Frank Lucas
American mobster (1930-2019) · United States · On the map · Died at 88
He ran Harlem's heroin trade in the early 1970s by cutting straight to the source in Southeast Asia. The coffin-smuggling story that made American Gangster wasn't true, but the empire was real enough to earn him seventy years - before he turned informant.
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About this person
Frank Lucas was born September 9, 1930, and built his operation by eliminating middlemen, buying heroin directly from the Golden Triangle during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He claimed he smuggled it in the coffin pallets of dead servicemen - a boast his own associate denied, though it became the centerpiece of American Gangster in 2007. In 1976 he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to seventy years, but cooperation shaved that down to time served plus lifetime parole by 1981. He was convicted again in 1984 for drug offenses and released in 1991. In 2012, at eighty-one and in poor health, he pleaded guilty to trying to cash the same $17,000 disability check twice. He died May 30, 2019.