Lords of Dopetown

Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes once ruled the drug trade in Harlem. They came out of retirement to talk business.

• By Mark Jacobson
• Published Oct 25, 2007 - New York Magazine

Nicky Barnes, left, and Frank Lucas (Photo: From left, Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times/Redux; PR Newsfoto/BET Networks/Newscom)

During the Harlem heroin plague of the seventies, few dealers were bigger than Frank Lucas and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Both made millions selling dope, lived the wide-brimmed-hat high life, enabled the addiction of whole neighborhoods, and, eventually, got caught. Both were locked up and later cooperated with authorities—some might call it snitching. Now, with Lucas confined to a wheelchair and Barnes in some Witness Protection Program locale, each is the subject of a current film. Barnes reports on his life and times in the flava-full documentary Mr. Untouchable. Lucas hit the ultimate Hollywood jackpot, getting Denzel Washington, no less, to play him in American Gangster (reviewed this week in “The Culture Pages”).

And so, three decades after their heyday, these former street titans are still generating commerce. This makes sense, as both insist they were businessmen, first and foremost. The trick for an ambitious black man in the seventies dope game was to minimize the sway of the Italian distributors who had controlled the Harlem scene for decades. Using sheer volume as an edge, Barnes cut increasingly favorable deals with his Mafia partners. He had the biggest clientele—hundreds of thousands of repeat (and repeat) buyers. It was a captive market, and he was their low-cost retailer. Lucas, more of a boutique operator, managed to bypass the Italians altogether by establishing the grisly but exceedingly lucrative “cadaver connection”—a direct line from Asia’s “Golden Triangle” poppy growers straight to 116th Street, smuggling heroin inside the coffins of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

When the possibility emerged that these two old-school street rivals might be willing to engage in what could only be called a historic conversation—they haven’t spoken in 30 years—it was easy to envision yelling, phone slamming, and maybe even a death threat or two. Lucas, as I knew well (from writing in this magazine the original piece upon which American Gangster is based), could go off at any moment. And Barnes, who likes to quote Moby-Dick and King Lear, mocks Lucas’s “country boy” lack of education and perceived lack of finesse in Mr. Untouchable. When it came down to it, however, the two old drug-kingpins-in-winter revealed a familiarity that bordered on a kind of love. Or at least respect for a fellow tycoon.

NICKY BARNES: Hey, hey, what’s up, playa?

FRANK LUCAS: Hey, Nick.

NB: I heard you’re in a wheelchair. What’s going on?

FL: Broke a leg, Nick. Two places.

NB: Damn.

FL: So what’s with you, man?

NB: Chilling, dude.

MARK JACOBSON: You two guys talking is something of an occasion. Ever think you’d be in the history books?

NB: I don’t know about history—

FL: Hey, Nick! I told everybody and their momma you’ll be hooking up with me in Harlem in the next two years.

NB: You won’t see me in Harlem … I gave up 109 federal felony offenses ’cause I had powder in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Too many people would be gunning for me in New York.

FL: Come on, Nick, you don’t give a damn about them little kamikazes out in the street. I been knowing you for fortysomething years.

MJ: Do you remember when you guys first met?

FL: When was it, Nick? The night you come outta jail. Was that 1970, ’69, ’68?

NB: Yeah, ’70. We met through Jimmy Terrell. Remember Jimmy Terrell? Remember Goldfinger?

FL: ’Course I remember the Goldfinger.

NB: We were in Smalls, drinking. You remember this dude Prat that had that habitual stool right next to—

FL: Yeah, Prat! He didn’t live long after that, did he?

NB: Somebody knocked him over. He owed somebody some money or something.

FL: Right. He was going at somebody’s woman…

MJ: You guys have been described as being competitors. Is that true?

FL: Well, Nick wasn’t gonna catch me—I was paying $4,000 a key. Nick, you was probably paying $65,000 or $70,000, weren’t you?

NB: During that time I was paying $35,000.

FL: And I was paying $4,000. So there was no fight then.¹

MJ: Which one of you guys had the best dope?

FL: Mark, here you go! Stirring shit up. Man, I had the best dope in the world. I had 98 to 100 percent pure.

NB: Frank had a nice package, no doubt. I had to get a pen and a pad and mediate my stuff. But when you took the mix out, my thing was close to his. Close enough for somebody not to wait on one when they could get the other. Frank, you were mostly on 116th Street, right?

FL: Yeah.

NB: Well, I had powder in all five boroughs. Not just uptown.

FL: You were big, Nick, all over.

Nicky Barnes with then-wife Thelma at a party in the seventies. (Photo: Beverly James)

MJ: Suppose each one of you got a pound. Frank Lucas’s business model against Nicky Barnes’s business model—head-to-head, who’s going to make the most money?

FL: That’s easy. The one who got the best dope, that’s who.

NB: Frank’s right. It is always about the product. Once I had a fight with a guy named Steve Austin. I had better dope. Steve knew it. He came up and knocked on the window of my car. “Yo, dude,” he said, “we don’t want you over here.” I said, “I’m gonna put my foot in your motherfuckin’ ass.” In those days, you didn’t shoot nobody because he was on your turf, you know. You had to have hand-to-hand combat. But the buyers didn’t care, because they followed the powder, not the guys who controlled the neighborhood.

MJ: When the movies come out, there’ll be a lot of controversy about whether you guys are being glorified. What about that?

FL: Nick is a good dude who should be glorified, not me.

MJ: Why do you say that?

FL: Because he’s a hell of a good guy.

MJ: But you were both in the same business.

FL: You in the same business as other writers. You don’t go to slit their throat. Do you?

MJ: Frank. I mean, c’mon.

NB: No one should be elevated because of what they did in the drug business. The way we operated—there was a lot of violence, like, ten to twelve homicides, to keep the whole operation running. You can’t glorify that. It’s not something Frank or I would tell any of our children to get into.

FL: Absolutely right, Nick.

NB: Heroin wreaked a lot of havoc and a lot of pain in the black community. I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe I was aware, but I just didn’t give a fuck. I wanted to make money, and that’s what I did. Looking back, I wouldn’t have made those decisions, but it’s a hell of a lot different and much easier to sanitize yourself after the fact.

FL: In our business, you get paid by fear. When the fear factor comes in, that’s when you start to make money. Violence is part of it. You ain’t gonna sweet-talk no motherfucker.

MJ: Who was more corrupt: the dealers or the cops?

FL: The cops was more corrupt. You shake hands with a drug dealer, you got their word. If they don’t do what they say, they’re gonna die. Everyone knows that.

NB: Yeah, yeah, I go with that.

FL: A drug dealer gonna live to his word. I’m not talking about a junkie. I’m talking about a man like Frank Lucas or Nicky Barnes.

MJ: Rudy Giuliani chased both you guys when he was D.A. What do you think about him running for president?

NB: Giuliani would make a good president because he’s a principled guy.

FL: When Giuliani tells you something, he means it. But I don’t think we’re ready for an Italian president. I don’t think we’re ready for a black president. I don’t think we’re ready for a woman president, but I tell you right now: I think Hillary Clinton will win this thing hands down.

NB: Hillary will be the next president.

FL: No question about it.

MJ: You guys have said some pretty harsh things about each other over the years. Nick, what’s your biggest bitch with Frank?

NB: Well, I read he had this multimillion-dollar contract on my life.

FL: Nick, hold on there! You know me a long time, and you know me well. If I had a contract on you, I’d have been hanged 20 or 30 years ago. You know doggone well that I wouldn’t do that.

NB: This was when they had the grand jury. I was with Matty Madonna and Herbie Sperling. You were on the third floor at the MCC.² Do you remember that, Frank?

FL: Absolutely.

NB: There was a corrections officer who said that Frank Lucas went to one of the other corrections officers and told him that Nicky Barnes was down there, and he was trying to set him up.

FL: You believe that? Nick! Listen to me, and hear me real good: Anybody tells you that, they’re a damn liar. You’ve been too close to me.

NB: Just what I heard.

MJ: Nick, when the New York Times called you “Mister Untouchable,” that even got the president’s attention.³ When you first found out about Carter seeing the paper, what did you think?

NB: I thought I had made a mistake, but it was done then. I still thought that I had a really good chance of winning that case, because there’s a difference between a trial in a federal court and one in a state court.

FL: All the difference in the world.

NB: In federal court, they can railroad your ass, man. In state court, you can get a fair hearing and a fair jury.

MJ: A topic that comes up a lot—it came up at a showing of Nick’s movie, and it will when American Gangster opens—is that you can sell a lot of drugs and kill people—

FL: Stop right there. Nick ain’t ever killed nobody. Me either.

MJ: I know you’re a Gandhi kind of guy, Frank. I’m saying you can do all kinds of crimes, but a lot of people feel if you snitch, that’s worse. What do you guys think about that?

FL: I never in my life, not to this day, testified on nobody. Ain’t no sonofabitch in the world who’s ever gotten put in on account of me. Bad cops, yes. But rat that shit—no, no, no, no, no.

NB: When it comes to testifying, I testified against the guys who were in the Council along with me.⁴

FL: Like Guy Fisher.

NB: Yeah, Guy Fisher, Frank James, Wally, Coco, Kenny, and you know, a couple of other guys. When I went into the joint, I gave Guy Fisher a woman of mine and told him to look out for her, take care of her. I didn’t expect him to start fucking her.

FL: Guy Fisher’s a punk. What do you expect out of a fucking punk?

NB: I expected him to do what I was askin’ him to do. Not to betray me. Look, he had women of his own who were as attractive as mine.

FL: You had good-looking women, Nick!

NB: I don’t know why he had to bone her, and I don’t know why the other Council members let him live after they knew he did it. That’s why I cooperated. If I couldn’t get out, I could still pull those motherfuckers in with me.

MJ: Any second thoughts, Nick?

NB: No, man. When I realized they left me on the battlefield to die, I said, “Fuck it!” … I said, “I’ll pull those motherfuckers in, let them see what it’s like.” I would rather be out here in the witness program than to be in jail with them. Why would I wanna be in there with them kinda niggers? I don’t regret it. I saw this show on CNN, with Anderson Cooper. Cats were talking about “Don’t snitch, no matter what happens.” Well, I can’t see how a guy can be considered strong if he lets a bunch of assholes walk all over him and he doesn’t respond, just because of some code that a bunch of idiots have cooked up. Anderson Cooper asked this rapper, “Suppose a child was molested and you knew who this molester was. Would you tell the police?” He said, “No.” So that’s what I’m sayin’—the street guidelines are just moron bullshit.

MJ: Frank? Do you think there’s a time when it’s good to cooperate?

FL: I told you before. I never testified on nobody.

MJ: Some cases were made, Frank.

FL: Look! I have remorse about what I did.

NB: Frank, talk a little softer. You’re yelling.

FL: I have remorse. I never sold nothing to a kid in the street, but I found out that my people had. I didn’t want to sell to kids. I didn’t want to make them junkies. I didn’t want to be a part of it. I justify it by saying during my time, I couldn’t get a job on Wall Street, not even washing toilets. I went to school three days and the teacher wasn’t there two of them. I had to make a living. I didn’t want to be just a damn bum in the street. So that’s what I did. But it’s complicated. When you get there, every rat in the goddamned woods is gonna come running to you. And anytime you don’t got no money, everybody disappears. Tell ’em, Nick.

MJ: Most people say you guys hated each other, but it seems like you were buddies. What’s the story?

NB: I’ll tell you what a lot of people don’t understand. See, you read in the paper about people having shooting wars about turf. But both of us operated in that 116th Street area, and it was no problem. If only one of us had had powder out there, every time the police came out, they would have been able to surveil out that one group. But if there’s a lot of people out there …

MJ: Did you ever think there’d be this whole hip-hop thing? You guys are both mentioned in a million rap songs.

FL: Call them songs? When I came along, we had singing. They might make up songs about me, but I don’t have to like them.

MJ: What about you, Nick? You’re like a hip-hop folk hero.

NB: I never thought anything like this would happen. When hip-hop first started, everybody—I mean the music entrepreneurs—predicted that hip-hop would be dead in five years. They said, “Those motherfuckers ain’t gonna make no money.” But hip-hop rolled along, and look what they’re doing now. They got Jay-Z, Damon Dash, Kanye West, 50 Cent. These guys are doing something legitimate.

FL: At least Nick knows the names. I don’t know none of them. I know Puffy Combs, because of his father.

NB: Oh, Melvin! Melvin Combs.

FL: Melvin used to be at my house a couple of times a week. I’m proud to see Melvin’s son like that.

MJ: Nick, are you curious about how you’re portrayed in American Gangster?

NB: Yeah. But when I heard that Cuba Gooding was doing it, I thought it’ll probably be decent. He’s an Academy Award winner.

MJ: What about Denzel as Frank?

NB: I knew if Denzel played the lead, then it wouldn’t be a bullshit part or a fucked-up script.

FL: Denzel Washington did more than a good job, he did a hell of a job. Nobody in the world’s as good as Denzel.

MJ: Man, I thought you guys might be more at odds. This is a love-in.

FL: We are friends, so you’re missing the whole point.

NB: There were a lot of the people who we were both hooked up with who we both like. Jimmy Terrell, for example, and Turtle and Claude, Peter MacDougal, Frank Moten.

NB: What about the guy who died in the mob riot?

FL: Aww, what was his name? Got killed on the George Washington Bridge. What was his fuckin’ name?

NB: I forgot his name, too, but we knew all of these guys. I guess there’s some nostalgia in it.

FL: It was the good old boys back then, that’s what it was.

NB: Frank, are you taking anything for your broken leg?

FL: They gave me a whole bunch of shit.

NB: There’s a Website out there of a guy named Gary Null. He’s an alternative practitioner, and he offers all kinds of vitamin supplements to cure bone injuries. You really ought to go check him out.

FL: Yeah? I’m going to take this down, man.

MJ: The vitamin connect. Hey, what do you want to have on your epitaph? What do you want your legacy to be?

NB: I’ll tell you what I want them to say on mine. I want them to say, “Boy oh boy, he was old. God damn, he was old.”

FL: Fuckin’ old.

The Return of Superfly

Frank Lucas, once the city's biggest, baddest heroin kingpin, the original O.G. in chinchilla, now seems like just a very likable guy. But don't be fooled.

• By Mark Jacobson
• Published Aug 7, 2000 - New York Magazine

(Photo: New York Magazine, August 14th 2000)

During 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. Then living in a suite at the Regency Hotel with 100 custom-made, multi-hued suits in the closet, Lucas owned several cars. 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.

But for "spying," Nellybelle was best.

"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.

"One-sixteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue was mine. I bought it. I ran it. I owned it," Lucas says. "When something is yours, you've got to be Johnny-on-the-spot, ready to take it to the top. 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 . . ."

It was a matter of control, and trust. 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. 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. 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, 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. But none sold like Frank Lucas's Blue Magic.

"That's because with Blue Magic, you could get 10 percent purity," Lucas asserts. "Any other, if you got 5 percent, you were doing good. We put it out there at four in the afternoon, when the cops changed shifts. That gave you a couple of hours before those lazy bastards got down there. My buyers, though, you could set your watch by them. By four o'clock, we had enough niggers in the street to make a Tarzan movie. They had to reroute the bus on Eighth Avenue. Call the Transit Department if it's not so. By nine o'clock, I ain't got a fucking gram. Everything is gone. Sold . . . and I got myself a million dollars.

"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. "And no one even knew it was me. I was a shadow. A ghost . . . what we call down home a haint . . . That was me, the Haint of Harlem."

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. 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.

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. Added to this is "maybe 1,000 keys of dope on hand" with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo. 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.

Nor would most imagine that the old man in the fake Timberland jacket was a prime mover in what federal judge Sterling Johnson, who in the seventies served as New York City special narcotics prosecutor, calls "one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever . . . an innovator who got his own connection outside the U.S. and then sold the stuff himself in the street."

It was "a real womb-to-tomb operation," Johnson says, and the funerary image fits, especially in light of Lucas's most culturally pungent claim to fame, the so-called Cadaver Connection. Woodstockers may remember being urged by Country Joe & the Fish to sing along on the "Fixin' to Die Rag" -- "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box." But even the most apocalyptic-minded sixties freak wouldn't guess the box also contained a dozen keys of 98 percent-pure heroin. Of all the dreadful iconography of Vietnam -- the napalmed girl running down the road, Calley at My Lai, etc., etc. -- dope in the body bag, death begetting death, most hideously conveys 'Nam's spreading pestilence. The metaphor is almost too rich. In fact, to someone who got his 1-A in the mail the same day the NVA raised the Red Star over Hue City, the story has always seemed a tad apocryphal.

But it is not. "We did it, all right . . . ha, ha, ha . . . " Lucas chortles in his dying-crapshooter's scrape of a voice. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin? Ha ha ha."

"I had so much fucking money -- you have no idea," Lucas says, riding around Harlem, his heavy-lidded light-brown eyes turned to the sky in mock expectation that his vanished wealth, long since seized by the Feds, will rain back down from the heavens.

Aside from the hulking 369th Infantry Armory, where Lucas and his boys unloaded trucks they'd hijack out on Route 1-9, little about Harlem has remained the same. Still, nearly every block summons a memory. Over at Eighth Avenue and 113th Street, that used to belong to Spanish Raymond Marquez, the big numbers guy. On one Lenox Avenue corner is where "Preacher got killed"; on the next is where Black Joe bought it. Some deserved killing, some maybe not, but they were all dead just the same.

In front of a blue frame house on West 123rd Street, Lucas stops and gets nostalgic. "I had my best table workers in there," he says, describing how his "table workers," ten to twelve women naked except for surgical masks, would "whack up" the dope, cutting it with "60 percent mannite and 40 percent quinine." The petite, ruby-haired Red Top was in charge. "I'd bring in three, four keys, let Red go do her thing. She'd mix up that dope like a rabbit in a hat, never drop a speck . . . Red . . . I sure do miss her . . ."

At 135th and Seventh, Lucas stops again. Small's Paradise used to be there. Back in the day, there were plenty of places -- 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 the Brown Bomber died, Lucas, who once paid off a $50,000 tax lien for the champ, 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.

"He was right there, with Ava Gardner . . . Howard Hughes, the original ghost -- that impressed me."

In the end, the tour comes back to 116th Street. It's now part of Harlem's nascent real-estate boom, but when Frank "owned" this street, "you'd see junkies, nodding, sucking their own dicks . . . heads down in the crotch. People saw that, they knew that shit was good."

A moment later, Lucas looks up. "Uh-oh, here come the gangstas," he shouts in mock fright, as a trio of youths, blue kerchiefs knotted around their heads, go by blaring rap music. Lucas is no fan of "any Wu-Tang this and Tupac that." Likewise, Lucas, who thought nothing of spending $50,000 on a chinchilla coat and $10,000 on a matching hat, doesn't go for the current O.G. styles. "Baggy-pants bullshit" is his blanket comment on the thug-life knockoffs currently in homeboy favor.

"I guess every idiot gets to be young once," Lucas snaps, driving half a block before slamming on the brakes.

"Then he broke for me, but he was too late. I shot him, four times, bam, bam, bam, bam."

"Here's something you ought to see," the gangster says, pointing toward the curb between the Canaan Baptist Church and the New Africa House of Fish. "There's where I did that boy . . . Tango," he sneers, his large, squarish jaw lanterning forward. "I told you about that, didn't I?"

Of course he had, only days before, in minute, hair-raising detail.

For Lucas, the incident, which occurred in "the summer of 1965 or '66," was strategy. Strictly business. Because, as Lucas recalls, "when you're in the kind of work I was in, you've got to be for real. You've got to show what you're willing to do."

"Everyone, Goldfinger Terrell, Willie Abraham, Hollywood Harold, was talking about this big guy, this Tango. About six five, 270 pounds, quick on his feet . . . He killed two or three guys with his hands. Had this big bald head, like Mr. Clean. Wore those Mafia undershirts. Everyone was scared of him. So I figured, Tango, you're my man.

"I went up to him, asked him if he wanted to do something, some business. I gave him $5,000 worth of merchandise. Because I know he was gonna fuck up. That's the kind of guy he was. Two weeks later, I go talk to him. 'Look, man,' I say. 'Hey, man, when you gonna pay me?'

"Then, like I knew he would, he started getting hot, going into one of his gorilla acts. He was one of them silverback gorillas, you know, you seen them in the jungle. A silverback gorilla, that's what he was.

"He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch and he'd do the same to my mama too. Well, as of now, he's dead. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man got a right to say what he wants. Now the whole block is there, to see if I'm going to pussy out. He was still yelling. So I said to him, 'When you get through, let me know.' "

"Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.

"Yeah, it was right there," says Frank Lucas, 35 years after the shooting, pointing out the car window. "The boy didn't have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there . . . That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem but in the world."

Then Frank laughs.

Frank's laugh: It's a trickster's sound, a jeer that cuts deep. First he rolls up his shoulders and cranes back his large, angular face, which, despite all the wear and tear, remains strikingly handsome, even empathetic in a way you'd like to trust but know better. Then the smooth, tawny skin over his cheekbones creases, his ashy lips spread, and his tongue snakes out of his gate-wide mouth. Frank has a very long, very red tongue. Only then the soundtrack kicks in, staccato stabs of mirth followed by a bevy of low rumbled cackles.

Ha ha ha, siss siss siss. For how many luckless fools like Tango was this the last sound they heard on this earth?

Hearing tapes of our conversations, my wife leaned back in her chair. "Oh," she said, "you're doing a story on Satan . . . " She said it was like hearing the real interview with a vampire.

"After I killed that boy," Frank Lucas goes on, gesturing toward the corner on the other side of 116th Street, "from that day on, I could take any amount of money, set it on the corner, and put my name on it. FRANK LUCAS. I guarantee you, nobody would touch it."

Then Frank laughs again, putting a little extra menace into it. This is just so you don't get too comfortable with the assumption that your traveling partner is nothing but a limping old guy with a gnarled hand fond of telling colorful stories and wearing $5 acetate shirts covered with faux nascar logos.

Just so you never forget exactly who you are dealing with.

When asked about the relative morality of killing people, selling millions of dollars of dope, and playing a significant role in the destruction of the social fabric of his times, Frank Lucas bristles. What choice did he have? he demands. "Kind of sonofabitch I saw myself being, money I 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."

Be that as it may, there's little doubt that when, on a sweltering summer's afternoon in 1946, Frank Lucas arrived in Harlem, which he'd been told was "the promised land," his prospects in the legitimate world were limited. Not yet 16 years old, he was already on the run. Already a gangster.

It couldn't have been any other way, Lucas insists, after the Ku Klux Klan came to the shack where he grew up and killed his cousin. "I couldn't have been more than 6. We were living back in the woods near a little place they call La Grange, North Carolina. These five white guys come up to the house one morning, big rednecks . . . they're yelling, 'Obadiah . . . Obadiah Jones . . . come out. Come out, you nigger . . .' They said he was looking at a white girl walking down the street. 'Reckless eyeballing,' they call it down there.

"Obadiah was like 12 or 13, and he come out the door, all sleepy and stuff. 'You been looking at somebody's daughter. We're going to fix you,' they said. They took ropes on each hand, pulled them tight in opposite directions. Then they shoved a shotgun in Obadiah's mouth and pulled the trigger."

It was then, Lucas says, that he began his life of crime. "I was the oldest. Someone had to put food on the table. I started stealing chickens. Knocking pigs on their head . . . It wasn't too long that I was going over to La Grange, mugging drunks when they come out of the whorehouse. They'd spent their $5 or $6 buying ass, head jobs, then I'd be waiting with a rock in my hand, a tobacco rack, anything."

By the time he was 12, "but big for my age," Lucas says, he was in Knoxville, Tennessee, locked up on a chain gang. In Lexington, Kentucky, not yet 14, he lived with a lady bootlegger. In Wilson, North Carolina, working as a truck driver at a pipe company, he started in sleeping with the owner's daughter. This led to problems, especially after "Big Bill, a fat, 250-pound beer-belly bastard" caught them in the act. In the ensuing fight, Frank hit Bill on the head with a piece of pipe, laying him out.

"They didn't owe me but $100, but I took $400 and set the whole damned place on fire." Told by his mother to run and keep running, he bummed his way northward.

"I got to 34th Street. Penn Station. Then took the bus to 14th Street. I went over to a policeman and said, 'Hey, this ain't 14th Street. I want to go where all the black people are at.' He said, 'You want to go to Harlem . . . 114th Street!'

"I got to 114th Street. I had never seen so many black people in one place in all my life. It was a world of black people. "And I just shouted out: 'Hello, Harlem . . . hello, Harlem, USA!' "

People told him to be smart, get a job as an elevator operator. But once Frank saw guys writing policy numbers, carrying big wads, his course was set. Within a few months, he was a one-man, hell-bent crime wave. He stuck up the Hollywood Bar on Lenox and 116th, got himself $600. He went to the Busch Jewelers on 125th Street, stole a tray of diamonds, broke the guard's jaw with brass knuckles on the way out. Later, he ripped off a high-roller crap game at the Big Track Club on 110th. "They was all gangsters in there, Cool Breeze, a lot of them. I walked in, took their money. Now they was all looking for me."

The way he was going, Frank figures, it took Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, the most famous of all Harlem gangsters, to save his life. "I was hustling up at Lump's Pool Room, on 134th Street. Eight-ball and that. So in comes Icepick Red. Red, he was a tall motherfucker, clean, with a hat. A fierce killer, from the heart. Freelanced Mafia hits. Anyway, he took out a roll of money that must have been that high. My eyes got big. I knew right then, that wasn't none of his money. That was my money . . .

"'Who got a thousand dollars to shoot pool?' Icepick Red shouted. I told him I'm playing, but I only got a hundred dollars . . . and he's saying, 'What kind of punk only got a hundred dollars?' I wanted to take out my gun and kill him right there, take his damn money.

"Except right then, everything seemed to stop. The jukebox stopped, the pool balls stopped. Every fucking thing stopped. It got so quiet you could've heard a rat piss on a piece of cotton in China.

"I turned around and I saw this guy -- he was like five feet ten, five feet eleven, dark complexion, neat, looked like he just stepped off the back cover of Vogue magazine. He had on a gray suit and a maroon tie, with a gray overcoat and flower in the lapel. I never seen nothing that looked like him. He was another species altogether.

"'Can you beat him?' he said to me in a deep, smooth voice.

"I said, 'I can shoot pool with anybody, mister. I can beat anybody.'

"Icepick Red, suddenly he's nervous. Scared. 'Bumpy!' he shouts out, 'I don't got no bet with you!'

"Bumpy ignores that. 'Rack 'em up, Lump!'

"We rolled for the break, and I got it. And I wasted him. Icepick Red never got a goddamn shot. Bumpy sat there, watching. Didn't say a word. Then he says to me, 'Come on, let's go.' I'm thinking, who the fuck is this Bumpy? But something told me I better keep my damn mouth shut. I got in the car. A long Caddy. First we stopped at a clothing store -- he picked out a bunch of stuff for me. Suits, ties, slacks. Nice stuff. Then we drove to where he was living, on Mount Morris Park. He took me into his front room, said I should clean myself up, sleep there that night.

"I wound up sleeping there six months . . . Then things were different. The gangsters stopped fucking with me. The cops stopped fucking with me. I walk into the Busch Jewelers, see the man I robbed, and all he says is: 'Can I help you, sir?' Because now I'm with Bumpy Johnson -- a Bumpy Johnson man. I'm 17 years old and I'm Mr. Lucas.

"Bumpy was a gentleman among gentlemen, a king among kings, a killer among killers, a whole book and Bible by himself," says Lucas about his years with the so-called Robin Hood of Harlem, who had opposed Dutch Schultz in the thirties and would be played by Moses Gunn in the original Shaft and twice by Laurence Fishburne (in The Cotton Club and Hoodlum).

"He saw something in me, I guess. He showed me the ropes -- how to collect, to figure the vig. Back then, if you wanted to do business in Harlem, you paid Bumpy or you died. Extortion, I guess you could call it. Everyone had to pay -- except the mom-and-pop stores."

With Bumpy, Frank caught a glimpse of the big time. He'd drive downtown, to the 57th Street Diner, waiting by the car while his boss ate breakfast with Frank Costello. Frank accompanied Bumpy to Cuba to see Lucky Luciano. "I stayed outside," Frank remembers, "just another guy with a bulge in my pocket."

"There was a lot about Bumpy I didn't understand, a lot I still don't understand . . . when he was older, he'd lean over his chessboard in his apartment at the Lenox Terrace, with these Shakespeare books around, listening to soft piano music, Beethoven -- or that Henry Mancini record he played over and over, 'Baby Elephant Walk' . . . He'd start talking about philosophy, read me from Tom Paine, 'The Rights of Man' . . . 'What do you think of that, Frank?' he'd ask . . . I'd shrug. What could I say? Best book I remember reading was Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers."

In the end, as Frank tells it, Bumpy died in his arms: "We were at Wells Restaurant on Lenox Avenue. Billy Daniels, the singer, might have been there. Maybe Cockeye Johnny, J.J., Chickenfoot. There was always a crowd around, wanting to talk to him. Bumpy just started shaking and fell over."

Three months after Martin Luther King's assassination, the headline in the Amsterdam News said BUMPY'S DEATH MARKS END OF AN ERA. Bumpy had been the link back to the wild days of people like Madame St. Clair, the French-speaking Queen of Policy, and rackets wizard Casper Holstein, who reportedly aided the careers of Harlem Renaissance writers. Also passing from the scene were characters like Helen Lawrenson, a Vanity Fair editor whose tart account of her concurrent affairs with Condé Nast, Bernard Baruch, and Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson can be found in the long-out-of-print Stranger at the Party.

Lucas says, "There wasn't gonna be no next Bumpy. Bumpy believed in that share-the-wealth. I was a different sonofabitch. I wanted all the money for myself . . . Harlem was boring to me then. Numbers, protection, those little pieces of paper flying out of your pocket. I wanted adventure. I wanted to see the world."

A few days after our Harlem trip, drinking Kirins in a fake Benihana, Frank told me how he came upon what he refers to as his "bold new plan" to smuggle heroin from Southeast Asia to Harlem. It is a thought process Lucas says he often uses when on the verge of a "pattern change."

First he locks himself in a room, preferably in a hotel in Puerto Rico, shuts off the phone, pulls down the blinds, has his meals delivered, and does not speak to a soul for a couple of weeks. In this meditative isolation, Lucas engages in what he calls "backtracking . . . I think about everything I done in the past five years, look in each nook and cranny, down to what I put on my toast in the morning."

Having vetted the past, Lucas begins to "forward-look . . . peering around every bend in the road ahead." It is only then, he says, "when you can see back to Alaska and ahead as far as South America . . . and know nothing, not even the smallest hair on a cockroach's dick, can stand in your way" -- that you are ready to make your next big move.

If he really wanted to become "white-boy rich, Donald Trump rich," Lucas thought, he'd have to "cut out the guineas." He'd learned as much 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."

Lucas, traveling alone, had never been to Southeast Asia, but 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."

Checked into the Dusit Thani Hotel in Bangkok, Lucas soon hailed a motorcycle taxi to take him to Jack's American Star Bar, an R&R hangout for black soldiers. Offering ham hocks and collard greens on the first floor and a wide array of hookers and dope connections on the second, the Soul Bar, as Frank calls it, was run by the former U.S. Army sergeant Leslie "Ike" Atkinson, a country boy from Goldsboro, North Carolina, who happened to be married to one of Frank's cousins, which made him as good as family.

"Ike knew everyone over there, every black guy in the Army, from the cooks on up," Frank says. It was this "army inside the Army" that would serve as the Country Boys' international distribution system, moving heroin shipments almost exclusively on military planes routed to Eastern Seaboard bases. Mostly these were draftees and enlisted men, but "there were also generals and colonels, guys with eagles and chickens on the collars, white guys and South Vietnamese too," Lucas swears. "These were the greediest motherfuckers I ever dealt with. They'd send people out to get their ass shot up but do anything if you gave them enough money," says Frank who, as part of his scam if need be, would dress up as a lieutenant colonel himself. "You should have seen me -- I could really salute."

Lucas soon located his main overseas connection, an English-speaking, Rolls-Royce-driving Chinese gentleman who went by the sobriquet 007. "I called him 007 because he was a fucking Chinese James Bond." Double-oh Seven took Lucas upcountry, to the Golden Triangle, the heavily jungled, poppy-growing area where Thailand, Burma, and Laos come together.

"It wasn't too bad, getting up there," says Lucas. "We was in trucks, in boats. I might have been on every damn river in the Golden Triangle. When we got up there, you couldn't believe it. They've got fields the size of Tucson, Arizona, with nothing but poppy seeds in them. There's caves in the mountains so big you could set this building in them, which is where they do the processing . . . I'd sit there, watch these Chinese paramilitary guys come out of the mist on the green hills. When they saw me, they stopped dead. They'd never seen a black man before."

Likely dealing with remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Kuomintang army, Lucas purchased 132 kilos that first trip. At $4,200 per unit, compared with the $50,000 that Mafia dealers charged Stateside competitors, it would turn out to be an unbelievable bonanza. But the journey was not without problems.

"Right off, guys were stepping on little green snakes, dying on the spot. Then guess what happened? Banditos! Those motherfuckers came right out of the trees. Trying to steal our shit. The guys I was with -- 007's guys -- all of them was Bruce Lees. Those sonofabitches were good. They fought like hell.

"I was stuck under a log firing my piece. Guys were dropping. You see a lot of dead shit in there, man, like a month and a half of nightmares. I think I ate a damn dog. I was in bad shape, crazy with fever. Then people were talking about tigers. I figured, that does it. I'm gonna be ripped up by a tiger in this damn jungle. What a fucking epitaph . . . But we got back alive. Lost half my dope, but I was still alive."

It is a fabulous cartoon, an image to take its place in the easy-riding annals of the American dope pusher -- the Superfly in his Botany 500 sportswear down in the malarial muck, clutching his 100 keys, Sierra Madre-style, bullets whizzing overhead. "It was the most physiological thing I done and hope not to again," says Lucas.

Throughout it all, Lucas swears, he remained a "100 percent true-blue, red-white-and-blue patriotic American." Details concerning the dope-in-the-body-bags caper have been wildly misrepresented, he says, stories that he and Ike Atkinson actually stitched the dope inside the body cavities of the dead soldiers being nothing but "sick cop propaganda."

"No way I'm touching a dead anything. Bet your life on that."

"Kissinger. Wonder what he'd do if he knew he'd helped smuggle dope into the country?"

What really happened, he says, was that he and Ike flew a country-boy North Carolina carpenter over to Bangkok. "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 . . ."

Of the dozens of smuggling operations he ran from Asia, Frank still rates "the Henry Kissinger deal" as an all-time favorite. To hear Frank tell it, he and Ike were desperate to get 125 keys out of town, but there weren't any "friendly" planes scheduled leaving. "All we had was Kissinger. He was on a mercy mission on account of big cyclones in Bangladesh. We knew a cook on the plane and gave $100,000 to some general to look the other way. I mean, who the fuck is gonna search fucking Henry Kissinger's plane?

". . . Henry Kissinger! Wonder what he'd say if knew he helped smuggle all that dope into the country? . . . Hoo hahz poot zum dope in my aero-plan? Ha ha ha . . ."

During the dope-plague days of the late sixties and early seventies, when the Feds (over)estimated that half the country's heroin addicts were in New York and 75 percent of those in Harlem, the Amsterdam News reported what 116th Street was like during the reign of Frank Lucas. "We're being destroyed by dope and crime every day," said Lou Broders, who ran an apparel shop at 253 West 116th Street. "It's my own people doing it, too. That's the pity of it. This neighborhood is dying out."

In the face of such talk, Frank, who recalls the 1967 riots as "no big thing," exhibits typically willful obliviousness. "It's not my fault if your television got stolen," he says. "Besides, Harlem was great then. It wasn't until they 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."

To hear Frank tell it, life as a multimillionaire dope dealer was a whirl of flying to Paris for dinner at Maxim's, gambling in Vegas with Joe Louis and Sammy Davis Jr., spending $140,000 on a couple of Van Cleef bracelets, and squiring around his beautiful mistress -- Billie Mays, step-daughter of Willie, who, according to Lucas, he'd snaked away from Walt "Clyde" Frazier. The grotty 116th Street operation was left in the hands of trusted lieutenants. If problems arose, Lucas says, "we'd have 500 guns in the street in 30 minutes, ready to hit the mattress."

Frank'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 misdemeanor violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.

As Bumpy had once run the Palmetto Chemical Company, a roach-exterminating concern, Frank opened a string of gas stations and dry cleaners: "I had a dry-cleaning place on Broadway, next to Zabar's. Once I had to go behind the counter myself. And you know I ain't no nine-to-five guy. These old ladies kept coming in, shoving these shirts in my face, screaming, 'Look at this spot' . . . I couldn't take it. I just ran out of the place, didn't lock up or even take the money out of the cash register."

Show business was more to Frank's taste, especially after he and fellow Harlem gangster Zack Robinson began hanging out at Lloyd Price's Turntable, a nightclub at 52nd Street and Broadway. "There'd be Muhammad Ali, members of the Temptations, James Brown, Berry Gordy, Diana Ross," says Frank, who calls the Turntable "a good scene -- the integration crowd was there, every night."

In 1970, Price, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who'd had huge hits with tunes like "Personality" and "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," decided to make a gangster movie, The Ripoff, set on the streets of New York.

"The idea was to get real, practicing gangsters to play themselves," Price remembers. "We needed the villain romantic lead, the guy with the sable coat and the hat, so I thought, why not get Frank?"

"It was like Shaft before Shaft," says Lucas. "All the cars in the picture was mine. We did a scene with me chasing Lloyd, shooting out the window of a Mercedes on the West Side Highway. I put 70, 80 grand into the movie. It was real fun."

Never finished, the footage missing, The Ripoff qualifies as the Great Lost Film of the blaxploitation genre. "A lot of strange things happened making The Ripoff," says Lloyd Price. "Once, we went over to the editing room. Frank didn't like the director. 'You want to cut, I'll show you how to cut,' he said, pulling out his knife. 'Frank, man,' I told him, 'this isn't the way they do it in the movie business.' "

A drug kingpin attracts attention from the police, and according to Lucas, most of his trouble came from the NYPD's infamously corrupt Special Investigations Unit. Known for its near-unlimited authority, the SIU wrote its own mighty chapter in the crazy-street-money days of the early-seventies heroin epidemic; by 1977, 52 out of 70 officers who'd worked in the unit were either in jail or under indictment.

The worst of the SIU crew, Lucas says, was Bob Leuci, the main player in Robert Daley's best-selling Prince of the City. Says Frank: "We called him Babyface, and he had the balls of a gorilla. He'd wait outside your house and fuck with you." Once, according to Lucas, Leuci caught him with several keys of heroin and cocaine in his trunk. "This is gonna cost you," the detective supposedly said after taking Lucas down to the station house. The two men then reportedly engaged in a heated negotiation, Lucas offering 30 grand, Leuci countering with "30 grand and two keys." Seeing no alternative, Lucas said, "Sold!"

"That's why I had to move downtown," wails Frank. "To duck Babyface."

Lucas likewise expresses no love for his more famous Harlem dope-dealer rival Nicky Barnes, who rankled the older pusher by appearing on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in his trademark gogglelike Gucci glasses, bragging that he was "Mr. Untouchable." The brazen assertion soon got then-president Jimmy Carter on the telephone demanding that something be done about the Harlem dope trade. "Talk about bringing the heat," the Country Boy moans.

According to Lucas, it was Barnes's "delusions of grandeur" that led to a bizarre chance meeting between the two drug lords in the lingerie department of Henri Bendel on 57th Street. "Nicky wanted to make this black-Mafia thing called the Council. An uptown Cosa Nostra. The Five Families of Dope. I didn't want no part of it. Because before long, everyone's gonna think they're Carlo Gambino. That's trouble.

"Anyway, I'm with my wife at Henri Bendel's, and who comes up? Nicky fucking Barnes! 'Frank,' he's going, 'we got to talk . . . we got to get together on this Council thing.' I told him forget it, my wife is trying on underwear -- can't we do this some other time? He says, 'Hey, Frank, I'm short this week, can you front me a couple of keys?' That's Nicky."

Lucas says he thought about quitting "all the time." His wife, Julie, whom he met on a "backtracking" trip in Puerto Rico, begged him to get out, especially after Brooklyn dope king Frank Matthews jumped bail in 1973, never to be heard from again. "Some say he's dead, but I know he's living in Africa, like a king, with all the fucking money in the world," Lucas sighs. "Probably I should have stayed in Colombia. Always liked Colombia. But I had my heart set on getting a jet plane . . . there was always something."

For Lucas, the inevitable came on January 28, 1975, when an NYPD/DEA strike force, acting on a tip from two Pleasant Avenue guys, staged a surprise raid on his house in a leafy neighborhood of Teaneck, New Jersey. In the ensuing panic, Julie Lucas, screaming "Take it all, take it all," tossed several suitcases out the window. The cases were found to contain $584,000 in the rumpled bills Lucas refers to as "shit street money." Also found were keys to Lucas's Cayman Islands safe-deposit boxes, property deeds, and a ticket to a United Nations ball, compliments of the ambassador of Honduras.

"Those motherfuckers just came in," Lucas says now, sitting in a car across the street from the split-level house where he played pickup games with members of the Knicks. For years, he has contended that the cops took a lot more than $585,000 from him. "Five hundred eighty-five thousand, what's that? Shit. In Vegas, I'd lose 500 G's playing baccarat with a green-headed whore in half an hour." According to Lucas, agents took something on the order of "9 to 10 million dollars" from him that fateful evening. To bolster his claim, he cites passing a federally administered polygraph test on the matter. A DEA agent on the scene that night, noting that "$10 million in crumpled $20 bills isn't something you just stick in your pocket," vigorously denies Lucas's charge.

Whatever. Frank doesn't expect to see his money again: "It's just too fucking old -- old and gone."

A few days later, I brought Lucas a copy of his newspaper-clip file, detailing the Country Boy's long and tortuous interface with the criminal-justice system, a period in which he would do time in nearly a dozen state and federal joints. Lucas silently thumbed through dog-eared headlines like COUNTRY BOYS, CALLED NO. 1 HEROIN GANG IS BUSTED; 30 COUNTRY BOYS INDICTED IN $50M HEROIN OPERATION. There was also an October 25, 1979, Post story entitled CONVICT LIVES IT UP WITH SEX AND DRUGS, quoting a Metropolitan Correctional Center prisoner named "Nick," convicted killer of five, whining that Lucas had ordered prostitutes up to his cell and was "so indiscreet about it I had to have my wife turn the other way . . . he didn't give one damn about anyone else's feelings."

One clip, however, did engage Frank's attention. Titled EX-ASSISTANT PROSECUTOR FOR HOGAN SHOT TO DEATH IN VILLAGE AMBUSH, the November 5, 1977, Times story tells how Gino E. Gallina, then a Pelham Manor mouthpiece for "top drug dealers and organized-crime figures," was rubbed out "mob style . . . as many passersby looked on in horror" one nippy evening at the corner of Carmine and Varick Streets.

"You gonna make me out to be the devil, or what? Am I going to Heaven or hell?"

Lucas reckons he must have spent "millions" on high-priced criminal lawyers through the early eighties. Gino Gallina, however, was the only lawyer Lucas ever physically assaulted, the incident occurring in the visiting room of the Rikers Island prison. Lucas had reputedly given Gallina a large payoff to fix a case, $200,000 of which became "lost." Upon hearing this, Lucas, said the Daily News, "leaped across the table in the visitors' pen and began punching Gallina savagely."

Acknowledging that he told Gallina "if I didn't get my money in 24 hours he was a dead man" and asserting that the lawyer "did not deserve to live," Frank still steadfastly maintains he has "no idea at all" about who murdered Gallina.

What Lucas will absolutely not talk about is how he got out of jail, the stuff described in clips like a Newark Star-Ledger piece from 1983 entitled 'HELPFUL' DRUG KINGPIN GRANTED REDUCED TERM, in which Judge Leonard Ronco of Newark is reported as cutting in half Lucas's 30-year New Jersey stretch. This followed the previous decision by U.S. District Court judge Irving Ben Cooper, who "granted the unusual request of Dominic Amorosa, chief of the Southern District Organized Crime Strike Force, to reduce Lucas's 40-year New York prison sentence to time already served."

"I ask two things," Lucas demanded in our first meeting. "One, if they are slamming bamboo rods beneath your fingernails with ball-peen hammers, do not reveal where you saw me; and two, none of that bullshit about being buddy-buddy with the cops. That is out . . . " Then, so there was no mistake, he added, "Don't cross me on this, because I am a busy man and have no time, no time whatsoever, to go to your funeral."

Still, it was hard to let it go. How was I supposed to explain how he wound up serving less than nine years? To this, Frank replied: "I know I have that mark on me. I was always playing games with them. Go back and look -- I never, ever testified against anyone in court. Not once."

Then finally, Frank said, "Look, all you got to know is that I am sitting here talking to you right now. Walking and talking -- when I could have, should have, been dead and buried a hundred times. And you know why that is?

"Because: People like me. People like the fuck out of me." This was his primary survival skill, said the former dope king: his downright friendliness, his upbeat demeanor. "All the way back to when I was a boy, people have always liked me. I've always counted on that."

That much was apparent when I went to the Eastern District federal court to see Judge Sterling Johnson, the former narcotics prosecutor instrumental in putting the Country Boy behind bars.

Frank told me to look up Johnson, whom he calls "Idi Amin." "Judge Johnson likes me a lot. You'll see," he said.

Johnson greeted me with a burnished dignity befitting a highly respected public official. "This is Judge Johnson," he said. When I mentioned the name Frank Lucas, Johnson became notably more familiar. "Frank Lucas? Is that mother still living?!" A few days later, chatting in his stately chambers, the judge told me to call Lucas up.

"Get that old gangster on the phone," Johnson demanded, turning on the speaker.

Lucas answered with his usual growl. "This is Frank. Who's this?"

Johnson mentioned a name, someone apparently dead, likely snuffed by a Country Boy or two. This got Lucas's attention. "What? Who gave you this number?"

"Top!"

"Top who?"

"Red Top!" Johnson said, invoking the name of Lucas's beloved chief dope cutter.

"Red Top don't got my number . . ." It was around then that Frank figured it out.

"Judge Johnson! You dog! You still got that stick?" Johnson reached under his desk, pulled out a beat cop's nightstick, and slapped it into his open palm loud enough for Lucas to hear it. "Better believe it, Frank!"

"Stop that! You're making me nervous, Judge Johnson!" Lucas exclaimed before gingerly inquiring, "Hey, Judge, they ever get anyone in that Gallina thing?"

Johnson laughed and said, "Oh, Frank. You know you did it."

Smiling through Lucas's denials, Johnson said, "Well, come down and see me. I'm about the only fly in the buttermilk down here."

After he hung up, Johnson chortled, "That Frank. He's a pisser."

"You know, when we were first investigating him, the FBI, DEA, they didn't think he could pull off that Southeast Asia stuff. They wouldn't let themselves believe an uneducated black man could come up with such a sophisticated smuggling operation. In his sick way, he really did something."

The memory clearly tickled Johnson, who quickly added, "Look, don't get me wrong: Frank was as bad as they come. You should never forget who these people really are. But what are you going to do? The guy was a pisser. A pisser and a killer. Easy to like. A lot of those guys were like that. It is an old problem."

A couple of days later, eating at a T.G.I. Friday's, Lucas scowled through glareproof glass to the suburban strip beyond. "Look at this shit," he said. A giant Home Depot down the road especially bugged him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn't have collected protection from a damn Home Depot, he said with disgust. "What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that's the way it is now. You can't find the heart of anything to stick the knife into."

Then Frank turned to me and asked, "You gonna make me out to be the devil, or what? Am I going to Heaven or hell?"

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."

But what did I think? How did I see it going for the Country Boy beyond this world? It was a vexing question, as Sterling Johnson said. Who knew about these things? Frank was a con man, one of the best. He'd been telling white people, cops and everyone else, pretty much what they wanted to hear for decades, so why should I be different? It was true: I liked him. I liked the fuck out of him. Especially when he called his 90-year-old church-lady Hulk Hogan-fan mother, which he did about five times a day. But that wasn't the point.

Braggart, trickster, and fibber along with everything else, Lucas was nonetheless a living, breathing historical figure, a highly specialized font of secret knowledge, more exotic, and certainly less picked over, than any Don Corleone. He was a whole season of the black Sopranos -- old-school division. The idea that a backwoods boy could maneuver himself into position to tell at least a plausible lie about stashing 125 kilos of zum dope on Henry Kissinger's plane -- much less actually do it -- mitigated a multitude of sins.

In the end, even Lucas's resounding lack of repentance didn't seem to matter. About the only flicker of remorse I'd seen from him occurred following a couple of beers we had with one of his brothers, Vernon Lee, who is known as Shorty.

A bespectacled man now in his early fifties, Shorty followed Frank to Harlem in 1965. "We came up from Carolina in a beat-up car, the brothers and sisters, Mom and Dad, with everything we owned, like the Beverly Hillbillies." From the start, Shorty knew what he wanted. "Diamond rings, cars, women. But mostly it was the glory. Isn't that what most men really dream of? The glory."

Then Shorty reached across the table and touched Frank's hand. "We did make a little bit of noise, didn't we?" Shorty said. To which Frank replied, "A little bit."

Later, sitting in the car, Frank watched his brother make his way across the frozen puddles in the late-afternoon light and sighed. "You know, if I'd been a preacher, they would have been preachers. If I'd been a cop, they'd have been cops. But I was a dope dealer, so they became dope dealers . . . I don't know . . . if I'd done right."

After a while, Frank and I stopped in for another beer. The surroundings were not plush. Frank said, "Shit . . . from King of the Hill to dumps like this."

The Knicks game was over, so we sat around for a few hours watching The Black Rose, an old sword-fight movie with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles. Welles is a favorite of Lucas's, "at least before he got too fat." Then, when it was time for me to go, Lucas insisted I call him when I got back to New York. It was late, rainy, and a long drive. Frank said he was worried about me. So, back in the city, driving down the FDR, by the 116th Street exit, I called Lucas up, as arranged.

"You're back, that's good," the Country Boy croaked into the phone. "Watch out. I don't care what Giuliani says, New York is not so safe. You never know what you might find out there." Then Frank laughed that same chilling haint of a laugh, spilling out the car windows and onto the city streets beyond.

O prevalecente nacionalismo e investimentos de outros lugares tornam a presença norte-americana obsoleta.

MANTA, Equador - Quando os oficiais estadunidenses se instalaram nesta úmida cidade litorânea, justificando que eles deveriam continuar a sua missão de vigilância aérea que já dura uma década, eles falavam não apenas sobre a luta contra o tráfico de drogas no mar aberto, mas sobre os 71 milhões de dólares que gastaram para renovar e manter o aeroporto da cidade, e os 6,5 milhões de dólares que eles injetam a cada ano na economia local.

Entretanto, o governo do Equador decidiu, e Washington aparentemente concordou, que um dos mais importantes postos avançados da guerra contra as drogas dos Estados Unidos irá fechar. Os 450 funcionários e contratantes da Força Aérea dos Estados Unidos que se instalaram em uma base militar que compartilha a pista de decolagem do aeroporto, irão partir no ano que vem.

A decisão reflete tanto o prevalecente clima político daqui [do Equador] - enfrentar os Estados Unidos tende a ser amplamente popular - como a nova realidade econômica. Com grandes projetos iniciados em Manta pelo governo venezuelano e uma companhia de Hong Kong, os dólares estadunidenses não somam muito.

