The law enforcement raid came on a crisp, cold
night in late January, 1975, without a high profile. No involved planning. No
SWAT team. No large show of force. No TV cameras. There was plenty of man power,
though: a task force consisting of 10 agents from Group 22 of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency and 10 New York Police Department detectives attached to the
Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB).
The task force felt confident that it would face little resistance and
certainly no bodyguards wanting to disrupt the raid and cause trouble. After
all, it was the personal residence of the drug dealer and his family lived with
him.
Group 22 had been investigating the Gambino crime family of East Harlem for
some time, and now the long hours and hard work were about to pay off. In 1975
the Gambino family was one of the five families that ruled the powerful Italian
American mob, La Cosa Nostra, and controlled organized crime in New York City
The Gambino godfather, the "Boss of all Bosses," was the 5'7" hawk nosed,
unassuming legendary mobster and close friend of popular crooner, Frank Sinatra,
named Carlos Gambino. Four years before, after Carlos's wife died of cancer,
Uncle Sam tried to deport him to Sicily in Italy, but the godfather's lawyers
convinced the court that their client had heart trouble and would not survive
the trip. The deportation was stopped, but the OCCB put Gambino under constant
surveillance, some would say harassment; they even parked a car round the clock
in front of his home.
Under Gambino's leadership, his family became involved in large scale drug
trafficking. The police, however, arrested two Gambino soldiers on drug
trafficking charges, and, facing the prospect of long prison sentences, they
began to sing like the proverbial canary. The soldiers revealed that one of
their biggest customers for heroin was a prominent and flamboyant black drug
dealer named Frank Lucas, who liked to call himself "Superfly."
The informants' information allowed the authorities to obtain a search
warrant, which authorized the raid that was about to begin on Lucas's house at
933 Sheffield Road in Teaneck, a small comfortable suburb in New Jersey. With a
population of about 42,500, Teaneck had the distinction of being the first town
in America where a white majority had voluntarily voted for the integration of
the community's schools. But tensions flared in Teaneck in the late 1960s, as
African-Americans moved into town, and whites began fleeing for parts Caucasian.
The racial tension did not bother Frank "Superfly" Lucas, who enjoyed the
quiet suburban life after long nights on the streets of Harlem peddling his
heroin. Business was booming and he had more money than he could spend and hide.
Moreover, he had beaten a big rap that could have sent him to prison well into
the next century.
On this January evening, however, Superfly's
world was about to be turned upside down. The strike task force knew that Lucas
had a gardener, but the lawn looked in bad shape. A silver Mercedes Benz and
baby blue Thunderbird were parked in front.
After descending on Lucas's house, several members of the 20-man strike force
fanned out and surrounded the house. It was normal police procedure. "We used to
say to each other when we went on a raid: "take your baseball glove with you,'"
Joe Sullivan, then a young DEA agent with three years' experience, recalled with
a laugh. "People inside the house would rush up to the attic and throw drugs,
handguns and money out the window, if they heard the agents at the door
announcing their authority. It was a common headache for us."
The strike task force banged on the front door. "This is the police! Open up!
We have a search warrant." The strike task force could hear panic and rapid
movement inside and then a female screeching: "Where's the money!" We got to get
rid of it." One of the people inside began bounding up the stairs. Outside the
house, strike task force members watched as bags were thrown out the window.
When the task force barged through the door, they saw a big black man dressed
in sweatpants and a sweatshirt shuffling cautiously towards them. The team
identified the man from a mug shot as Frank "Superfly" Lucas. He looked as if
his life had just flashed by him. "Let's see the warrants, officers," Lucas
drawled in a strong southern accent.
Joe Rollo, a NYPD supervisor, handed the warrant to Lucas. "We're going to
search your house," Rollo said. "We want everybody to go and wait in the dining
room."
Lucas, two kids and a woman, who looked like a nanny or housekeeper, obeyed
the order A few minutes later, they were joined by Julie, Lucas's petite,
28-year Puerto Rican wife, who had tried to sneak downstairs undetected. The
team allowed Julie to go to the kitchen to get some milk for the kids. One
officer followed her just to be sure she did not grab a gun. Julie turned around
and snapped: "Why the hell are you following me? Where the hell can I go?"
