By Ron Chepesiuk

Frank Lucas, the 1970s Harlem drug trafficker, upon whose criminal career the movie American Gangster is based, has made many claims to fame. Among others, he was the right hand man of Bumpy Johnson, the legendary Harlem godfather; Bumpy, according to Lucas, even died in his arms. Lucas boasts that he was the first black gangster to become independent of La Cosa Nostra. In fact, Lucas claims, they came to him. In selling the purest heroin on the streets of New York City, he became the biggest drug dealer of the 1970s. And he never snitched on anybody except corrupt law enforcement officials, Lucas insists, or at the least the movie does. 

All of these claims are questionable, but to this dirty laundry list we must perhaps the most bogus one of all-- that he pioneered the Asian heroin connection, which, in the earlier to mid 1970s, flooded the streets of New York City with ultra pure China White heroin. In reality, that gangster accomplishment belongs to Leslie Ike Atkinson, one of the most enterprising, charismatic and brilliant drug dealers in U.S. history. Indeed, Atkinson was the biggest American drug trafficker ever to operate out of Southeast Asia.

Superfly: the True, Untold Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster
by Ron Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez

Who is Ike Atkinson? He is a former master sergeant from Goldsboro, North Carolina, whom the DEA dubbed Sergeant Smack for his ability to traffic heroin. He operated out of Bangkok from about 1968 to 1975, when he was taken down in an international drug investigation that, in scope and reach, rivaled the one that dismantled the French Connection four years earlier. The Atkinson investigation, which involved the DEA, Interpol, Thai police and other international law enforcement agencies, spanned three continents and would have exhausted the budgets of the participating law enforcement agencies, except the DEA set up a special operational nerve-center, code-named Centac 9, to fund it.

Atkinson organized a close-knit band of black army buddies and associates, and they operated a string of gambling houses in West Germany and Madrid, Spain.  “In those days, I didn’t have anything to do with drugs,” Atkinson explained in a recent interview. “The closest I came to drugs was seeing a few people smoke pot. I was moving back and forth between Europe and the US, making a comfortable living.” 

Entering the drug trade in 1968, about three years after he moved to Bangkok, Atkinson’s well oiled operation found a source for its heroin supply in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, and it used Army post offices, U.S. Air Force transport planes and retired and active, mainly African American, U.S. servicemen, to move the contraband to Fort Bragg, Seymour Air Force base and other military points in the U.S. 

Atkinson’s network paid their heroin sources of supply about $4,000 a kilo, according to DEA intelligence. They then cut the heroin four ways and sold it drug distributors in the United States for $25,000 a quarter, or a profit of $96,000. Atkinson had the leadership skills to organize a dynamic network, said DEA agents who investigated him. “Ike was charismatic, a leader, whom I believe, could have been CEO of a major corporation if he didn’t choose the criminal path,” explained Don Ashton, a retired DEA officer who was based in the agency’s Wilmington, North Carolina office and investigated Atkinson’s drug trafficking empire. “He had culture and wasn’t your typical drug dealer.”
And Atkinson could be cool under pressure. Ashton recalled the night he and some other DEA agents had Atkinson’s house in Goldsboro under surveillance. “Ike spotted us and came out to see us,” Ashton recalled with a laugh. “He said to us: ‘It’s a cold winter night, so why don’t you guys come in and have bowl of soup?’ He was almost likable.”

Atkinson said he first met Lucas in about 1972 through his nephew, but it was not until two years later that Lucas first came to Bangkok, thanks to Atkinson’s efforts. “Frank wanted to go to Bangkok with his wife Julie and his brother Shorty and did not know how to get a visa,” Atkinson recalled. “I helped by taking them to the Thai Embassy in Washington, DC.”

Lucas, on the other hand, has maintained that he decided to go to Bangkok on his own to make contact with the Southeast Asian heroin connection after going on one of his “retreats.”

