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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

32. Smuggling Heroin Inside the Corpses of Dead GIs

Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas in American Gangster. IMDb

Frank Lucas (1930 – 2019), whose criminal career was featured in the 2007 blockbuster, American Gangster, is perhaps the most famous African American criminal. Born and raised in North Carolina, Lucas claimed he was traumatized into a life of crime after witnessing his twelve-year-old cousin get his brains blown out by the KKK for his “reckless eyeballing” of a white woman.

While the movie took artistic license with Lucas’ life and career, it got the broad strokes right. He really was a big wheel in the heroin trade and was one of America’s biggest drug dealers in the 1960s and 1970s. During the Vietnam War, he smuggled heroin into the US inside the bodies of dead American soldiers – or at least inside their coffins.

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.