Mark Jacobson - American Gangster. And Other Tales of New York

I was born in New York City in the baby boom year of 1948 and lived here most of my life. I started my journalism career back in the middle 1970s, writing more often than not about New York. There have been ups and downs over the past thirty years, but I can't say I have ever been bored. After all, the Naked City is supposed to have eight million stories and, as a magazine writer, I only need about ten good ones a year. So I can afford to be picky. Whether I've been picky enoughor managed to tell those stories well enoughyou can decide for yourself by thumbing through this book. That said, some stories are just winners, fresh-out-of-the-blocks winners. The saga of Frank Lucas, Harlem drug dealer, reputed killer, and general all-around enemy of the people, was one of those stories.

An odd thing about the genesis of my involvement with Lucas is that I'd always been under the impression he was something of an urban myth. That was my opinion when Lucas's name came up in a conversation I was having half a dozen years ago with my good friend, the late Jack Newfield. Newfield said he'd seen Nick Pileggi, the classic pre-Internet New York City magazine writer who had been smart enough to get out at the right time, making untold fortunes writing movies like Goodfellas. Nick had mentioned to Jack that Lucas was alive and living in New Jersey.

"You mean, Frank Lucas, the guy with the body bags?" I asked Newfield, who said, yeah, one and the same. This was a surprise. Anyone who had their ear to the ground during the fiscal crisis years of the 1970s, those Fear City times when New York appeared to be falling apart at the seams, remembered the ghoulish story of thousands of pounds of uncut heroin being smuggled from Southeast Asia in the body bags of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. The doomsday metaphordeath arriving wrapped inside of deathwas hard to beat, but this couldn't really be true, could it?

This was one of the first things I asked Lucas when, after much hunting, I located him in downtown Newark. "Did you really smuggle dope in the body bags?" I asked Frank, then in his late sixties, living in a beat-up project apartment and driving an even more beat-up 1979 Caddy with a bad transmission.

"Fuck no," responded Lucas, taking great offense. He never put any heroin into the body bag of a GI. Nor did he ever stuff kilos of dope into the body cavities of the dead soldiers, as some law enforcement officials had contended. These were disgusting, slanderous stories, Lucas protested.

"We smuggled the dope in the soldiers' coffins," Lucas roared, setting the record straight. "Coffins, not bags!"

This was a large distinction, Frank contended. He and his fellow "Country Boys" (he only hired family members or residents of his backwoods North Carolina hometown) would never be so sloppy as to toss good dope into a dead guy's body bag. They took the trouble to contact highly skilled carpenters to construct false bottoms for soldiers' coffins. It was inside these secret compartments that Lucas shipped the heroin that would addict who knows how many poor suckers. "Who the hell is gonna look in a soldier's coffin," Lucas chortled rhetorically, maintaining that his insistence on careful workmanship showed proper deference to those who had given their life for their country.