This series was narrated by Ving Rhames; the same Rhames who played a character that got bent over a table in a police station and raped by a crooked cop in Pulp Fiction. Both he and the producers try to promote American Gangster the series, as a cautionary tale against gangsterism. American Gangster the series highlights several criminal-minded “personalities and celebrities” in the African community in America Inc. The producers claimed that the series showed how each gangster’s wrongdoing put in the context of Black his-story shows how their actions both reflected and corrupted the values of their community.
Reflected the values of the community? That is a damning statement against a whole community. I am at a loss to understand how being abnormal reflects African values, or is it we are abnormal, and criminality is a natural predilection of African people?
"Crime is a cancer that eats away at our communities," said Reginald Hudlin, BET President of Entertainment. "But for a generation that grew up thinking greed is good -- whether on Wall Street or Martin Luther King Boulevard -- they're not quite so sure whether crime pays or not. We wanted to take an honest look at the criminal life, demystify that world and show what it does to our community."
This very statement is indicative of the moral spiral, for some of us, into a cesspool of the group think in America Inc. If Africans in America Inc. struggle with whether crime pays or not, as Hudlin implies, then no wonder the outside community views us with trepidation and distrust.
One press release states, “the series profiled one infamous crime figure each week through the use of archival footage, photographs and interviews with people familiar with the various cases. Featured experts include ex-members of these polarizing criminals' organizations, police officials from the time period, attorneys that represented the criminals and crime historians.”
Yet! The series seemed to have the opposite effect of being enticing, powerfully drawing audiences into the lives of these murderers and dope pushers. Invokes and provokes the emotions and fantasies of numerous wannabe gangsters nurtured on John Wayne, the Godfather and the superflys of the world. They talk of getting mine before you, kind of talk I’ve heard from young bloods and some older cats that done took life lessons from the series.
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In my mind it is coincidental, and I don’t believe in coincident, that a new movie was recently released in theatres this summer, about the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, the original Superfly. As Isaac Hayes said one bad motherfucker. According to director Ridley Scott the film, portrays Lucas as a sober-looking, hard-working black guy. A one-man drug pushing epidemic who, supported by his brothers from North Carolina, sold heroin twice as pure and twice as cheap as any of his rivals, including the Mafia. In the movie he is portrayed as a clear-eyed methodical alpha male who decides to travel to the poppy fields of war-strafed Vietnam to make face-to-face deals with local dealers. “A schemer of extraordinary daring, who imported heroin from those -fields to the US in the coffins of soldiers.”Denzel Washington played Lucas as a man with a Don King like mission - to live the American way, of getting mine and not giving a fuck about you, replicating the “efficiency and cruel dynamism of American capitalism”. His first and biggest inspiration was the high standards of stylish criminality established by his mentor, Howard Bumpy Johnson.
According to one reviewers take “Lucas is a striver, an entrepreneur in the Booker T Washington mould, who prefers local businessmen (meaning, mainly, himself) rather than big corporations to control the fate of Harlem. His particular formula for heroin he dubs "Blue Magic", a brand name he compares to Pepsi, and one whose "trademark infringement" by rivals results in them being battered.” In a climate of increased African bashing in America Inc. from O.J. XXX111, to Hurricane Katrina, to Jenna 6 and Michael Vick, Adam “pacman” Jones to Barry Bonds to increased incidents of hangmen’s noose turning up all over America Inc. the attack on all things African is beginning to rival the atmosphere of the 1920’s.
If we peruse any blog site or internet sites, we will no doubt come across vailed and overt attacks on the character and moral make up of Africans in America Inc. Some of the best example remain the hew and cry about the kind of Money Athletes and entertainers make and the grand lifestyle they lead. This brings us to the Russell Crowe character Richie Roberts. Roberts is a New Jersey police officer with “terrible hair, terrible clothes, and terrible eating habits”, who was out to get Lucas. Through out the film the director tried to compare the lifestyles of both men as an honest cop versus an unredeemable soul in a very visual way to incite the appropriate emotional response. A shot of Lucas laying on a lavish Thanksgiving spread is followed by one of Roberts preparing a tuna-and-crisps sandwich.
The unredeemable soul also has his trophy Puerto Rican beauty queen as a wife and a loving mother; while the honest cop's wife and child had left him.
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In the early 1970s Harlem, a once proud and largely African community, enclave, home to poets and jazz performers and artists, began to teeter on the brink of implosion. The economy was failing; businesses are moving out, thousands of families are living in rotted tenements.