O presidente Hugo Chávez, da Venezuela, ficou ao lado do presidente Rafael Correa, do Equador, em julho, para anunciar uma refinaria de petróleo financiada em parceria de 6 bilhões de dólares, a ser construída na periferia de Manta. E a Hutchison Port Holdings, baseada em Hong Kong, começou a construir o que estará entre os maiores portos de água profunda da costa oeste da América do Sul, um projeto de 523 milhões de dólares com píeres, guindastes, terminais para barcos atuneiros, estradas, e a capacidade de eventualmente gerenciar 1,6 milhões de contêineres de mercadorias por ano, no ponto do continente mais próximo da Ásia.

"Os EUA pararam de ser a referência do que é bom para a América Latina", disse Gustavo Larrea, ministro da segurança do Equador. "Porque a América Latina fez tudo que os EUA pediram para que ela fizesse e não esteve apta a sair da pobreza, o mito norte-americano perdeu peso político".

Nos dias finais da administração de Bush, os governos da América Latina estão rejeitando muitos programas financiados pelos EUA, particularmente esforços no campo dos anti-narcóticos com a retórica de promover a soberania e denunciando o "imperialismo" do norte.

Na Venezuela, dizem os agentes anti-narcóticos, a cooperação com a Força Administrativa de Narcóticos (DEA) dos Estados Unidos da América tem se deteriorado intensamente. Na Bolívia, plantadores de coca decidiram em junho expelir a Agência dos Estados Unidos para o Desenvolvimento Internacional (USAID) de parte do país, entre acusações de que ela estava conspirando contra o presidente Evo Morales.

A resistência ressoa bem politicamente em muitas partes da América Latina, onde as políticas dos EUA são freqüentemente vistas como vestígios de obsessões de segurança da Guerra Fria ou pílulas de economia amargas forçadas pela garganta de governos relutantes.

O porta-voz que lidera tal anti-americanismo é Chávez, mas outros líderes sul-americanos muitas vezes se juntam a ele.

Durante sua campanha para a presidência, Correa disse que ele não renovaria um acordo de 10 anos, feito com os Estados Unidos em novembro de 1999, que permitiu aos militares estadunidenses operarem desde a base de Manta. Em julho último, o Ministro das Relações Exteriores do Equador oficialmente notificou os Estados Unidos de que eles devem evacuar a base até novembro do próximo ano.

A base aérea serve de plataforma de lançamento para vôos de vigilância sobre o Oceano Pacífico para localizar o tráfico de drogas transportadas pelo mar, e sobre a Colômbia para localizar vôos não-autorizados. De acordo com os números dos EUA, as missões resultaram na apreensão de cerca de 230 toneladas de cocaína em 2007.

Se os norte-americanos vão ficar ou partir "é uma questão política", disse o Lugar-tenente-coronel Robert Leonard, que recentemente completou uma visita como comandante do contingente estadunidense em Manta. "Eu não penso que isso está necessariamente ligado aos nossos sucessos ou ao impacto para os povos locais. É apenas uma questão política".

Mas oficiais equatorianos dizem que a base é pouco benéfica. Por um lado, o seu país é um jogador menor no mundo andino da produção de coca e de cocaína. E os vôos de vigilância dos EUA não fazem nada para ajudá-los a descobrir laboratórios de drogas escondidos sob vastas faixas de cobertura florestal.

"Este é um problema de soberania para nós", disse Larrea. "É como se nós tivéssemos uma base em Nova Iorque. Isto seria incompreensível para os norte-americanos".

O acordo original foi assinado pelo presidente Jamil Mahuad, pouco antes de protestos de rua e uma revolta militar tirarem-no do poder em 2000. Muitos equatorianos dizem que os termos do acordo favoreciam fortemente os norte-americanos. Os Estados Unidos, por exemplo, não pagam aluguel pela base.

O acordo foi negociado "em um momento de aflição" por um governo que precisava de um empréstimo do Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI), mas não o conseguiu, disse Adrián Bonilla, diretor da FLACSO [Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciências Sociais], um grupo de pensadores localizado em Quito, a capital equatoriana.

"O custo político de uma base estrangeira é muito alto. E a necessidade nacional é muito baixa", ele disse. "A cultura política do Equador é muito nacionalista. E ela está desconfiando dos Estados Unidos... É muito popular expulsar os gringos da base de Manta".

Oficiais dos EUA ainda não sabem para onde poderiam se mover depois de Manta. A Colômbia é freqüentemente mencionada. Em outros países vizinhos, como o Panamá, os oficiais rejeitaram publicamente qualquer possibilidade dos norte-americanos entrarem. A perda de Manta, de acordo com o porta-voz do Departamento de Estado, Sean McCormack, deixaria uma "séria lacuna" na luta dos EUA contra as drogas.

Entretanto, outros funcionários, como Leonard, dizem que os aviões dos EUA poderiam operar de uma base existente na ilha caribenha de Curaçao por enquanto, e cobrir o mesmo território.

"O sucesso será um pouco menor. Mas eu ainda penso que nós teremos a cobertura lá", disse Leonard. "Não é como se fosse desaparecer".

Na Bolívia, a decisão feita pela federação dos cultivadores de coca - ainda liderada pelo presidente Morales - de parar de trabalhar com a USAID na região de Chapare [província da Bolívia localizada no norte do departamento de Cochabamba, que tem como capital a cidade de Sacaba. Recentemente tornou-se um esconderijo para o cultivo ilegal da planta de coca], foi também motivada por um crescente desejo de auto-determinação. Esta parte da Bolívia é o lar do slogan "Vida longa à coca, morte aos ianques". Moradores expressam frustrações muito antigas com os esforços dos EUA de erradicar o cultivo ou de persuadir os cultivadores a plantar alternativas freqüentemente inviáveis.

"A famosa noz de macadamia? O cardamomo? Estes foram projetos muito caros que resultaram no quê? Em nada", disse Felipe Cáceres, vice-ministro da defesa social da Bolívia e antigo cultivador de coca.

O contingente da USAID, de cerca de 100 empregados e contratantes, os quais Cáceres descreveu como "todos direitistas", deixaram Chapare. Morales acusou a USAID de criar grupos de oposição para fomentar protestos contra ele, acusações que os oficiais dos EUA negaram.

Cáceres disse no último mês que o governo boliviano planeja "nacionalizar" a guerra contra as drogas na Bolívia através do controle do próprio país de como o dinheiro dado como auxílio é gasto. Enquanto Cáceres elogiou a cooperação entre o seu governo e o DEA, ele ridicularizou os projetos da USAID como um desperdício de gastos que freqüentemente vêm com pesadas condições.

De acordo com a Rede de Informação Andina, um grupo de pesquisa localizado na Bolívia, entre 1998 e 2003, os cultivadores bolivianos poderiam receber da USAID financiamento para ajudar a plantar outros cultivos apenas se eles eliminassem toda a produção de coca. Outras regras, tais como o pré-requisito de que as comunidades participantes tenham que declarar-se "zonas livres de terroristas", simplesmente irritaram as pessoas, disse Kathryn Ledebur, diretora da Rede de Informação Andina.

"Erradique toda a sua coca e então você cultiva uma laranjeira que dará frutos em oito anos, mas você não tem nada para comer neste meio-tempo? Uma má idéia", disse ela. "Sobre expulsar a USAID, eu não acho que seja um sentimento anti-americano generalizado, mas, particularmente, uma rejeição de maus programas".

Outro fator citado pelos oficiais bolivianos é o de que a União Européia e a Venezuela entraram como principais fontes de financiamento do desenvolvimento da Bolívia, sem muitas limitações. A UE destinou cerca de 350 milhões de dólares para a Bolívia para o período de 2007 até 2013. "Muito mais importantes e alinhadas com as autoridades bolivianas, as atividades não foram feitas tendo como pré-condição a erradicação da coca", afirma um trabalho da UE de estratégia para a Bolívia do final do ano passado.

Neste meio-tempo, a ajuda dos EUA para a luta contra as drogas na Bolívia foi caindo gradualmente, disse Cáceres. De mais de 100 milhões de dólares por ano durante os anos 1990 para 26 milhões de dólares este ano. Este governo tem feito o melhor trabalho de luta contra as drogas, diz ele, "mas a cada ano nós estamos conseguindo menos".

Para os agentes anti-narcóticos dos EUA, a iminente perda da base no Equador e a parada dos projetos da USAID no Chapare não anunciam um desastre, mas sugerem uma falta de comprometimento com a interrupção do tráfico de cocaína.

"Eu creio que seja um atraso aos interesses do povo norte-americano e do povo do Equador e da Bolívia", afirma John P. Walters, o chefe da política sobre as drogas da Casa Branca. "Mas, novamente, nós respeitamos a autoridade soberana da liderança destes países, e nós tentaremos fazer a parceria funcionar o melhor que pudermos".

Joshua Partlow*

Acesse o texto original clicando aqui.

*O Correspondente Juan Forero contribuiu para esta reportagem.

Sobreviviente de la masacre de la Calendaria, y espectador, a los seis años, del deguello de su madre,  Sandro es la típica historia del desamparo, de la humillación y de la desesperación social brasilera, que no tiene alternativa, mas que partir para la violencia para hacerse visible socialmente.

Foco de estudios sobre la violencia y tesis de sociología, la historia de Sandro después de ocho años, va a competir por el Oscar.

Implementé tres post con los mejores videos del filme , ya que de la vida real se mesacla con la ficción, la ficción con el documentario, y la vida real pasa con las politicas públicas a ser aplicadas, hoy, en nuestras sociedad.

Sitio Oficial del filme

Sinopsis . 

 Cronica periodistica de Luana Espeschit : www.ezine.jor.br

Introducción del filme: (english translate)

Os acusados escondiam a maior parte da droga em dois baús de madeira fechados sob palafitas. O caso está registrado no 1º Distrito Policial de Santos, para onde os acusados foram encaminhados e autuados em flagrante.

Un filme que cuenta una historia común de la ciudad de São Paulo.Recientemente estrenado,y con la actriz principa Sandra Coverloni:l ganadora da la Palma de oro en Cannes. Soy fan de Daniela Thomas, no me pierdo los trabajos escenográficos de ella. Y Waltinho... bué.. es obligatorio asistir las bellas peliculas que hace.

São Paulo. 19 milhões de habitantes. 200 quilômetros diários de engarrafamento. 300 mil motoboys. No coração de uma das maiores metrópoles do mundo, quatro irmãos tentam reinventar suas vidas. Reginaldo, o mais novo, procura obstinadamente seu pai, que nunca conheceu. Dario, prestes a completar 18 anos, sonha com uma carreira como jogador de futebol profissional. Dinho, frentista em um posto de gasolina, busca na religião o refúgio para um passado obscuro. Dênis, o irmão mais velho, já é pai de um filho e ganha a vida como motoboy. No centro desta família está Cleusa, 42 anos, grávida do quinto filho. Ela trabalha duro como empregada doméstica enquanto luta para manter os filhos na linha. Para sobreviver à brutalidade de uma cidade onde as oportunidades se afunilam, eles só podem contar um com o outro.

