In the underworld environment, cops are the natural enemy of a drug dealer. It was my job to just stay out of their way. But that rule only applies to cops trying to do their job. Crooked cops have no rules and no ethics. And some of them get a badge just so they can have a license to beat people up and rob them.
If I ever turned a corner and saw Diggs and his partner, Pappo, my stomach sank and my temper jumped a few degrees.
“If it isn’t Frank Lucas,” Diggs would say, grabbing me by my collar. Diggs was six foot five, at least three hundred pounds. Muscles like Hulk Hogan’s. He was twice as big as I was. Don’t ask me why he was always picking on me.
“You got a reason to have your hands on me?” I’d say.
“We can make one up if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Pappo would chime in.
Diggs and Pappo would take me behind a building and punch me in my stomach and face, for no good reason except that they could.
“We heard someone snatched some chains over on Lexington and One Hundred Sixteenth,” said Diggs, before socking me in the jaw. “Was it you?”
“No, it wasn’t!’ I said, rubbing my chin. “You see any chains on me?”
“What’s this?” said Pappo, putting his hands in my pocket and pulling out a gold chain.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “You just put that in there.”
“Let’s go, Lucas.”
I would struggle all the way into the police car. Because I knew that once they got me to the precinct, it was really over. They’d work me over with rubber hoses, their fists and legs, until they were too tired to beat my ass anymore. Then they’d throw me out of the station and I’d look like I just came out of a grinding machine, bloody and swollen.
Except for Diggs and Pappo, things were sweet for me. Had a nice place, more money than I could spend, and anywoman I wanted at my fingertips. I was coming home and throwing my money into dresser drawers around my apartment. I didn’t put any of it in the bank. I just threw it wherever and took out whatever I needed. I wasn’t organized or thinking ahead. I was just keeping one foot in front of the other and surviving.
At one point, I took an afternoon off to count up all the money I had strewn around my place. I was curious about just how much I had. The money was flowing like water and I was losing touch with what it represented collectively. It’s like if you leave the water running in your sink: if it goes right down the drain, you don’t realize how much water you’re wasting. But if you put a stopper in the sink and the water collects, you see how quickly it overflows and realize how much you’ve been wasting.
I counted, making thousand-dollar piles and stacking them around my apartment. When I was done, I had a half-million dollars.
I was stunned. I knew I’d been making a lot of money, but I had no idea it was quite that much. I thought it was time to give myself a few days off from the streets. I sent my parents some money. And then I headed down to a craps game. I bet ten thousand dollars and left there twenty thousand dollars richer.
I’d been playing craps for years. And I often had a winning streak that would piss the other players off, like when Igot jumped after beating all those boys out in Kentucky. I learned to play pool when I was in Kentucky, too. And Iswore up and down I could beat anybody. And most of the time, I did. Craps was about chance and pool was about skill. But if I put money down on either, I rarely lost.
Until, of course, I started losing. It wasn’t often. But it was enough to make my money start dwindling. Today, I can’t even imagine how a half-million dollars in 1948 started to slip away from me. But it did. And quickly. Six months after I counted out my money that day, I had $250,000. I was buying out the bar whenever I felt like it, betting larger and larger numbers on craps and pool games, and just throwing money away on God knows what. I was too young and ignorant to think about finding someone to put it in the bank for me, or buy a house or make some other kind of investment. I just spent and spent and spent. I’d crash my car, leave it right there, and go straight to the car dealer and buy a new one.
While my money was withering away, I saw more and more of Diggs and Pappo. If a little kid took a piece of candy from a corner store, they were looking for me.
“What the fuck y’all want from me now?” I said one morning when they yanked me up after I came out of a corner store.
“Let’s go,” said Pappo.
“What kind of bullshit is this?”
As soon as we walked in to the precinct: BAM! Pappo punched me right in the face and my nose started spurting blood. I dropped my head, and as soon as I did, Diggs punched me on the side of my head and blood started seeping out of my left ear. The whole world dipped to one side as I gritted my teeth, clutched my hands and arms to cover my vital organs, and tried to steel myself through the beat-down. They used their hands, feet, and a rubber hose to damn near kill me. It lasted for fifteen minutes. Just long enough for me to end up throwing up blood for the next three weeks.
