Frank Matthews built one of the most powerful drug trafficking empires in American history, escaped with the equivalent of more than $100 million in today's money, and vanished without leaving a trace.
Only Frank Matthews knows how he did it.
Ranked by the DEA among the top 10 drug traffickers in United States history, Matthews lived an extraordinary life. Yet few people are familiar with his name.
Operating from Brooklyn during the 1960s and 70s, this young African-American kingpin controlled one of the most formidable criminal organizations the world has ever witnessed, all while still in his twenties.
His wealth was estimated at $300 million, equivalent to roughly $2 billion today. It was an astronomical fortune built through heroin and cocaine distribution across the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.
His trafficking network operated completely independent of mafia influence, which was exceptionally uncommon for an African-American gangster and, frankly, for any American criminal at that time.
By breaking free from mafia control, Matthews surpassed his predecessor, Bumpy Johnson, and even accumulated more wealth than Frank Lucas, the heroin dealer immortalized in the film American Gangster.
Yet most people have never heard his story. Perhaps Hollywood didn't want to glorify a criminal who successfully beat the system.
Imagine a gangster film where the protagonist escapes with all the money at the end. That is precisely what Frank Matthews accomplished, vanishing off the face of the planet with his girlfriend and over $100 million in cash while scheduled to appear in court.
He had been identified as one of the largest, if not the largest, heroin traffickers in the United States. He was in a league of his own, and he was not only an organizer but a businessman.
There have been many recent movies about Lucas being the king of drugs. That is not true. Matthews was the number one heroin pioneer, and those who studied him say he was definitely smarter than Frank Lucas.
Where he is today, God only knows. Many believe he is alive, and the agents who worked on the case to this day believe he is still alive, precisely because he was smart enough to stay gone.
The life of Frank Matthews is an absolute enigma, and his early life is even more puzzling. We genuinely know very little about it.
The explanation is simple: numerous contradictory stories from people who claim they knew him.
Ricky Johnson, a Durham native, the North Carolina city where Frank Matthews originated, explains that you hear countless stories about Frank Matthews and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. Everyone has a different account of growing up with him, and much of what you hear is nothing more than rumor.
Another Durham resident confirms this sentiment. Many people enjoy fabricating stories so they can share the spotlight, claiming they worked with Frank or sold drugs for him, only to be revealed as younger than Matthews and not from the same generation. They simply want to be connected to the legend.
As for those who genuinely knew him, they typically refuse to discuss it. A Durham native who claims to have known Frank explains that people from there will not speak openly about him. They either suspect you are with law enforcement or worry they might say something that could return to haunt them.
People there are careful. Many believe Frank Matthews is still alive, and you never know who might be listening or what information could reach him.
Still, certain facts about his formative years can be established.
Frank Larry Matthews came from Durham, North Carolina. He was born there on February 13, 1944, into a family he barely experienced.
We know virtually nothing about his father. His mother passed away when he was only four years old, and from that point forward young Matthews was raised by his aunt, who accepted him and raised him as her own child.
He lived in the most impoverished neighborhood of Durham, a city famous at that time for hosting one of the most affluent black communities in the nation despite the segregation that existed.
A Durham native and friend of Matthews remembers that during the segregation era, Durham had everything a black person could desire. There was substantial black wealth per capita and more black millionaires than any other city in North Carolina.
That environment gave young blacks the motivation to strive for achievement, and Frank was certainly influenced by it, undoubtedly inspired by all the successful black entrepreneurs in Durham.
Al Bradley, an author who has written extensively about Frank's life, observes that Matthews must have witnessed numerous black-owned businesses and successful black men during his childhood. That later provided him the confidence to bypass the Italian mafia in the drug business, which was unprecedented at the time.
Something in Matthews's upbringing gave him the boldness to walk fearlessly into a world that didn't respect him.
