Frank Lucas & Nicky Barnes New Yorks Most Notorious Drug Dealers

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• published: 30 Mar 2014
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This show takes a look at New York's most notorious drug dealers Frank Lucas and Leroy "Nicky" Barnes. Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930) is an American organized crime boss, and former heroin dealer, who operated in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was particularly known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle. Lucas boasted that he smuggled heroin using the coffins of dead American servicemen, but this claim is denied by his South East Asian associate, Leslie "Ike" Atkinson. Rather than hide the drugs in the coffins, they were hidden in the pallets underneath as depicted in the 2007 feature film American Gangster in which he was played by Denzel Washington, although the film fictionalized elements of Lucas' life for dramatic effect. Arrests and releases In January 1975, Lucas' house in Teaneck, New Jersey, was raided by a task force consisting of 10 agents from Group 22 of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and 10 New York Police Department detectives attached to the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB). In his house authorities found $584,683 in cash. He was later convicted of both federal and New Jersey state drug violations. The following year he was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Once convicted, Lucas provided evidence that led to more than 100 further drug-related convictions. For his safety in 1977, Lucas and his family were placed in the witness protection program. In 1981, after 5 years in custody, his 40-year Federal term and 30-year state term were reduced to time served plus lifetime parole. In 1984, he was caught and convicted of trying to exchange one ounce of heroin and $13,000 for one kilogram of cocaine. He was defended by his former prosecutor Richie Roberts and received a sentence of seven years. He was released from prison in 1991. Depictions in media Lucas' life was dramatized in the 2007 Universal Pictures crime film American Gangster, in which he was portrayed by Denzel Washington. The film grossed more than $US127 million, and was met with generally positive reviews. In an interview with MSNBC, Lucas expressed his excitement about the film and amazement at Denzel Washington's portrayal, though he admitted to several news outlets that only a small portion of the film was true, and that much of it was fabricated for narrative effect. In addition, Richie Roberts criticized the film for portraying him in a custody battle while in real life he never had a child; he also criticized the portrayal of Lucas, describing it as "almost noble". Sterling Johnson, Jr., a federal judge who served as a special narcotics prosecutor and assisted the arrest and trial of Lucas, described the film as "one percent reality and ninety-nine percent Hollywood." In addition, Johnson described the real life Lucas as "illiterate, vicious, violent, and everything Denzel Washington was not." Former DEA agents Jack Toal, Gregory Korniloff, and Louis Diaz filed a lawsuit against Universal saying that the events in the film were fictionalized and that the film defamed them and hundreds of other agents. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon. While McMahon noted that the intertitle that appears at the end of the film was "wholly inaccurate", in that Lucas' cooperation did not lead to the convictions, and admonished that "It would behoove a major corporation like Universal (which is owned by a major news organization, NBC) not to put inaccurate statements at the end of popular films", she stated that the film failed to meet legal standards of defamation because it failed to "show a single person who is identifiable as a DEA agent". Many of Lucas' other claims, as presented in the film, have also been called into question, such as being the right hand man of Bumpy Johnson, rising above the power of the Mafia and Nicky Barnes, and that he was the mastermind behind the Golden Triangle heroin connection of the 1970s. Ron Chepesiuk, a biographer of Frank Lucas, deemed the story a myth. Associated Press entertainment writer Frank Coyle noted that "this mess happened partially because journalists have been relying on secondary sources removed from the actual events."