Frank Lucas

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 p…