Commentary: ‘Gangster’ Creates an Entertaining Paradox

Date: Sunday, November 04, 2007
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

I felt sure that DenZelllll – that’s how we women say his name – would hold to his principles and not let even the heavyweights in Hollywood get away with making former heroin dealer extraordinare Frank Lucas more than he was. Happily, he affirmed the commitment in a recent interview. 

Lucas, who is now in his 70s and in poor health, still has a whiff of that storied charm about him, though it’s hard to know now if it’s just the charm of the old goat variety, like men who were a piece of work in their youth often possess in their senior years.  

In a couple of newly aired documentaries about his experiences as the junk maestro of Harlem, Lucas says his criminal career presented itself when no other opportunities were available for a dirt poor, aimless, critically uneducated “country boy” on the run from the down-and-out in North Carolina.  This is where you root for him.  

As fate would have it, he fell in with another master gangster, the legendary Bumpy Johnson, immortalized in another gangster film, “Hoodlum,” starring Laurence Fishburne. As Bumpy’s apprentice, Lucas learned how to wheel and deal – and then some -- in the underworld.  

And this, too, is where a kind of grudging admiration rears its head: When he got into the heroin business full steam, Lucas outwitted the mafia bosses who had controlled the influx of smack from Asia. Rather than become only a distributor, he went into the acquisition and wholesale arenas, traveling to southeast Asia to cut the deals directly.  

Come on, now; you’ve got to admire that kind of determination and smarts in someone who started out as a flat-out nobody. 

And because Lucas cut out the middle man, he could afford to boost his sales even more, by raising the quality. Indeed, the purity of his junk was so high in the beginning, that junkies were dropping dead from overdoses. So he cut the purity by two-thirds and still had the best stuff on the streets. And since the economics for heroin are no different than the economics for Ivory soap, the immutable laws of market forces went to work and made Lucas the man.  He claims to have raked in as much as $1 million a day for awhile. 

Wow, you say; until you remember the toll. To this day, some families have not recovered from the hell Lucas wrought.  In the end, it doesn’t matter how much money he made or even what good he may have done with it. He pimped his people for his own enrichment. In the end, it’s move along, people; nothing to see here. 

Ah, but a point of redemption, perhaps? In the documentaries, Lucas urges young people – country boys and city boys alike – to get an education and “make something of yourselves.”  After all, he lost everything he had – including his freedom for a time – and turned state’s evidence to keep from losing it for good. He’s broke now and broken. Supposedly, he asked Denzel to buy him a car in exchange for his cooperation on the film. 

But then, he also says that if he could do it all over again, he would. So what’s really his message?   

It’s mixed, for sure. On the one hand, do the right thing. On the other hand, do what you gotta do to make it, regardless of who pays.   

As I said, only in the movies can you ever really cheer a gangster.