Lucas barked in a deep, booming voice: "Calm down, woman! You're making too
much noise." Julia was pretty, to be sure, sexy, in fact, and some of the task
force members watched as she returned in a huff to the living room with the
milk.
The house inside was larger than it appeared from the front. Lucas had built
some extensions, including a huge playroom with a pool table, a ping pong table
and a bar. In the master bedroom was a large closet containing shelves about 18
to 20 feet long. Joe Sullivan peaked inside the closet and was dazzled by a
rainbow of colors: at least 200 pairs of lilac, purple, lime green
shoes….alligator shoes, snake skin shoes, platform shoes…. "I had never seen
anything like that in my life," Sullivan recalled. "I was a poor kid from
Queen's (New York), who was lucky to wear one pair of shoes to school. Lucas had
more shoes than he needed in a lifetime. It really said something about the
guy."
Finding
evidence was surprisingly easy. There were no guns or dope, but scattered
throughout the house were bags of what Sullivan called "chump change," paper
bags stuffed with "street money" in mostly $1 to $20 bills, with the occasional
$100 thrown in.
Obviously, the money had not been counted, and the strike task force knew
that the evidence would strengthen the charge that the house's owner was
involved in a criminal conspiracy to sell drugs. "Lucas had no means of
employment and a jury would think: ‘What does this guy do?'" Sullivan explained.
"'He does not work, but he's got all this money in the house.'"
Counting the money made the raid seem as if it had lasted a lifetime. And it
did not help matters that agents who had surrounded the house brought in more of
the green stuff in the bags that Julie had tossed through the second floor
bathroom window.
Julie became agitated again when asked the obvious question: "I didn't throw
any god damn money out of the window," she insisted.
In looking for evidence, the strike task force divided into teams of three.
One member looked for drugs, money and guns. A second agent took notes when
evidence was found and recorded the seizure in a notebook. A third agent acted
as a witness. As the agents found money, they brought it into the center of the
living room. There, several task force members made a big circle around the
pile. Everybody was in plain view of all the others present, and they were able
to observe each other.
If an outside observer had encountered the scene, he might have thought that
the authorities did not trust its task force to do the honest thing. Actually,
the authorities were just protecting themselves against the potential charge off
corruption. In April 1970, New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay had formed the
five-member Knapp Commission to investigate corruption charges in the NYPD.
In the public hearings that began in October, 1971, the public heard shocking
testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Police Commission Howard R. Leary,
corrupt policemen, victims of police shakedowns and whistle blowers like Sgt.
David Durk and Frank Serpico, who later became famous as model for the character
in the 1973 movie, Serpico, starring Al Pacino in the lead role.
One of the Knapp Commission witnesses was Waverly Logan, a member of the
NYPD's Preventive Enforcement Patrol, an elite unit of 20 black and Puerto Rican
patrolmen with the specific assignment of reducing crime. Logan testified he
took $1,500 a month in bribes and that police officers in Harlem routinely paid
off informants with heroin in return for such stolen goods as cigarettes and
whiskey. The NYPD subsequently dismissed the former policeman for taking a $100
bribe.
On Nov. 19, 1971, New York City established the OCCB to centralize organized
crime enforcement. The objective: Combat potential corruption problems and unify
under the bureau all operations of enforcement prone to corruption, such as
vice, narcotics and organized crime. Still, law enforcement remained under
intense scrutiny. "The Knapp Commission hearings forced law enforcement in (New
York City) to be extra careful about how we investigated crime," Sullivan
recalled.
It took the strike task force several hours
to count the money in Lucas' house. Meanwhile, the streetwise gangster knew it
was best to stay quiet, and he looked on impassively. Julie fell silent,
resigned to the fact that the evening would not have a happy ending.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the strike task force told Lucas
the money they had counted totaled $584,683. The gangster nodded; he did not
appear to have a problem with the count. "We have enough evidence to arrest
you," Rollo told Lucas and then read him his Miranda rights. Julia was also
arrested for obstruction of justice. Throwing the money out of the window had
not been the brightest of moves.