Frank established his presence from a young age, particularly with his classmates and the children in his neighborhood. He appeared to be a natural leader whom peers his age wanted to follow.
People who knew him as a youth consistently used the same two descriptions: strong and charismatic. Those qualities would eventually enable Frank to compete with New York's most dangerous gangsters.
At school, however, the situation was completely different. Frank lacked commitment and appeared uninterested in his education. What he preferred was being on the streets, an environment where he thrived like a fish in water.
Naturally, he abandoned school at a young age. All he cared about was earning money. As one of his childhood friends remembers, even back then he was completely focused on money. Frank was a hustler.
Frank Matthews could also be kind to those close to him. However, you didn't want to cross him, because he could become violent. As another associate notes, Frank was a natural who would fight anyone over anything.
He could, however, be distant and guarded. As another friend discloses, people boasted that they knew Frank, but they didn't truly know him. You could never really get close to Frank.
As a teenager, he led a gang involved in various minor crimes, including stealing chickens from a local farm, which resulted in his arrest at age 14.
He subsequently enrolled in a hairdressing school but only remained there a few months. According to a Durham native, this was because Frank had been caught stealing barber's equipment.
Not long after that, the same source encountered Matthews on Fayetteville Street. He told him he was heading to New York to make money.
Frank departed his hometown of Durham in the early 60s to pursue his fortune. Still a teenager, he set off to chase his dreams of wealth by traveling northeast, initially to Philadelphia.
He remained there approximately one year. During this period, he worked as a barber and numbers collector for an illegal lottery operation. Through this illegal enterprise, which was common at the time, Frank encountered other ambitious young people who, like him, were seeking to earn money.
But Frank didn't remain long in Philadelphia. In 1963, or possibly 1964, he departed for New York, a predictable decision for an ambitious gangster according to Roger Geret, a police detective who had investigated him.
New York is a city of opportunity for an ambitious gangster as well as for those who want to earn an honest living.
Frank relocated to Brooklyn and continued doing what he had been doing in Philadelphia, working as a hairdresser while organizing illegal gambling. He maintained this activity for some time before growing tired of the numbers racket and transitioning to a more lucrative business: drug dealing.
Frank quickly noticed that the black drug dealers in his neighborhood were making substantial profits, so it didn't take long for him to decide to join them.
As Inspector Roger Geret notes, Frank woke up one morning and decided to abandon the barber's white jacket. Frank told himself he was going to be the man who wears the $300 silk suits and drives a Lincoln.
During the 60s and 70s, an illegal substance spread massively throughout New York: heroin. At the time, the drug was generating a genuine epidemic, fueling violence and chaos in the black community.
One of the city's former police officers recalls that the year following King's assassination, there were over 2,000 homicides in New York. The majority occurred in Harlem, and he estimated about 85% were drug-related.
It became so severe that if an officer working in Harlem issued someone a ticket for double parking, it could easily escalate to a small riot. That is how unstable Harlem was in the late 1960s.
Drug dealers like Frank Matthews and Nicky Barnes became heroes because people viewed them as challenging a system that wasn't working.
Frank capitalized on the situation and entered the thriving drug trade. He had no alternative but to establish contact with the criminal organization that controlled the supply and distribution of heroin throughout New York: La Cosa Nostra.
In the 1960s, the drug trade on the US East Coast, particularly in black communities, was dominated by New York's five major mafia families: the Gambinos, the Luccheses, the Bonannos, the Genoveses, formerly Luciano, and the Colombos, formerly Profaci.
For a period, the trade was controlled by Jewish gangsters, notably Arnold Rothstein, an organized crime figure who as early as the 1920s understood the profitable potential of this illegal trade, helping to organize and expand it in America.
Then in the 1930s, the Italian mafia, seeking to diversify after Prohibition, partnered with the Jewish underworld in drug trafficking before monopolizing the market in the subsequent decade.
