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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
A New Jersey Crime Story’s Hollywood Ending
    #7582383 - 10/31/07 08:57 PM (16 years, 3 months ago)

A New Jersey Crime Story’s Hollywood Ending
October 31, 2007 - New York Times

It was the early 1970s, and every week nearly four dozen American soldiers were returning home from Vietnam in flag-draped coffins. Frank Lucas, who ruled a crime empire in Newark and Harlem, had a plan: smuggle the purest Asian heroin he could find into New York, stashed inside those coffins.

It took Richard M. Roberts, a prosecutor in Essex County, until 1975 to catch on to the scheme, and a year after that he helped put together the case that would earn Mr. Lucas a sentence of 70 years to life in federal prison. Mr. Lucas returned the favor by putting out a $100,000 contract on Mr. Roberts’s life.

The contract was never carried out, and Mr. Lucas, who turned government informant, was freed after serving seven years. He said that as he spent day after day in prison, the notion of becoming an informant, and shortening his sentence, became more appealing. Information he provided would help lead to scores of convictions, including cases against corrupt police officers, and an unlikely friendship between Mr. Lucas and Mr. Roberts developed.

Now, Mr. Roberts — who is known as Richie — and Mr. Lucas talk almost every day, and they usually meet once a week at Mr. Roberts’s expansive law office here. Mr. Roberts also is the godfather to Mr. Lucas’s son, Ray, 11, and helps to pay for the child’s education.

They are friends who finish each other’s sentences, and they share recollections about the days when Mr. Lucas’s Newark gang — whose members called themselves the Country Boys, because Mr. Lucas was from North Carolina — ruled the drug trade in two states with a deadly form of heroin known as “blue magic.”

“I can’t explain it,” Mr. Roberts said with a shrug and a wan smile when asked about his friendship with Mr. Lucas. “What he did disgusts me. But here we are.”

It is the stuff of movies. Indeed, the story of Mr. Roberts’s successful pursuit and prosecution of Mr. Lucas is the subject of the film “American Gangster,” which is being released on Friday, with Russell Crowe as Mr. Roberts and Denzel Washington as Mr. Lucas. As their friendship has been thrust into the spotlight, each has responded in a way that seems out of character.

Mr. Lucas, 77, who favored chinchilla coats when he ran his drug empire, has recoiled from the publicity that has come with the movie.

“I’m not working today, no comment,” he said when a reporter called for an interview last week, before handing the telephone to his daughter, Francine.

And Mr. Roberts, the prosecutor and former undercover investigator who favored the shadows, has embraced his star turn, if somewhat reluctantly.

“There are so many conflicting aspects of this,” said Mr. Roberts, a silver-haired, compact man whose lawyerly diction is still influenced by his Bronx upbringing. “People are focusing on some of the wrong things when it comes to Frank.”

Mr. Lucas’s story is like that of any gangster’s rise through the ranks, except that it is seen through the lens of racial prejudice in the criminal world.

Mr. Lucas, who is black, was believed to be one of the first Americans to establish a direct relationship with drug suppliers overseas. After making a connection in Southeast Asia, he brokered a deal in which more than $50 million of high-quality heroin — which officials said was up to 10 times more potent than what had been available on the street in the 1970s — was smuggled into the United States, much of it stashed in secret compartments that were built into the coffins of dead soldiers.

“If you had a connection, you were the king, and Frank was the king,” said Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn. In the mid-1970s, he was a special prosecutor dealing in narcotics cases in New York City and, with Mr. Roberts, was part of a two-state effort to topple Mr. Lucas.

“In those days we were inundated with drugs,” Judge Johnson said. “We would make arrests, but it was like digging a hole in the ocean. No matter what you did, there’s always someone there to replace them.”

Mr. Roberts joined the Essex County prosecutor’s office as a detective in 1963. In 1971, after earning a law degree from Seton Hall University, he became a prosecutor, and two years later, he was asked to lead the office’s special narcotics squad. In 1975 — in large part because of the work of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Johnson — Mr. Lucas was arrested; he was convicted on federal drug charges a year later.

“American Gangster” depicts Mr. Roberts’ pursuit of Mr. Lucas. Mr. Roberts, now a lawyer in private practice, said that he was satisfied that the film and its director, Ridley Scott, have not glorified Mr. Lucas’s life and times. But he was concerned that young people in the rough neighborhoods of Newark might celebrate the swagger and short-lived success of Mr. Lucas.

“A lot of people are drawn to the idea that a black man was able to rise to that height over a white man — the Mafia — because of his brains,” Mr. Roberts said. “That’s fine. I’m Jewish, and part of me thinks that Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky were pretty cool guys because at a time when everybody thought that Jews were wimps, these guys rose to the heights of the Mafia. Part of me does feel that.

“But the other part of me recognizes that this is ridiculous; these guys are killers, not to be admired,” he added. “It’s the same thing with Frank. In truth, Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for “American Gangster,” said that thought helped shape how he depicted the Lucas character in the film.

“When you meet Frank, he’s very charismatic, very personable,” said Mr. Zaillian, who interviewed both men extensively. “But you can never forget who he is and what he’s done.”

It was while the case against Mr. Lucas was being prepared that Mr. Roberts learned that Mr. Lucas had put out a contract on his life.

He briefly carried a pistol just in case — including into courtrooms, the gun tucked in an ankle holster: “I thought I was going to shoot my toes off.”

As the opening of “American Gangster” approached, Mr. Roberts was the subject of several celebrations — including one held by the alumni association at Weequahic High School in Newark, which sponsored a screening of the film last week as a cautionary tale for students — and he attended the film’s premiere in Harlem last month. Mr. Lucas skipped the premiere and has declined most interview requests.

Mr. Zaillian said he reached out to Mr. Lucas after the premiere. “He said, ‘I know what I am, I know what I did.’”


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InvisibleEntheogenicPeace
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Registered: 10/04/05
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Re: A New Jersey Crime Story’s Hollywood Ending [Re: veggie]
    #7582439 - 10/31/07 09:19 PM (16 years, 3 months ago)

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Edited by EntheogenicPeace (01/30/21 06:19 PM)


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OfflineEraserhead
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Registered: 05/26/06
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Re: A New Jersey Crime Story’s Hollywood Ending [Re: EntheogenicPeace]
    #7582704 - 10/31/07 11:50 PM (16 years, 3 months ago)

That was a good movie :thumbup:

However all it showed lucas snitching on were the corrupt NYPD :shrug:
Fuck em.


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OfflineLoWgRoW
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Registered: 09/22/07
Posts: 296
Last seen: 6 years, 11 months
Re: A New Jersey Crime Story’s Hollywood Ending [Re: Eraserhead]
    #7583345 - 11/01/07 09:40 AM (16 years, 2 months ago)

snitch!!!


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Avoid negative people.


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