25 Facts About Frank Lucas

Frank Lucas was an American drug lord who operated in Harlem, New York City, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Frank Lucas was known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia.

In 1976, Frank Lucas was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 70 years in prison, but after becoming an informant, he and his family were placed in the Witness Protection Program.

Frank Lucas was born and raised in La Grange, North Carolina, a suburb of Goldsboro, North Carolina, to Fred and Mahalee Frank Lucas, He said the incident that motivated him to embark on a life of crime was him witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, for looking flirtatiously at a white woman.

Frank Lucas drifted through a life of petty crime until one occasion when he got into a fight with a former employer with whose daughter he had been having an affair.

Frank Lucas then stole $400 from the company safe and set the establishment on fire.

Later, Frank Lucas fled to New York City at the behest of his mother, who feared that he would either be imprisoned for life or lynched.

When interviewed for a New York magazine article published in 2000, Frank Lucas denied putting the drugs among the corpses of American soldiers.

Whatever method he used, Frank Lucas was able to smuggle narcotics through this direct link from Asia, thereby bypassing the Mafia's French Connection.

Frank Lucas said that he made $1 million per day selling drugs on 116th Street though this was later discovered to be an exaggeration.

Frank Lucas trusted only relatives and close friends from North Carolina to handle his various heroin operations, believing that they were less likely to steal from him and be tempted by various vices in the big city.

Frank Lucas has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million", most of it in Cayman Islands banks.

Frank Lucas bought a ranch of several thousand acres in North Carolina on which he ranged 300 head of Black Angus cattle, including a breeding bull worth $125,000.

Frank Lucas rubbed shoulders with the elite of the entertainment, political, and criminal worlds of his time, stating later that he had met Howard Hughes at one of Harlem's best clubs in his day.

When he was arrested in the mid-1970s, all of Frank Lucas' assets were seized, as he later recounted:.

Frank Lucas was convicted of both federal and New Jersey state drug violations, with the case against him built largely on over two years of investigative work and penetration of his distribution network by the "Z-Team".

Frank Lucas then cut a deal to provide information that led to over 100 additional drug-related convictions; in exchange, he and his family entered the witness protection program.

Frank Lucas received a sentence of seven years and was released from prison in 1991.

Frank Lucas' life was dramatized in the Universal Pictures crime film American Gangster, in which he was portrayed by Denzel Washington.

Frank Lucas was often on set during the filming providing advice; on how he carried his gun, for example.

Frank Lucas criticized the portrayal of Lucas as a seemingly noble individual.

Ron Chepesiuk, a Frank Lucas biographer, said there was no evidence to confirm Frank Lucas' claim that he once used coffins to ship heroin.

Frank Lucas appears as a minor supporting character in the Warner Bros.

Frank Lucas was known to be eclectic in his religious preferences, having converted to the Catholic faith while at prison in Elmira, which he stated he did because the prison chaplain assisted inmates being released on parole.

Frank Lucas died at the age of 88 on May 30,2019, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey.