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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

28. Walking the Straight-ish and Narrow-ish

After he ratted out his former colleagues, Frank Lucas and his family were placed in the Witness Protection Program in 1977. Between his testimony and evidence, he gave the authorities, over a hundred drug-related convictions were secured. He was rewarded for his cooperation in 1981 with a sentence reduction to time served plus lifetime parole, and he walked out of prison, a free man.

Lucas was back behind bars in 1984 after he was caught and convicted of trying to swap some heroin and cash for a kilo of cocaine. He was sentenced to seven years, and released in 1991. He walked the straight and narrow or at least was not convicted of anything major, from then until his death in 2019.

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.