Twenty-five years after the New Jersey home of Harlem Blue Magic heroin ringleader Frank Lucas was raided by the NYPD, Mark Jacobson did a New York Magazine profile on Lucas that would become the basis for American Gangster, a 2007 film starring Denzel Washington.
Lucas’ Cadaver Connection tale of smuggling heroin in the false bottoms of soldier’s coffins returning to the US from Vietnam “always seemed a tad apocryphal,” wrote Jacobson.
At that time, when “everybody had heard that story,” Jacobson was a cab driver in New York City and published his first story in New York Magazine about the 12th Ave clubs where he would take his passengers. His latest novel, The Lampshade, was published on September 28 and follows the origin of a supposed Buchenwald lampshade found in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.
I interviewed Jacobson on the 2000 article, and he told me, “That’s one of my specialties, proving that urban legends are true.”
In “The Return of Superfly,” Jacobson determined that “braggart, trickster, and fibber along with everything else, Lucas was nonetheless a living, breathing historical figure, a highly specialized font of secret knowledge, more exotic, and certainly less picked over, than any Don Corleone… The idea that a backwoods boy could maneuver himself into position to tell at least a plausible lie about stashing 125 kilos of zum dope on Henry Kissinger’s plane — much less actually do it — mitigated a multitude of sins.”
The idea to interview Frank Lucas came when Jack Newfield, a friend from the Village Voice, told him that Nick Pileggi, the Goodfellas co-screenwriter and New York Magazine writer, had run across somebody who knew Lucas, prompting Jacobson to ask, “how could he possibly still be alive?” But Jacobson shelved the idea until the 2000 profile when he found Lucas living in a New Jersey project, ready to tell the story he’d been crafting during his jail time.
Over twenty visits Frank would tell him about his “Robin Hood of Harlem” mentor Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson dying in his arms in a restaurant, and smuggling heroin on Henry Kissinger’s plane back from a Bangladeshian mercy mission.
Jacobson would sometimes meet with Lucas at Richie Roberts’s office, played by Russell Crowe in American Gangster as Lucas’s main foil, a detective at a new drug trafficking task force. By 2000, the former cop was Lucas’ defense attorney, and although he was not mentioned in The Return of Superfly, Roberts would eventually accompany Jacobson, Lucas and Pileggi to LA to sell the movie rights to the story, according to a New York Magazine article in 2007.
Even if Frank’s account of the era was like a “historical novel fudged to make himself look better,” because of limited documentation on black organized crime, that period had been “previously inaccessible.”
“You know he’s lying, he’s sitting there and you know he’s making some of this stuff up because it just can’t be true,” said Jacobson. But Lucas became a compelling figure for remembering “this time that was unremembered.”
“To me he was his own truth.”
“I felt that my job as a journalist in that situation was to write down what he had to say.”
A lot of what Lucas said checked out, as Jacobson found contacting old lawyers as well as well as going through old newspaper clippings. With details that are impossible to verify details, “the fact that you can’t corroborate it doesn’t mean you can’t use it,” said Jacobson. “There is no way to verify most of this stuff because it was already thirty years ago and most of the people are dead.”
In a “typical” situation, Jacobson asked Lucas about the murder at of Harold Logan, a partner in Double L Records label that recorded soul singers like Wilson Pickett. Logan was shot between the eyes at the uptown club Lloyd Price’s Turntable. “I happened to know about it because I made it my business to find this stuff out,” said Jacobson, and he also knew that the club was actually owned by Lucas and gangster Zack Robinson. Lucas feedback was simply, “Well man, you can’t fuck with Zack Robinson.” When Jacobson pried again, he answered, “I just told you man, you don’t fuck with Zack Robinson.”
In this unsolved murder case, a traditional journalism lit search gets you nowhere. “Lucas was in the position to know the answer, or at least have an answer about certain things like that,” said Jacobson. The Logan story did not make it into the article.
A visit to former narcotics prosecutors Judge Sterling Johnson “added veracity to Lucas’s position” said Jacobson, since it “was just the way Frank said it would be.” Lucas had told Jacobson that “people like me. People like the fuck out of me,” and “Judge Johnson likes me a lot. You’ll see.” On a visit to the Judge’s office, he demandad “Get that old gangster on the phone,” and told Jacobson “look, don’t get me wrong: Frank was as bad as they come. You should never forget who these people really are. But what are you going to do? The guy was a pisser. A pisser and a killer. Easy to like.”
In 2007, Jacobson reunited rival Nicky Barnes, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in American Gangster, and Lucas for their first conversation in 30 years. Barnes New York Times cover appearance “bragging that he was “Mr. Untouchable,” wrote Jacobson “soon got then-president Jimmy Carter on the telephone demanding that something be done about the Harlem dope trade.”
The two former gangsters agreed they wanted their epitaph to read, “Boy oh boy, he was old. God damn, he was old.”
