Sergeant Smack, Frank Lucas, and the Bangkok Heroin Corpse Connection
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No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld. It's summer 1968. Paris is burning. The Vietnam War is heating up.

An MLK is about to be shot dead. Retired US Army Sergeant Leslie Ike Atkinson is sat on a hulking C-141 military cargo plane from Bangkok, Thailand en route to the US. The plane's engines are booming and the flight's bumpy. But 43-year-old Ike, stocky with a clip throw and a bored moustache,

He's only got eyes and ears for one thing, a military duffel bag, dumped in the corner of the cabin, buried in a pile of luggage. Ike's done these flights a dozen times, from his hometown in North Carolina to casinos in Madrid, Istanbul, Athens, armed with his best pal Herman Jackson and a few party tricks, ready to rip off the high-rolling hoi polloi of post-war Europe.

Ike and Herman are born hustlers. They've been screwing marks over from Goldsboro to Frankfurt, Germany for decades. But this is something way, way different. What Ike's up to in Bangkok has got everything to do with hustle, but he doesn't need loaded dice or magnets. In that bag, bobbing about in the C141, are kilos of number four heroin, purer than anything's been seen before and fine like flour.

Ike's plan is little more than dump the bag, fly on his veteran's ID and pick it up again in the States. Anyone kicks off, he'll just pretend it isn't his. Rocket science, this ain't. But Ike Atkinson's about to level up from Globetrotting Card Shark to Sergeant Smack.

Over the coming years, his high-grade product, produced in the jungles of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, and shipped from a Harlem-themed Bangkok bar where GIs eat collard greens served by Thai girls with hodgepodge afros, that stuff is going to supercharge the American drug epidemic, decimating the poor of New York, D.C., Chicago, everywhere.

Mike uses his Bangkok dive bar to recruit black American troops fed up with the war to ship his stuff.

They'll carry it in film canisters, furniture, false legs, even, it's rumoured, the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers. Some suspect his so-called Asia connection is even sewing heroin into the bodies of the fallen men themselves. Ike Atkinson is on his way to becoming one of the biggest drug lords in the world. He's cutting out the Cosa Nostra, fobbing off the French connection, tricking the Turks. Aye, he says later.

I was the source of all my action. I considered myself a Lone Ranger. Nobody ever brought down a Lone Ranger, of course. And when Ike lands on the East Coast, he picks up his bag and waltzes off the plane without a word. He'll face a dramatic come up and soon enough, though. The story of Ike Atkinson's rise and fall is one of the greatest organized crime stories rarely told. And crucially, there's barely a Frank Lucas in sight. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to the show where we show you how in a gang, a lie really does go further than the truth. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm joined today as ever by my roving reporter co-host, Danny Gold, who I think is about to head out on assignment doing something pretty cool. Is that true? No, nothing cool ever. Give us money, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast and happy holidays.

Yeah, happy holidays. This is coming out, what, like a couple of days before Christmas? Christmas week, yeah. Nice. I'll see if I can get home for Christmas. Doesn't look like I'm going to, but, you know, miracles might happen. Anyway.

We're fresh off the back of your mega episode about Belizean rapper turned Hasid, turned politician Shine, which I knew pretty much nothing about beforehand. So cool. And this show's all about someone whose insane story I think a lot of our listeners will know pretty much nothing about too. And there's a big reason for that. First off though, as always, we've got tons of stuff going up on the Patreon. There's interviews, scripts, reading lists, bonus episodes, and

I mean, we know you're all buying Furbies or Tamagotchis or I don't know, like that dates me pretty badly or whatever other useless stuff kids want this time of year. So why not treat yourself to us instead for the price of a cheap shit coffee? Actually, it doesn't just have to be us instead, does it? You'll get even more of Sean's references from 2008. Wow. That was later than I thought, actually. I'll take it.

So Sergeant Smack and the cadaver connection, that's not a dancehall act, but it's actually one of the most underrated organized crime stories of the 20th century. Like, I really mean that this story is crazy. And perhaps just perhaps one half of the title isn't true at all. But we're going to get there. This is a Hollywood style rags to riches tale. And the reason you don't know about it, well, that's Hollywood, too.

Now, I've used Ridley Scott's American Gangster before to illustrate how Kun Sa's drug empire made its way to the US through famed Jersey Hood Frank Lucas at Superfly. There's that scene where Frank and his Air Force buddy are riding horseback through the Golden Triangle. They're flanked by KMT. That's the Exiled Chinese Nationalist Army.

