American Gangster (29 page)

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.

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.

“What?”

“What the fuck is that? Just do what?”

Richie smiled. “Sneakers. Expensive ones. People get killed over them.”

“Over
shoes?
Who the fuck would buy those ugly things, much less shoot somebody over 'em?”

“You need a better lawyer than me to come up with an argument for that.”

A car booming with subwoofer bass came rumbling by, bleeding rap. Frank stared at the vehicle with a pained look, and suddenly he remembered Bumpy staring at that electronics-emporium window, the day the great man dropped dead on the street.

Casually, maybe too casually, Richie asked, “Your brothers know you're out?”

“Haven't talked to them in years. Better that way—for them. I don't know where they are. Went back home to Greensboro, I guess, when they got out. Hope they're leading straight lives.”

Richie nodded.

Frank was taking in the strange storefronts. “What the hell am I gonna do now? Be a janitor or some shit? What do
I
know how to do on this strange fuckin' planet? How am I gonna live?”

“I told you,” Richie said, “I wouldn't let you starve. I got legwork needs doing.”

“Yeah, you told me, but you can barely take care of yourself, 'cause of all your, what-you-call-it, pro boner shit.” Frank nodded toward a pay phone down on the corner. “One little phone call, Richie, I could be back in business.”

“You'd need a different lawyer.”

“I
won't
. I'm just saying I
could
.”

“And I could go to the cops and help put your evil ass back in jail.”

“Uh-oh—look out.”

Richie swivelled to see what Frank was looking at: a trio of young hoods swaggering up the sidewalk like they owned it and everything around it, baggy pants, bandanas tied around their heads, dripping with what they were calling
bling bling
these days.

Frank was right in their way, but he didn't move, which forced one kid to squeeze between him and a parking meter. The kid glared back, obviously about to say something or maybe even
do
something . . .

. . . but something about the expressionless expression on Frank's old-school face made the kid think better.

One of his pals said, “What?”

But the kid who'd squeezed past Frank had the good sense to let it go. “Nothin',” he mumbled.

And they bounced on.

Frank glanced at Richie. “Hell. Every idiot gets to be young once.”

“You think?”

The man who once owned 116th Street had no idea what lay ahead, but he knew one thing: he was alive today when he should have been dead and buried, a hundred times over. So he was ahead of the game.

“Let's get out of here,” Frank said.

“Where to?”

“I don't care. Just some other direction.”

As Richie was getting behind the wheel, Frank said, “Tell me the truth, Rich—when you were first investigating me, you couldn't believe I'd pulled off that Southeast Asia connection, could you? An uneducated black man, come up with a slick smuggling operation like that? You just couldn't buy it. I mean, man, in my own twisted way, I really did something. Admit it.”

“You really did,” Richie granted. “In your own twisted way.”

And the two friends drove out of Harlem.

Although this novel is
based on the screenplay by Steven Zaillian, I am also indebted to the original basic source material, Mark Jacobson's fascinating August 14, 2000,
New York
magazine article, “The Return of Superfly.”

As you may have gathered from a passage in the text, the somewhat cryptic chapter titles make use of “brand names” of heroin in Harlem in the early '70s (listed in the
New York
magazine article).

Despite its basis in fact, Mr. Zaillian's fine screenplay is a fictionalized take on events in the lives of Richard Roberts and Frank Lucas. This novel takes further liberties with this fact-based tale, and the “Richie Roberts” and “Frank Lucas” in these pages must be viewed as highly fictionalized characterizations (as should “Nicky Barnes”). In interviews, for example, Mr. Roberts has made clear that his depiction as a womanizer during his first marriage was a fiction created for the film to make him seem “less vanilla.”

My thanks to Cindy Chang of Universal Pictures for providing stills and other materials throughout the writing of this novel; and to Tor editor Jim Frenkel,
who was always available for help and support. Thanks also to my agent and friend, Dominick Abel.

As usual my wife, writer Barbara Collins, was my first reader and editor, and I appreciate her help and encouragement, which began long before I ever knew I'd be writing this novel, specifically on our honeymoon in Chicago, when I took her to see
Cotton Comes to Harlem.

M
AX
A
LLAN
C
OLLINS
was hailed in 2004 by
Publishers Weekly
as “a new breed of writer.” A frequent Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee, he has earned an unprecedented fourteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations for his historical thrillers, winning for his Nathan Heller novels
True Detective
(1983) and
Stolen Away
(1991).

His graphic novel
Road to Perdition
is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks, directed by Sam Mendes. His many comics credits include the syndicated strip
Dick Tracy,
his own
Ms. Tree, Batman,
and
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,
based on the hit TV series for which he has also written video games, jigsaw puzzles, and a
USA Today
bestselling series of novels.

An independent filmmaker in the midwest, he wrote and directed the Lifetime movie
Mommy
(1996) and a sequel,
Mommy's Day
(1997). He wrote
The Expert,
a 1995 HBO World Premiere, and wrote and directed the innovative made-for-DVD feature
Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market
(2000).
Shades of Noir
(2004), an anthology of his short films, includes his award-winning documentary
Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane,
featured
in a collection of his films,
Black Box.
His most recent feature,
Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life
(2006), based on his Edgar-nominated play, has won two film festivals and is also available on DVD.

His other credits include film criticism, short fiction, songwriting, trading-card sets, and movie/TV tie-in novels, including the
New York Times
bestseller
Saving Private Ryan
.

Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. Their son, Nathan, a recent University of Iowa graduate, has completed a year of post-grad studies in Japan.

THE ROAD TO PERDITION SAGA

Road to Perdition
(graphic novel)

Road to Perdition
(movie tie-in novel)
Road to Perdition 2: On the Road
(graphic novel)
Road to Purgatory

Road to Paradise

THE MEMOIRS OF NATHAN HELLER

True Detective

True Crime
The Million-Dollar Wound

Neon Mirage

Stolen Away

Dying in the Post-War World

Carnal Hours

Blood and Thunder

Damned in Paradise

Flying Blind

Majic Man

Angel in Black

Kisses of Death

Chicago Confidential

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