“It might mean something to you. But if that was a threat? You better get in line... chump. That one stretches around the block, too.”
Lucas’s frustration was palpable. Richie understood why: Frank Lucas was used to buying people, and he was used to outmaneuvering people, and outthinking them. The druglord obviously wanted to work out something with Richie, but could not find a way in.
And Richie wasn’t about to give him one.
Finally Frank said, “What can we do?”
Richie’s voice had no self-satisfaction, in fact it even carried a certain compassion when he said, “You know what you have to do.”
Lucas did know. He didn’t like it, but he knew. The only way to improve his future was to flip.
“I could give you cops,” Lucas said quietly, “but that’s not who you want, right? You want the Organized Crime names.”
“I’ll take the cops, too. I want all these bastards.”
Lucas seemed confused. “You’ll take the cops, too? You’d go after cops, like those SIU pricks?”
“Especially those SIU pricks.”
“You’d do that? Go after your own kind?”
Richie’s upper lip twitched. “They’re not my kind. Not the bent bastards you’ve been doing business with. They’re not my kind any more than the Italians you put up with are yours.”
The two men sat and studied each other in silence.
Then Lucas asked, “What can you give me?”
“Only my promise that if you lie to me about one name, you’ll never get out of prison. Lie about one dollar in one offshore account, and the only time you’ll see daylight is in the exercise yard. You can live rich in jail, rest of your life... or poor outside it. That’s what I can promise.”
“You’re not saying I could walk...?”
“No. But you won’t be an old man when you get out.”
Lucas sat thinking. Richie let him.
Finally, Lucas said, “You know, I don’t care if you feds take all my buildings, my stocks, my offshore accounts. Take it all, I don’t give a shit — use it to build battleships or paint bridges or whatever the fuck. Fight another pointless war, far as I care.”
Lucas leaned forward, fire in his eyes.
“But, Roberts, those other motherfuckers... those prick cops... they put my money in their pockets. We’re talking millions.”
“I believe you.”
Lucas got a distant look, still debating with himself over whether to step off this particular cliff...
“I’ll want to know everyone you’ve met for the last twenty years,” Richie said. “Everyone you sold to. Every cop you ever paid off. Everybody who ever cheated or stole or shorted you. Every one you can remember.”
Lucas chuckled. “Oh, nobody ever said Frank Lucas don’t have a good memory. Hell, I remember them all, every damn name, every ugly face. That’s not the problem.”
Richie blinked. “What is?”
“You ain’t got jails big enough.”
Frank Lucas’s trial was still under way when Richie sicced his squad on their new target.
Surveillance photos were again gathered, but this time the subjects were not players in the dope game, rather cops receiving envelopes of money on 116th Street and other drops on the New York side of the river. The new table of criminal organization that went up was strictly cops — crooked cops.
And right up at the top of the chart went a surveillance photo of Detective Trupo, Richie finally deciding the son of a bitch was special...
Trupo’s special moment came at his house, over his morning coffee. Two squad cars pulled into his driveway, blocking him in and embarrassing him with the neighbors. He and his associates had, over the months, watched many of their brethren getting hauled off in cuffs, praying that as the Princes of the City, they breathed air too rarified for them to be taken down.
They were wrong.
Trupo fled to his backyard, but unlike the Lucas place, no buried treasure was waiting, unless you counted the self-administered bullet in the bent cop’s brain.
Indictments handed down by the Manhattan DA’s office, working in concert with Richard Roberts’s narcotics task force, numbered fifty-three NYPD and SIU detectives. By 1977, out of the seventy officers who’d worked the SIU, fifty-two were either under indictment or in jail.
Frank Lucas was convicted of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and sentenced to seventy years. Federal authorities confiscated over 250 million dollars in real estate, equities and cash in domestic and foreign banks.
The day after he convicted Frank Lucas (and thirty Country Boy relatives), Richard Roberts borrowed four hundred bucks from his credit union for a three-day vacation to the Bahamas.
He figured he’d earned it.
And six months later, he quit the Prosecutor’s Office to become a defense attorney. He had been a lost cause long enough himself to have developed a rooting interest in other lost causes.
First among his new clients was one Frank Lucas.
With his attorney’s help, Frank got out of stir, after fifteen years.
27. Joint
On a bright sunshiny day in 1990, a graying Frank Lucas stepped out of a federal prison, free-at-last-Great-God-Almighty-free-at-last, but also broke as hell — owning nothing more, in fact, than the small cardboard box of odds and ends he’d filled in his cell not long ago.
Frank blinked at the sun — God, it seemed blinding out here. But he was not complaining. His gaze stretched across the parking lot, looking to see if his ride was here.
Richie Roberts, standing by a couple-year-old Pontiac, raised his hand like a kid wanting a teacher to recognize him. Long-haired as ever, Richie was in a black sportcoat over a black T-shirt and black slacks, while Frank wore the gray suit he’d worn into the prison fifteen years before, but no tie.
“You know,” Frank said, ambling up with his cardboard box, “a lawyer billing a guy for driving him around could run into dough.”
“You don’t have any dough.”
“Keep that in mind.”
Frank set the box on the car’s trunk and the two men shook hands, then embraced.
“Where to?” Richie asked.
“Where else? Gotta see it — 116th Street.”
Pretty soon the two men — who by now had been friends much longer than they’d been adversaries — stood on the sidewalk near Richie’s parked car. The street sign Frank was looking up at said: 116TH STREET AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS BOULEVARD.
“Frederick Douglass Boulevard?” Frank asked, dumbfounded. “What was wrong with just plain Eighth Avenue?”
Richie chuckled. “You don’t have a sense of history, Frank.”
“Bull shit. I got too much sense of history, is my problem. Look at this street. Everything Bumpy predicted, a hundred years ago, has come true — corner groceries are gone now. Chain stores everywhere.”
“It’s a franchise world,” Richie said.
But without Blue Magic, Frank thought.
Frank shook his head and grinned. “I used to sit here in my old beater car, with Eva? She hated it, but I liked it ’cause I could be invisible, and watch my street, watch everything goin’ down. But it’s not my street anymore. And I don’t even have a car.”
Or Eva.
Right across the street was where Frank had shot Tango Black, a lifetime or two ago. This memory he didn’t share with his attorney. The fruit stand he’d shot Tango in front of, it was gone. And his favorite diner.
In the sign of a store labeled nike was a huge painting of basketball star Michael Jordan, and a big sign saying JUST DO IT.
“Just do what?” Frank asked.