03x01 - Chasing the Dragon: How Sgt. Smack Hooked Up Harlem

[bunniefuu]

[siren blaring]

♪ ♪

DRUG CUTTER: I feel like they want the fentanyl.

They think it's a better high.

And it's crazy because people die in the garage,

people die in the backyard, people die in the car.

But they want it, it's calling them.

They looking for it.

You know what I mean? I'm gonna give them what they want.

♪ ♪

Basically, what I'm doing is just putting this cut on it

so we can get a little extra out of what this product is about.

♪ ♪

When that thing cut with fentanyl, the prices go up.

We stretching that thing.

So something that I might have made $, for,

I'm gonna make an extra eight, nine, possibly ten more bags off that thing.

We into six figures in a year.

This is easy. This is the dope game.

(blender whirring)

I'm not trying to k*ll nobody,

but I gotta keep my business going.

So I'm not gonna sit here and wait around.

You know?

TELEVISION ANNOUNCER: Shake this square world

and blast off for kicksville.

RICHARD NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

MAN : Heroin destroys everything.

Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.

[protestors changing]

MAN : Opium is cash.

It's like you're growing bills on the bush.

MAN : Crime and drug abuse go hand in hand.

It's like peanut butter and jelly.

KAMALA HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the w*r on drugs

was an abject failure.

MAN : You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?

♪ ♪

(helicopter whirring)

SOLDIER: Get 'em moving.

(indistinct) ...hurry up.

(expl*si*n)

(rapid g*nf*re)

♪ ♪

LEW RICE: My friends,

when they went to Vietnam, they were young men.

They may think they're adults, but they're babies.

RICE: You're going to a foreign country where you realize,

people are trying to k*ll you just because of who you are.

And when they came back from Vietnam,

they were different people and they came back to escape,

you know, the fears that they had, would use drugs

(indistinct chatter)

(tracks rumbling)

And in New York during that time,

all roads led to Harlem.

People went to Harlem to get heroin.

It was like The Night of the Living Dead.

And you'll see burned-out buildings.

You'll see somebody with their hands

two times the size of what they normally are.

Heroin destroys everything.

And it was just devastating for me to see that these were all young men,

but their lives were ruined forever.

It changed the course of my life.

I said, I can join DEA and my mission will be to go out

and get the guys that destroyed my friends.

It became personal to me to get the people at the top.

♪ ♪

FRANCINE LUCAS: What I know about my dad's upbringing

is that my grandmother and my grandfather,

they lived in the south, they were poor black people.

They picked cotton in the cotton fields

and my father had to do some of that and my uncles as well.

They were extremely poor.

When he was very young, he had a cousin

that recklessly eyeballed a white woman.

Recklessly eyeballing means looking at a white woman.

And as a consequence,

the KKK came to the house and m*rder*d his cousin.

And my father was age six.

If the world and the environment that you grow up in

is a cruel world,

then that can most definitely change the way

that you go about things in your life.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: Frank Lucas was my oldest brother.

His goal in life was to make money.

He definitely didn't want to live like he did in segregated North Carolina.

You what I'm saying?

Because we had no life in North Carolina.

Any means necessary, we're not gonna live like that.

(children playing)

♪ ♪

Wow.

Harlem was a very exciting place.

When Frank came to Harlem in the 's from North Carolina,

it was like moving out the ghetto into Buckingham Palace.

♪ ♪

Anything you wanted to do or get into, Harlem was the place to be,

especially the life of crime.

[laughs] You know what I'm saying?

Frank started with Bumpy Johnson.

Bumpy Johnson was controlling everything.

RICE: Frank went to Bumpy and said,

can you help me get started in the heroin business?

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: And that was his life pretty much,

heroin and gangsterism,

or whatever you want to call it.

RICE: Frank's was a typical street operation in Harlem.

He'd get a large amount of wholesale heroin,

then they cut the heroin for street distribution.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: We had ten cut houses,

we got to people in each cut house.

As fast as we could put it on the street, it's gone.

RICE: Lucas was a very smart guy, very cunning.

