Keepin’ it Gangster
American Gangster
9.5/10
by Adam Silkworth
In contemporary Hollywood, it seems there is only one actor to call upon when the script reads drugs, money, and women—Denzel Washington. His latest film, American Gangster, is based on a true story about the drug kingpin Frank Lucas. Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe join forces in this historical film for the ages about the Harlem drug trade of the 1970s. Ridley Scott teams up with Steve Zaillian to direct the stars in an epic journey through the drug-infested streets of New York City.
Frank Lucas grew up in the back woods of North Carolina and began his criminal career at a very young age. After watching his cousin get murdered by the Ku Klux Klan at age six, Lucas, the oldest of nine siblings, had to put food on the table. He mugged drunks outside of strip clubs, and by age 12 he was locked up with his ankles in chains in Knoxville, Tennessee. At 14, he lived with a lady bootlegger. After he knocked his boss out with a steel pipe in Wilson, North Carolina, his mother told him to run and keep running.
He made his way north until he arrived at 114th street in Harlem. Then, he knocked off a bar and a jewelry store. Everyone was after him. Lucky for Lucas, he met the most famous Harlem gangster of his time, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, while hustling at Lump’s pool room. Bumpy took him under his wing, and Frank Lucas became his right hand man. He was untouchable. Bumpy showed Lucas the ropes and if you wanted to do business in Harlem at the time, you paid Bumpy, or you died.
Frank Lucas (Washington) became the new face behind the drug trade in Harlem after his mentor, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, died in his arms. Lucas established his own source of heroin, cutting out the middle man and making his product cheaper and more profitable than ever. He dominated the drug game in New York, establishing more power than the mafia. On the other side of the game, an ambitious cop named Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) had been put in charge of a special unit designed to attack the illegal drug trade. The film parallels the two nemeses, rising up through their respective lines of work, until they finally meet face to face.
Following Bumpy’s death, Lucas came up with a bold new plan to smuggle heroin from Southeast Asia to Harlem. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the GIs in Vietnam being strung out on heroin. Lucas jumped on the next plane. Hooking up with his cousin’s husband, Leslie “Ike” Atkinson, he soon found his connection and purchased 132 kilos of heroin on the first trip. He shipped kilos of smack over in dead soldier’s coffins to a nearby army base and paid off the military for their efforts over the next four to five years.
American Gangster is an astounding achievement by director Ridley Scott. He does not over-dramatize the characters and really leaves the “Hollywood” out of the film. It’s a realistic portrayal of the high-end street life of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. There are a number of intense action scenes. The movie opens with Frank Lucas pouring gasoline on a guy and lighting him on fire before putting a few rounds in his head—intense.
Business became so good for Lucas that he brought his family in to help. He bought his poor mother an estate and married a beauty queen. Throughout the film he gained new enemies due to his success and ended up saving his wife from a drive-by shooting. He paid off dirty cops who wanted their cut—all except for Roberts, who seemed to be the only honorable officer at the time.
Lucas owned Harlem, bringing in a million dollars a day selling his “Blue Magic.” As the leader of the heroin ring called the Country Boys, Lucas was known for restricting his operations to blood relatives because they would never turn against him. Frank Lucas owned office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles and Miami, along with “Frank Lucas’s Paradise Valley,” a several-thousand acre spread in North Carolina—not to mention his string of gas stations and dry cleaning businesses throughout New York City.
The inevitable came on January 28, 1975 when his estate was raided by a DEA strike force. They seized an estimated 250 million dollars in money and assets. Lucas was sentenced to 70 years in prison, but later had that sentence reduced to 15 years and actually served less than nine. He helped put three-quarters of the NYPD drug enforcement agency behind bars for corruption.
American Gangster is truly about a real American gangster. It is not about the gun battles or the underlying drug trade as much as it is about the rise of a desperate man upwards on the socioeconomic ladder. It puts the emphasis on the class struggle and empowerment. Watch out for American Gangster at the Academy Awards.
