Infamous America - FRANK LUCAS Ep. 5 | “Mr. Untouchable”

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

 In 1975, the law finally takes down Frank Lucas. Frank faces decades in prison, and he makes a decision to work with New Jersey prosecutor Richie Roberts to reduce his sentence. When Frank returns to Harlem, his empire is in ruins, his family is scattered, and his prospects for the future are bleak. The early 1980s are a pale reflection of Frank’s heyday in the early 1970s. Check out these great books about Frank Lucas, Bumpy Johnson, and Harlem crime: “Harlem Godfather” by Mayme Johnson and Karen E. Quinones Miller “Original Gangster” by Frank Lucas and Aliya S. King Go to Surfshark.com/infamous or use code INFAMOUS at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Mood! For 20% off of your first order, use the promo code INFAMOUS at Mood.com Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans?

Spotify Advertising. You're among fans. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. January 28th, 1975 was a cold winter evening in Teaneck, New Jersey. At the home of Frank Lucas, Frank and his family were going about their evening with no immediate concerns. Frank must have been concerned in general because any drug trafficker in New York at that time had to have been concerned. The DEA and the NYPD had been on a role for the past three years. They had arrested many of the top dealers or caused them to flee and exile. Four months earlier, the agencies started going after Frank's operation.

The DEA arrested one of Frank's heroin suppliers from Thailand in September 1974. They arrested the other on January 19, 1975, 10 days before they surrounded Frank's house. Frank must have known his time was coming. He just didn't know when. The when was January 28th. Twenty officers from a joint DEA NYPD task force descended on Frank's house in Teaneck. They pounded on the door and demanded entry. Inside, they found Frank's son and daughter and quickly led them out of the house. Agents swarmed the house and confronted Frank and his wife Julie. In a rage, Julie started throwing bags of money out of one of the windows. The agents arrested her for obstruction of justice. They arrested Frank for conspiracy to distribute heroin. When Frank and Julie were booked, the real

search began. The house was modest on the outside, but Frank had spent a lot of money on upgrades. He added several extensions, a pool table, and a bar. The interior matched the gaudy persona that Frank liked to show on the streets. In Frank's bedroom, one of the agents found a closet that was full of at least 200 custom-made pairs of shoes and tailored suits of every color. Also stashed in there, and in almost every other room, were bags of cash in small amounts, a few tens and twenties, maybe the occasional hundred. According to Frank, he never kept large amounts of money in the house for longer than a night.

And that night, he had just brought back $8 million that he was going to pass off to his associates the following day. When the task force held its press conference after the raid, agents announced they had seized half a million dollars in cash. According to Frank and his lawyer, the rest, $7.5 million must have been stolen by the task force. Was there really $8 million in the house? Who knows? Was it possible that the NYPD officers, at the very least, took some of the money that night? Sure. The 1970s was a time of headline-grabbing corruption and scandal in the New York Police Department. Did they take money that night? Again, who knows? For Frank, it didn't really matter if the money went into an evidence locker or into the pockets of the officers.

It was gone. The reckoning had arrived. and Frank and his crew were going to face a hell of a storm. And incidentally, that storm would also engulf the NYPD. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of Frank Lucas, one of the godfathers of crime in Harlem, New York,

the man whose life was the inspiration for the film, American Gangster. This is episode 5, Mr. Untouchable. Frank Lucas was one of 19 defendants who were charged with conspiracy to transnational, transport millions of dollars worth of narcotics into New York. Initially, Frank's operation was able to continue without him, and he was fairly confident in his case. Many of the 19 defendants were mafia guys whom Frank claimed he'd never met. The prosecutors were going to have to work extra hard if they were going to prove that Frank

was tied directly to that conspiracy because Frank had worked hard to keep the mafia out of his heroin business. But five months later, Frank's operation took a number of other direct hit. At midnight on May 23rd, 1975, Frank's younger brother Vernon Lee Lucas, nicknamed Shorty, entered a building in New Jersey to buy and cut a kilo of heroin with a handful of associates. The police were watching the building. Four hours later, when Shorty and the others left, the cops tailed one of the associates a guy named Eddie James to his apartment. The cops reportedly caught Eddie James with millions of dollars worth of heroin.