Worst of all, more and more of its young men and women are ready to do anything to escape from that reality by scoring some of the heroin that was flooding into the area. What the film makers never accurately pointed out was who's responsible for so much heroin flooding Harlem? According to prevailing knowledge at the time most New Yorkers, most New York cops too, assumed it was a huge Mafia clan, a brigade of tight-knit Don Corleones.
"I don't want it [heroin sold] near schools," says Don Zaluchi in a meeting with other heads of Mafia families in the '72 movie. "I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls."
A line in the "Godfather" movie
In the movie, the myth makers of hollyweird wanted us to believe that a country ass uneducated drug pusher took it upon himself to go off to Vietnam, during the worst type of fighting in the Imperialist his-story of America Inc. A country boy from North Carolina straight to Harlem with probably no passport, tipped off by U.S. soldiers fighting in the invasion, found his own supplier and managed to buy his dope in the jungles of Vietnam, then returned to America Inc. where he set up one of the most lucrative drug operation in the annals of drug pushing in America Inc.
Lucas, according to Mark Jacobson, whose New York magazine article "The Return of Superfly" was the basis of the script, was a "braggart, trickster, and fibber". He had his bling, proto-Shaft tendencies.
After Johnson's death, Lucas, who went by the nickname "Superfly," took over Johnson’s heroin dealing business, but made one audacious change by establishing his own drug connection, cutting out the middleman and landing huge amounts of nearly pure heroin. Sold on the street as "Blue Magic," it had alleged to have netted him an incredible profit -- up to $1 million in revenue a day, as Lucas claims.
Frank Lucas's according to the story provided pure heroin of the sort that were consumed by American troops in Vietnam. Through a cousin in the army, he arranges to buy it directly from the producers in the jungles of Thailand and ship it back to the States using military transport. He then sells this superior product for less than the inferior stuff peddled by the Mafia and starts to make $1m a day. With two-thirds of the New York police vice department on the take, along with members of the US army, he brings his family north to run the business, sets his elderly mother up in a huge mansion, marries Miss Puerto Rico and starts to enjoy the American Dream.
Lucas’s country Boy connection was a matter of control, and trust. As the leader of the heroin-dealing ring, Lucas, older brother Ezell, Vernon Lee, John Paul, Larry, and Leevan Lucas, he was known for restricting his operation to blood relatives and others from his rural North Carolina area hometown. This was because, Lucas says, "a country boy, he ain't hip . . . he's not used to big cars, fancy ladies, and diamond rings. He'll be loyal to you. A country boy, you can give him any amount of money. His wife and kids might be hungry, and he'll never touch your stuff until he checks with you. City boys ain't like that. A city boy will take your last dime, look you in the face, and swear he ain't got it . . . You don't want a city boy -- the sonofabitch is just no good."
Back in the early seventies, there were many "brands" of dope in Harlem: Tru Blu, Mean Machine, Could Be Fatal, Dick Down, Boody, Cooley High, Capone, Ding Dong, Fuck Me, Fuck You, Nice, Nice to Be Nice, Oh -- Can't Get Enough of That Funky Stuff, Tragic Magic, Gerber, The Judge, 32, 32-20, O.D., Correct, Official Correct, Past Due, Payback, Revenge, Green Tape, Red Tape, Rush, Swear to God, Praise Praise Praise, Kill Kill Kill, Killer 1, Killer 2, KKK, Good Pussy, Taster's Choice, Harlem Hijack, Joint, Insured for Life, and Insured for Death were only a few of the brand names rubber-stamped onto cellophane bags. But none sold like Frank Lucas's Blue Magic.
Lucas usually hung out at Small's Paradise at 135th and Seventh. Back in the day, there were plenty of places like Small’s for gangsters like Lucas and celebrety seekers to hang out in– “Mr. B's, Willie Abraham's Gold Lounge, the Shalimar. But Small's was the coolest. "Everyone came by Small's . . . jazz guys, politicians. Ray Robinson. Wilt Chamberlain, when they called the place Big Wilt's Small's Paradise. ."
At Small's, Lucas often met his great friend the heavyweight champ Joe Louis, who later appeared nearly every day at Lucas's various trials, expressing outrage at how the state was harassing "this beautiful man." When Louis died, Lucas paid off a $50,000 tax lien for the champ, and was heard weeping into a telephone, "my daddy . . . he's dead." It was also at Small's, on a winter's night in the late fifties, that Frank Lucas encountered Howard Hughes.
pon recognizing the hustle and potential up in Harlem on his initial visit Lucas thought he'd have to "cut out the guineas." if he really wanted to become "white-boy rich, Donald Trump rich," "Kind of sonofabitch I saw myself being, moneyI wanted to make, I'd have to be on Wall Street. On Wall Street, from the giddy-up. But I couldn't have even gotten a job being a fucking janitor on Wall Street."