“Every six to eight months I would go Puerto Rico or Hawaii, where I would live in a hotel for two to three weeks and think,” Lucas explained to this author. “I would try to figure out where was I now and where was I going.”
He first went to Bangkok in 1969 or 1970, Lucas said. “At the time I didn’t even know Ike was there,” he explained, adding. ”It’s probably true I did see him in ’73 or ’74.”

In the 2000 New York magazine profile of him, upon which the script for “American Gangster” is based, Lucas claimed that he hooked up with a Chinese man who became his main heroin supplier. He can’t remember the contact’s name but gave him the sobriquet of “007.”

“I began to do business with 007,” Lucas said. “I didn’t see Atkinson. He wasn’t important to me at all.”

The man that Lucas called “007” was, no doubt, Luetchi Rubiwat, a Chinese Thai who worked at Jack’s American Star Bar, Atkinson’s bar in Bangkok. The bar served as the command center for his criminal network. Rubiwat, according to Atkinson, was actually his business partner and contact to the heroin supply in the Golden Triangle. If this was the case, could Lucas have used Rubiwat’s sources without having to deal with Atkinson? Rubiwat, after all, was reportedly a co-owner of Jack’s.

That scenario is unlikely. In fact, Lucas has changed his story since that 2000 New York magazine article appeared. Now he claims to have gone directly to the source in the Golden Triangle, and he makes nary a mention of 007. In a February 8, 2007 article, the New York Post quoted Lucas as saying: “Back in that day, you can remember they had a war called the Vietnam War. And every night, there’d be pictures of the soldiers getting high because the heroin was dirt-cheap. I heard that, I said, “Hell!” I jumped on a plane, went to Bangkok checked into a hotel for a couple of months—and the rest is history.”

In the American Gangster movie, the Bangkok-based character Nate is loosely based on Ike Atkinson and Lucas is suppose to be Nate’s cousin. Lucas has made that filial claim in real life as well, but Atkinson denied any blood relationship with him, as did many of his extended family. Nate is essentially a gofer for the Lucas character, and he helps him find the Chinese general in the Golden Triangle, who supplies him the potent heroin that on the  New York City streets becomes known as Blue Magic.

In the 2000 New York magazine profile of Lucas, the author concludes: "Ike knew everybody over there, every black guy in the army, from the cooks on up. It was this ‘army within an army’ that served the Country boys international distribution (Lucas’s organization), moving heroin shipments almost exclusively on military planes routed to eastern seaboard bases.”

That is not true; in fact, Lucas was dependent on Atkinson for his heroin supply, according to DEA agents who investigated the Atkinson organization in the early to mid 1970s. “The intelligence information we were getting indicated that Lucas was getting his heroin supply from Atkinson,” revealed Chuck Lutz, a DEA agent who was based in Bangkok in the mid 1970s and investigated the Atkinson organization.

Atkinson revealed: “Lucas never came back to Bangkok after that first time I brought him over.”

Atkinson takes issue with perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Asian connection, which Lucas has promoted: the so-called Cadaver Connection. In the New York magazine article, Lucas claimed that he flew a “country boy North Carolina carpenter to Bangkok to make 28 replicas of U.S. government issued coffins with false bottoms, big enough to load six to eight kilos.” Atkinson said that he used a carpenter and his name was Leon, a lifelong friend of his. “He (Leon) never had any association with constructing coffins for transporting heroin or drugs,” Atkinson explained. “On the contrary, Leon was in Bangkok hollowing out teak furniture.”

And that is how Atkinson believes the story of transporting heroin via coffins got started: his use of the teak furniture to move heroin to the U.S. “One time, when I was in Bangkok, Frank came to visit,” Atkinson recalled. “We used teak furniture to smuggle the heroin and we were getting a shipment ready. Frank barged in and went right to the back. ‘What are you doing?’ Frank asked me. “I was caught of guard, and didn’t want him to know how I was moving drugs. The only thing I could think of to say was: ‘We are making coffins.’”