Actually, true story, the guy who wrote the story American Gangster, I think, is partially based on, Mark Jacobson. He also wrote some of the best stuff on the ghost shadows and the Chinatown Wars from the episode we did maybe five or six weeks back. Ah, cool. Yeah, he's going to come up later on in this show as well because, yeah, that story is, I don't know, a lot of Frank Lucas' stuff is a little bit shifty. Yeah.

I mean, I kind of shat on that film before because of how it showed Khun Sa, but it also pretty much cuts Ike Atkinson out of the whole thing. And he wasn't just a bit part player, this guy. He was the whole deal. There's a bit around half an hour in where Frank heads to a bar in Bangkok's red light district. There's all these guys playing blues and dancing girls and folks smoking dope. And he meets his so-called cousin's husband in the forces who hooks him up in the jungle.

Well, that entire storyline is Frank Lucas grandstanding, lying, cutting out the real brains of the operation. Also rewatching that made me really want to go back to Bangkok so badly. Like I think it's just the soupy noodles. I just want to eat noodles with random shit in it forever.

Yeah, I mean, that's what it is, right? Sure. Just want to go back for the soupy noodles. That's what we call it. Yeah. That Bangkok bar, that exists. But it's way cooler than the film. Yeah, I've always been fascinated by how that era of Bangkok nightlife took off and how it became what it is now. It must have been insane back then. I mean, it's pretty off the hook even today.

And that cousin by marriage in the movie, that's Ike. Yeah, she was related to Frank, but he isn't a serving officer. And Frank certainly isn't the smooth, self-styled, superfly gangster that he made himself out to be. According to Ike, quote, Frank is the dumbest guy I ever met in the drug business.

There you go. He tells a story about when he took Frank to a Buddhist temple on his second or third day in town. And Frank sees people bringing food and gifts for the statue of Buddha there. So he just grabs some apples and starts crying. And like, he asks if Thailand borders the Holy Land. And actually, Frank only visits Bangkok the once. And he stays in the five-star Dusit Thani Hotel. And we'll dump a bit more on Frank Lucas further down this show. Because he really was a bit of a violent fantasist. But,

First off, who is Ike Atkinson and how does he end up quarterbacking one of the biggest drug rackets in history? Now, Leslie Ike Atkinson is born November 19th, 1925. He's the youngest of five with two brothers and two sisters in the town of Goldsboro, North Carolina. When Ike's five or six, his dad walks out and the family's so poor they have to send one of his brothers off to live with a family across town who don't have kids. And Goldsboro at this time is segregated.

And white kids bully and they beat black kids like Ike. There's a community centre in Goldsboro, but if the black children try going there, the whites will throw rocks out the windows like some segregation bunker. Frank says at the time, quote, I wanted to go anywhere in the world where I thought I would be accepted for who I was. So from a very young age, I dreamt of leaving Goldsboro. I wanted to change my life. And the reason there's so much in Ike's words in this is thanks in part to Ron Chepsyk,

Crime writer who I quote tons in the Black Caesar episode. Ron's book, Sergeant Smack, really is the backbone of this episode. And folks should go out and buy his stuff. As ever, reading list, as of the show notes, get on it, pay for my nephew's Charlton shirt this Christmas. Do you know when that book came out? I wonder if it came out after the Jacobson article in the movie. It's about, it actually came out like quite a bit afterwards. I think Jacobson's article is like 2000, I think.

And then the movie came out, I think, 07 or 08. And then this book came out 2010. So it's kind of like him going back. Yeah. Yeah. And if there's anyone out there that wants to do that, we'll, you know, correct the record. You let us know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so Ike's really good in school, right? He's a clever kid. Yeah.

But 1930s Goldsboro doesn't care about intelligent black boys. Says Ike later, quote, I knew I would have done well in school. My life could have gone in a much different direction. Ike does get out of Goldsboro with the military. He works in naval construction in Ithaca, New York, just months after the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 42. And he joins the Navy later that year, having only just turned 17.

And then he heads to Fort Huachuca, Huachuca, Huachuca? Yeah, Arizona for his basic training. And he realizes something. He's really, really good at this stuff. Quote, the military was so easy for me. I think I was born to it. I could take apart a 30 caliber machine gun and do it blindfolded. I could hardly wait to go overseas.

That year, Ike gets married to Helen, a high school sweetheart, but he's always away. The war effort's in full swing, and he's assigned to an all-black company at Fort Bliss, Texas. For Ike, the pinnacle would be getting into the 555th Parachute Infantry, nicknamed the Triple Nickel because of the three fives. These guys were America's first black paratroopers, taken from the original 97th Infantry, or Buffalo Division.

