Frank Lucas.

Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930 in La Grange, North Carolina and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina) is a former heroin dealer and organized crime boss 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. Frank Lucas is popularly known for smuggling heroin using the coffins of dead American servicemen, a claim his South Asian associate, Leslie "Ike" Atkinson denies. His career was dramatized in the 2007 feature film American Gangster.

Early life:

Lucas claims that the incident that sparked his motivation into the life of crime was witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the KKK, for apparently "reckless eyeballing" (looking at a Caucasian woman), in Greensboro, North Carolina. He drifted through a life of petty crime until one particular occasion when he engaged in a fight with a former employer and, on advice of his mother, fled to New York. In Harlem he indulged in petty crime and pool hustling before he was taken under the wing of gangster Bumpy Johnson. His connection to Bumpy has come under some doubt, however. Lucas claimed to have been Johnson's driver for 15 years, although Johnson spent just 5 years out of prison before his death in 1968. And according to Johnson's widow, much of the narrative that Lucas claims actually belonged to another young hustler named Zach Walker, who lived with Bumpy and his family and later betrayed him.

Criminal career:
Lucas' January 1975 federal mug shot.After Johnson's death, Lucas traveled around and came to the realization that to be successful he would have to break the monopoly that the Italian mafia held in New York. Traveling to Stilwell, Oklahoma, he eventually made his way to Jack's American Star Bar, an R&R hangout for black soldiers. It was here that he met former U.S. Army sergeant Leslie "Ike" Atkinson, a country boy from Goldsboro, North Carolina, who happened to be married to one of Lucas' cousins. Lucas is quoted as saying, "Ike knew everyone over there, every black guy in the Army, from the cooks on up."Lucas denies putting the drugs among the corpses of American soldiers. Instead he flew in a North Carolina carpenter to Bangkok and:

“ We had him make up 28 copies of the government coffins . . . except we fixed them up with false bottoms, big enough to load up with six, maybe eight kilos . . . It had to be snug. You couldn't have shit sliding around. Ike was very smart, because he made sure we used heavy guys' coffins. He didn't put them in no skinny guy's . . ." ” — Frank Lucas

However, Atkinson, nicknamed "Sergeant Smack" by the DEA, has said he shipped drugs in furniture, not caskets. Whatever method he used, Lucas smuggled the drugs into the country with this direct link from Asia. Lucas said that he made US$1 million per day selling drugs on 116th Street. Federal judge Sterling Johnson, who was special narcotics prosecutor in New York at the time of Lucas' crimes, called Lucas' operation "one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever, an innovator who got his own connections outside the U.S. and then sold the narcotics himself in the street." He had connections with the Sicilian and Mexican mobs, holding an enormous monopoly on the heroin market in Manhattan. In an interview, Lucas said, "I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be Donald Trump rich, and so help me God, I made it."

Lucas only trusted relatives and close friends from North Carolina to handle his various heroin operations. Lucas thought they were less likely to steal from him and be tempted by various vices in the big city. His heroin "Blue Magic" was 100% pure when shipped fromThailand. Lucas has been quoted as saying that his worth was "something like $52 million", most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Added to this is "maybe 1,000 keys (kilograms), (2,200 pounds), of dope on hand" with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo (per 2.2 lb).

This huge profit margin allowed him to buy property all over the country, including office buildings in Detroit, and apartments in Los Angeles and Miami. He also bought a several-thousand-acre ranch in North Carolina on which he ranged 300 head of Black Angus cows, including a breeding bull worth $125,000.

Lucas rubbed shoulders with the elite in entertainment, politics, and crime, meeting Howard Hughes at one of Harlem's best clubs in his day. Though he owned several mink and chinchilla coats and other accessories, Lucas much preferred to dress very casually and corporately so as to not attract attention to himself. He fathered seven children, including a daughter, Francine Lucas-Sinclair, and a son, Frank Lucas, Jr. When he was arrested in the mid-1970s, all of Lucas' assets were seized.