How a Church Deacon Became the Most Feared Kingpin in Harlem – HT
January 28th, 1975. A Tuesday morning, Tene, New Jersey, Sheffield Road. A modest split level at number 933. 1500 square ft of green lawn and a tree growing crooked in the front yard. Suburban, quiet, the kind of house a postal clerk owns. 20 federal agents move on the front door. 10de NYPD. They know what’s inside.
They’ve known for months. Inside the house, a woman named Julie Farret runs upstairs to the second floor bathroom. She is the lady of the house, Puerto Rican, beautiful, married to the homeowner since 1967. In her arms are two suitcases. She opens the bathroom window. She throws the suitcases out.
Cash rains onto the sideyard. Hundreds, 20s, stacks bound in rubber bands. She is screaming. She is screaming at the agents. The exact words recorded by the men who heard her, “Take it all. Take it all.” In the hallway behind her, a three-year-old girl named Francine watches. Julie grabs the toddler. She stuffs $100 bills into the waistband of her daughter’s pants.
She is trying to save what she can with the only hiding place she has left. By the time the agents finish counting, the seizure log reads 584,683 in cash on the floor of a 1,500 square ft house in a town that voted to integrate its own schools, plus keys to safe deposit boxes in the Cayman Islands, plus deeds to property in North Carolina, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and Puerto Rico.
plus two diamond rings appraised at $125,000. Plus a ticket to a United Nations ball, compliments of the ambassador of Honduras. The man who answers the door is wearing sweatpants, a sweatshirt, no jewelry. He looks like he’s been watching television. His name is Frank Lucas. He is 44 years old. His mother goes to church every Sunday.
His wife is upstairs throwing money out a window. He has been running heroin into Harlem for six years. Lenoir County, North Carolina, 1930. Lrange, a railroad town, cotton fields, dirt roads, black sharecroers, and white land owners, and not much in between. This is the south before the civil rights movement, before integration, before the highways.
This is where Frank Lucas entered the world on September 9th, 1930. His mother was Mahali Jones Lucas. The neighbors called her Miss Mahali. She was a churchwoman, African Methodist Episcopal. She raised her children on hymns and scripture and the kind of country discipline that doesn’t ask twice.
She lived to be 94 years old. She buried her husband, buried her sons, and never stopped going to church. Frank was the oldest. Behind him came the brothers Azelle called Dicki, Vernon Lee called Shorty, John Paul, Larry Leven. Five boys who would three decades later sit at the center of the most disciplined heroin distribution crew Harlem had ever seen.
The Country Boys. But that’s later. The boys grew up black and poor in eastern North Carolina. The work was tobacco fields and lumber yards. The schools were segregated and underfunded. The future for a black boy in Lenoir County in the 1930s was the future Mahalei could pray for and not much else. Frank Lucas told a story about why he left.
He said when he was 6 years old, he watched five clansmen take his cousin into the woods. The cousin’s name was Oadaya, 12 years old. They tied him with ropes. They put a shotgun in his mouth. They killed him for looking at a white girl. Frank said he saw it. Frank said it was the moment that broke something in him.
Frank said it was the reason he became what he became. The story has no record, no newspaper, no death certificate, no family confirmation. The biographer Ron Chip Pesuk searched for evidence of the Oadia lynching for years and found nothing. He noted that there were almost no documented lynchings in North Carolina during Frank Lucas’s adolescence.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It means the only witness is Frank Lucas. And Frank Lucas was a man who knew the value of a good origin story. He told other stories. He said at 15 he was working for a pipe company in Wilson, North Carolina when he had an affair with the owner’s daughter, got caught, hit her father with a piece of pipe, stole $400 from the safe, and set the building on fire.
He said his mother pulled him on a bus to New York that same night. He said when he got off at Penn Station, he asked the policeman, “I want to go where all the black people are at.” He said the policeman pointed him to 114th Street. Maybe that happened, maybe it didn’t. What’s verifiable is this. By the late 1940s, Frank Lucas was in Harlem.
The boy from Lenoir County, who had never seen a building taller than a barn, was living in a city where the buildings blocked the sun. He learned the way country boys always learn the city. He watched, he copied, he stole. By his own count, he stuck up the Hollywood bar at Linux and 16th Street for $600. He walked into Bush Jewelers on 125th Street and walked out with a tray of diamonds.