Later at the 1976 trial of Atkinson and several of his associates, trial testimony revealed that teak furniture was one of the major ways Atkinson’s organization shipped drugs to the U.S. There is no mention of any “Cadaver Connection.”

So did coffins or the bodies of dead GIs from the Vietnam War play any role in the trafficking of heroin to the U.S.? DEA agents who investigated the Atkinson drug ring said no evidence was ever found to verify that coffins were used. “There were rumors for years that Atkinson was shipping heroin via coffins carrying the bodies of dead GIs back to the U.S.,” explained Chuck Lutz, a retired DEA agent who was stationed at the agency’s Bangkok bureau in the 1970s and investigated Atkinson. “It was never proven, although we had our suspicions.”

On one occasion, an Atkinson associate was arrested on a plane transporting him back to the U.S. “He carried false papers, but when we searched the coffins on the plane we found nothing,” Lutz recalled.

The media, however, jumped on the story, and helped create the myth of the Cadaver Connection, one that has been fueled by the movie “American Gangster.” Hundreds of articles have been written that treat the “Cadaver Connection” as fact. Frank Coyle, AP entertainment writer, noted that “this mess happened partially because journalists have been relying on secondary sources removed from the actual events.”

Today, DEA agents who investigated the Atkinson organization believe that the former career military man had nothing to do with a Cadaver Connection and dismiss the idea that Frank Lucas could engineer such a drug distribution network as defying common sense.

In order for the “Cadaver Connection” to function, Lucas, who was never in the U.S. military and did not live in Asia, would have needed a main heroin connection in Thailand and then would have had to find a way to smuggle the heroin to Vietnam and the mortuary office at Tan Son Nhut from which the bodies were sent home to the U.S. There, Lucas would have had to recruit and bribe people to place the heroin inside the coffins or actual bodies. Next he would have needed to corrupt the entire transportation system from the mortuary to the U.S. Once the bodies arrived in the U.S., there would have to be more corrupt personnel to remove the heroin from the bodies.

Remarkably, no journalist has asked Lucas probing questions about how his “Cadaver Connection” worked.

The beginning of the end for Ike Atkinson came on January 19, 1975, when he was arrested at his comfortable Goldsboro home and charged with importing heroin into the United States. About a month before his arrest, Atkinson took one of his regular “business” trips to Thailand, where he had helped an associate pack a $3 million heroin consignment into two false-bottom overnight bags that were posted to two different addresses in Fayetteville, North Carolina. An elderly Black woman lived at each address.  The plan was to have a serviceman in Atkinson’s employ visit the elderly women and explain that the bags had been wrongly posted.

The plan had worked before, but this time it went terribly wrong. The first woman to receive one of the bags contacted postal authorities and told them it has been delivered to the wrong address. The second lady thought that someone has sent her a bomb and she promptly alerted police. 

In searching of the overnight bags, the authorities discovered that each bag had a secret compartment hidden under a layer of clothes. Bingo—they found the heroin. Forensic experts dusted up Atkinson’s palm print on one of the plastic bags containing the contraband. “I did not know the U.S. Army was taking palm prints of its servicemen,” Atkinson explained. “I thought all they had on file were my finger prints. In handling the heroin, I wore gloves that just covered my fingers, not my palm.” 

Ike Atkinson’s remarkable drug trafficking organization was dismantled, but today, law enforcement officials still look back and marvel at the international heroin pipeline he pioneered. Ike Atkinson ran his network with the efficiency of a successful businessman and was able to do so for several years right under the nose of the U.S. military. He could have a successful career in the legitimate business, many authorities who investigated him believe, but he loved the excitement, the flirting with the risk that came with the international drug trade

Convicted of drug trafficking charges in 1976, Ike Atkinson paid a severe price for his adventure. He spent the next 31 years in prison.

Ron Chepesiuk is the author and co-producer of a book and documentary titled “Superfly: the True Untold Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster” www.franklucasamericangangster.com

He is currently writing a book about Ike Atkinson, his life and times.