American Gangster

Richie and his squad had no way of knowing they were up against not only a new player, but a whole new ballgame, that in fact somebody from the minors had just moved up to the big leagues.

The process started overseas, in a cave in the Golden Triangle, where the poppies were processed, each bulb pierced, its white liquid oozing, changing into filthy liquids in wooden bowls, finally forming a gray paste.

It continued back home, in the Bronx, at the Chemical Bank where Frank Lucas would sit with a respectable Caucasian vice president who wire-transferred a sizable amount overseas to a Bangkok bank, where Frank’s friend, former Master Sergeant Nate Atkins, sat with a respectable Thai banker, who proceeded to convert the transfer to cash.

Nate would carry the ball for a while, sliding cash across a table at his Soul Brothers Bar to a pair of Chinese Triad gangsters.

Then in a tent at a jungle army base in Vietnam, Nate would hand still more cash to the two-star general he and Frank had met on his first East Asian business trip — the military brass had to get their cut, after all.

Nate’s next stop was Vietnam, at a landing strip where the air was chopped by propellers as wounded soldiers on stretchers were lifted onto a transport plane. Nearby, four large crates of Japanese TVs waited under cargo netting. And the pilot of the transport was stuffing more cash in a pouch, after he saluted Nate, as if the master sergeant’s uniform still meant something.

Nate’s role in the process had now played out.

Before long, at dusk at an army base in North Carolina, that transport plane had come and was about to be gone, taxiing for takeoff, leaving behind a pile of discarded TV boxes outside a supply warehouse.

At the perimeter of the base, several black servicemen transferred heavy, taped-up duffel bags from an army jeep into a station wagon, hoisting those that wouldn’t fit inside a roof rack. Two civilians — brothers of Frank Lucas — supervised, helping tie down the duffels with twine.

The Lucas boys headed north in their station wagon, down a rain-slicked highway, canvas tarp atop their vehicle flapping like the tongue of a happy hound. Before long, in the distance, the glow of the Washington Monument beckoned like the American dream coming true.

The process finally got to Harlem, as a black mom exited a discount drugstore into a parking lot, pushing a shopping car loaded down with her baby, bundles of Pampers and several cases of milk sugar.

That milk sugar found its way to Red Top’s apartment, where the ruby-haired woman in charge tended not just to the cutting of the powder, but to the cleanup. Her five table workers, in street clothes now, surgical masks dangling, wiped down surfaces, scales and other apparatus. Tens of thousands of blue cellophane packets of heroin were neatly arranged on two folding tables.

The process was complete.

The product was ready to hit the street.

Richie and his squad were hitting the street, too. But the squad leader’s bulletin board of dope kingpins did not include a shot of Frank Lucas, nor would that name have meant anything to Richie Roberts.