The most iconic scene in the 2007 film American Gangster, in which Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas executes a man named Tango on a crowded Harlem sidewalk and then calmly returns to his breakfast, was based on a murder that never happened. The killing was the foundation of a criminal mythology that Frank Lucas spent decades constructing, and it was a story he eventually admitted was false. In the winter of 2000, magazine writer Mark Jacobson interviewed a nearly 70-year-old Frank Lucas in a government-subsidized apartment in Newark. Lucas was broke, living with little furniture and a broken-down Cadillac.
But he had a story to sell. In the resulting article for New York magazine, Lucas described in vivid detail how he shot Tango four times in the head in broad daylight on 116th Street, calling the victim the most dangerous man in Harlem. That article caught the attention of Hollywood producers and became the basis for American Gangster, which grossed $266 million worldwide. The film’s screenwriter added even more fictional details.
In Frank’s original telling, his brothers were not present and he did not return to a diner breakfast. The movie’s opening sequence was a dramatization of a lie with additional fabrications layered on top. There was one significant problem with the story. Frank Lucas was never charged with any murder.
There is no police report, no arrest record, no coroner’s file, and no witness statements connected to Tango’s death. Years later, Lucas himself began walking back the claim, denying the killing in interviews. The writer Mark Jacobson later acknowledged he was not an investigative journalist and had served as more of a stenographer for Lucas’s claims. The Tango story was not the only fabrication.
Bumpy Johnson’s widow, Mayme Johnson, publicly called Lucas a liar, saying he was never part of her husband’s inner circle and was not present when Johnson died in 1968. She claimed the real right-hand man to Bumpy Johnson was a Harlem hustler named Zack Walker, and that it was Walker who had the confrontation with the feared gangster known as Tango. Lucas, she said, took Walker’s life story and claimed it as his own. Lucas’s claim that he smuggled heroin inside the coffins of dead American soldiers returning from Vietnam was also disputed.
Leslie Ike Atkinson, the man who actually ran the Southeast Asian smuggling operation, flatly denied it, saying he used hollowed-out furniture instead. Investigative journalist Ron Chepesiuk found no evidence or court records to support the coffin story and called it the biggest hoax in the history of the international drug trade. Federal Judge Sterling Johnson, who prosecuted Lucas, said the movie was one percent reality and 99 percent Hollywood. He described the real Lucas as illiterate, vicious, and violent, nothing like the character Denzel Washington portrayed.
Lucas’s claim that he made a million dollars a day was discovered to be an exaggeration, and his claim that he exposed corrupt DEA agents was disputed. Three former DEA agents sued Universal Pictures over that claim, and a judge called it wholly inaccurate. Lucas was also one of the most prolific informants in federal history. His 70-year sentence was reduced to five years after he cooperated extensively, giving up over 100 drug dealers, including his own associates.
A 1984 New York Times headline identified him as a heroin informant. Yet Lucas repeatedly denied in interviews that he had ever testified against anyone. The financial rewards of his mythology were substantial. The movie brought a $300,000 consulting fee, and Denzel Washington and Ridley Scott purchased a $500,000 home for him.
Documentaries on the History Channel and BET paid him as well, and he received a book deal for his autobiography Original Gangster. The total windfall likely exceeded one million dollars. When Lucas first told his stories to Jacobson in that empty apartment, he was bragging the way old gangsters do, never imagining a movie would result. When Hollywood came calling, he was trapped by his own lies and doubled down until they became official history.
Frank Lucas died on May 30, 2019, at age 88, having successfully sold the world a version of himself that was, according to the judge who prosecuted him, one percent reality and 99 percent Hollywood.