After World War II, heroin trafficked by the mafia was imported from Italian refineries. These refineries shut down after the Italian government decided to prohibit heroin manufacturing in the early 50s.
Without options, the mafia searched for alternative sources of supply. This is where the French Connection emerged, with the establishment of an even more sophisticated smuggling network where opium was cultivated in Turkey, then transported to France for processing in clandestine laboratories, and finally distributed throughout the United States.
This network, which flourished in the 50s and 60s, allowed the American mafia to continue trafficking drugs in the United States and New York.
To enter this market and begin selling his first kilograms of heroin, Frank Matthews had to work through La Cosa Nostra. He attempted this by trying to establish a partnership with the Gambino and Bonanno families, but for whatever reason, they rejected him.
Many would have been discouraged by this rejection, but not Frank. He was young, ambitious, and determined to establish himself in the drug business. So he persisted until he discovered another opportunity.
That opportunity came through Spanish Raymond Marquez, an acquaintance of Frank's known at the time as the king of the underground lottery in Harlem. He had connections which he shared with Frank, introducing him to a Cuban gangster named Rolando Gonzalez Nunez, a major cocaine supplier who in the 1960s was among the biggest cocaine dealers in New York before fleeing to Venezuela due to legal troubles.
Frank connected with Rolando and the agreement was finalized. He purchased his first kilogram of cocaine for $20,000.
The relationship quickly evolved into a drug trafficking network. The Cuban trafficker regularly shipped him large quantities of cocaine and heroin from South America, and Frank expanded his operation by reselling the product in New York.
It didn't take him long to establish himself, becoming one of the city's major drug dealers in just one year.
At that time, Venezuela was one of the Latin American countries where La Cosa Nostra was established for drug trafficking. It was a strategic location, especially due to its geographical proximity to the United States.
It was an ideal base which the French Connection utilized to transport its heroin to Latin America and distribute it to Miami, one of the primary entry points to the United States for drug trafficking.
The Corsicans, with their capacity to infiltrate and corrupt governments, were responsible for transporting the drugs to Venezuela. Then the Cubans would ship the heroin to the United States before it was distributed nationwide, including New York, where Frank, through his collaboration with the French Connection and the Cubans, had become one of the city's largest dealers.
Ultimately, Frank was the complete opposite of La Cosa Nostra, who sold their drugs at excessive prices with no concern for product quality.
It wasn't long before his network expanded even further, supplying drugs to nearly 21 different states, particularly on the east coast of the United States. It never reached California, but given time, it certainly could have dominated the entire country.
As US federal prosecutor William Callahan reports, if Matthews hadn't been stopped as he was in 1972, he would have eventually controlled the national scene and then he would have become a truly international kingpin. Callahan believed Matthews was so ambitious that this could have been his ultimate goal.
Frank Matthews's profits from heroin and cocaine trafficking were staggering. It is said that he earned up to $600,000 daily and that his fortune approached $300 million, equivalent to $2 billion today, a fortune he accumulated in just four years.
According to Liddy Jones, a former associate of Frank's, no gangster in New York at the time earned more money than him. The Italian mafia made substantial money, but they couldn't match Frank. He had more money than the mob.
Jones then shares an anecdote from the early 70s. A good friend told her she knew somebody in Brooklyn who could supply all the heroin she needed. Her friend was close with an associate of Frank. She requested five keys and received them for $22,000 per key.
She started making really good money from her connection to Frank Matthews, and she discovered she wasn't anything special. All the top drug dealers along the east coast were obtaining their drugs from Frank.
It was remarkable to deal with him. He never actually counted the money. You could have short-changed him thousands of dollars and Frank wouldn't have noticed.
Five years after his arrival in New York, Frank Matthews had become the biggest drug kingpin in the city. Even though he was barely in his twenties, he had established his own drug trafficking network completely independent of the mafia, which was quite an achievement for an African-American gangster.
