Max Collins - American Gangster

Pretty soon the two men — who by now had been friends much longer than they’d been adversaries — stood on the sidewalk near Richie’s parked car. The street sign Frank was looking up at said: 116TH STREET AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS BOULEVARD.

“Frederick Douglass Boulevard?” Frank asked, dumbfounded. “What was wrong with just plain Eighth Avenue?”

Richie chuckled. “You don’t have a sense of history, Frank.”

“Bull shit . I got too much sense of history, is my problem. Look at this street. Everything Bumpy predicted, a hundred years ago, has come true — corner groceries are gone now. Chain stores everywhere.”

“It’s a franchise world,” Richie said.

But without Blue Magic, Frank thought.

Frank shook his head and grinned. “I used to sit here in my old beater car, with Eva? She hated it, but I liked it ’cause I could be invisible, and watch my street, watch everything goin’ down. But it’s not my street anymore. And I don’t even have a car.”

Or Eva .

Right across the street was where Frank had shot Tango Black, a lifetime or two ago. This memory he didn’t share with his attorney. The fruit stand he’d shot Tango in front of, it was gone. And his favorite diner.

In the sign of a store labeled nike was a huge painting of basketball star Michael Jordan, and a big sign saying JUST DO IT.

“Just do what ?” Frank asked.

“What?”

“What the fuck is that? Just do what?”

Richie smiled. “Sneakers. Expensive ones. People get killed over them.”

“Over shoes? Who the fuck would buy those ugly things, much less shoot somebody over ’em?”

“You need a better lawyer than me to come up with an argument for that.”

A car booming with subwoofer bass came rumbling by, bleeding rap. Frank stared at the vehicle with a pained look, and suddenly he remembered Bumpy staring at that electronics-emporium window, the day the great man dropped dead on the street.

Casually, maybe too casually, Richie asked, “Your brothers know you’re out?”

“Haven’t talked to them in years. Better that way — for them. I don’t know where they are. Went back home to Greensboro, I guess, when they got out. Hope they’re leading straight lives.”

Richie nodded.

Frank was taking in the strange storefronts. “What the hell am I gonna do now? Be a janitor or some shit? What do I know how to do on this strange fuckin’ planet? How am I gonna live?”

“I told you,” Richie said, “I wouldn’t let you starve. I got legwork needs doing.”

“Yeah, you told me, but you can barely take care of yourself, ’cause of all your, what-you-call-it, pro boner shit.” Frank nodded toward a pay phone down on the corner. “One little phone call, Richie, I could be back in business.”

“You’d need a different lawyer.”

“I won’t . I’m just saying I could .”

“And I could go to the cops and help put your evil ass back in jail.”

“Uh-oh — look out.”

Richie swivelled to see what Frank was looking at: a trio of young hoods swaggering up the sidewalk like they owned it and everything around it, baggy pants, bandanas tied around their heads, dripping with what they were calling bling bling these days.

Frank was right in their way, but he didn’t move, which forced one kid to squeeze between him and a parking meter. The kid glared back, obviously about to say something or maybe even do something...

... but something about the expressionless expression on Frank’s old-school face made the kid think better.

One of his pals said, “What?”

But the kid who’d squeezed past Frank had the good sense to let it go. “Nothin’,” he mumbled.

And they bounced on.

Frank glanced at Richie. “Hell. Every idiot gets to be young once.”

“You think?”

The man who once owned 116th Street had no idea what lay ahead, but he knew one thing: he was alive today when he should have been dead and buried, a hundred times over. So he was ahead of the game.

“Let’s get out of here,” Frank said.

“Where to?”

“I don’t care. Just some other direction.”

As Richie was getting behind the wheel, Frank said, “Tell me the truth, Rich — when you were first investigating me, you couldn’t believe I’d pulled off that Southeast Asia connection, could you? An uneducated black man, come up with a slick smuggling operation like that? You just couldn’t buy it. I mean, man, in my own twisted way, I really did something. Admit it.”

“You really did,” Richie granted. “In your own twisted way.”

And the two friends drove out of Harlem.

Although this novel is based on the screenplay by Steven Zaillian, I am also indebted to the original basic source material, Mark Jacobson’s fascinating August 14, 2000, New York magazine article, “The Return of Superfly.”

As you may have gathered from a passage in the text, the somewhat cryptic chapter titles make use of “brand names” of heroin in Harlem in the early ’70s (listed in the New York magazine article).

Despite its basis in fact, Mr. Zaillian’s fine screenplay is a fictionalized take on events in the lives of Richard Roberts and Frank Lucas. This novel takes further liberties with this fact-based tale, and the “Richie Roberts” and “Frank Lucas” in these pages must be viewed as highly fictionalized characterizations (as should “Nicky Barnes”). In interviews, for example, Mr. Roberts has made clear that his depiction as a womanizer during his first marriage was a fiction created for the film to make him seem “less vanilla.”

My thanks to Cindy Chang of Universal Pictures for providing stills and other materials throughout the writing of this novel; and to Tor editor Jim Frenkel, who was always available for help and support. Thanks also to my agent and friend, Dominick Abel.

As usual my wife, writer Barbara Collins, was my first reader and editor, and I appreciate her help and encouragement, which began long before I ever knew I’d be writing this novel, specifically on our honeymoon in Chicago, when I took her to see Cotton Comes to Harlem.