‘American Gangster’ Frank Lucas, Onetime Drug Kingpin, Dead At 88: Report

Frank Lucas, a notorious drug dealer who became something of a folk hero after he was portrayed by Denzel Washington in the blockbuster mob movie “American Gangster,” died Thursday, TMZ reported.

Paul Milo

05/31/2019 4:06 p.m.

Lucas, 88, passed away while being transported to a medical facility in New Jersey, where he lived, TMZ also reported.

Lucas rose to underworld fame in the late 1960s after spending years as a protege to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, an African-American gangster based in Harlem.

Lucas soon began importing pure heroin from Southeast Asia in the caskets of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. He was a major dealer in New York City and in Newark for several years.

Lucas’s empire fell in the mid-1970s when Richard Roberts, an investigator with the Essex County Bureau of Narcotics, broke up a heroin ring run by Lucas’s brother Vernon. Vernon Lucas later testified against his brother Frank, The Star Ledger reported.

Frank Lucas also became an informant and spent about a decade in jail before moving to Newark in the 1980s, the paper also reported.

In the film, Roberts -- a Newark native who would later befriend Lucas -- was played by Russell Crowe.

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