He saw there was a market to sell heroin

and capitalized on market conditions.

♪ ♪

(inaudible)

Frank was the guy that had several cars,

he had property throughout the United States.

So, he was amassing a strong income from selling narcotics.

INTERVIEWER: Who do you think's gonna win the fight?

-FRANK LUCAS: Ali. -INTERVIEWER: Why?

FRANK LUCAS: Because he appears to be the greatest, man.

INTERVIEWER: Right on.

FRANCINE LUCAS: My father was always well dressed

and I just think about all the poor chinchillas

that died to make that coat,

that's really what comes to mind.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: When it comes to a $, mink coat,

it's not a problem. I make $, in a half an hour.

Frank had a million-dollar drug empire.

He was absolutely the heroin kingpin.

No question about it.

RICE: Frank was getting his heroin from the Italian mafia.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: The mafia had a monopoly on drugs.

We did the business with them, but trusted them?

Hell no.

No.

The mafia would dilute the product until pretty much it was nothing,

then pass it off to the Blacks.

Frank always wanted a better deal because

he know what he'd been getting from the Italians

was straight garbage,

until Uncle Ike came along.

Uncle Ike coming along was a game changer.

♪ ♪

RON CHEPESIUK: Ike Atkinson was born

in in Goldsboro.

It's a small southern town in North Carolina, very rural.

It was segregated.

He made his mind up that he would leave Goldsboro

when the w*r broke out.

It was very difficult for a Black soldier to rise in rank,

but he managed to rise all the way to second lieutenant,

which was quite an amazing feat.

DAN BURCH: I was extremely proud of his military career.

He felt like the military was his family, friends.

CHEPESIUK: Ike made friends everywhere, you know?

He was such a likable person.

People gravitated to him and they became part of this circle.

In , Ike Atkinson left the military.

He was retired.

He could have done anything he wanted.

♪ ♪

BURCH: Ike and I both arrived in Bangkok in .

Bangkok had a lot going on,

but we were going specifically to gamble.

Ike and I bonded over gambling.

I tilted the odds in his favor.

Ike marked cars and he switched decks

and some people might call that cheating.

♪ ♪

There were thousands of Americans in Bangkok every week.

It was time off from Vietnam.

CHEPESIUK: Any black G.I., pretty well,

that served in Vietnam during that period ended up

in Jack's American Star Bar, which became famous.

CHARLES LUTZ: I was told that Jack's American Star Bar

had the best soul music, soul food and soul sisters,

Thai soul sisters of course, in Bangkok.

BURCH: Herman Jackson, AKA, Jack,

was a long-time friend of Ike Atkinson in the military.

CHEPESIUK: And every week

they'd have a big card game with big money.

BURCH: We made some thousands.

That was, you know, that was a lot of money.

CHEPESIUK: Ike could have spent

the rest of his life gambling and making a lot of money

and avoiding trouble with the law.

But he was a risk taker.

BURCH: Jack had been there and had

a Thai girlfriend

and that girlfriend knew this guy, Papa san.

Papa san had his contacts to get heroin.

LUTZ: Bangkok was the gateway

for heroin into the international markets.

The heroin was actually originating

in what's called the golden triangle

of Burma, Thailand, and Laos.

The golden triangle produced China White.

China White heroin was very pure.

Five thousand dollars a kilo,

that's what the going price was for heroin in Bangkok

and they would sell for a hundred thousand in the States.

CHEPESIUK: And Ike said, we can make a fortune on it.

(helicopter whirring)

It was ingenious.

It had never been tried before.

Ike would recruit soldiers out of the American Star Bar

that were going back to the US.

So, they would come in for a little bit of fun

and he would work them.

LUTZ: As I understand it, many of them had been cheated at card games,

got into debt to Atkinson, and Atkinson would tell them,

hey, I'll forgive your debt, just take this bag back for me.

They came up with this idea of the AWOL bag.

CHEPESIUK: Dan Burch built in a false bottom

for the placement of two kilos of heroin.

BURCH: If you open this up

and you look all in here, you don't see anything.

One hundred percent foolproof.