He hustled pool at a place called Lumps Pool Room on 134th, taking grown men’s money with the soft accent and the dropped jaw of a kid who looked too dumb to know the angles. He was learning that in Harlem, what you looked like was almost never what you were. And he was watching one man harder than the rest.
The man Frank Lucas was watching was Ellsworth Raymond Johnson. Everyone called him Bumpy. Bumpy ran Harlem the way Carlo Gambino ran the docks. He was the black underworld’s bridge to the Italian mafia. He ran numbers. He ran narcotics. He went to prison three times, served 15 years at Alcatraz, and came home in 1963, still wearing a suit.
He died of a heart attack at Wells restaurant on 7th Avenue on July 7th, 1968. Frank Lucas told the world he was Bumpy Johnson’s right-hand man for 15 years. He told the world Bumpy died in his arms. He told the world he inherited Bumpy’s empire the moment Bumpy stopped breathing. The math doesn’t work.
Bumpy was at Alcatraz from 1952 until 1963. He was a free man in Harlem for 5 years before he died. Not 15. The strongest witness against Frank’s version is a woman named my Hatcher Johnson, Bumpy’s widow. She lived until 2009. She wrote a book in 2008 specifically to correct the record.
The title was Harlem Godfather, the rap on my husband. Her words on the record repeated to journalists for the rest of her life. Frank wasn’t nothing but a flunky and one that Bumpy never did really trust. And Bumpy did not die with Frank Lucas. All of his talk is lies. And Frank Lucas never spent one night in my house.
The man who actually drove Bumpy that last night was named Juny Bird. The young hustler who actually lived with Bumpy was named Zack Walker. Frank Lucas held coats. Frank Lucas ran errands. Frank Lucas was around. That was the whole of it. But when Bumpy died, Frank Lucas had something nobody could take from him, a name. He could say, “I was Bumpy’s man.
” And in 1968, with Bumpy in the ground, there was nobody left to say otherwise. So Frank said it loud often to anyone who would listen. He grew the story year by year until he believed it himself. He needed the name because he had a plan, and the plan needed legitimacy. The plan was to cut out the middleman.
In 1968, black heroin dealers in Harlem bought their product from the Italian mafia. The mafia bought it from Marseilles, the French Connection. By the time the powder hit Harlem, it had been cut six times and cost $50,000 a kilo. Frank Lucas wanted to skip the Italians. He wanted to skip Marles. He wanted to go to the source.
The source was Southeast Asia, the Golden Triangle, the opium fields of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Frank Lucas had a cousin by marriage. The cousin’s name was Leslie Atkinson. Everyone called him Ike. Ike was a retired US Army Master Sergeant from Goldsboro, North Carolina. Ike owned a bar in Bangkok called Jack’s American Star Bar.
Ike was already moving heroin to the United States through American military bases, through Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, through the parcel post, through hollowedout teak furniture. The DEA called him Sergeant Smack. Ike Atkinson had built the pipeline before Frank Lucas ever stepped on a plane. Frank Lucas did go to Bangkok.
That much is true, but he did not go alone and he did not build what was already built. The special narcotics prosecutor of New York at the time was a man named Sterling Johnson Jr., later a federal judge. His verdict on the record, Lucas wasn’t capable of securing a drug connection from the infamous Golden Triangle. Ron Cheper’s verdict.
After writing the only investigative biography of Atkinson, Lucas did go to Bangkok, but it was Ike who brought him there. Lucas did get some heroin from the Golden Triangle, but he got it from Ike, who established the Asian Heroin Pipeline. Frank Lucas, in his 2010 autobiography, erased Ike Atkinson entirely. The man who built the pipeline disappeared from the story. That’s how the legend works.
But the product was real. By 1969, Frank Lucas was selling pure Southeast Asian heroin and distinctive blue stamped glass sign bags on West 116th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. The brand had a name, Blue Magic. It was cleaner than anything Harlem had ever seen. The street cut was higher. The high was longer.
Junkies stopped buying from anyone else. The corner moved kilos a week. The cutting operation, by Frank’s own description, was a dozen women working in a Harlem apartment naked except for surgical masks so the powder wouldn’t absorb through their skin. A fourwoman called Red Top ran the table. They mixed the heroine with manite and quinine, stamped the bags, and shipped them out by the thousand.