He'd learned the gangster trade working for Bumpy, picking up "packages" from Fat Tony Salerno's Pleasant Avenue guys, men with names like Joey Farts and Kid Blast: "I needed my own supply. That's when I decided to go to Southeast Asia. Because the war was on, and people were talking about GIs getting strung out over there. I knew if the shit is good enough to string out GIs, then I can make myself a killing."
According to the New Yorker article, traveling alone, had never been a problem for Lucas in Southeast Asia, he felt confident. "Because I knew it was a street thing over there. You see, I never went to school even for a day, but I got a Ph.D. in street. When it comes to a street atmosphere, I know I'm going to make out."
“Harlem was great then. It wasn't until they put me and Nicky Barnes in jail that the city went into default. There was tons of money up in Harlem in 1971, 1972 -- if you knew how to get it. Shit, those were the heydays."
rank's money-laundering routine consisted of throwing duffel bags filled with cash into the back seat of his car and driving to a Chemical Bank on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Most of the money was sent to Cayman Island banks; if Frank needed a little extra, he'd read the newspaper in the lobby while bank managers filled a duffel with crisp $100 bills. For their part in the scheme, Chemical Bank would eventually plead guilty to 200 misdemeanour violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
To get the drugs back to the States, Lucas was said to established the infamous "cadaver connection," hiding the heroin in the caskets of dead soldiers. This and was quite interesting, since the government controlled the entry and exit from Vietnam, and with only military plane or military contracted plane flying in or out, Lucas had to have had the deftness of James Bond or Jason Bourne to swing that deal. Then again both screen heroes had …ehm, government help didn’t they?
Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. who prosecuted Lucas and played a major role in bringing him down, that is African Judge Sterling Johnson Jr., a judicial oath taker and a part of the old boys club of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, once called the operation "one of the most outrageous dope-smuggling gangs ever." Yet this Judge today is on good terms with a cold blooded killer and poison pusher, who by his own claim is a bad man. "One of the most outrageous dope-smuggling gangs ever," implies that Lucas’s empire was greater than all others and reinforces the notion that a black man can be splashier, smarter, and more audacious than the organized crime racketeers that ran – and still run – the drug trade in America. The ones who today still hold an iron grip on the foreign growers and suppliers, the transport, street distribution, and the network of banks that launder the dirty money. This statement by Judge Johnson was not only a very inaccurate statement, but is mores attributable to the America Inc.’s CEO’s and mercenary army as opposed to Frank Lucas.
The CDC in Atlanta last June, found that Caucasians are much more likely to sell and use drugs than Africans. Non-Hispanic Caucasians had a higher percentage of using cocaine or street drugs (23.5 percent) than Africans in America Inc. (18 percent).
Other studies have found roughly equal rates of generic drug use between the two groups, but the CDC survey singled out the use of cocaine and street drugs – as depicted in the movie American Gangster.
The findings debunks the conventional drug war propaganda that Africans use and deal street drugs while Caucasians use trendy, recreational designer drugs, which include powder cocaine. The gaping disparity in drug sentencing between Africans and Caucasians becomes the racial fall out of this deliberate Nazi like culling.
More than 70 percent of those prosecuted in federal courts for drug possession and sale - mostly small amounts of crack cocaine- and given stiff mandatory sentences are Africans. Though the Supreme Court recently agreed to review the disparities in drug sentencing, it hasn't ruled yet and won't for months. The majority of those who deal and use crack cocaine aren't violent gang members, but poor, and increasingly female, young Africans. They continue to exhibit the desperate attitude of people who lack basic amenities such as jobs, stable housing, emotional stability and education.
The moral of American Gangster is if you’re African and poor and you use drugs you’ll either die, become a walking zombie, or spend your life behind bars. And more than likely the guy that sells you the [poison will get away scot-free, live a celebrity lifestyle, filled with fabulous wealth and women, and if unlucky enough to get caught, rat out their fellow dealers or crooked cops.
After Lucas was arrested in 1975, his sentences in New York and New Jersey added up to 70 years in prison and he quickly turned into a government informant, most notably against the then-corrupt Special Investigations Unit of the NYPD. The movie hinted that Frank Lucas did snitch, despite his protestation and refusal to directly answer the question and, considering the very real death and destruction that he spread, he waltzed away with a relative hand slap sentence. Then he gives the supreme self-serving rationale for the dirty dealing by whining that if he didn’t do it, somebody else would.
However, the real drug boss rarely looked like him. In fact, Lucas and his knee-grow competitor Nicky Barnes are the rarest of rare birds. In the movie, Lucas is portrayed as a knee-grow drug boss who supposedly topped the mafia for control of the drug business in Harlem. Through cunning and dumb luck, he found an opening in the Vietnam War, a willing, strategically placed accomplice among the black soldiers in Vietnam, and a supplier to get him the drugs and help with the transport.
