(sirens).
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Shake this square world and
blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
MAN: Heroin destroys everything.
MAN: Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.
CROWD: People die, Sacklers lie.
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.
HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the
war on drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here?
(helicopter whirring).
SOLDIER: Get them moving... (inaudible) is now, hurry up.
(explosions).
(gunfire).
LEW: My friends, when they went to Vietnam,
they were young men.
They may think they're adults, but they're babies.
♪ ♪
SOLDIER: Come on, get them out of here.
LEW: You're going to a foreign country where you realize,
people are trying to kill 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.
(chatter).
And in New York during that time,
all roads lead 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: 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 murdered his cousin,
(fire crackling)
(chanting)
and my father was age six.
(fire crackling)
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.
(screaming).
DICKIE: Wow.
DICKIE: You know what I'm saying.
LEW: Frank went to Bumpy and said, can you help me
get started in the heroin business?
LEW: Frank's was a typical street operation in Harlem.
He'd get a large amount of wholesale heroin,
then they cut the heroin with street distribution.
LEW: Lucas was a very smart guy, very cunning.
He saw there was a market to sell heroin
and capitalized on market conditions.
♪ ♪
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.
FRANCINE: 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.
(laughs)
LEW: Frank was getting his heroin from the Italian mafia.
DICKIE: No.
♪ ♪
RON: Ike Atkinson was born in 1925 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 war 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: Ike was extremely proud of his military career.
He felt like the military was his family, friends.
RON: Ike made friends everywhere, you know?
He was such a likable person.
People gravitated to him and they became part of this circle.
In 1963, Ike Atkinson left the military.
He was retired.
He could have done anything he wanted.
DAN: Ike and I both arrived in Bangkok in 1966.
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 uh, switched decks and
some people might call that cheating.
There were thousands of Americans in Bangkok every week.
It was time off from Vietnam.
RON: Any Black GI, pretty well, that served in Vietnam
during that period ended up in Jack's American Star Bar,
which became famous.
CHARLES: 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.
DAN: Herman Jackson, aka Jack, was a long-time friend
of Ike Atkinson in the military.
And every week they'd have a big card game with big money.
We made some thousands.
That was, you know, that was a lot of money.
RON: 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.
DAN: 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.
CHARLES: 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.
$5,000 a kilo.
That's what the going price was for heroin in Bangkok and
they would sell for $100,000 in the states.
RON: And Ike said, we can make a fortune on it.
(helicopter whirring).
It was uh, genius.
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.
CHARLES: 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.
Dan Burch built in a false bottom for the placement of
two kilos of heroin.
DAN: If you open this up and you look all in here,
you don't see anything.
100% foolproof.
Ike loved that false bottom.
CHARLES: 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
GI's that were moving back and forth to the states.
They subverted the US military facilities and
personnel for their own greed.
DAN: Goldsboro was Ike's hometown, just a little,
small, sleepy town.
You have Seymour Johnson out there, which is, you know,
a big base,
but you wouldn't think that millions of dollars of drugs
were flowing through there.
RON: 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.
CHARLES: 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.
RON: 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.
♪ ♪
RON: 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.
LEW: 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.
FRANCINE: 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,
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, used to put a lot of cash...
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, just everywhere.
LEW: 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 '74, he owed them over $300,000 in drug money.
VOICE (over GPS): At the light, turn left onto Royall Avenue.
STEVE: 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 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 1974, 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 AWOL bag.
Our suspicion was that they were being used to courier heroin.
At the time, suspicion was about as strong as we had.
♪ ♪
LEW: During the 70s, 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 Franks 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.
(sirens).
We have about 20 law enforcement officers.
They had not only the revolvers, but at that time,
in the 70s, we had a lot of shotguns.
FRANCINE: January, 1975, it was just a typical morning
and as I remember, chaos exploded everywhere.
LEW: 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: 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.
LEW: Somebody notices Frank's wife throwing
suitcases outside the window.
They notice that there's a large amount of money there.
FRANCINE: 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.
REPORTER (over TV): Federal agents displayed the evidence a
regional headquarters for the Drug Enforcement Administration
$584,683.
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 gang sold large amounts
of heroin in Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester.
♪ ♪
RON: 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 service men 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.
♪ ♪
CHARLES: As the war 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.
RON: He saw that they needed some help and being a good boss,
he decided to pitch in.
DAN: He wanted to be sure that the false bottom was working
and he just bang, with his hand.
CHARLES: That particular AWOL bag, they load 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.
STEVE: In late January, 1975, Mary Ethel Waters,
an elderly Black lady, received a large parcel package.
CHARLES: This particular woman, when she got it,
thought it was a bomb and called the police.
STEVE: And when they opened the package, they found two
AWOL 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 $1 million 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 100%, 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.
(chatter).
STEVE: 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,
(sirens)
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
19 years in federal custody,
and he accepted it at that point, but he didn't stop.
♪ ♪
CHARLES: 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 GI'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 100 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.
LEW: Frank Lucas, when faced with 70 years imprisonment
began to cooperate.
Frank's cooperation lead to investigations and
arrest of over 100 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.
RON: Ike Atkinson shipped, according to the DEA over
1,000 kilos of heroin and that's a lot of poison.
CHARLES: I don't think Atkinson had a conscience or
he wouldn't have caused all the harm that he did to our country.
FRANCINE: You have to put blinders on to be able to do
that and not want to see what's taking place.
I just don't understand it to be honest with you.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.