It is remarkable to observe what he accomplished as a self-made man and how he built a criminal empire independently. The only people in organized crime history comparable to Matthews are Lucky Luciano and Pablo Escobar.
Frank can indeed be compared to Luciano and Escobar in the sense that, like them, he was the organizer and coordinator of summits between kingpins.
One was in Atlanta in October 1971, during which he invited the country's biggest African-American and Hispanic drug traffickers with the objective of improving the distribution of heroin and cocaine.
The other was in Las Vegas the following year during the fight between Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry. It was a meeting where similar topics were discussed, such as the necessity to establish stronger independent relationships with the Corsican and Cuban mafia to liberate themselves from the control of the Italian-American mafia.
An American anti-drug agent recalls that when they started checking the license plates and the intelligence on who was in attendance, they could see it was a gathering of the who's who of black organized crime. Matthews was the reason they came. At the time, he truly was the country's biggest black kingpin.
It was then that the authorities began to take a closer interest in him.
Las Vegas was a location where Frank Matthews frequently visited. Like many drug dealers, he loved the city that had legalized gambling. Frank went there to gamble, to enjoy himself, but also to launder his money.
As prosecutor William Callahan notes, they heard Frank would bring duffel bags filled with cash to a casino and hand them to a cashier. The casino would take 15 to 18% for laundering his money.
The peculiar thing was that the authorities didn't even have him on their radar. Frank Matthews had illegally built his fortune and risen to the pinnacle of the underworld, and nobody in law enforcement seemed aware of it.
In 1970, Matthews's name didn't appear on any of the major criminal violators lists maintained by the authorities. He was a non-entity.
In fact, it wasn't until shortly after the Las Vegas summit in 1972 that the police finally began tapping his phone.
It was the investigative group known as Group 12 that seriously examined his case. Its objective was to find a method to indict drug kingpin Frank Matthews.
The investigators included William Callahan, whose responsibility was to coordinate the investigation, and Gerard Miller, a DEA agent with 20 years of experience in organized crime.
Group 12 needed to gather all the evidence they could to prove that Matthews was involved in drug trafficking. This was not an easy task, considering that Frank's only criminal record was for stealing chickens.
Besides, Gerard Miller couldn't comprehend how such an influential drug trafficker had managed to evade police attention so far, and how an African-American in his twenties could be involved in drug trafficking in almost 21 states of the country.
It was a perplexing observation for the agents, including Miller, who said he hated to admit it, but Frank was ahead of them from the beginning.
The investigation was therefore not easy to conduct, especially as Group 12 was under considerable pressure from its superiors to produce results, and a shortage of resources didn't help matters.
The agents only had three months to produce something significant, which was very limited, especially to apprehend a gangster of Matthews's caliber. In reality, it would have required several years of investigation to achieve a convincing result.
But Gerard Miller and his colleagues did their best with the resources at their disposal. It was thanks to them that Frank Matthews's telephone calls began to be intercepted.
In 1972, the US anti-drug authorities provided their support to the case, followed by Interpol and the US Tax Service, with whom Group 12 was collaborating closely to pursue the drug kingpin.
Together, they succeeded in locating and seizing assets belonging to Frank, including several real estate properties.
The investigators then attempted to follow his car whenever possible, but Frank was faster than them and always escaped, breaking every conceivable traffic rule.
Frank was probably under the influence of cocaine during these chases, or perhaps he knew in advance that he was being monitored. Corruption was widespread in the NYPD at the time.
Either way, it wasn't worth continuing for Gerard Miller, who explains that it didn't really matter. They knew it was pointless to follow him. He didn't seem to fear anything.
He once opened the trunk of his car in broad daylight, removed a kilogram of drugs, and handed them to an individual in plain view of everyone, as if Frank Matthews didn't care about law enforcement surveillance.
But it was only a matter of time before things shifted in the investigators' favor.