De acordo com o delegado-chefe da Polícia Federal em Londrina, Evaristo Kuceki, a explosão ocorreu provavelmente em razão das alterações feitas no cilindro para que os pacotes de maconha fossem acondicionados dentro. Com a explosão, o cilindro foi arremessado de encontro a outro carro que estava parado no posto e, depois, atingiu um muro. “Se ele (Freitas) estivesse dentro do carro teria morrido”, disse Kuceki. O motorista tentou fugir, mas foi preso por policiais militares, que o encontraram escondido perto de um chiqueiro de porcos.

Ele disse à polícia que tinha assumido a direção do carro em Iporã, no noroeste do Paraná, com a missão de entregá-lo em São Paulo. O delegado afirmou que Freitas já foi condenado a 13 anos de prisão por assalto à mão armada. O inquérito será remetido à Justiça Estadual, em razão de, a princípio, não haver indícios de tráfico internacional.AE

Graças a negociações com os colombianos, a ‘Ndrangheta prospera. Familiar e sangrenta, ela se infiltrou na Europa e não para de crescer.

A Cosa Nostra e sua prima longínqua, a ‘Ndrangheta, estão se preparando para agir. A Sicília e a Calábria, seus respectivos bastiões, serão brevemente ligadas por uma das maiores pontes suspensas do mundo. Uma imensa obra de arte que correrá por 3,3 km sobre o Estreito de Merssina. As duas máfias estão menos preocupadas com as proezas tecnológicas do que com a ponte de ouro que representa este investimento de 6 bilhões de Euros. Terceirizações, expropriações, desvios diversos e variados... Esta passarela jogada entre as duas famosas armadilhas de Caríbdis e Cila deveria permitir mensurar a potência de dois monstros da mitologia moderna. E, neste exercício, não é certo que seja a ‘Ndrangheta quem perca.

Nós a víamos como uma organização folclórica, selvagem e limitada a sua terra natal, especializada em seqüestros dignos de outra época. No dia 15 de agosto de 2007, ela ingressou no grupo dos grandes do crime organizado com um massacre em Duisburgo, na Alemanha. Seis mortes, todos jovens mafiosi emigrados na República Federal [Alemã] e abatidos a tiros de metralhadora em nome de uma faida, uma antiga vingança entre famílias calabresas. Neste dia, o mundo descobriu uma máfia ultramoderna, que havia investido em redes de pizzarias, que possuía um verdadeiro capital imobiliário, sobretudo nos países do Leste [Europeu], e lavava o dinheiro sujo em grande escala. Desde então, o chefe do principal clã familiar, Guiseppe Nirta, foi detido. Outras detenções seguiram: financeiros, armeiros... 52 prisões ao todo. Embora sangrada, a organização não foi decapitada. Longe disso.

A ‘Ndrangheta (do grego andraghatos: homem valoroso!) é um império que reivindica 7 mil afiliados. Como confirma o historiador Enzo Ciconte, ela "controla 80% do tráfico mundial de cocaína". Ela superou a Cosa Nostra junto aos traficantes colombianos. Seu faturamento foi avaliado em 44 bilhões de Euros em 2007, seja 3,5% do PIB italiano, segundo o instituto Eurispes. Mais que qualquer outra organização, ela tem capacidade de realizar, hoje, todo o tipo de transação internacional, lavar o dinheiro da droga, coletar um "imposto", o pizzo, e oferecer oportunidades inesperadas de lucro e prosperidade social em um contexto onde o desemprego alcança 30% dos jovens. Uma influência adquirida lentamente, na sombra, no silêncio e no medo.

A administração Bush incluiu no início de junho a ‘Ndrangheta em sua lista das organizações criminosas mais perigosas. "A Europa e o mundo estão lotados de ‘ndranghetistas", confirma Ciconte. "Na Alemanha, na Holanda, na Espanha e mesmo na França (Juan-les-Pins, Nice, Saint-Etienne), sem esquecer o Canadá, a América Latina e a Austrália". Como explicar esse formidável sucesso? Primeiro, o declínio da Cosa Nostra sobre o mercado do crime. A velha máfia siciliana perdeu sua credibilidade após a prisão de diversos de seus integrantes, o que decapitou a organização (seus principais chefes estão presos, de Toto Riina a Bernardo Provenzano, passando pelo herdeiro designado, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, preso ano passado em Palermo). Um pizzino (bilhete) assinado por Mateo Messina Denaro, um dos raros chefes a ter escapado à prisão, resume a situação em 2006: "Logo, não haverá mais ninguém... vão prender até mesmo as cadeiras...". Mas, em razão de sua estrutura piramidal, quando um capomandamento - um chefe da Cosa Nostra - é detido, uma seção inteira da organização desmorona. Pior: o mafioso confessa tudo e se torna um arrependido, colaborando com o Estado.

Este é um risco que não assume a ‘Ndrangheta. Sua estrutura a base de locali territoriais, sem ligação ente si, dissuade os desejos de deserção. "Não há arrependido na máfia calabresa, com exceção de dois colaboradores de pequena importância", lembra Nicolas Grattieri, o magistrado encarregado das investigações sobre Duisburgo. Mas além da compartimentação rígida, é a consangüinidade que salva a unidade da ‘Ndrangheta. Pode-se contar quatro gerações de casamentos cruzados desde 1900, o que reduz o risco de colaboração com a Justiça: não podemos entregar nossa própria família! Tudo isso contribui para forjar um organismo criminal tão sólido quando o granito. Um interlocutor sério e eficaz para os cartéis colombianos, que paga à vista os carregamentos de cocaína. As ligações se multiplicam por toda parte. "Eu contei 24 hostéis-restaurante da ‘Ndrangheta na ‘zona vermelha' de Bogotá", confia o magistrado Grattieri. Estes calabreses imigrantes vivem como agentes convenientes, adianta. Eles têm contatos permanentes com as FARC [Forças armadas Revolucionárias Colombianas] e compram a "coca" no Cartel de Cali a 1.200 Euros por quilo, quando a matéria tem 98% de pureza. Mas, no mercado europeu, um grama de cocaína misturada custa 70 Euros. Podemos imaginar os lucros. Mas como lavar este dinheiro?

Aí, é preciso distinguir entre a reciclagem local e internacional. O primeiro caso é ilustrado de maneira exemplar pela cidade de Reggio, na Calábria, 190 mil habitantes na ponta da "bota". Corso Garibaldi: 2 Km de butiques ultra-chiques ao longo de uma via reservada aos pedestres. Pode-se adquirir o que há de melhor em matéria de moda e design: roupas assinadas por Valentino ou Calvin Klein, bolsas Vuitton ou móveis Armani. Mas estas butiques estão vazias. Ninguém compra nada. Um mistério logo explicado por Vicenzo Macri, magistrado: "Estas lojas não são mais que vitrines. Pouco importa que não vendam nada. O proprietário emite a cada noite tíquetes de caixa como se houvesse vendas. E assim é lavado o dinheiro sujo da droga...".

Ao nível internacional, os mafiosi calabreses se apresentam como perfeitos homens de negócios. "Consegui capturar seis que faziam tráfico de drogas entre a Bélgica, a Holanda e a França, movendo somas importantes de capitais. Eles falavam quatro línguas. E estavam irreconhecíveis para um calabrês como eu", conta Grattieri. "A Europa está cheia de ‘ndranghetistas", confirma Salvatore Boemi, procurador adjunto de Reggio. Eles se apóiam sobre os locali, de aproximadamente 50 pessoas cada um, instalados de maneira fixa sobre o território. "Nós sabemos que há um locali em Nice, por exemplo", segue Boemi.

Mas segundo ele, é nos países do Leste que a ‘Ndrangheta se desenvolve mais rapidamente. Uma escuta telefônica já considerada velha, pois data de 1989, é explícita sobre esse assunto: "Compre tudo!", diz um ‘ndranghetista a seu interlocutor. "Tudo o que?", responde. "Tudo: imóveis, cafés, restaurantes, hotéis. O Muro [de Berlim] caiu".

A ‘Ndrangheta sabe explorar as carências da legislação internacional e a má cooperação entre os serviços de policiamento. Com sua fabulosa mescla de arcaísmo (para os valores) e modernidade (para os métodos), ela se tornou a organização criminosa de ponta no Ocidente. "Espera-se que os governos europeus de dêem conta", dizem em coro os magistrados Boemi, Grattieri e Macri. Estes não são mais que combatentes solitários às máfias.

 Marcelle Padovani

Acesse o texto original clicando aqui.

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Junte os pontinhos e veja o país da "transpolítica"

”...Pensadores pós-modernistas franceses inventaram o termo "transpolítica" para se referir ao ultrapasse da política tradicional por formas novas de esvaziamento da democracia representativa. A "parapolítica" é outra coisa: não um termo reflexivo, mas a realidade da transformação de ações marginais ou ilegalistas em poder político...”

(Muniz Sodré)
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Vocês podem dizer que não estão nem aí ou que não é com vocês, mas, as notícias mais eletrizantes da região onde moro são as seguintes:

Notícia Um (locutor mascarado de touca ninja):

- O mais cotado candidato a vereador, com chances de ser um dos mais votados do Rio é, todo mundo sabe, o chefe-gerente da milícia local (preposto de alguém que nenhum de nós conhece, um grande capo, pior que os do cinema, com certeza).

Notícia Dois:

- O mais cotado candidato a ser eleito como prefeito da cidade é um senador, suposto bispo de uma milionária seita evangélica inventada ontem mesmo. A ideologia desta seita é meramente pecuniária, baseada que é na máxima do ‘é dando (dinheiro) que se recebe (dinheiro)”. Esta ideologia espertalhona paira hegemônica sobre os corações e mentes da miserável população carioca, como uma praga pior do que as saúvas citadas pelo Mário de Andrade.

Notícia Dois e meio:

- Este poderoso senador apóia, entusiasticamente, o tal vereador miliciano, chegando até mesmo a defendê-lo chamando-o de ‘jovem honesto, esforçado e trabalhador’. Supõe-se, por óbvia dedução, que toda a máquina coercitiva das milícias, que domina já, a base de chacinas quase diárias, praticamente, toda a cidade ‘maravilhosa’, tenha o Senador como seu candidato preferido, amigo ‘do peito’.

