30. The Ghoulish Smuggling Scheme
After Frank Lucas got established in Harlem, he took to traveling. He eventually ended up in Thailand, where he ran into a US Army sergeant who turned out to be a distant cousin, and who put Lucas in touch with local heroin dealers. The cousins worked out a plan to import heroin from its source in Southeast Asia, bypassing the Italian mafia which had a near total heroin monopoly at the time. The saving were huge: buying heroin at source cost Lucas $4200 a kilo. Buying the same kilo in Harlem from the mafia would have cost him $50,000.
The main difficulty was getting the drugs into the US. The cousins solved it by smuggling heroin inside the coffins of American servicemen killed in the Vietnam War. Lucas claimed that heroin bricks were stuffed inside the cadavers of the fallen. His cousin disputed that, however, and contended that the drugs were smuggled in relatively less ghoulish fashion, in the coffins but not inside the corpses.
