Frank Lucas (drug dealer)

Frank Lucas
Lucas at the Big Apple Comic Con in 2008
Born	(1930-09-09) September 9, 1930 (age 86) La Grange, North Carolina
Occupation	Retired drug trafficker/smuggler
Criminal charge	Drug trafficking
Conviction(s)	1976; sentenced to 70 years but released in 1981 upon serving 5 years. Convicted again in 1984 released in 1991 after he served a term of seven years.

Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930) is an American 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.

Lucas was born in La Grange, North Carolina, and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was the son of Mahalee (née Jones 1909-2003) and Fred Lucas. He claims that the incident that sparked his motivation to embark on a life of crime was witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, for apparently "reckless eyeballing" (looking at) a Caucasian woman, in Greensboro. He drifted through a life of petty crime until one particular occasion when, after a fight with a former employer, he fled to New York City on the advice of his mother. In Harlem, he indulged in petty crime and pool hustling before he was taken under the wing of gangster Bumpy Johnson. Lucas' connection to Johnson has since come under some doubt; he claimed to have been Johnson's driver for 15 years, although Johnson spent just five years out of prison before his death in 1968. According to Johnson's widow, much of the narrative that Lucas claims as his actually belonged to another young hustler named Zach Walker, who lived with Johnson and his family and later betrayed him.