I had to stay close to home, Babyface or no Babyface, because Julie was getting closer to giving birth. One night, she got tired of me following her around the house, checking on her every five seconds. She sent me out.
“Go, Frank, please. You’re driving me crazy.”
I went out to Queens to a party. Got out there around eleven and called Julie around eleven thirty.
“I am fine, Frank. You have fun. Stop calling me. Nothing happening here.”
I called her back at midnight.
“Frank Lucas, you stop calling this house,” she said. “I am fine.”
I got caught up in a poker game and then a few games of pool. I called Julie again about two thirty in the morning and her mother answered.
“Is Julie sleeping?”
“No! We’ve been trying to find you! She went into labor and left for the hospital. I stayed behind to wait for you to call.”
I must have done 110 miles an hour from Queens to the Englewood Hospital. Double-parked the car in the middle of the street and ran all the way up to the maternity ward.
“Julie Lucas,” I said, completely out of breath.
They led me to her room and the nurse put a finger to her lips. “They’re asleep,” she said.
“They who?”
“Your wife,” she said. “And your little girl.”
Sure enough, there was my wife, knocked out. Then the nurse led me to the nursery and I saw my new baby. The nurse took her out, brought her to me, and put her in my arms.
“Well, look at this little girl,” I said. “Gotta give her a name.”
“She already has a name. The mother named her.”
“Like hell she did,” I said. “Nobody cleared a name with me.”
“Her name is Francine. I’m assuming after you…”
“Oh. Well then, I guess I can’t object to that, can I?”
“No, you can’t,” said the nurse.
Now, of course Francine wasn’t my firstborn child, but itwas a little different. It was the first time I’d had a child within the confines of a true household and family. I had the twins when I was just a kid. I was never married to Yogi’s mother. Francine was going to have the very best I could give her. Nothing less.
Francine had me wrapped me around her pinkie finger immediately. As soon as she could say “Daddy,” it was over. Whatever she wanted, she got. And whatever she didn’t even know she wanted, she got that, too.
“Daddy, Mommy’s trying to comb my hair,” she would say, running through the house to escape the comb and brush. She would jump into my lap and cry on my shoulder.
“Why would she do that to you?”
“I don’t know! But I don’t want my hair combed.”
Julie would look at me like she expected me to help her out by explaining to Francine that she had to listen to her mother.
“Well, if you don’t want your hair done, then that’s that. Julie, don’t touch this baby’s hair. And I mean it.”
Julie would throw her hands up and storm out of the room, muttering in Spanish under her breath.
It’s a damn shame what I did to Francine. Spoiled her so rotten I’m sure her insides were green. If she didn’t get her way, she’d overturn everything in a room. Rip anything she could get her hands on to shreds. And she’d bite you, too. She managed to turn out okay. So maybe it was all for the best. But boy was she a terror. All ’cause Daddy always let her have her way. Always.
For some people, having a child makes you rethink your priorities. If you’re a criminal, seeing your children grow up might make you rethink your lifestyle. What if you died? What if you went to prison for life? What would happen to your children if you weren’t there for them?
I didn’t have those thoughts. I was thinking about how much more money I could squirrel away in overseas accounts. The money was piling up nicely.
The street money would come in through my lieutenants. Piles and piles of tens and twenties, fifties and hundreds. It was actually a pain in the ass to deal with it. And a bigger pain in the ass to count it.
The large amounts of cash is what really let Julie know what I was up to after years of her being clueless.
“Why so much cash always in the house?” Julie asked me one day, as I sat in a guest bedroom, preparing to take the street money to the bank to have it converted into large bills for transport to the Cayman Islands bank.
“Julie, the less you know, the better.”
“I think I know more than I want to.”
“Don’t ask any more questions.”
“I don’t like all this money in the house. It’s dangerous.”
“I’ll be back,” I said.
Julie just looked at me and walked out of the room.
Over a few months, maybe a year, Julie got adjusted to the large amounts of money. She didn’t like it. And she made that clear. But she knew there was nothing she could do about it. I came home one day with bags and bags of cash and she saw me emptying it out onto the floor of a guest bedroom.
