We're not much for pimping New York Magazine (it's a bit too localized for us on the West Coast), but after seeing the trailer for the upcoming American Gangster, we had to check out the film's source material. And, in all honesty, if the film ends up anything like Marc Jacobson's haunting article they can halt the Best Picture race right now.
In a vivid profile, Jacobson tells the story of the rise and fall of Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas with brutal detail and a macabre sense of humor that sticks in your chest long after it's vacated your stomach. He portrays Lucas as one of those likable old-timers you might find on any New York stoop - frail, beaten down but jovial - except beneath his wrinkled skin lies a soulless devil. Jacobson doesn't need to use colorful prose or flowing narrative to get us to see the monster within Lucas, because the man once known as "Superfly" is more than willing to talk.
He asks Lucas about his Harlem operation's long-rumored method of importing Heroin into the States - lining the walls of American soldiers' caskets - during the Vietnam era.
"We did it, all right . . . ha, ha, ha . . . " Lucas chortles in his dying-crapshooter's scrape of a voice. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin? Ha ha ha."
He asks how Lucas, a rural Carolina boy with little education and no knowledge of the city, rose to a million dollar-a-day earner so fast. Simple, Lucas says, find the biggest mover in the neighborhood, round up a crowd and take him out.
"He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch and he'd do the same to my mama too. Well, as of now, he's dead. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man got a right to say what he wants. Now the whole block is there, to see if I'm going to pussy out. He was still yelling. So I said to him, 'When you get through, let me know.'"
"Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.
He asks Lucas how he became "white-boy rich, Donald Trump rich," and gets a simple, callous answer: "Cut out the guineas."
Lucas is a villian, but Jacobson paints him as a Horatio Alger gone awry, as if "Superfly" could have done anything with his mind, yet chose a gun instead. It's a frightening look into the face of evil, an evil with a warm smile, easy demeanor, and merciless heart. Read it now.
The Return of Superfly [NY Mag]
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