Notícia Três (esta, apesar de velha, revista agora mesmo na TV, no programa eleitoral gratuito:

_ Este candidato a prefeito– e, por extensão, toda a sua eventual futura entourage de vereadores milicianos - é, segundo o reiterado depoimento do próprio vice-presidente da república, “o candidato preferido e do coração do presidente Lula”.

(Corte rápido. Pela minha assustada e conturbada mente passa, de relance, a imagem embaçada e trêmula de uma enorme fila de eleitores vestindo toucas ninjas)

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Que os sensatos e comedidos insistam sempre, pacientemente, que é muito mais recomendável (faz bem à saúde) focar com melhores olhos os pixels azulados e edificantes da rede, do que ficar remoendo os tons marrons da malha suja, onde estão entranhadas as chagas mais comezinhas do dia à dia torpe deste nosso país.

Eu sei. Eu sei. Eu sei.

É exatamente por saber de tudo isto que entabulei esta conversa para lhes falar, assim, no sapatinho, acerca da impressão que se tem de que o Brasil está gestando em si mesmo, um certo tipo de sociedade mucho loca, com sintomas daquelas carcomidas por interesses bandidos de todo tipo, divididas em guerras entre grupos políticos mafiosos, que confundem o trato da causa pública com seus mais inconfessáveis interesses, com o beneplácito, no início pragmático e, logo depois, acovardado dos cidadãos ‘de bem’.

Sabem a Itália siciliana? Sabem a Colômbia de Medellín?

Pois é. A realidade brasileira às vezes, é mesmo complexa demais, difícil de decifrar, não é mesmo? Se avexe não. Sabe aqueles joguinhos de ‘junte os pontos’, nos quais, depois de todos os pontinhos juntados aparece uma figurinha graciosa qualquer, um coelhinho, um gatinho? Faça como eu: Relaxe jogando um desses joguinhos?

Não se garante ao final graciosidade alguma às figurinhas, mas que é diversão garantida, lá isto é. Tiro mais que certeiro no stress.

Juntemos os pontinhos pois:

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Pontinho 01
A revolta dos mercenários
C’os diabos! O meu exército escafedeu-se!

Ano de 1822.

Nos momentos decisivos da chamada Guerra de independência do Brasil, a repatriação de oficiais e soldados do exército português derrotado, criou um problema para D.Pedro I: Como manter a integridade territorial, a segurança do Império recém criado após a dissolução do exército anterior?

Ainda no calor da luta, o governo se viu obrigado a improvisar a organização de uma força armada de transição, não só para eliminar de vez a resistência portuguesa, mas também para se incumbir das demais tarefas de manutenção da integridade do império.

Sem povo – pelo menos, confiável - para montar um exército nacional, a ‘brilhante’ solução encontrada foi a compra de armas e navios além da contratação de mercenários europeus criando em 18 de janeiro de 1822 o Corpo de Estrangeiros, instituído como uma divisão do exército, formada por mercenários alemães (arregimentados pelo major Georg Anton von Schäffer na Europa), além de imigrantes suíços recrutados na própria Corte.

A segurança da Corte ficou à cargo de gajos germânicos, que formavam o 27o Batalhão de Caçadores de Alemães, conhecidos como "Os diabos brancos", aquartelados na Praia Vermelha e dos outros gajos estrangeiros, suíços em sua maioria, que formavam o Batalhão de Granadeiros estrangeiros, cujo quartel era o atual (êpa!)...Palácio Duque de Caxias.

Não queriam, de jeito nenhum um exército composto de ‘diabos negros’ ‘prata da casa’ e aí... deu no que deu:

“...Em junho de 1828, no Rio de Janeiro, durante o governo de D. Pedro I, (a Revolta dos mercenários) constituiu-se numa sublevação de tropas militares compostas por mercenários alemães e irlandeses. Iniciada em 09 de junho, ela foi reprimida quatro dias depois por soldados brasileiros e populares, entre os quais se incluíam muitos escravos capoeiristas da cidade...”

Fernando K. Dannemann nos conta:

...” Revoltados (com atrasos dos soldos e com os castigos físicos a que eram submetidos)...dirigiram-se ao palácio imperial, no bairro de São Cristóvão, pretendendo apresentar queixa contra o oficial e pedir sua demissão imediata...A partir daí...os mercenários praticaram todo o tipo de desordem e confusão, culminando por invadir e tomar conta do ministério do exército, (Palácio Duque de Caxias)... Ali eles...apossaram-se das armas...e se entrincheiraram...o comandante das Armas ordenou que as forças legais investissem...contra os rebeldes, procedimento que contou com o apoio de marinheiros franceses e ingleses cujos navios se encontravam atracados no porto, de populares e escravos (leia-se capoeiristas) na emergência, ali compareceram armados... Ao final do confronto, 12 mercenários estavam mortos e 50 deles feridos...”

Êpa, êpa! Mas o palácio invadido não é o mesmo Palácio Duque de Caxias, recentemente, apedrejado pela população do Morro da Providência?

Êpa! E sacaram também aquela outra citação sobre escravos capoeiristas? Como assim?

Pois é isto mesmo: Um jogo de juntar os pontinhos. Já havia avisado a vocês lá em cima.

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Pontinho 02
As Milícias escravas
Uma ‘flor’ de gente

Carlos E. Líbano Soares falando:

“...O discurso contra a capoeira no século 19 se assemelha ao discurso contra o crime organizado, o tráfico de drogas. Um crime rendoso, com uma rede de proteção muito grande, com pessoas da alta sociedade envolvidas, protegendo e mantendo esses grupos e por isso garantindo a impunidade deles.

“...Cada freguesia do Rio tinha um grupo...Quando outro invadia seu espaço, era a senha para o confronto. Havia um controle informal, uma geografia inquieta semelhante à atual guerra das drogas. Assim como hoje há, no Rio, o Comando Vermelho e o Terceiro Comando, havia na época nagoas e guaiamus. Os nagoas dominavam a periferia, são grupos de origem africana, e os guaiamus dominavam o centro da cidade...”

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Ali por volta de 1870 o problema da violência urbana e do caos político-social protagonizado pelas maltas de capoeiras, compostas, em sua maioria, por adolescentes (escravos fugidos e negros de ganho desocupados), ficou tão agudo que a solução foi desmobilizar, violentamente os bandos, enviando os capoeiras, em massa, para a guerra do Paraguai. Com o regresso destes ‘involuntários da pátria’, livres da escravidão por direito, fardados, mas, ainda revoltados, o problema da violência urbana voltou, mais intenso ainda.

“...O Flor da Gente era um poderoso grupo de capoeira do Rio de Janeiro no século XIX. O grupo era tão poderoso que chegou a ser contratado por Duque Estrada Teixeira quando candidato ao governo da província do Rio de Janeiro. Para que Duque Estrada contratou o grupo de capoeira Flor da Gente? Na época, as eleições eram decididas no tapa mesmo e quem não votasse em Duque Estrada era ameaçado pelo grupo Flor da Gente...”

Na crônica da Revolta da Chibata (1910), junto com os degredados enviados pelo governo para serem escravizados - ou comidos pelos bichos - nos cafundós da selva amazônica, constavam dezenas, talvez centenas de capoeiristas.

Já conseguiram enxergar o esboço da figurinha que começa a aparecer no nosso jogo? Não? Pois siga em frente e junte mais pontinhos então.

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Pontinho 03
O Cimento Social

(Agora mesmo, em pleno século 21)

Uma tropa de militares, sob a alegação de que um Projeto federal denominado Cimento Social era ‘obra do Exército’, fazia policiamento ostensivo do Morro da Providência, exercendo, literalmente, a função de uma milícia privada, desalojando, sabe-se lá como sem um único tiro, os traficantes que mantinham o controle do local.

No incidente amplamente divulgado pela imprensa, esta milícia, estranhamente formada por soldados regulares, segundo afirmam seus integrantes diretamente envolvidos no incidente, aprisionaram e espancaram três jovens da comunidade por motivo fútil (teriam sido xingados) e os entregaram a misteriosos bandidos de uma favela próxima, pretensos rivais da comunidade a que os jovens pertenciam.

Foi daí que a milícia...digo, a patrulha do Exército se encontrou com outra milícia...ou melhor, um grupo de traficantes do Morro da Mineira e negociou a entrega dos jovens (segundo as famílias dos mortos, pela quantia de 60 mil reais). Não se sabe ainda por que misteriosas razões, os jovens foram torturados e chacinados pelos nunca identificados traficantes, sendo os seus corpos lançados numa caçamba de lixo da própria favela para aparecerem, dias depois, num lixão num município vizinho.

Revoltada a população (da qual fazem parte, inclusive, os operários da obra), impediu a continuação dos trabalhos e rejeitou os pedidos de desculpas das autoridades, cercando o Palácio Duque de Caxias, sede do Comando Militar do Leste, a quem a tropa estava subordinada.

(Êpa, êpa! Mas não é este o mesmo Palácio Duque de Caxias, no passado, invadido pelos mercenários gringos, os tais ‘Diabos Brancos’?)

O escândalo se agravou quando a imprensa divulgou a natureza estranha do convênio entre tão altas instancias do governo federal e um candidato a prefeito da cidade. O projeto do senador era, literalmente, uma ‘obra de fachada’, já que apenas as fachadas das casas-barracos, visíveis do centro da cidade, seriam reformadas e pintadas de verde.

Pressionado pelo escândalo, em solenidade no Rio de Janeiro, o presidente da República recebeu os familiares das vítimas que, surpreendentemente, se mantiveram na firme posição de não admitir desculpas nem a presença do Exército no Morro.

Nitidamente contrariado, o governo federal decidiu então, numa insidiosa represália talvez, abandonar o morro e as obras inacabadas, deixando a população ao Deus dará.

Vocês sabem quem era o candidato envolvido neste lamentável incidente, não sabem? Ele mesmo: o bispo-senador, preferido do coração do nosso presidente.

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Pontinho 04
Luta Democrática

A máfia nordestina e outras máfias

”...Tenório Cavalcanti foi um dos muitos migrantes que vieram do Nordeste para a Baixada. Lá, enriqueceu e tornou-se uma poderosa figura política, criando um sistema clientelista e apoiando-se na violência como estratégia de conquista e manutenção do poder tanto econômico quanto político. A sua volta, montou-se uma “densa rede de relações pessoais, de amizade, parentesco e patronagem, trançada pela reciprocidade, a dependência, a lealdade e a deferência, tendo no líder seu fio central”...