Detectives turned Eddie into an informant and used his information to raid Shorty's house. Officers rounded up 47 people, including Shorty and his wife. That was a solid win, but Essex County, New Jersey prosecutor Richie Roberts wanted more. He wanted to tie Frank Lucas and his brothers and the entire network together into one big conspiracy case. As yet, neither Roberts nor the investigators had any physical evidence that connected Frank to the actions of his brothers. While Roberts worked to build the New Jersey case against Shorty, Frank Lucas went to trial in New York.

His earlier confidence was misplaced. In January of 1976, he was found guilty of heroin distribution and sentenced to 40 years in prison. It didn't matter that Frank claimed he never worked with the mafia. The DEA had been investigating the Gambino crime family for three months prior to Frank's arrest. Members of the Gambino family said they worked with Frank, and their statements outweighed Frank's claims. Frank went to prison, where he said he maintained a lifestyle similar to that of Lucky Luciano and Bumpy Johnson when they were in prison together in upstate New York in the 1940s. Frank described money pouring into the place, bribing guards, wardens, and cooks.

He said he had stakes shipped in by his contacts on the outside, and his meals served directly in his room. He said he continued to run his businesses unimpeded. He used coded words and phrases to talk about heroin and deals that were in the works. And at that point, it's a bit of a mystery as to how Frank was sourcing his heroin. His contacts in Thailand had been arrested, and if he really had been working with the Gambino family after his Thailand pipeline fell apart, many of those guys had been arrested too. But ultimately, that didn't mean much. As long as there was an appetite for the drug,

there would always be drug smugglers. With the right connections, they weren't hard to find. So, Frank's gang, the country boys, was still active, which meant the task force kept working. On April 3, 1976, Frank's brother, Larry Lucas, who ran his heroin operation in the Bronx, was out for a drive. Suddenly, police sirens blared around him and several squad cars swerved in front of his car at an intersection. Officers arrested him, searched the car, and found $3,500 in cash.

Around the same time, police struck one of the places where he processed heroin. They seized four loaded revolvers and around $10,000 worth of drugs. Larry Lucas's case was a New York case, but it was still ammunition for the wider investigation of Richie Roberts in New Jersey. It didn't take a genius to understand that Frank Lucas was the kingpin, and his brothers were working for the operation that he built. The key was proving it. To that end, Richie Roberts decided he needed to see the king.

We do mass amounts of online research for our podcasts, and often that leads us to some pretty shady corners of the internet. That experience can be maddening, but that's why I use Surf Shark VPN. A VPN like Surf Shark creates a VPN. secure encrypted tunnel for your internet traffic, so random companies, trackers, and third parties can't see what you're doing or where you're browsing from. But for me, the game changer was the clean web feature. It blocked every single pop-up ad on those search sites instantly. The distractions were just gone. I also use it to unlock entertainment. You can virtually change

your location to access documentaries and shows that are usually geo-blocked in your region. It effectively unlocks a global library of entertainment right from your living room. And the best part, one subscription covers unlimited devices. That means my laptop, phone, and tablet are all secured on a single account. Secure your privacy with Surfshark. It's completely risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee. Right now, go to surfshark.com slash infamous or use the code infamous to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. Surfshark.com slash infamous.

The link and code are in the show notes of this episode. In late 1976, Essex County prosecutor Richie Roberts met Frank Lucas for the first time. Roberts was prosecuting Frank's brother Shorty and trying to build a larger conspiracy case against the entire Lucas family. But Lucas family members

were not the only ones caught in the dragnet. It was a long shot, but Roberts tried to get Frank to testify against some of the other defendants. Not surprisingly, Frank refused. At the time, Roberts' case was fairly thin. He only had the testimony of Eddie James, the associate of Shorty Lucas.