And for those of you wondering, no, they're not necessarily the guys Bob Marley was singing about. Those were the guys fighting Native Americans back in the 19th century. Though their name does derive from it.

Yeah, I was just thinking about that, actually. Yeah, there's like so much interesting history I've stuck on the reading list about this stuff, but it's a little bit out of the story. But read it, guys. Yeah, it's cool. They're among the 700,000 black Americans who volunteered during the Second World War, and they're hoping in part that it's going to forge a path to equality. The Triple Nickel, basically, they want to kill Nazis. But instead, in 1945, they're sent to quell forest fires in Oregon.

Ike discharges from the Navy in 1946 and he applies to join the Triple Nickel, doing jump training. And in that January, he meets Herman Jackson, nicknamed Jack, who becomes his closest friend.

It's not until 47, the year Ike divorces Helen, by the way, that Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9981, issuing, quote, equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, colour, religion or national origin.

But by 1956, pretty much nothing's changed on the ground. And Ike, who's a well-respected master sergeant with six stripes, he writes a letter to the famous Harlem politician, Adam Clayton Powell, saying that, quote, certain commanders tell their classification officers they want so many Negroes in their unit. Ike even offers to go to Washington and lift the lid on this, like, quota, but Powell never replies.

At this point, Ike's being sent to Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany, and he's really into gambling. And he's good at it, and he wins a bit of a rep as a hustler. The problem is, he's a second lieutenant by this time, and gambling with his enlisted men is strictly forbidden. On one night, he takes off his insignia, another crime. Ike wins the money, which he always does, but he's rumbled by a higher-up. He's tossed out the army and handed a 500-buck fine.

Ike loves the forces, though, and he signs up again just 30 days later. Any idea what it was like for American soldiers in Berlin or in Germany at that time? You know, there's that there's a great Netflix show or a medium Netflix show about like right in the postwar era, like late 1940s. And it just seems like super. Yeah, really. I mean, it's fiction, obviously, but just like really wild and cutthroat and all sorts of like black market contraband action going on. And I'm wondering what it was like there.

I bet it was absolute mayhem. I mean, I'm like researching something about gangsters in the 80s in East Germany and it's like complete bedlam. And the whole country is just bombed to shit as well. So it's falling to pieces. I think there's a lot of gang crime at that time, but I haven't seen the show. What's the name of it? Do you know? I forget what it's called. I mean, it has to do with like American soldier there and the serial killer who's his brother. I don't know, man. We'll figure it out later.

So in 1951, the army sends Ike back to Germany. And this time it's Mainz near Frankfurt. Being black, he says, I must have stuck out like a bubba in Harlem. By this time in life, Ike's into the good life.

And he frequents a place called Johnny's Keller in Kaiserslautern, that's a city all the American troops just call K-Town. People know him as a skilled mediator, a people person. And it's in K-Town that Ike gets his first taste of the true gangster life when he meets Robert Johnson, a tall Popeye guy from Greensboro, North Carolina, just two hours from Goldsboro.

Johnson drives a Mercedes, and he's got a beautiful Corsican girlfriend. And he makes his cash count in cards and trafficking contraband military supplies all over Europe. These guys sound like, I don't know, they sound like they're having a lot of fun. Just like really epic 1950s, you know, I don't even know, gambling, yachts, Monaco shit. Like, I really like it. I'm thinking like loafers, no socks, like nice polo shirts, wind through your hair. Pretty James Bond-y. It's pretty cool. And...

That guy's Corsican missus, that's no coincidence either. At this time, the Corsican Mafia is the most powerful crime organisation amongst France's so-called milieu of mobs, and it's recently pioneered the French connection heroin trade, smuggling smack from the former French Indochina, that's Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, into the ports of Europe, especially Marseille, and off into the US.

Yeah, I still want to do a separate Corsican mob French connection episode for sure. Yeah, it's really interesting. I was just like researching something about when they got shut out of Laos by this army general. It's really, really cool. He just like stopped French people getting visas and it stopped them being able to land their little drug planes everywhere. Anyway, Ike's been in the military for a while now, right? And he's getting a sense of this hustle.

