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Bonkers Crimes and Criminals In History

Khalid Elhassan February 7, 2020 32 min

Thomas Blood - Royal Academy of Arts — Colonel Blood Stealing the Crown Jewels. Royal Academy of Arts

31. Making it In the Big Apple

After a few years of petty crimes, such as mugging drunks outside bars, Frank Lucas got a job at a pipe company when he was sixteen. His employment ended when his boss walked in on his daughter and Lucas having sex. In the ensuing fight, the budding hoodlum knocked out the outraged father with a pipe blow to the head. Then figuring in for a penny, in for a pound, he stole $400 from the company till and fled to New York City.

There, Lucas met and became the protege of Bumpy Johnson, Harlem’s crime boss. However, Lucas was given to stretching the truth, or outright fibbing, so the details of his early life, which are based on his own accounts, should be taken with a grain of salt. When Bumpy Johnson died in 1968, he left Harlem up for grabs, and Lucas grabbed as much turf as he could.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.