He was pretty sure that Frank was supplying his brother Shorty with heroin and that all of the brothers worked for Frank, but there was very little hard evidence to prove that the men were connected in that way. Roberts took his chances and went to trial. There were 34 defendants, in the conspiracy case, nine of whom were members of the Lucas family, including Frank as the ringleader. Roberts was told over and over again that taking the case to trial was a risk,

since they only had James to testify from the inside of the conspiracy. But then Frank gave the prosecutors an unexpected gift in the days leading up to the trial. Frank's lawyer, Larry Dublin, reached out to every potential witness, including Eddie James. Richie Roberts suspected that Frank pushed his lawyer to try to intimidate everyone out of testifying, which made Frank look like the influential kingpin that he was. By the time they reached the courtroom, there was no shortage of people who came forward to testify against Frank's crew and to put them out of business for good. Eddie James testified about the inner workings of the organization, but the star witness for the prosecution turned out to be a woman who had lost her daughter to heroin abuse. The mother described

finding her daughter with a needle in her arm and a packet of blue magic heroin lying nearby. Everyone was moved by the woman's testimony, including Frank. At that moment, he knew his crew was going down. When the judge asked the defense team if they had any questions for the woman, they said no. They just wanted her off the stand as fast as possible. When the proceedings finished in late November 1976, they resulted in a mixed bag. Of the 34 defendants, Two had their charges dropped. 23 ended up pleading guilty. Four were acquitted by the jury, and five were found guilty.

The two big names among the guilty were Frank and Shorty Lucas. Shorty received a prison sentence of 30 to 37 years, plus a fine of $85,000. Frank received a prison sentence of 25 to 30 years plus a fine of $25,000. Frank's new sentence would be served after his 40-year sentence from the New York trial. Frank Lucas was 46 years old, and he was facing up to 70 years in prison. Since he was unlikely to live to 115 years old, he was understandably worried that he would spend the rest of his life in a cell and die in prison.

Maybe Frank could win an appeal at some point. Maybe he could earn parole after who knew how many years. But maybe not. Maybe decades would pass, and he would grow old and infirmed in a New York or New Jersey prison. With the weight of those thoughts on his mind, Frank started looking at Richie Roberts with fresh eyes. Maybe there was a deal to be done after all. Frank started asking around about the Essex County prosecutor and started thinking about the kind of deal that might work.

While he did, he received news that there might be fewer reasons to keep his mouth shut. He was thinking about talking in a much different way than the unexpected update he was about to receive. But it might be one more reason to do everything he could to get himself. out of prison. Sometime in the first half of 1977, after Frank Lucas had been in prison for about a year, he received a surprise visitor. It was Thelma, the wife of Nikki Barnes. Nicky Barnes was a fellow drug dealer from Harlem, and Frank and Nicky hated each other. Despite their animosity, Nikki had asked Frank to join forces with the other kingpins in the area to form a mafia-style group

that Nikki called the council. That had been three years ago, right before everything started to fall apart for Frank. For the past three years, Nikki had been running the council. Now, Thelma showed up out of nowhere to tell Frank that the New York Times had reached out to Nikki and wanted to do a story about him for their special Sunday section, The New York Times Magazine.

Frank urged Thelma to persuade her husband to say no. To be spotlighted by one of the biggest newspapers in the world was a profoundly stupid thing to do for a gangster. But Nikki did it anyway. On June 5, 1977, the Sunday edition of the New York Times included the New York Times Magazine's special publication. On the cover of the magazine was a photo of Nikki Barnes in a gray business suit and a red tie. The title was Mr. Untouchable. With the subtitle, this is Nikki Barnes.

The police say he may be Harlem's biggest drug dealer, but can they prove it? When Frank Lucas received the paper in his cell, he threw it up in the air in frustration. The article reportedly offended President Jimmy Carter so much that he ordered law enforcement to target Nikki Barnes specifically. While Nikki's world was about to fall apart like Frank's had over the past three years, Frank decided he was ready to try to change his situation. Frank started thinking about the NYPD cop, Robert Lucci, whom Frank had been paying to stay off his case. And Lucci wasn't alone, not by a long shot. In 1970, NYPD detective Frank Serpico had blown the lid off of years of corruption in the department. His story had been turned into a book and then a movie.

Six years after the scandal rocked the department, there was still plenty of corruption for Frank to talk about, starting with the NYPD cop Robert Lucci, who had been blackmailing Frank for $10,000 per month. Frank had asked around about Richie Roberts and learned that Roberts had a reputation as a straight arrow. going back to his days as a detective. Frank heard a story that Roberts once found a million dollars in cash during a drug bust. Instead of taking a cut, Roberts turned it in.

Frank found the story strangely endearing. He had been so aggravated by dirty cops over the years, which was wildly ironic, that he respected a man who had such a strong sense of integrity. The next time Richie Roberts visited Frank, Frank eagerly awaited a discussion. The first topic was instantly intriguing. Roberts said he knew all about NYPD officer Robert Lucci and the other cops. It turned out that Lucci was not just a bold and aggressive patrolman. He was a member of S IU, the Special Investigations Unit.

