Who is Frank Lucas?

Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930) is a former U.S. heroin dealer and organized crime boss who operated in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was particularly known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle. Lucas boasted that he smuggled heroin using the coffins of dead American servicemen, but this claim is denied by his South East Asian associate, Leslie "Ike" Atkinson. His career was dramatized in the 2007 feature film American Gangster in which Lucas is played by Denzel Washington.
Lucas was born in La Grange, North Carolina and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He claims that the incident that sparked his motivation to embark on a life of crime was witnessing his 12-year-old cousin's murder at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, for apparently "reckless eyeballing" (looking at a Caucasian woman), in Greensboro, North Carolina. He drifted through a life of petty crime until one particular occasion when after a fight with a former employer he fled to New York on the advice of his mother. In Harlem he indulged in petty crime and pool hustling before he was taken under the wing of gangster Bumpy Johnson. Lucas' connection to Bumpy has since come under some doubt; he claimed to have been Johnson's driver for 15 years, although Johnson spent just 5 years out of prison before his death in 1968. According to Johnson's widow, much of the narrative that Lucas claims as his actually belonged to another young hustler named Zach Walker, who lived with Bumpy and his family and later betrayed him.

Lucas married Julianna Farrait, a homecoming queen from Puerto Rico (not Miss Puerto Rico as portrayed in the movie, American Gangster). The two often bought each other expensive gifts including a coat for which she paid $125,000 and another $40,000 cash for a matching hat. Julie was also jailed for her role in her husband's criminal enterprise, spending five years behind bars. After she came out of prison they lived separately for some years, and Julie moved back to Puerto Rico. However, they reconciled in 2006, and have been married for over 40 years.
Lucas has a total of seven children, including a daughter, Francine, with Julie. Francine entered the witness protection program with Lucas in 1977 and has since started up a webpage Yellow Brick Road, containing resources for the children of imprisoned parents.