When I got back uptown, I made a solemn vow to myself. I was never getting beat down by Diggs and Pappo again. Ever. The next time I saw them, one of us was going to die if they even looked like they wanted to put a hand on me.
Soon after that incident, my money dipped so low that I had to sell my red-and-black Cadillac just to keep up with my gambling debts and pay my measly one-hundred-dollar-a-month rent. A few months after that, I had to sell the sky-blue convertible. I kept shooting craps. And of course, when you really need to win, you lose.
It got so bad that I got a notice that I was being evicted. I gathered up what I could carry in a single bag and walked out of my first decent apartment and never looked back. Left all the furniture I’d bought and that fancy chandelier.
I tried to get back in the game selling heroin. But I owed a few dealers money and no one would front me a supply. I was flat broke and homeless. Now I’d done a 360-degree turn from my days in North Carolina. The only difference was that I wasn’t in La Grange. I was in Harlem, a place where you get nothing but second chances.
I tried to get back to selling drugs steadily. Finally got someone to front me some product. And then I ended up getting arrested and sent to The Tombs, the downtown jail at 125 White Street, for nine months. It was my first serious arrest and, besides little stints here and there, it was my first real jail sentence. I was still messing with Annabelle and she still had that little job making sixty dollars a week. She’d come downtown to The Tombs and bring me cigarettes and shit. She was the only person I wanted to see down there. I didn’t tell any of my other associates.
I had nine months in The Tombs to think. Nine months to get my mind right. Takes nine months for a child to be ready to leave its momma’s womb. Turns out I needed those nine months to be reborn.
I wish I could say that after I got out of The Tombs, I had my mind straight and had a plan that made sense. Instead, I went back to the first job I had when I came to Harlem—robbing and stealing.
By this time, people knew my name and my face, so going back to my old profession probably wasn’t the smartest move. But of course, I didn’t give a good goddamn. I needed money and I was going to get it however I had to. Numbers runners, store owners, and whoever else had anything for me to take got robbed before they knew it was coming. If I had to knock you upside the head, I did it. If I could just snatch the money out of your hands, even better. I got more daring and less careful. And I began to rack up enemies who were out there looking for me faster than I was getting money.
Two enemies that I finally got rid of were the two cops, Diggs and Pappo. One day, soon after robbing a bodega, I was walking up Eighth Avenue on my way to get something to eat. I was always on alert, my eyes darting every which way whenever I was on the streets. I heard a car slow up behind me and waited briefly before turning around. It was Diggs and Pappo.
“Frank, where you been?” said Diggs.
I felt my blood start boiling. If either one of them wanted to start with me, I was ready. I had a .45 on me. And I knew in that moment that if they touched me, I was going to kill them both, right there in broad daylight. If I got locked up, so be it. There was no way I was letting them disrespect me again.
I kept walking. But I didn’t increase my speed. I was just waiting for them to start fucking with me.
“Frank, you hear me talking to you?!” Diggs said.
The car was cruising slowly enough to not pass me as I walked. I put my hand on my gun, which was tucked into my waistband. Finally, I stopped. I heard the car stop behind me.
“I’ll tell y’all motherfuckers something right now,” I said, staring them both down. “It’s a real good goddamned day to die.”
I don’t know what came over me. But I wasn’t getting beat up by them again. Diggs and Pappo must have known that I felt like I had nothing to lose, because they both looked at me for a long second. And then they pulled off and kept driving up Eighth Avenue. I never saw either of them again.
I was now free to continue in my life of crime without any interruptions. After robbing a few numbers runners, I went up to A. J. Lester’s, a clothing store on 125th Street and 8th Avenue, to get my wardrobe back together. It was early in the morning when I went in and I noticed right away that they had only two employees, a salesman on the floor and a manager I could hear on the phone in a back office. I picked out a few items, and as I paid for my new threads, I was also casing the joint.