It was an open secret that the unit was rife with corrupt officers. Roberts wanted Frank to provide information about his dealings with Lucci and others. In return, Roberts might be able to get Frank's sent. reduced. Frank accepted the deal, and Roberts moved Frank to a safe house in Caldwell, New Jersey. Over the course of several weeks, Frank talked about lots of things, though as always, the nature of those things differed depending on who was asked. According to Frank, he only ratted out crooked cops, never dealers. In the words of Richie Roberts, Frank gave up, quote, every cop he ever smiled at. But dealers on the street said Frank ratted out everyone.

He said whatever he had to say to get himself out of prison. And while Frank seemed to be providing fascinating information, he was still a gangster, and he was going to have fun along the way. One day, Richie Roberts was in the neighborhood of the safe house, and he decided to swing by. Right away, he could tell something was up because there was no guard at the door. When he entered, he heard music coming from the second floor. He went upstairs and found Frank with a lobster dinner spread out before him, and a woman sitting across from him.

The woman was Billy Mays, the stepdaughter of baseball legend Willie Mays. Apparently she and Frank had an on-again, off-again relationship. The guard who was supposed to be at the door stood off to the side, as if nothing was wrong with the picture. Roberts exploded. He grabbed the lobster and threw it across the room. If anyone found out about the scene,

Frank's testimony would be worthless. Fortunately, Roberts discreetly removed, moved Billy Mays from the house, and no one learned of the escapade until years later. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.

Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature... Wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. In December of 1977, six months after the cover story in the New York Times magazine,

Nikki Barnes and many of his associates were arrested. Nikki received 20 years to life in prison. At the same time, another wave of NYPD officers was falling. Detective Robert Lucci said later that legendary detective Frank Serpico urged him to change his ways. As a corrupt cop, Lucci was in a good position to become an undercover informant against other corrupt cops.

Lucci never addressed the allegations made by Frank Lucas, but Lucci wore a wire for two years in order to gather evidence against mobsters and corrupt cops. In the fall of 1977, another widespread corruption scandal started hitting the NYPD. Of the 70 men in the Special Investigations Unit, 52 were under indictment or injunction. jail for drug-related corruption by the end of the year. Lucci was never charged because of his

instrumental role in exposing the corruption of his fellow officers. He moved on to become a police academy lecturer and later an author. Like Serpico, Lucci's story was written as a book and then adapted into a film. Both were titled Prince of the City, and the film was released in 1981. Coincidentally, the same man, legendary filmmaker Sidney Lomette, directed Serpico, and Prince of the City. The same year Prince of the City debuted in theaters, Frank Lucas' deal with Richie Roberts paid off. After Frank completed his testimony at the safe house,

he went back to prison and waited for Roberts to live up to his end of the deal. As the fallout over the police scandal became public, Frank's position looked good. At the same time, Frank's wife Julie, who was Puerto Rican, had moved to the island with their daughter, Francine, to get as far away from the dangers of New York as possible. And then, the wheels of justice started turning again for Frank Lucas. On June 4, 1981, a federal judge reduced Frank's New York sentence to time served. Shortly thereafter,

a judge did the same thing with Frank's New Jersey sentence. Frank served just six years of the combined 70 years that he could have spent in prison. One of the judges said, the cooperation of individuals such as Frank is vital to the government's effort to combat narcotics traffic. The judge claimed that Frank's cooperation led to the prosecution of 80 individuals are narcotics-related charges. Frank spent the rest of his life claiming that he only snitched on dirty cops, but the U.S. attorneys seemed to believe otherwise. And at the same time, Frank was being released, Nikki Barnes was using the same tactic to try to achieve the same result. Nikki was facing a minimum of 20 years, and maybe the rest of his life behind bars.

In 1981, after a couple years in prison, he started talking. He named all the other members of the council, as well as almost 50 others who were involved in heroin trafficking. According to some reports, he named more than 100 people in total. He admitted to ordering six murders while he was the head of the council. And Barnes went even further than Frank Lucas. He wore a wire in order to expose people who were still dealing drugs behind bars. His cooperation spanned 15 months, and it allowed the feds to convict 50 gangsters of additional crimes.