“There’s nowhere else you can do that, Frank?”
“Please don’t start with me, Julie.”
“Just get it out of here.”
“Gotta count it first,” I said. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you count it for me.”
“No way José.”
“Look, the faster we get this counted up, the sooner it will be out of the house.”
“Fine, Frank. I will count it.”
I came back that night and Julie told me exactly how much money was there, down to the dollar. I couldn’t believe how much faster she was than me at counting the money. I brought home more money, left the house for a meeting, came back, and she was done counting once again. Finally, a few weeks after I’d hired her as my at-home money counter, I came into the house and saw why she was such a fast worker. She’d hired someone to come help her count the damn money!
“Who the hell is this?” I yelled out, when I saw some woman sitting on the floor making neat piles out of my drug money.
“Oh, this is my friend Rosario. She was looking for work. So I hired her to help me. See, we work fast together, Frank.”
Julie smiled at me like I was going to clap her on the back and congratulate her on a smart move. I took two steps toward Rosario and she got up real quick.
“I’m giving you exactly three seconds to get the hell out of my house,” I said to the woman. “And don’t ever come here again.” I slammed the door and turned to Julie.
“What, Frank? She was just helping me to count the money.”
That was the end of my wife’s very short-lived career helping me out with anything related to my business. I went back to counting the money myself. I bought a money counter to help the process.
Of course, I could not have managed my business without someone on the inside at the banks helping me to wash the money. I didn’t put any of my large amounts of cash directly into an account. I just rolled up to a Chemical Bank in midtown and I would sit in the lobby, reading the newspaper, while the people I knew on the inside would take my money, count it up, and then give me clean, crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in their place.
I had to pay two points on the money for the service. So, for every $1,000 I brought in to get cleaned up, they would give me back $980.
One particular day, after I got my cash, I had to deliver large amounts to a few different places. I had to give a half million to my lieutenant for overhead. Red Top had to get her cut. I dropped off some with my lawyer for him to take to the overseas bank. And then, there was a present I wanted to buy for myself.
A few weeks before, I’d gone onto Frank Sinatra’s yacht. It was docked out in Nyack and one of the security folks was a guy I knew from Harlem. He gave me a quick tour of the boat. That thing must have been 250 feet, with a whole mess of bedrooms and bathrooms. The whole thing looked like an airplane carrier to me. The moment I walked off Sinatra’s boat, I knew I wanted one for myself.
The day I went to the bank, I’d heard that there was an eighty-five footer that an investment banker was trying to unload. He had one buyer who wanted to finance it through the bank. But when I told him I was bringing cold hard cash, it was a wrap. That very day, I bought my first yacht. I called it Mr. New York. It was furnished but I brought in a designer to gut it and and do it up in my style.
I used it as a hotel, for the most part. Instead of hanging out in a bar or in a hotel room, we’d go out on Mr. New York and hang out.
Had some good times on that boat before I ever even took it out on the water. Now, I’m not big on being out in the middle of the ocean. I like the water. But I’m not keen on drowning. I did want to take the boat out, so I hired a captain to take me and a few friends down to Florida. It was right after the Jets won the Super Bowl, down in Miami. We didn’t go down for the actual game. But after they won, I heard about how much after-partying was going on and I was ready to go.
“Now look here,” I told the captain of my boat, as we prepared to start moving. “I want to see land the whole way.”
“Not a problem, Mr. Lucas.”
“I don’t want to wake up feeling like I’m in the middle of the goddamn ocean. Can you hug the coast all the way to Florida?”
“Yes, sir, I can.”
I woke up the next morning, threw open the curtains in my cabin, and I couldn’t see nothing but blue water. I found that captain and grabbed him by the throat.
“The currents, sir,” he managed to choke out. “I did the best that I could.”
“Well, obviously that wasn’t good enough! Don’t let that shit happen again! Don’t think I won’t throw you off this boat.”