And every man on the corner, every cutter at the table, every driver, every lookout, they were all from home. Lenoir County, Green County, Wayne County, North Carolina. Most of them were blood. Frank’s brothers ran the streets. Cousins ran the books. Nephews ran the bags. The crew called themselves the Country Boys. And the rule was simple.
No outsiders ever. If you were not from North Carolina and not in the family, you did not work for Frank Lucas. The federal government would spend three years trying to flip an informant inside that crew. The closed loop held until it didn’t. March 8th, 1971, Madison Square Garden. The fight of the century, Joe Frasier versus Muhammad Ali.
The most expensive ticket in American sports. Frank Lucas sat ringside, two seats over from Frank Sinatra. He was wearing a coat. The coat was chinchilla, floor length with a matching hat. He told different reporters different prices over the years. 50,000 60,000 100,000 $125,000. The price drifted because Frank Lucas was a storyteller and storytellers round up.
He sat there for 15 rounds in a coat worth more than the median Harlem family made in 20 years. Cameras found him. Newspapers wrote him up. The federal government and by Frank’s later telling saw the coat and started the file. That story is mostly cinema. The man who actually built the case against Frank Lucas was named Richard Roberts.
Richie, Essex County, New Jersey, head of the narcotic strike force. Richie Roberts spent years on Frank Lucas. And Richie Roberts, on the record, has corrected the legend. Law enforcement knew of him. Frank doesn’t believe that, but law enforcement certainly knew of him and his people. The coat brought a lot more attention on to him, but it did not start the case.
The coat was a vanity, a single expensive vanity. Frank Lucas knew it was a vanity because every other day of his life he wore the opposite. Drive past 933 Sheffield Roads in T-neck in 1973. You see a man pulling into the driveway of a 1500 square f foot split level. He’s driving a beat up Chevrolet he bought for $300. He calls it Nelly bail.
He sometimes wears a fake beard, dark glasses, and a long wig when he sits in that car watching his own corner from across the street. His own words on a tape he gave a journalist years later. Who’ think I’d be in a [ __ ] $300 car like that? That was the costume. The wife Julie, the little girl, Francine, the four daughters and three sons who eventually came.
the mother, Mahali, on the phone five times a day from North Carolina. Frank called her constantly. He flew her up. He took her to church when she visited. The neighbors of 933 Sheffield Road thought Frank Lucas was in real estate. They thought he was import export. He let them think about it. Inside the house was a different story.
A builtout playroom with pool table and bar. A master closet 20 feet long holding what one DEA agent later swore was at least 200 pairs of alligator snakes skin and platform shoes. Lilac, purple, lime green, every color you would never wear in public. A silver Mercedes Benz outside. A baby blue Thunderbird. Frank played pickup basketball on the property with members of the New York Knicks.
Walt Frasier, Earl Monroe, the men whose faces were on the front page of the sports section. They came to 933 Sheffield Road to shoot hoops on a halfcourt Frank had built behind the house. Artha Franklin once drove her car into the tree on the front lawn, and Frank left the tree growing crooked because he liked the story. He owned a cattle ranch in North Carolina.
He called it Paradise Valley. He claimed 300 heads of black Angus and a breeding bull worth $125,000. He owned office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles, Miami, and Puerto Rico. He laundered the cash through the East Tmont Avenue branch of Chemical Bank in the Bronx, a bank that later pleaded guilty to 200 misdemeanor violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, a direct consequence of Frank Lucas’s deposits.
He told reporters he was making a million dollars a day. He told them his net worth and offshore accounts was 52 million. The numbers came from his own mouth, repeated, embellished, never audited. The federal government later seized roughly 37 million in assets. The cash on the floor at Sheffield Road was the verifiable number, and it was a fraction of what he claimed.
The DEA agent who debriefed him after his arrest, Lewis Rice, called it chump change. Street money, not the warehouse Frank described. But it was enough. By 1973, Frank Lucas was a serious man. By 1974, he was a target. The federal task force that ended him was called Group 22. 20 DEA agents working out of New York. The lead case agent was named Gregory Cornelof.
The agents on his team were named Jack Tol, Louie Diaz, and eventually Lewis Rice. The Newick detectives who built the New Jersey half were named Eddie Jones, Al Spearman, and Benny Abbruso. The federal prosecutor was named Dominic Amarosa. In November and December of 1973, two members of the Gambino crime family were arrested in an unrelated case.
