Frank Lucas - Depictions in Media

Depictions in Media

Lucas' life was dramatized in the 2007 Universal Pictures crime film American Gangster, in which he was portrayed by Denzel Washington. The film grossed more than $US127 million, and was met with generally positive reviews. In an interview with MSNBC, Lucas expressed his excitement about the film and amazement at Denzel Washington's portrayal, though he admitted to several news outlets that only a small portion of the film was true, and that much of it was fabricated for narrative effect. In addition, Richie Roberts criticized the film for portraying him in a custody battle while in real life he never had a child; he also criticized the portrayal of Lucas, describing it as "almost noble".

Sterling Johnson, Jr., a federal judge who served as a special narcotics prosecutor and assisted the arrest and trial of Lucas, described the film as "one percent reality and ninety-nine percent Hollywood." In addition, Johnson described the real life Lucas as "illiterate, vicious, violent, and everything Denzel Washington was not." Former DEA agents Jack Toal, Gregory Korniloff, and Louis Diaz filed a lawsuit against Universal saying that the events in the film were fictionalized and that the film defamed them and hundreds of other agents. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon. While McMahon noted that the intertitle that appears at the end of the film was "wholly inaccurate", in that Lucas' cooperation did not lead to the convictions, and admonished that "It would behoove a major corporation like Universal (which is owned by a major news organization, NBC) not to put inaccurate statements at the end of popular films", she stated that the film failed to meet legal standards of defamation because it failed to "show a single person who is identifiable as a DEA agent".

Many of Lucas' other claims, as presented in the film, have also been called into question, such as being the right hand man of Bumpy Johnson, rising above the power of the Mafia and Nicky Barnes, and that he was the mastermind behind the Golden Triangle heroin connection of the 1970s. Ron Chepesiuk, a biographer of Frank Lucas, deemed the story a myth. Associated Press entertainment writer Frank Coyle noted that "this mess happened partially because journalists have been relying on secondary sources removed from the actual events."