Somehow, he managed to keep us within view of the shoreline for the rest of our trip and we had a great time.
But Julie wasn’t crazy about the yacht. “Too much attention,” she would say, shaking her head. “Asking for big trouble.”
After she figured out what I did for a living, she lived in constant fear. Would the police come and arrest her? Would they take away Francine? How would they live with no money? She worried constantly and I tried to comfort her. But nothing I said really helped to ease her fear.
The only extravagance that Julie truly enjoyed was a place I bought down in Oxford, North Carolina that I named Frank Lucas’s Paradise Valley. I bought two places down South. One had about four thousand acres and the other was over six hundred acres.
I’m a country boy, through and through. And of all the places I owned, Paradise Valley was probably my favorite. It really was paradise. I had about two hundred acres of farmland. Mainly tobacco and corn growing there. Had a man named Clyde Coburn running the whole place. For some reason, we called him Sam. Sam and his family lived on the property and he and his staff tended to everything.
I put a trailer for myself on the place with three bedrooms—a master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms. I could have built a big old house on the property but I didn’t want to. When I was there, I wanted to be a little bit closer to the actual land. The double-wide trailer was perfect. Bought it from Goldsboro and had it delivered right onto the property.
Sometimes I would fly down alone, just for the night, to regroup and think. Many times, I brought Julie and Francine and Yogi down for a week or longer in the summer. I had four man-made ponds stocked with all kinds of fish. I’d take the kids fishing and we’d swim and eat meals made from food harvested from my farm.
I also had six hundred Black Angus cows. Beautiful, majestic animals. Francine would start saying mooooo as soon as we got off the plane because she couldn’t wait to see the cows. Had a few breeding bulls, too.
There was one incident that took place on my farm that doesn’t sit right with me to this very day.
I had this cow I had raised from a calf. Jet-black thing I named Sambo. For some reason or another, he became more of a pet. Other cows his age were butchered and eaten. But I had Sambo drinking beer out of a can in my hand and I fed him all kinds of snacks. As soon as I came onto the property, he was right there, nosing into my hand like a dog instead of a cow. I neutered the cow, same as you would a dog or a cat that you want tame enough to be a house pet.
And then, for some reason, when it was butchering season, I put Sambo in the pen with the other animals to be killed. I’m not sure why. I mean, I had cows there to be used for meat and leather. But Sambo had become more of a pet. But in one instant, when I was on my way back to New York, I thought it made sense to tell Sam to kill Sambo and have him ready to eat when I came back down a week later with the family.
A week later, Julie, her parents, Francine, Yogi, my parents, and a few other family members were all sitting around the dining-room table in my trailer. The cook on the property started bringing out all the food, a huge simmering crock of beef stew with potatoes and carrots, some burgers and hot-dogs for the kids, and several huge steaks for the adults.
Something in the pit of my stomach turned when I looked at the meat.
What had I done? That meat in front of me was Sambo. A cow I’d neutered and coddled like a child! I’d fed him out of my hand and would scratch him behind his ears for twenty minutes at a time. I felt like I was about to throw up as I watched my family prepare to pierce their food with forks and knives and eat poor Sambo.
“Don’t touch this food,” I said.
My wife had a piece of meat two inches away from her mouth. “Is it spoiled, Frank?”
“Just don’t touch it!” I said.
The cook came over to ask what was wrong.
“Get this meat out of here! Right now!”
While the cook cleared the table, my family looked around, confused. There was no way I was going to eat Sambo. Just no way.
I truly believe the devil got into me and told me to kill that cow. Ain’t no other way I could ever understand what made me do it. It was wrong. And I couldn’t even look at that meat.
My family must have thought I was crazy. We just had vegetables and other side dishes.
My conscience was starting to fuck with me. I’d killed Sambo. And it hurt me. I’d done some heartless things at that point in my life, all without thinking twice. But killing Sambo threw me off. And I felt the emotion so strong that I still feel it today. And from that point on, I started looking at things differently. In what other ways was I doing wrong? And at forty-something years old, was I really in a position to start over?