Their names were Antonio Dutro and Mario Pera. They flipped. They told the federal government that one of their best customers was a black man in Harlem who claimed he didn’t need them. A black man who they had personally delivered 22 pounds of heroin to at the Vanc Courtland Motel in the Bronx. That contradicted the Lucas legend before the legend was even written.
Frank Lucas was supposedly buying directly from Bangkok. The Gambinos said he was buying from them. Both things were true. Frank had multiple suppliers. Frank lied about which one he used. The names Delro and Pera gave the federal government produced a search warrant. But here’s where the costume cracked. January 28th, 1975, Tuesday morning, 20 agents on Sheffield Road.
Frank answered the door in sweatpants. Julie ran upstairs. The suitcases came out the window. Francine got the $100 bills shoved into her waistband, the cash, the safe deposit keys, the deeds, the rings, the UN ball ticket, all of it on the seizure log by sundown. DEA Deputy Director Frank Monasterero and head of enforcement Jim Hunt drove to Teneck personally that morning.
They had the agents pat each other down in front of witnesses before any cash was counted. They knew Frank Lucas would later claim the agent stole from him. He did claim it. He claimed 9 to 11 million vanished from his attic. In 2008, federal judge Colleen McMahon examined the record and ruled the search was carried out legally and that the $584,683 was seized in accordance with a valid warrant.
The patowns held up and the months before the raid, Frank Lucas had stopped sleeping the same place twice. He had stopped trusting his own corner. He had been driving Nelly Bell in the wig and fake beard for two years by then, watching his own dealers from across the street looking for the one who would betray him.
He thought it would be a stranger. He thought the closed loop of family and home county would protect him from outside infiltration. He was right about that. The infiltration didn’t come from outside. Julie was charged with obstruction. Frank was charged with continuing criminal enterprise. The country boy structure, the closed family loop, the rule that no outsider ever worked the corner held for one round of interrogations.
Then it broke from the inside. A nephew of Frank Lucas, brought in for questioning, agreed to cooperate. His name has never been made public. He named the locations. He named pay phones used for deals. He named co-conspirators by street name and birth name. Roberts confirmed it on the record years later.
We had three detectives who really spearheaded our investigation. We helped them flip a cousin who was an informant. He testified during the trial. The all family crew was broken by the family. What followed was federal indictment number one and state indictment number two. Frank Lucas plus 18 co-defendants in the Southern District of New York under the continuing criminal enterprise statute.
Frank Lucas plus 34 to 43 country boys defendants in New Jersey state court. The federal trial judge was named Irvin Ben Cooper. Cooper would at sentencing look at Frank Lucas across the courtroom and tell him on the record that he had showed not a grain of contrition for the legions of young people whose lives he had destroyed.
The federal sentence was 40 years. The New Jersey sentence was 30 more consecutive, 70 years aggregate. Frank Lucas was 45 years old. He would have been 115 on his release date. He had been on top of Harlem for 6 years. The family was waiting. Julie went into witness protection with him in 1977. They were relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. She would not stay clean.
Eight years later, around 1983, Frank arranged a drug deal in Las Vegas and sent Julie to deliver. Julie took young Francine, by then a child growing up, on what looked like a motheraughter trip. The FBI arrested Julie in the hotel room. Francine was sitting on the bed watching cartoons. The little girl who had been a toddler with $100 bills in her pants was now a child watching her mother get handcuffed in a Vegas hotel.
Julie did five years in federal prison. Francine grew up. Years later, she would found a nonprofit called Yellow Brick Road for children of incarcerated parents. The toddler from the bathroom window built a life out of the wreckage. 25 years after that Vegas arrest on May 19th, 2010, the DEA arrested Julie Farer again.
this time at an EA Verde hotel in Puerto Rico delivering 2 kg of cocaine to a confidential informant. In February 2012, Manhattan federal judge Laura Taylor Swain sentenced to Julie Farret to 5 years. Julie’s lawyer asked for leniency so she could spend time with her aging husband. Judge Swain refused. Frank Lucas’s wife, the girl from Puerto Rico, the homecoming queen, the mother of his children, the woman who threw the suitcases out the second floor window, went to federal prison for cocaine trafficking at age 69.
The costume by then had been off for 35 years. Frank Lucas served just over 5 years. In June of 1981, US Attorney John Martin of the Southern District of New York filed a motion to reduce Frank Lucas’ federal sentence. New York Judge Leonard Ronco filed the parallel motion in state court.