I love that false bottom.

LUTZ: As well as recruiting couriers

that were carrying heroin back for him,

they came up with another way

to be able to smuggle heroin back to the States.

They recruited, through these card games,

some people that worked at the Army postal office.

They would mail AWOL bags packed into boxed

to addresses of people who were totally unrelated.

Someone would go by the house and retrieve it from the person

who it had been addressed to.

Atkinson had access to military transportation,

to the Army post office system, to hundreds if not thousands

of G.I.'s that were moving back and forth to the States.

They subverted the US military facilities

and personnel for their own greed.

♪ ♪

BURCH: Goldsboro was Ike's hometown,

just a little, small, sleepy town.

You have Seymour Johnson out there, which is a big base.

But you wouldn't think that millions of dollars of drugs

were flowing through there.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: You can have all the drugs in the world.

Unless you got somebody to get rid of it, it ain't gonna do you no good.

You know what I'm saying?

Frank was a very high-rate drug kingpin,

drug lord, whatever you want to call him.

Frank is that way.

CHEPESIUK: Ike reached out to Lucas.

He saw a money-making opportunity

because Frank was a big dealer and Lucas had heard of Ike,

mainly because the heroin that Ike was selling

was better quality than what the Italian mafia was selling.

So, Ike, when he went to see him,

he thought he was gonna meet him in this big mansion and all that.

♪ ♪

And here he was holed up in a small apartment

somewhere in New York City.

He was hiding from the mafia.

He owed the mafia a lot of money.

But Ike, you know, he loved taking risks.

So, Ike said, why not? It could work.

So, from that meeting, a relationship developed.

♪ ♪

LUTZ: Atkinson had a better product.

And it enabled Frank Lucas to break from the mafia

and start buying his heroin from Southeast Asia

through Leslie Atkinson.

♪ ♪

CHEPESIUK: You know, it wouldn't be like just a couple of kilos.

It would be like hundreds of kilos.

And the only way he could do that was to use

a bigger shipping method.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

WOOD WORKER: Wood is very versatile and you can work it in many ways.

There are an endless number of things

that you can make from wood.

The color lets you, the vein allows you to work it in such a way

that the joints go unnoticed, it's unnoticed

if you work it properly.

In this piece, you can fit three thousand M pills,

which is what I just did.

It's a pill, it contains fentanyl.

Look, the people who inspect for a living

we have to think like them. What are they going to look for?

What are they going to check? Will they have dogs?

The dog is the enemy to beat. So you add chemicals.

You put vacuum packaging, chemicals

and other things that we can't mention.

They are trade secrets.

If you look, the products we handle

are very compact products, which offer great value.

$, in this one alone.

So I don't need a trailer, I don't need a container.

I don't need any of that.

I go small, I squeeze between the rest.

♪ ♪

CHEPESIUK: Ike loved teakwood.

He said, why can't I use teakwood furniture to help ship the drugs?

And they started building furniture to hold heroin.

RICE: The furniture is so large that you can do secret compartments.

I mean, anything that you're making,

you can make to hold drugs.

♪ ♪

Brand names marks your product.

It's just like going into a store and you want Gucci,

you want Louis Vuitton.

Blue Magic was a brand name

that Frank used to sell heroin in Harlem.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: They didn't want this,

they didn't want that. They wanted Blue Magic.

Blue Magic was the best dope to ever come into this country.

Whereas the mafia stuff, you put one cut on it,

you know what I'm saying? Better not let no air hit it

because it ain't gonna be no good.

But with Uncle Ike's stuff, you can cut that **** all night long,

all night long, and it's still the best **** out here.

I'd say it was five time stronger than everything else.

Well, when Blue Magic came out, overdoses, yes, definitely increased.

No question.

The deadlier the drugs, the more you're gonna sell.

And the ones who were making the millions of dollars was us.

♪ ♪

FRANCINE LUCAS: I remember him as a very

incredibly loving father.

He would come home, throw himself on the floor, play.

He would always show up with something sweet for me.

So, you know, I honestly thought my dad was a candy man.

