By LINDA STASI
Rating: 
October 31, 2007
Lucas was an authentic N.Y.C. character in an era that was so full of gangsters, madmen, pimps, pushers, prostitutes and disco divas, there were almost no regular people left to worship and abhor all of them.
But this is one guy who never wanted the attention or the adoration. He wanted the money and the power.
Tonight BET's shock-doc "American Gangster" profiles the criminal you probably never heard of before - the baddest of the black mobsters - who grew up the son of Southern sharecroppers and rose to become the biggest importer and dealer of heroin in the world.
How big? How's a million bucks a day for starters? How's the fact that the Mafia bought its dope wholesale from him?
Tonight, the real Frank Lucas steps into the spotlight to tell his story beginning at the beginning when, as a 6-year-old, his uncle was killed by the Klan for "reckless eyeballing" - i.e., looking at a white woman.
Lucas made his way to Harlem and eventually into the life and good times of notorious mobster Bumpy Johnson.
Although Lucas, now in his 70s, told Matt Lauer last weekend that he won't talk about murders (there is no statute of limitations for that crime), in this interview he does just that.
Granted, it's some vague character named Tango whose murder he describes: "I took a .45, aimed it at his chest, but hit him in the forehead. That was the beginning and the end of Tango!" You can't make up stuff like that.
Lucas never hit it "Donald Trump rich" (as he calls it) until the Vietnam War era. That's when he realized that the GIs were getting high every day on the good heroin of Southeast Asia. So he bought up poppy fields and started smuggling drugs back into the U.S. - on government planes.
The show features not just Lucas, but also the men who brought him down and the men who chronicled his fall - former narcotics prosecutors Sterling Johnson, former DEA agent Lou Rice and authors Nick Pileggi and Ron Chepesniuk.
Oh yeah, and Denzel makes an appearance too.
He says: "Frank is very charming, very humble, and he'll have you working for him by the end of the day."
A great documentary about a very bad, if very intriguing guy.
AMERICAN GANGSTER
Tonight at 10 on BET
NO matter what Denzel Washington has accomplished with his reel-life role as 1970s mob-muscle-turned-drug-kingpin Frank Lucas, he can't be bigger than Lucas was in real life.
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