Assistant Essis County Prosecutor Vincent Newsie declined to oppose. Both sentences were reduced to time served plus lifetime parole. Martin’s words to reporters, “When someone decides to cooperate with the government and risks his life in doing so, then the reward must be substantial.” Frank Lucas had cooperated. What the cooperation actually produced by the most authoritative count up wire story in June of 1981 was the prosecution of 70 drug traffickers 34 of them in North Carolina plus 30 in the New York area.
Roughly 100 drug dealer convictions. All of them dealers. All of them street level or mid-level operators in the heroin and cocaine trade. The legend says different. The legend finalized by Ridley Scott’s 2007 film American Gangster says Frank Lucas’s cooperation took down three quarters of New York’s DEA.
The film’s closing in title says it on the screen. In 2008, federal judge Colleen McMahon examined the record and ruled the closing inner title wholly inaccurate. DEA spokesman Garrison Courtourtney confirmed publicly that no DEA agents were ever charged with wrongdoing in the Lucas case. NYPD spokesman Paul Brown confirmed no NYPD officer was ever convicted on Lucas’ evidence.
The DEA agent who handled Frank as an informant for years, Jack Tol, said it on the record. He never mentioned any crooked DEA agent or cop. He never gave up anybody like that. It was 100% drug dealers. Lewis Rice put it in two words, never happened. Frank Lucas did not bring down the federal government. Frank Lucas brought down a 100 black drug dealers.
most of their men who had once worked for him or alongside him and walked away after five years. He was not finished. In August of 1984, federal agents caught Frank Lucas in a reverse sting operation attempting to exchange one ounce of heroin and $13,000 for a kilogram of cocaine. He was sentenced to seven years.
His defense attorney was Richie Roberts, by then in private practice, taking his first criminal defense case, defending the man he had spent years putting in prison. Frank Lucas was released in 1991. In 2012, in Newick federal court, Frank Lucas pleaded guilty to attempting to cash a single $17,000 federal disability benefit check twice.
He was 82 years old. He had broken both legs in a car accident and was confined to a motorized wheelchair. The judge gave him 5 years probation. The man who told the world he made a million dollars a day died trying to double cash a disability check. He died on May 30th, 2019. Allaris Healthc Care Center, Cedar Grove, New Jersey, Natural Causes, 88 years old.
The funeral was at St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church in Newark on June 11th. His casket was custom airbrushed white painted with an image of him in the chinchilla coat. He was buried in Pineelon Memorial Park in Kinston, North Carolina in the same cemetery as Mahali. Mark Jacobson, the journalist whose 2000 articles in New York magazine built the modern Lucas legend, attended the funeral.
He admitted in his retrospective that year what his methodology had really been. For every seemingly outrageous, impossible to check comment, all you had to write was Frank claims or Lucas asserts. Richie Roberts, the prosecutor, also came. Roberts surveyed the crowd of mourers and said, “My kind of crowd, a room full of people with criminal records.
” Roberts was godfather to Frank’s youngest son, Ray Lucas, who had died around 2017 at roughly 18 years old. Roberts had paid for Ray’s Catholic school education for 9 years. The man who put Frank Lucas in prison buried Frank Lucas’s son. The most honest line about Frank Lucas was said by the man who put him in prison.
Roberts to the New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the KKK could ever dream of.” The most honest line about Frank Lucas was said by Frank Lucas himself in 2013 to the Newark Star Ledger with no journalist filtering the answer. I probably did more damage than I did good.
A bad business was a good business. It was a horrible business. If you want to put that, I was a no good son of a [ __ ] Be my guest, cuz that’s what I was. He was a country boy from Lenoir County who put a churchgoing mother on speed dial and a beat up Chevy in the driveway and a chinchilla coat in the closet for the one fight he wanted to be seen at.
He sold poison to his own people for six years and walked away after five years in a federal sale. He told the world he was Bumpy Johnson’s heir. He was Bumpy Johnson’s coat holder. He told the world he built the Asian pipeline. His cousin’s husband built the Asian pipeline. He told the world he took down the federal government.
He took down a 100 black men who had trusted him. The split level on Sheffield Road. The wife threw cash out the window. The toddler with hundreds in her waistband. The mother is on the phone five times a day from North Carolina. The pickup basketball with the Knicks. The crooked tree on the front lawn. The fake beard. The $300 Chevy. The chinchilla in the closet.
The costume was the whole cone.