The Other Side of the Game
will the real murderous hustlers please stand up
2007-11-09
By William Jelani Cobb

In America history repeats itself but with any luck it gets better lighting and a soundtrack the second time around. In the case of New York and the heroin hustle that nearly pushed it to municipal collapse in the 1970s history has stuttered, delivering American Gangster and Mr. Untouchable to the big screen within a week of each other. Before we get to the neon, the whitewalls and the velvet-lined glory, we need a statement of the semi-obvious: Lucas and Barnes were parasitic gamesmen who pushed counterfeit bliss and real heroin to their own people by the syringeful. Whatever their business acumen and their insights into that unlit corner of American life, there is no index to properly measure the misery they midwifed.

That kind of preamble is necessary because in the course of the last decade and a half, hip hop has sponsored a kind of hustler’s rehab, transforming the image of the drug dealer from stone-hearted stealer of lives to the epitome of urban success. And although both men were incarcerated well before Rapper’s Delight ever reached the airwaves it is clear that hip hop’s enduring fixation with the drug hustle is at least partly responsible for the appearance of these cinematic portraits.

Here we have Denzel Washington bringing to life Lucas who essentially did for the heroin trade what Wal-Mart has done for American retail culture: tapped into cheap overseas markets and undercut the competition. In the skin-color coordinated hierarchy of organized crime, Lucas achievements were outstanding. In stepping outside the Italian syndicate for his product he became what might have been the first independent gangster in the history of black crime. In Washington’s rendering Lucas comes off as a kind of smooth underworld CEO, closer kin to Jack Welch than Lucky Luciano. In reality, Lucas game is literally surrounded by death -- key to his success was his ability to move nearly pure heroin out of Southeast Asia using the coffins of deceased soldiers returning from Vietnam. For his part, Scott delivers a vision of the city as a bleak depot for broken possibilities, one in which the constant snow flurries are a metaphor for the stone cold nature of the hustle. In the opening scenes we witness Lucas, under the watchful eye of his mentor Bumpy Johnson – played by Clarence Williams III – douse a man with gasoline, set him afire and shoot him in the head with the cavalier demeanor of a man buying a newspaper on his way to work.

That same theme of hustler-as-company man animates Mark Levin’s Mr. Untouchable, a documentary tracing the rise and fall of the city’s most notorious hustler. Leroy "Nicky" Barnes – the thinly veiled inspiration for Nino Brown in New Jack City -- built the largest smack distribution network in the city. If his quality could not match the 98% pure product Lucas was importing he made up for it in the sheer size of his sales force. Given to quoting Melville and dropping grand philosophical gems, Barnes remains as impressed with himself three decades after his downfall as he was at the height of his peacocking glory. His former associates still speak of him with a combination of awe, disdain and fascination. Where Lucas was known to his fellow traffickers and a handful of law enforcement agents, Nicky Barnes became a hustler’s household name. In Barnes’s telling Lucas was an uncultured lout whose organization was known derisively as "the country boys." (As if to crush any lingering belief in honor among dealers, Barnes appears in American Gangster as a loud-talking buffoon who lacks the polish to operate on Lucas’s level.)

Lucas took the term "crime family" literally, employing over two dozen relatives in various parts of his distribution network. Barnes presided over a seven member drug cooperative called The Counsel which was bound together by an oath to "treat my brother as I treat myself." This, of course, begs the obvious question of just who these men considered to be their "brothers" – certainly not the legions of black Vietnam veterans who were used in the misadventure of war and returned home addicted. The irony of course lies in the arbitrary morality that Barnes and Lucas concoct to justify the violation of their own codes.

Given that Levin literally goes straight to the source (Barnes appears in silhouette throughout the film) it’s instantly recognizable that the deposed kingpin was driven by a brand of amoral narcissism. Check the interviews Lucas has given since the debut, though, and a similar strain emerges. Barnes’s downfall was brought about by the visibility generated by a New York Times magazine article that featured him on the cover along with the caption "Mister Untouchable." Lucas comes to the attention of federal agents when he shows up in the front row of the first Ali-Frazier fight bedecked in an unholy Chinchilla ensemble.

Then as now, residents of that world held to a kind of hood Omerta which demanded silence in the face of prosecution. But confronted with the actual consequences of their actions, both men cut deals to inform on their former associates. This is where both Scott and Levin’s films miss the mark. American Gangster and Mr. Untouchable treat this decision to snitch as a departure from the path that their respective subjects traveled in the preceding years. It is a damning flaw that will slip past a good portion of that viewing audience because a sizable portion of it is too young to remember the New York of the 1970s, occupied by a zombie army that constantly scratched, nodded out and float-staggered from one smack hit to the next.

Barnes tells of his lieutenants becoming increasingly independent of him as his time in prison stretched on. His wife begins showing up in public – in his Benz – with another man and his second-in-charge starts an affair with his mistress. When his enforcer balks at an order to kill the wife’s lover and the wayward lieutenant, he decides to play the only card left: dropping dime. In American Gangster Lucas collaborates with Robinson to root out the crooked cops and enforcement agents, ultimately resulting in the convictions of 75% of the city’s narcotics task force. In later interviews, Lucas argues that there is a difference between snitching on cops and snitching on fellow hustlers. These are thin rationales which gave the two the flimsiest of excuses to do what they wanted to do all along. Barnes tells Levin bluntly "I would rather be out here and be considered a snitch than be in there with them and be considered a stand-up guy." The net result is that both men won parole long before many of the people they sent prison.

For all his alleged accomplishments, Lucas remained fundamentally in the same position as black overseers in the old South. His ability to move up in the world was directly tied to his willingness to inflict misery upon his own. Insulating oneself from the visible impact of that line of work requires a particular kind of dwindled soul. In the spate of interviews Lucas has granted since the film premiered what emerges is a man who would do it all again if he had the chance, a man who hoped to sell the public the ridiculous lie that neither he nor Barnes ever killed anyone.

Beyond the initial impact of heroin in derailing the social momentum black America had built in the previous decade, Barnes and Lucas legacy is intertwined with the early spread of HIV in black communities – a plague we continue to struggle with in 2007. It is telling that decades after he moved his first package of H Barnes confesses that he still does not know whether he was a tool of the white men around him, which is to say that at age 75, he has yet to recognize an answer that was obvious to anyone outside the hustle. Or cursed with the knowledge of life on the other side of the spoon.

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, now available from NYU Press:  To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic  

Read dream hampton on American Gangster 

Read a review of American Gangster