With Lucas and Julie handcuffed and in tow,
the strike task force began streaming out of the house. To their surprise,
outside waiting for them were the number two and number three officials in the
DEA's New York office: Frank Monastero, the deputy director, and Jim Hunt, the
head of enforcement. It was not a high profile bust, so something important must
be up to get those two suits out of bed late at night
Both of them were no-nonsense type of guys. Reserved and always
impeccably dressed, Monastero had served as an Internal Revenue Service
inspector for several years before joining the DEA's predecessor, the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where he worked in Internal Affairs. The
burly Hunt was a World War II veteran who had survived German machine
gun nests on the beaches of Normandy in France. Jesuit educated, Hunt
was a good amateur boxer and a graduate of Fordham University. "I
remember Hunt as an intellectual tough guy," Sullivan recalled. "He
liked to mix expletives with choice six syllable words that you had to
look up in Webster's dictionary."
It was now biting cold outside, and the strike task force members
could see their breath. But the two DEA officials stopped them and gave
explicit orders. "I want you to line up and turn around and search the
man behind you," Monastero instructed. "I'll start by searching the
first man in line."
Some of the men laughed and thought their bosses were joking.
Sullivan, though, was not one of them. He felt insulted. Here the strike
task force had spent hours taking extraordinary precautions in
collecting and counting Lucas's dirty money and their bosses upstairs
still did not trust them. The pat down revealed nothing; no one had as
much as a nickel in his pockets. Yet, years later, Sullivan recognized
the procedure as the best move his bosses could have made. It provided
irrefutable proof that the raid was squeaky clean.
The next day, Lucas had a chance to talk to
his lawyer, and he began to change his tune. Now he said that the money count
was not right; in fact, a lot of the money was missing. The strike task force
had ripped him off, Superfly complained to the press. It had to be as much $10
million, he later told Mark Jacobson, the journalist who would make Lucas
Hollywood material and famous as the mythical embodiment of the black-American
gangster.
"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand. What's that?" Superfly
boasted. "Shit. In Las Vegas I lost 500 Gs in half an hour playing
baccarat with a green haired whore." Later, Superfly would tell a
television interviewer that the figure was actually $20 million. With
time, the story has kept getting longer like Pinocchio's nose.
Today, Joe Sullivan and other DEA agents who investigated Lucas say
anybody willing to look objectively at the details of the raid on
Lucas's New Jersey residence can see that nobody ripped off $10
million, let alone $20 million. Strict precautions were in place and
imagine trying to move and hide that huge amount of money.
Lucas has always been adamant that the strike task force stole his
money, so some DEA agents suggest a different explanation. Maybe someone
close to Superfly, who had access to his home, stole the money. It's an
explanation that Superfly, a gangster who has claimed to be the biggest,
smartest and baddest dope dealer in the history of the planet, would not
want to hear.
Our investigation into Lucas's legendary career follows. It reveals a lot of
things that Superfly, nearly a quarter of a century removed from the scene of
his crimes, does not want to hear, nor does he want the public to know, given
the Hollywood movie that will make him famous.
The Raid in Teaneck is the prologue from Ron
Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez's upcoming book, Superfly: The True Untold
Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster. (A major movie about Lucas
entitled American Gangster and starring Denzel Washington and Russell
Crowe will be in theaters beginning Nov. 2, 2007.) The book investigates
Lucas's life and criminal career and the claims to fame the movie makes
about him. This includes Lucas's relationship with legendary Harlem gangster
Bumpy Johnson, his connection to La Cosa Nostra, the money he made in the
drug trade and the development of the Asian drug pipeline. Lucas's life as a
government informant is also examined. Beginning Oct. 25, 2007, Superfly
can be purchased from the web site
franklucasamericangangster.com. A documentary is also available.
Ron Chepesiuk is the co-founder of
Street Certified
Entertainment, a media company
specializing in true crime and gangster books and documentaries and new
media products. He is also a Fulbright Scholar and investigative
journalist specializing in true and organized crime, who has authored 23
books and more than 3,500 articles. His true and organized crime books
include Drug Lords: the
Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel,
Gangsters of Harlem: The
Gritty Underworld of New York's Most Famous Neighborhood,
and Black Gangsters of Chicago.
He is currently serving an expert consultant to the History Channel's
"Gangland" documentary series.
Anthony Gonzalez is the co-founder of Street Certified
Entertainment. He has also directed numerous, music videos for rap
artists, produced and directed the documentary, "Hell Up in East
Harlem," and served as an assistant director for several documentaries,
including a best-selling one about Guy Fisher, a legendary organized
crime figure from Harlem, and "The Larry Davis Story," a HBO Urban World
film festival documentary winner.