He absolutely loved restaurants and I would get to come along.

I really did get the idea that my dad was somebody special

because I do remember just being treated so well.

There is one specific toy that I remember very well,

[laughs] It's a kangaroo.

That's where the clothes were supposed to go.

But there was a lot of money in there.

My dad, I don't know who, it was full of money.

What I've heard from my parents

and what I've heard from other people in the family,

the inside of the walls were lined with money.

I would always see my mom just going into random places

and pulling money out.

It was everywhere, um, just everywhere.

♪ ♪

RICE: So, all drug dealers play a dangerous game.

♪ ♪

Frank Lucas played the odds and knows how to handle risk.

Frank short-changed the mafia.

By late ',

he owed them over $, in drug money.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: If you come up short with that money

or don't bring that money back,

there are going to be consequences.

No question about it.

There ain't no question about it.

CAR AUDIO: At the light, turn left onto (indistinct) avenue.

♪ ♪

STEVE SURRATT: We would get intelligence reports

periodically and I recall

getting an intelligence briefing about Leslie Ike Atkinson

and his heroin distribution and importation.

I am Steven G. Surratt.

I was assigned as a drug agent working a narcotics investigation,

reside in Goldsboro.

I was trying to piece together a picture of the network

that Ike Atkinson was involved with.

And we routinely would run surveillance

on associates of Atkinson.

And one of which was an individual named Howard Rose.

He had a mobile home southeast of Goldsboro

that he stayed at when he came into town.

Sometime in late ,

we observed him take one of those bags out of the house

and put it in the trunk of a car and drive over,

very cautiously drive, to Ike's house across Goldsboro

and back in under the carport and raised the trunk.

It was a black A-W-O-L bag.

Our suspicion was that they were being used to courier heroin.

At the time, suspicion was about as strong as we had.

♪ ♪

RICE: During the 's, DEA was focused on heroin trafficking

and going after the dealers in Harlem,

also going after their source of supply in the mafia.

One of these mafia guys, Verzino, got locked up.

Verzino wants to cut a deal, he doesn't want to go to jail.

So, he starts to cooperate.

He identifies Frank as one of the guys he's selling heroin to.

He also has fiscal ledgers, which has Frank's name

and notations of the amount of money Frank owes

and the amount of heroin he was given.

Verzino's testimony and these documents

were powerful evidence to indict Frank.

(siren wailing)

♪ ♪

We have about law enforcement officers.

They had not only the revolvers,

but at that time, in the 's, we had a lot of shotguns.

FRANCINE LUCAS: January ,

it was just a typical morning.

And as I remember, chaos exploded everywhere.

RICE: You have to come in hard and secure the premise.

So, they probably came in with the revolvers

and the shotguns to let people know they meant business,

going upstairs, downstairs to the basement.

FRANCINE LUCAS: All I remember is screaming.

Screaming and just, I'm feeling very afraid, very scared.

My mother was hiding things in my diaper.

Maybe she was hiding money

because she threw some money out the window.

RICE: Somebody notices Frank's wife

throwing suitcases outside the window.

They notice that there's a large amount of money there.

FRANCINE LUCAS: And at some point, I start to feel scared for my father.

I think it's because maybe at some point he was restrained.

In an instant, everything just fell apart.

It was never the same after that.

NEWSCASTER: Federal agents displayed the evidence

at regional headquarters for the Drug Enforcement Administration,

$,.

It was seized, they said, in Teaneck, New Jersey,

at the home of Frank Lucas, a so-called big dealer

in the wholesale narcotics division of organized crime.

It's charged that the Frank Lucas g*ng

sold large amounts of heroin in Manhattan,

the Bronx, and Westchester.

♪ ♪

CHEPESIUK: United States decided to get out of Vietnam.

And of course that affected Ike, too.

They closed down Jack's American Star Bar

'cause there weren't any servicemen coming from Vietnam.

The people he had working for him weren't reliable,

drunk most of the time

and becoming more difficult to work with and so,

his empire was becoming dysfunctional.

The writing was on the wall.