A few days later, I came in, right at ten when they opened up. There were two salesmen on the floor. If there had beena woman working that morning, I would have walked right up out of there. I wouldn’t rob no spot with a woman working—no way. I had my .45 at my hip, but I knew I wasn’t going to have to any problems.
“Give me the shit. Now,” I said to the tall, red-complexioned guy who was manning the floor. I slipped the .45 out of my waistband just enough for him to see what I was working with.
“Don’t want no problems,” he said, hustling over to the cash register and stabbing at the keys.
“That makes two of us,” I said. “Move faster.”
I kept one eye on the door and one on the man emptying the register. I stuffed my bag with the money and dashed out. They didn’t even follow me out of the store or yell for help. I went to my car parked around the corner and drove downtown to Fifty-seventh Street to chill out for a minute. Ended up picking up a white girl and laying up in a hotel in midtown for a week or so.
Don’t remember how much money I got from A. J. Lester’s. A few hundred dollars. I remember thinking that the whole thing went well—except it was a Wednesday. I was a damn fool, robbing them in the middle of the week. I should’ve waited until the end of the week, when they would have had more money in the store. The two or three hundred or I got was probably just what they got from the bank to make change.
The next week, I hit up a small grocery store on 141st and 8th Avenue. They had collard greens and other vegetables set up in the front of the store. I had come by a few times and noticed a manager handing over money to a delivery truck. Like most stores in Harlem, it was owned by a Jewish guy and run by a few black folks. I drove over one morning, parked around the corner, and made my way inside. I didn’t bother with the cashiers this time. I went straight back to the manager’s office. (All managers’ offices are situated in the exact same spot in these kinds of stores. You follow the aisles leading to a back entrance. There’ll be a hallway where deliveries will come in. Probably a bathroom on one side. And the other side will almost always be the manager’s office.) I barged in and then stood behind him where he couldn’t see me.
“Act busy,” I said, the pistol pressed to his back.
“What do you want?” he said. I could see his white skin turning pink.
“What you think I want?” I asked. “Give me whatever you got in here.”
The manager reached over to the lock box and took out the money with one hand, transferred it to his other hand, and put it on his desk right next to where I stood.
“You come out after me and I’ll kill you,” I said as I left his office.
Can’t tell you how much I got from that job, so don’t ask me. But it wasn’t enough. I can tell you that. It wasn’t enough to get me back in the game the way I had been before. I needed a car (or two). I wasn’t living the lifestyle that Harlem had shown me was possible. I had to get more daring, more I-don’t-give-a-fuck. And for me, that was not a problem at all.
Although I was doing all kinds of dirt in New York City, I still managed to get back down to North Carolina to see my family whenever I could.
In 1947, I had gone down for a visit, while the cops were looking for me up North for a robbery and I needed to cool my heels out of town. While I was there, I met up with Flora, a country girl with a cute smile and a great pair of legs. We had a good time while I was at home, but I went back to New York thinking that would be the extent of our relationship.
And then I got word that Flora was pregnant. I came back to North Carolina and ended up taking her to the hospital when she went into labor. Back then, you couldn’t find out ahead of time which gender you were having. I didn’t care one way or another. I was young. Wasn’t even sure if I was ready to be a father. I hung around the hospital while I waited to hear back from the doctor.
“Girls,” the doctor said.
“It’s a girl?”
“Two girls,” he said.
I almost passed out. Twins? We had no idea. We named our daughters Betty and Ruby Lucas. Flora was still young, living with her parents and all that. I never gave a second thought to building a life in North Carolina. I’m sorry to say it, but that just wasn’t what was in the cards for me. I wanted them to have a good life and I knew I’d do the best I could to provide for them. But I knew that unless they moved up North, I was not going to be a regular presence in their lives.
Now, I was a father. And I was also a die-hard criminal. For a while, I was ten times better as a criminal than I was as a father. Soon after my twin daughters were born, I was back in New York, tearing things up and making money at the same time.