In the early 70s, Frank Matthews's network continued to supply the United States with illegal substances and generate millions of dollars in revenue. Group 12's investigation progressed to the point where it caused the first damage to the drug kingpin's empire.
It began with the arrest of several of his associates. The arrests followed one another over time, with people occasionally cooperating, giving Group 12 more and more evidence to strengthen their case.
After a year's investigation, the authorities finally had solid evidence to bring down Frank Matthews. All that remained was to arrest him.
The arrest occurred at 11 a.m. on January 5, 1973. Frank was at Las Vegas International Airport with his girlfriend, flying to Los Angeles, when the authorities intercepted him to place him in handcuffs.
Shortly after, they had obtained an arrest warrant for tax fraud and conspiracy to traffic drugs. Matthews had attempted between April and September 1972 to sell 18 kilograms of cocaine in Miami with an estimated value between $1 million and $4.5 million.
So drug kingpin Frank Matthews was finally arrested. All that remained was to await his trial, scheduled for seven months later.
At the bail hearing, which occurred the day following his arrest, Frank displayed a certain arrogance toward William Callahan. They were literally face to face. He told them that they had nothing on him and that he would be released in no time.
Frank had regained his freedom and was once again leading his criminal organization. For the investigators, this made it difficult to monitor him before the trial.
Police Inspector Roger Geret testifies that they couldn't keep tabs on Matthews. They were stretched thin and simply didn't have the manpower to watch him 24/7. All they could do was hope and pray he would keep showing up in court.
Hope was all the police had, because ultimately there was nothing preventing Frank Matthews from taking his belongings and disappearing with his entire fortune.
It must be said that he was facing a life sentence. And in any case, the heroin market was increasingly unstable due to the gradual dismantling of the French Connection. Based on this reality, there was nothing stopping him from fleeing.
That is precisely what happened on July 2, 1973, when the accused Frank Larry Matthews never appeared for the trial that was supposed to send him to prison. The drug kingpin had vanished.
Reggie Collins, a drug dealer at the time, claims he was one of the last friends Frank saw before he disappeared. It was 4:00 a.m. and they were at Flaps on 119th Street. Frank said he was leaving town and not coming back. Collins watched him drive away in a 1972 Ford Thunderbird, black body, white top, and never saw him again.
The DEA offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who could help capture him. This was the highest reward since the one offered for John Dillinger in 1931.
The authorities distributed thousands of wanted posters across the country, receiving numerous calls from people claiming to have seen the fugitive. Unfortunately, these leads went nowhere.
The hunt for Frank Matthews intensified and the DEA searched the world for him, having no doubt they would capture him eventually.
Glenn Chisum, one of the investigators involved in the search, recalls that it was the biggest manhunt in DEA history. It was exciting to be part of the team, but frustrating as well. It appeared as if they had mountains of evidence, but as they moved forward, the leads seemed to vanish into thin air.
The investigators therefore hoped he wasn't there, because it would have been virtually impossible to capture him.
The investigation group responsible for finding Matthews received hundreds of leads from around the world. It was as if Matthews could be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
Getting information from interviewees was also extremely difficult. As Glenn Chisum reports, during the entire time he was involved with the investigation, he never interviewed anybody who actually knew anything about Frank's whereabouts.
They would say invariably that if they knew where Frank was, they would not tell them, because Frank was generous with his money. Strangely, nobody seemed willing to provide any information about Frank Matthews.
The investigators therefore interviewed other people, such as Barbara Hinton, Matthews's former wife, with whom he had three children.
They interviewed Barbara at her liquor store. The store was sparsely stocked and didn't appear to be profitable. Barbara struck Chisum as being bitter. He didn't know if she was that way personally or if she was upset that Frank had left her. In any case, they believed she didn't know anything.
Al Parish, Glenn Chisum's colleague on the Frank Matthews case, also shares his impressions of the interview with Barbara Hinton. It didn't seem that Hinton had any recent contact with Matthews.