He gets busted for gambling one more time in 1959. He gets docked pay, stripes, and he retires in 1963.

he doesn't end his love affair with Europe just yet. Vets can hop on any cargo fight for free with their IDs and Ike alongside his pal Jack work casinos all over the continent loading dice counting cards and just taking this Euro elite for a complete ride. He buys a house back home in Goldsboro and one night he even takes this well-known gambler called Chief for 38 grand in one night. I mean that's like almost a third of a million dollars in today's money.

Ike's doing pretty well for himself at this point. And he sets up this handy hustling ring all over the continent. Hustle, scams, flim flams. I mean, they just seem so much easier back then. What a life. I mean, have you seen NFTs? They seem pretty easy. It's a good point. Valid point.

In 1966, Ike and Jack step it up a notch. Robert Johnson, that's that Popeye guy, the smuggler from K-Town, he's just bought a bar on Bangkok's new Petra Buri Road, right near Nana Plaza, which is one of the city's main red light districts. And it still is now. I think I stayed around that way last time, incidentally. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At this point, the Vietnam War is pretty hot, and there are tons of American GIs rolling through Thailand looking for a good time.

And sure, the Civil Rights Act has just been signed, but that doesn't mean anything in Thailand, and the bars are wildly segregated between white and black soldiers. You'd have country in one place, soul in another, no one mixing. And this bar I can jack by, which they then called Jack's American Star Bar, that's no different.

Only this one's insane. There's a heavy creaking dance floor, red tints along the walls, karaoke and Thai dancing girls are wearing their hair in afros, turning favors upstairs, and guys can order collard greens and fried chicken and they're smoking opium. I mean, it's quite the scene. Ike has a wife called Aether at this point and some kids, but they hate Bangkok and they leave almost straight off the bat. And he just winds up dating a bunch of girls from the bar.

Damn, man. I mean, Bangkok back then. I can only imagine. Bangkok anytime. Travelling anywhere. I'd go, just get me on a plane. Ike and Jack hook themselves up with a new scheme at the bar, and that is exchanging bogus NPCs, or military payment certificates, for dollars. So NPCs are a bit like bonds and the pair of ripping off tons of them, and they're making bank. Soon after, they travel to Hong Kong and learn how to make fake military IDs and sell them on for thousands.

In 1967, a military newspaper called the Overseas Weekly actually runs an expose on Ike Jack Johnson and an Ohio native called Daniel Birch, calling him the quote, Bangkok Four.

But in 1967, America has got bigger fish to fry. Up in northern Laos, a massive battle for control of the region's opium supply has left the sham warlord Khun Sa and his men scattered in the jungle, and Iwani Ratakoni, this rapacious Laotian general, pretty much in control of the world's supply.

And that same year, the US works with Turkey, one of the key poppy producers, to massively reduce the yield there, which hands even more power to the drug lords of the Golden Triangle.

I feel like you got into this a bit in the Kunsa episode, yeah? Yeah, like episode 482 or whatever it was. Yeah, people should definitely check that out, actually, because there's tons more to this, obviously, than I'm saying here. I think two people can kind of tell, but we're just both kind of losing our minds at this point. Yeah, I've probably slept a combined like eight hours in the whole week.

And it's this year, this 1968, with hell kicking off across the Vietnamese border, MLK's death bringing civil rights boiling to the surface of US politics. That's when things suddenly change for Ike Atkinson. Jack's got this beautiful half-Japanese girlfriend called Nataya, and she's hanging out at the bar a bunch. Turns out...

The tire's uncle is one of the biggest opium producers in Thailand, and he's working out the golden triangle where, as I said before, the Laotians, the Burmese rebels, the KMT and all kinds of now turning it into the world's biggest drug market.

This uncle, nicknamed Papa-san. Isn't that like the name of every old Japanese man? Basically, it's like calling something like an old Dominican guy, Poppy. That's kind of what I was thinking as well. I kind of double-guessed myself. But yeah, I think you're right. So this uncle, nicknamed any old guy, he's keen to get the boys from the bar in on the deal. He says the gear they buy off him in Thailand for a couple of grand, it could make up to 150 big in the States. And all they've got to do is get it there.

Ike balks at first. He doesn't take drugs, doesn't much like them either, but the hustle is the hustle. And after some convincing, Ike agrees to set up a heroin smuggling ring out of Jack's American Star Bar, kick-starting his career as a drug lord.

At the time, Jack's renting a place in Bangkok over a klong or canal. If you've been to downtown Bangkok, you know the kind of place it is. Lovely little warrens of homes close to the main temples on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. And it's in this place they buy up to 100 grand of high-grade smack from Papasan, using the bar to ship it out with black GIs they recruit on the dance floor.

