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Also in his portfolio were office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles and Miami, “and a mess of Puerto Rico.” There was also “Frank Lucas’s Paradise Valley,” a several-thousand-acre spread back in North Carolina on which ranged 300 head of Black Angus cows, including a “big-balled” breeding bull worth $125,000. Added to this is “maybe 1,000 keys of dope on hand” with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo. Indeed, few passersby might guess that Lucas, at least according to his own exceedingly ad hoc records, once had “something like $52 million,” most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Sitting in a blue Toyota at the corner of 116th Street and what is now called Frederick Douglass Boulevard (“What was wrong with just plain Eighth Avenue?” Lucas grouses), Frank, once by his own description “tall, pretty, slick, and something to see” but now stiff and teetering around “like a fucking one-legged tripod,” is no more noticeable than when he peered from Nellybelle’s window. Twenty-five years after the end of his uptown rule, Frank Lucas, now 69, has returned to Harlem for a whirlwind retrospective of his life and times. A ghost … what we call down home a haint … That was me, the Haint of Harlem.” “I’d sit there in Nellybelle and watch the money roll in,” says Frank Lucas of those near-forgotten days when Abe Beame lay his pint-size head upon the pillow at Gracie Mansion.
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Sold … and I got myself a million dollars. By nine o’clock, I ain’t got a fucking gram. Call the Transit Department if it’s not so. They had to reroute the bus on Eighth Avenue. By four o’clock, we had enough niggers in the street to make a Tarzan movie. My buyers, though, you could set your watch by them. That gave you a couple of hours before those lazy bastards got down there. We put it out there at four in the afternoon, when the cops changed shifts. “Any other, if you got 5 percent, you were doing good. “That’s because with Blue Magic, you could get 10 percent purity,” Lucas asserts. But none sold like Frank Lucas’s Blue Magic. 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, PraisePraisePraise, KillKillKill, 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. 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.”īack in the early seventies, there were many “brands” of dope in Harlem.
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His wife and kids might be hungry, and he’ll never touch your stuff until he checks with you. A country boy, you can give him any amount of money. This was because, Lucas says, in his down-home creak of a voice, “a country boy, he ain’t hip … he’s not used to big cars, fancy ladies, and diamond rings. As the leader of the heroin-dealing ring called the Country Boys, Lucas, older brother to Ezell, Vernon Lee, John Paul, Larry, and Leevan Lucas, was known for restricting his operation to blood relatives and others from his rural North Carolina area hometown. So I’d sit in Nellybelle by the Roman Garden Bar, cap pulled down, with a fake beard, dark glasses, long wig … I’d be up beside people dealing my stuff, and no one knew who I was …” “When something is yours, you’ve got to be Johnny-on-the-spot, ready to take it to the top. “One-sixteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue was mine. “Who’d think I’d be in a shit $300 car like that?” asks Lucas, who claims he’d clear up to $1 million a day selling dope on 116th Street. He had a Rolls, a Mercedes, a Corvette Sting Ray, and a 427 muscle job he’d once topped out at 160 mph near Exit 16E of the Jersey Turnpike, scaring himself so silly that he gave the car to his brother’s wife just to get it out of his sight. Then living in a suite at the Regency Hotel with 100 custom-made, multi-hued suits in the closet, Lucas owned several cars. Photo: New York Magazine, August 14th 2000ĭuring the early seventies, when for a sable-coat-wearing, Superfly-strutting instant of urban time he was perhaps the biggest heroin dealer in Harlem, Frank Lucas would sit at the corner of 116th Street and Eighth Avenue in a beat-up Chevrolet he called Nellybelle.