Frank Lucas (born September 9, 1930 in La Grange, North Carolina and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina) is a former heroin dealer, murderer, and organized crime boss in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was particularly known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in Southeast Asia. Frank Lucas is popularly known for smuggling heroin from Thailand using the coffins of dead American servicemen, a claim his South Asian associate, Leslie "Ike" Atkinson denies. He is the subject of the 2007 film "American Gangster", starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
