American Gangster

Unlikely friendship piques Hollywood interest (January 6, 2003)

Frank Lucas was a real-life Superfly who rose through the ranks of the Harlem underworld to become one of the biggest heroin kingpins of the 1970s, an illicit tycoon commanding hundreds of men and tens of millions of dollars.

Richard Roberts was an assistant prosecutor in Essex County, N.J., who helped bring him down, obtaining a prison sentence of 25 to 30 years for the once-untouchable New York crime figure in 1976 by linking him to a Newark, N.J., drug ring.

Their history would seem enough to make them lifelong enemies. But during the trial, a strange bond developed between the two men that evolved into a lasting friendship. Roberts cultivated Lucas as a prized informant whose wealth of knowledge about drug lords and crooked cops won him early release.

Now Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplays for "Schindler's List" and "The Gangs of New York," has written a script based on Lucas' remarkable criminal career that is scheduled to begin filming in the spring, with Hollywood figures Ron Howard and Nicholas Pileggi producing.

Neither Lucas nor Roberts has seen the screenplay, which was based on a 2000 New York magazine article, "The Return of Superfly," but they are told it focuses on both Lucas' life and his unlikely relationship with Roberts.

Lucas' life is an epic unto itself: his transformation from a North Carolina urchin -- robbing the customers of prostitutes before he was old enough to shave -- to one of the wealthiest and most feared gangsters in New York City.

At the peak of his career in the 1970s, Lucas had tens of millions of dollars in Cayman Island banks, an office building in Detroit, apartment complexes in Miami and Los Angeles and thousands of acres of farmland in North Carolina.

He began his ascent in the rackets in the 1940s as the right- hand man to Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, the Harlem numbers kingpin who was the inspiration for the black godfather character in the "Shaft" movies of the 1970s.

"If you wanted to do business in Harlem, you did it with Bumpy Johnson or you were dead," said Lucas, 72.

A chatty man with an infectious laugh, Lucas described his exploits in an interview at Roberts' law office in West Caldwell, N.J., speaking freely, even boastfully, about his years as a criminal. The only thing he would not discuss is how many men he had killed.

"Any time someone asks me that question I look at my lawyer, Richie Roberts," Lucas said. "There's no statute of limitations for murder."

Lucas says a traumatic event put him on the road to criminality when he was 6. The Ku Klux Klan came to his house in LeGrange, N.C., in the dead of night to abduct his teenage cousin, who Lucas said had been accused of making eyes at a white girl. Lucas said the men led his cousin outside, tied ropes on both of his arms, put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.

"I ran out into the woods to hide," he said. "My father couldn't find me for hours. That was the day I told myself that nobody was ever going to do anything like that to me. Nobody was ever going to push me around. And they haven't to this day."

Before he was 13, Lucas was on his own, bumming around the South picking up odd jobs and committing petty crimes.

He soon made his move to New York, where he found himself a homeless 15-year-old, sleeping in Harlem doorways and stealing to survive.

He said he would have been in the ground before the month was out were it not for a fateful encounter with Bumpy Johnson. He was in a pool room when a mob assassin named Icepick Red threw a wad of cash on the table and challenged anyone in the room to play him. Lucas said he was game, but the hit man laughed at him.

"I had like $100 and he had like ten grand," Lucas said. "Back then, I could play real good. If I didn't win at pool, I didn't eat."

Lucas said he decided to wait for him outside and take his money at gunpoint -- but fate intervened.

"All of a sudden the whole place went quiet," he said. "Even the jukebox stopped. I looked over at the door and I saw this guy, about 5-foot-10, 170 pounds, receding hairline, with a flower in his lapel. He looked like something out of Vogue magazine. It was Bumpy Johnson. He said, 'Can you beat him, kid?' Then, before Red can say much, he says, 'Rack 'em up, Lump.' "

The young Lucas not only won the pool game, but he left in a car with Johnson, who bought him new clothes and put him up in his apartment for a month. The young vagabond, now Johnson's right-hand man, was given new respect on the streets.

Johnson was not interested in the drug business, but Lucas jumped in with both feet after his mentor died of a heart attack in 1968. By the 1970s, he said, he was taking in up to $5 million in a week, selling heroin retail on the streets and making wholesale shipments to Newark, North Carolina and elsewhere. His gang, which included four of his brothers, became known as the "Country Boys."

Asked whether he is remorseful about his past, Lucas said, "Hell no. I wanted some things out of life. I didn't want to be poor, and this was the only way I was going to get it. With my education, I couldn't even have gotten a job as a janitor."

But he does regret the way it all ended. First there was the January 1975 raid on his home in Teaneck, N.J., by a task force made up of the New York City police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. His wife hurled suitcases of cash from the bedroom window -- much more cash, Lucas says, than the $584,000 police later claimed to have recovered. The raid eventually led to a 40- year federal prison sentence for Lucas.

In 1975, Roberts, who was head of the Essex County Bureau of Narcotics, helped convict Lucas for his role in a Newark heroin ring headed by his brother, Vernon Lucas.

The trial did not exactly start out as a love affair between Roberts and Lucas. Roberts said he learned early on that the Country Boys had put out a contract on his life.

But, he said, he saw another side of Lucas toward the end of the trial, when a woman took the stand and described finding her son dead with a hypodermic needle in his arm. Afterward, Roberts was told Lucas wanted to see him in his cell.

"Frank was sitting on one end of the small bed and I sat down on the other," said Roberts, now a prominent defense attorney. "He had his head in his hands. His face was wet. He said, 'I never thought about it like that.' He was really shook up. I believe he made up his mind at that moment that he was going to cooperate."

Lucas will not discuss his cooperation with authorities, other than to say he never testified in court. Roberts will only point out that it was directed as much at crooked cops as anyone. Lucas had been given consecutive prison sentences totaling 70 years, but he was released in 1981 after serving six years.

After his release, Lucas began working for Roberts, who became godfather to Lucas' 6-year-old son and has made plans to pay for the boy's education. The two men frequently socialize with each other. Roberts says he has no qualms about associating with a notorious criminal who has the blood of more than a few men on his hands.

"I have never felt I should be in a position to judge another human being," he said. "I see Frank for what he is now, and I really believe he is a changed man. If you had seen him sitting in that cell, you would know what I mean."

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