His drug empire was starting to unravel.

♪ ♪

LUTZ: As the w*r in Vietnam is winding down,

Atkinson saw that he, he needed to get more actively involved.

♪ ♪

It was in a house in Bangkok

and they were loading AWOL bags with heroin

and one of his band of brothers was having trouble,

kinda struggling with getting it in the bag

and Atkinson grabbed it and said,

hey, let me show you how to do this.

CHEPESIUK: He saw that they needed some help,

and being a good boss, he decided to pitch in.

BURCH: He wanted to be sure

that the false bottom was working

and he just bang, with his hand.

LUTZ: That particular AWOL bag,

they loaded it with some old clothes,

put it in a box and mailed it back

to the aunt of some associate of theirs in North Carolina.

Someone would go by the house

and retrieve it from the person who it had been addressed to.

SURRATT: In late January ,

Mary Ethel Waters, an elderly Black lady,

received a large parcel package.

LUTZ: This particular woman, when she got it,

thought it was a b*mb and called the police.

SURRATT: And when they opened the package, they found

two A-W-O-L bags based on our surveillance.

Well, I immediately suspected that there was a link

between those bags and Leslie Ike Atkinson.

And so, they went into the bags and discovered

that there was a false bottom.

And underneath were two plastic bags,

each containing a white powder,

a large quantity of suspected heroin.

Everyone was very excited,

but we just had to find the link between that and Leslie Ike Atkinson.

We were driving to Raleigh with,

you know, over a million dollars worth of suspected heroin.

It was after dark, I remember, when we got there,

and we turned it over to the chemist.

It showed that it was a hundred percent pure heroin.

That was the largest seizure of heroin

that had been made in North Carolina

and it had occurred there in Goldsboro

and we knew that it was only a piece of the pie,

that it was just a sample of what he had been doing over the years.

And this package also was processed

for any latent fingerprints.

I recall being in the sheriff's department when the call came in.

They had made Ike's palm print.

We were elated. This was the link we were looking for.

But we could not arrest him at the time

because he was out of the country in Bangkok, Thailand.

We felt that Ike would be coming back at some time in the near future.

We had no idea when that would be.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

SURRATT: Ike Atkinson actually flew,

on this occasion, on commercial aircraft.

We had set up surveillance to positively identify him

when he came off the plane.

(siren wailing)

And followed him to his residence there in Goldsboro.

When Ike was arrested, he was very calm

and his demeanor really didn't change.

He took the plea and he was sentenced

to a total of years in federal custody.

And he accepted it at that point,

but he didn't stop.

♪ ♪

LUTZ: There were rumors that Atkinson

was actually still running the operation from prison.

His family was probably visiting him at prison

and may have been taking the orders from Atkinson.

My office had been working with the US military.

So, they initiated an operation to inspect the furniture

of these G.I.'s being shipped back.

And one of the inspectors drilled a hole

in some bedroom furniture...

and out came heroin.

It turned out to be a hundred pounds,

I mean, an incredible amount of heroin.

The only time I ever met Leslie Atkinson was at his prosecution.

He was polite to me, called me sir,

but this was the con man that he was.

We put him out of business.

So, I was feeling pretty good in those days.

EZEL "DICKIE" LUCAS: years is forever!

You can't do it all. You can't do that time.

You gonna die.

Well, he informed on everybody.

RICE: Frank Lucas,

when faced with years imprisonment, began to cooperate.

Frank's cooperation led to investigations and arrest

of over a hundred people.

He got his sentence reduced to time served.

But they wind up re-arresting Frank for selling a small amount of heroin.

It was just like he had the criminal mindset

and he just couldn't break away from it and, of course, he got caught.

♪ ♪

CHEPESIUK: Ike Atkinson shipped, according to the DA,

over a thousand kilos of heroin and that's a lot of poison.

LUTZ: I don't think Atkinson had a conscience

or he wouldn't have caused all the harm that he did to our country.

FRANCINE LUCAS: You have to put blinders on

to be able to do that and not want to see what's taking place.

Um, I just don't understand it, to be honest with you.