The public scapegoating of Africans for America Inc.’s drug problem during the past two decades has been relentless and the greatest fallout from the nation’s hopelessly flawed and failed drug hunt for scapegoats is that it makes it easy for on-the-make politicians to grab votes, garner press attention, and bloat state prison budgets to jail more African offenders, while continuing to feed the illusion that the drug war is winnable. Unfortunately, “American Gangster” won’t do anything to change that illusion. In American Gangster, Lucas is depicted to a certain degree as an entrepreneur who broke through the racial barriers of traditional organized crime.
The targeting of the Mafia's deadly heroin to the African community, is lifted straight from the facts of life on city streets. In 1972, the feds wiretapped a high-echelon meeting of Cosa Nostra leaders on Staten Island, headed by Carlos "Don Carlo" Gambino, the then capo di tuti de capi. The Italian mob discussed getting back into the heroin street trade. They had withdrawn in the early '60s when new conspiracy laws allowed prosecutors to convict top leaders who never actually handled the street dope, including Carmine Galante and Vito Genovese.
"When they ran it for 30 years," one federal official told our investigative team back then, "it never got sold near a school or in the suburbs ... These others, they sell to anyone who has the money. You ought to listen to them. [On wiretaps] they say, 'What are they doing to our boys in Vietnam [by selling them heroin]? The stuff belongs in the ghetto.'"
Not coincidentally, or so they would have us believe, the millions being made from heroin on the streets of Harlem, Bed-Stuy and increasingly throughout the five boroughs and the suburbs were being raked in by expatriate Cuban mobsters and knee-grow gangster entrepreneurs such as Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.
As the Cosa Nostra had dealt its poison to the African community to the enrichment of the police, and with the indifference if not the blessings of the dominant society, so, too, did knee-grows like Lucas and partner in purgatory, Nicky Barnes - but their trafficking had a blow-back effect on the white community. In 1969, with the knee-grow wannabe Dons riding high as “drug lords of Harlem”, heroin-related deaths in the city climbed to more than 800, mostly among Africans. The muggings, burglaries and robberies the junkies executed to get cash for their deadly daily habits were astronomical. By 1971, the yearly death rate exceeded 1,100, and the victims began to mount among white youth.
On Long Island, for example, of the 25 addicts who died from heroin-related causes in 1972, 20 were white, at an average age of 25. With heroin leaking out into the suburbs, Nixon declared war on hard drugs, and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller enacted the toughest drug laws in the nation. Street addicts/dealers, mainly blacks, began - and continue - to fill the prisons, again, ironically, to the indifference, if not the blessing, of the dominant society.
With the body count and the lockdowns devastating Harlem and Bed- Stuy, Lucas and Barnes and the Italian mob rolled in the cash. When Barnes appeared on the cover of The New York Times Sunday magazine under the headline, "Mr. Untouchable," an irate President Jimmy Carter famously loosed his attorney general Rudy – keep it in the closet-Guiliani to bring him in. Sentenced to life without parole in '78 on drug-related charges, Barnes wormed his way into the witness-protection program in '98 by snitching on his drug-dealing associates.
Lucas served even less time than Barnes. It is interesting that both former heroin kingpins now hide in the bosom of the federal government. These two vermin who helped debase two generations of Africans in American Inc, are being rewarded by society, apparently for doing the state good service.
In interviews, Lucas has grumpily avoided follow-up questions on exactly who he turned against: cops or colleagues. He's only stated that the movie's representation, in which his character turns on crooked police officers in return for a lenient sentence, is correct. Lucas told MTV News that he served only four years of that sentence. Upon his release, however, Lucas was again sentenced and served seven years but was released early in exchange for information. In an interview with The Associated Press, when Roberts was asked if Lucas only turned on cops and not fellow dope dealers, he responded: "Absolutely not. He gets mad every time I tell the truth."
As far as Frank was concerned, his place in the hereafter was assured after he joined the Catholic Church while imprisoned at Elmira. "The priest there was getting crooks early parole, so I signed up," he says. As backup, Frank was also a Baptist. "I have praised the Lord," he says. "Praised Him in the street and praised Him in the joint. I know I'm forgiven, that I'm going to the good place, not the bad."
Today…not just the everyday people on the street had become enthralled by the character in the movie. RZA of the Wu Tang Clan sees heroin dealer Frank Lucas as a man who wanted to take care of his family, while Denzel talks about his character's "instinct to be the best." All this gives the White Supremacy system the green light to continue
