Includes index.

This memoir reveals what really happened to the man whose career was dramatized in the 2007 feature film American gangster. In his own words, Frank Lucas recounts his life as the former heroin dealer and organized crime boss who ran Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lucas realized that in order to gain success he would have to break the Italian mafia's monopoly in New York, so he cut out middlemen and began smuggling heroin into the United States directly from the Golden Triangle, using coffins. Making a million dollars per day selling the purest heroin on the street, Lucas became one of the most powerful crime lords of his time, while rubbing shoulders with the elite in entertainment, politics, and crime.