His wife and kids might be hungry, and he’ll never touch your stuff until he checks with you. A country boy, you can give him any amount of money. This was because, Lucas says, in his down-home creak of a voice, “a country boy, he ain’t hip … he’s not used to big cars, fancy ladies, and diamond rings. As the leader of the heroin-dealing ring called the Country Boys, Lucas, older brother to Ezell, Vernon Lee, John Paul, Larry, and Leevan Lucas, was known for restricting his operation to blood relatives and others from his rural North Carolina area hometown. So I’d sit in Nellybelle by the Roman Garden Bar, cap pulled down, with a fake beard, dark glasses, long wig … I’d be up beside people dealing my stuff, and no one knew who I was …” “When something is yours, you’ve got to be Johnny-on-the-spot, ready to take it to the top. “One-sixteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue was mine. “Who’d think I’d be in a shit $300 car like that?” asks Lucas, who claims he’d clear up to $1 million a day selling dope on 116th Street. He had a Rolls, a Mercedes, a Corvette Sting Ray, and a 427 muscle job he’d once topped out at 160 mph near Exit 16E of the Jersey Turnpike, scaring himself so silly that he gave the car to his brother’s wife just to get it out of his sight. Then living in a suite at the Regency Hotel with 100 custom-made, multi-hued suits in the closet, Lucas owned several cars. Photo: Wil Blanche/Sports Illustrated/Getty Imagesĭuring the early seventies, when for a sable-coat-wearing, Superfly-strutting instant of urban time he was perhaps the biggest heroin dealer in Harlem, Frank Lucas would sit at the corner of 116th Street and Eighth Avenue in a beat-up Chevrolet he called Nellybelle. Frank Lucas outside Madison Square Garden before the Muhammad Ali vs.
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