truth, and lies. But one thing has never changed: Frank Lucas made millions in the heroin trade. However he did it, he became one of the top gangsters in Harlem.
25:47 Speaker 02 On May 30th, 2019, Frank Lucas passed away at the age of 88. His family and friends tried to make the funeral as impressive as possible. They reportedly commissioned a custom-made coffin styled like a Cadillac with the words "Frank Lucas" on the license plate. In a final touch of irony, nobody had the money to pay for it, because Frank Lucas died broke. So the funeral had to wait while they negotiated to receive the coffin from the man who made it. Eventually, they did get it, and Frank Lucas, American gangster, was buried in his Cadillac coffin.
26:36 Speaker 02 Next time on Infamous America, it's a three-episode miniseries, the final miniseries of the year. And I'm gonna stay secretive about the topic because I want to try something new with the production. There are lots of things that have to come together in the right order, and I don't want to overpromise and underdeliver. We'll be back in a couple weeks with that series.
27:00 Speaker 02 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 Marc Jacobson's article, "The Return of Superfly," which is readily available online, "Harlem Godfather" by Mimi 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 Teamstro. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier.
27:45 Speaker 02 Thanks for listening.
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