But unlike Frank Lucas, Nikki Barnes didn't receive the benefit of his cooperation right away. He would spend a lot of years in prison before he was rewarded. For Frank, walking out of prison in 1981, he was at the biggest crossroads of his life. His heroin business was all but gone. A couple of his lieutenants were still in Harlem and willing to work with him, but his infrastructure and resources were crippled. His heroin connections in Thailand had been arrested. Virtually all of the high-level gangsters he had known in the 70s were dead or in prison.

Some of his family members were in prison, and the rest were scattered. His wife and daughter were in Puerto Rico, and his son was in Las Vegas. Frank Lucas Jr. had been living with famous boxer Joe, Lewis since Frank's arrest in 1975. Frank's first order of business was to try to reunite his family and then to restart his business. Frank's wife Julie wanted him to fully reform and leave the drug business in the past. She'd been telling him for years to get out of the drug business and focus on his legitimate businesses. It made sense, of course, especially in light of everything that had happened in the past six years. But it was easier said than done. Frank Lucas wasn't a real business

men, and he didn't really have any interest in being one. His legitimate businesses had collapsed, and even if they hadn't, there was simply no comparison to the money that could be made from heroin. The money was incomprehensible. Frank could make more money in a week than most businesses made in a year. It was incredibly difficult to walk away from that kind of cash, even with the risks involved. And add to it, the fact that crime was the only thing Frank knew how to do. It was the only thing he had ever done. He had grown up dirt poor in North Carolina, and his only source of income since he was a teenager had been crime. Now he was 51 years old. He had no marketable skills, and he had burned nearly all his bridges in order to get himself out of prison. So he went back

to dealing heroin as best he could with few resources. And he flew to Puerto Rico to try to get his family back together. Frank retrieved his wife Julie and his daughter, Francine from Puerto Rico and took them to Las Vegas to meet up with his son, though the trip was not entirely about a family reunion. Frank also wanted to secure more contacts for his new heroin operation. He had convinced some people to front him a little bit of product until he could get back on his feet, and he needed to find a way to turn that amount into a larger amount or use it to set up a pipeline or both. He didn't know how it was going to work. He was really winging it, but he was determined to make a triumphant return to Harlem as soon as possible.

He hardly had time to enjoy his family reunion when the DEA kicked down the door to his hotel room in Las Vegas. Like a replay of the raid on his house several years earlier, agents swarmed the room and shouted at Frank, Julie, and Francine to get on the floor. The family members complied, and the agents searched the room. Unlike the previous raid, there were no bags of money lying around. And Frank didn't have any heroin in the room, so he was clean from that standpoint.

But the agents did arrest him for parole violation, and they took him away from his wife and daughter and transported him to New York. Ultimately, the charges didn't stick, and Frank was released. But he still had the same problems, a scattered family and no business. The solution was just to be more careful. He was back on the street and dealing wherever he could. He kept his head down and made money and harbored no dreams of returning to the glory days of running an empire. Over the next couple of years, Frank could feel that he was no longer being watched by the authorities as closely as he had been previously. After all, there were always new criminals to chase, especially in New York.

In the 1980s, that meant the mafia. Mob guys had always been targets, and plenty of them had been arrested during Frank's heyday in the 1970s. But in the 80s, law enforcement agencies and state and federal prosecutors were going to try to roll up the heads of the five families into one gigantic criminal conspiracy case. So they paid less attention to old Harlem gangsters like Frank Lucas, or so Frank thought. He wasn't quite as sneaky or as smooth as he believed, and his freedom would not last very long. Next time on Infamous America, Frank Lucas crashes out of the drug game, serves more time. in prison and hits rock bottom. Then one of his brothers comes to his rescue with a legitimate business opportunity and Frank's life starts to turn up. And then the media comes calling with an

appetite for tales from the wild old days. And that leads to a book deal and a Hollywood movie. The final chapter of the Frank Lucas story is next week on Infamous America. To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts, or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Research for today's episode would not have been possible without The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson. Harlem Godfather by Mamie Johnson and Karen E. Quinonis Miller.

And Original Gangster, the Real Life Story of One of America's Most Notorious Drug Lords by Frank Lucas and Aaliyah S. King. This series was researched and written by Robert Teamstra. Additional writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.