What kind of man abandons his kids and doesn't appear again? Surely, if he was alive, he would have stayed in contact with Barbara for the sake of the kids. Parish just didn't understand it.
In any case, the investigators continued their work, which brings us to January 28, 1974, the day Glenn Chisum and Al Parish went to Madison Square Garden in New York to watch the second fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
The objective was to catch Frank Matthews, a devoted Muhammad Ali fan. The two investigators had been informed that Frank had undergone cosmetic surgery to modify his features and thus remain incognito.
Glenn Chisum recalls that he was really excited. He was going to an Ali-Frazier fight and catch a big fugitive, too. The experience was really something for a young agent like him.
That day, at least 20,000 people attended the legendary fight. The agents arrived early to observe the crowd and attempted to take photographs, but nothing. Not a single sign of Frank Matthews. It was another failure.
A year passed and the investigation group, which included Glenn Chisum and Al Parish, had not made one bit of progress.
It turned out that the investigators had spent an enormous amount of time searching for clues, examining every piece of evidence, and traveling across the United States and abroad to follow up potential leads, and ultimately had achieved very little.
In the end, they knew as much about Matthews's disappearance as they did at the start. That status quo prompted the DEA to disband the investigation group.
The DEA didn't have its act together. The investigation was then handed over to the US Marshals, who took up the case from the beginning given the scarcity of information on the fugitive.
But here too, as time went on, leads became increasingly rare. The DEA, which had kept the Matthews file open and continued the search, then saw a new generation of agents arrive in the following decades, who certainly knew Frank but had other priorities.
This was a time when major drug traffickers in Colombia and Mexico were monopolizing all the attention of the American authorities, and the Frank Matthews case was no longer the DEA's priority.
The US Marshals continued to search, then examined more closely the three sons Frank had left behind. That is when they learned that one of them was in prison for stealing cars.
This was surprising, as Frank was known to be a good father. To go from a caring father to a neglectful one was strange.
A suspicion shared by Mike Pizzy, who states that if Matthews had $20 million when he left and he was still alive, what was his son doing stealing cars? He didn't feel that Frank had reached out to his family since he disappeared.
Had he deliberately cut himself off from those closest to him to ensure an effective escape? If so, it was surprising.
What if, after all, Frank Matthews was dead? Of course, no fingerprints or traces of his body have been discovered, but there are theories that point in that direction. Many people interviewed by the investigators have said that Frank Matthews is no longer with us.
Deborah Nightwine, a member of the US Marshals Service, seems to share this opinion. The Matthews investigation was the most frustrating case she ever worked. She literally worked the case 24/7 and followed through on every lead. By the end of the assignment, she began thinking that maybe the reason she didn't find anything solid was because Frank Matthews was dead.
Mike Peasy also believes in this hypothesis. Being the ultimate optimist, he originally believed they could find and arrest him. His deputies and he worked many cases where the investigation took them far and wide.
Usually, they had a piece of information or a lead that was solid, even in cases where the fugitive was a month ahead of them or a state or county away from the last sighting or the last verifiable piece of information.
But he doesn't recall a case from the past 40 or more years that involves a fugitive fleeing with a young girlfriend and both of them disappearing without a trace.
A plausible theory, in the sense that Frank didn't like the mafia and the mafia didn't like him either. First of all, we know that some New York mobsters didn't appreciate Frank moving into their territory.
As Gerard Miller explains, we know the mob was really upset with Frank's presence in Todt Hill. We learned that the mob sent a delegation to see Frank and tell him he was out of his league.
La Cosa Nostra was in fact so upset that Group 12 even began to receive anonymous intelligence from sources living across the street from the Matthews residence.
Whether Frank Matthews escaped to live out his days in secret or was silenced by the criminal world he defied, the answer remains as elusive as the man himself. What is certain is that his story, a self-made kingpin who out-earned the mob and then beat the system entirely, deserves to be told.