Many people in Southeast Asia had the capability to smuggle heroin to the US, he says later, but none had my connections. So,

Ike does the maiden run himself, like we heard about in the intro, in the summer of 68. Then the gang do more runs in August, September, December. Birch gets into the ring, he's shipping high grade to his base in Akron, Ohio, and he teaches Ike how instead of just hauling duffel bags full of heroin straight through military airports, he can be a little more canny by stitching false bottoms into soldiers' AWOL bags. These things are almost never checked, meaning Ike can scale up his operation with the guys from the bar.

Amazingly, at this point, Jack's getting a bit greedy and he's gambling a ton with the syndicate's cash. And he actually steals a bunch of money from Birch, who then tracks him down to his home near Ikes in Goldsboro. He drives up beside Jack and says, come on, Jack, we're going for a ride. Jack shits himself and runs, which makes Birch laugh. Then Jack hands him the cash, says sorry, and it's all forgotten. Isn't that true friendship?

It's actually nice to see, you know, just real gentlemen, non-sociopaths in the game. Yeah, I mean, you might be getting it by now, but I've got a bit of a soft spot for these guys. Like, I don't normally go for these gangster fellas, but I don't know. These guys are all right. One of the maddest things about all this is that US have got agents up in the bar this whole time. There's two black guys pretending to be grizzled Vietnam War deserters, but they actually don't cultivate any informants. Like, Ike's guys are tight.

And the files from the investigation, they just sit around in a Bangkok office gathering dust. Even though the White House is getting tons of intel warning that the Golden Triangle is about to become the biggest driver of America's heroin epidemic, between 1963 and 68, the BNDD, which is the precursor to the DEA, it doesn't have an office in Southeast Asia, nor any permanently stationed officers at all.

And even then, just as Ike and his crew are getting massive, all eyes turn to the rise of Kunsa in Burma and how the opium trade is messing with the war, the American allied Laotians, the Cambodians. The writing's on the wall for the states in Vietnam. And by all accounts, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, they're getting more and more desperate. Torturing, disappearing people, siding with known warlords and drug barons. It's just the right amount of chaos that allows the Asian connection to flourish.

And it probably helps, actually, that Ike isn't a violent man. He never carries a gun. He's by all accounts still kind of the soldier he was in Germany. I mean, a hustler maybe, but not a fully-fledged gangster. He hides all his cash in a farmhouse in Goldsboro, and only he and Jack knows where it's stashed. He's got a split-level, seven-bed home with a TV set in every room, game room, bar. But he drives around in a battered Chevy station wagon, and he dresses in simple overalls and T-shirts when he's home.

He doesn't really want to do the gangster thing for life. He's already rich. Once he has a few million, he tells himself, he'll bail on Bangkok and he'll go straight. Is he mostly in Bangkok these days or just back and forth? He's back and forth all the time. Like his family are in Goldsboro. I think it's like half and half pretty much. And I think he does actually go to different places in Europe. I think he still rips people off in casinos. Like you can't get enough of that shit.

Anyway, a pal called Ellis Sutton, that's Ike's man in North Carolina, and that's a home state that he shares with Frank Lucas and his country boys.

Frank is like a polar opposite of Ike, impetuous, cruel, unafraid to kill. And when Ike first gets wind of him, he's on the hook with the Italian mob for 25 grand, which is a lot of cash for a street thug. According to Ike, he helps Frank out with the money, and then Frank goes on his trip to Bangkok to figure out a way to work together. Frank very cleverly uses the code name Rice when he's talking to Ike,

And it seems like he's just like, mate, I own all this. Just call it dope. Don't worry about that. In Mark Jacobson's New York Magazine profile of Frank called The Return of Superfly, so that's the 2000 story we mentioned, Frank does at least nod to Ike's role in the heroin trade back then. Quote, Ike knew everyone over there, every black guy in the army, from the cooks on up. He adds that Ike's career is part of a, quote, army within an army, serving as his country boy's distributors.

But Ike and Frank don't actually spend much time together. In fact, it's years later in prison when Ike gets wind of plans to make American Gangster and Frank's book, Original Gangster, that he flips out. Says Ike, quote, a friend of mine sent me a book. And in that book, Frank Lucas had virtually invented stuff. Everything that I did, he did it. And he didn't do any of it.

Now, Frank used to buy drugs from me and Frank bought drugs from me about three straight years. Before that, he got them from my nephew, who was also from North Carolina.

But, Ike adds, the idea Frank was the brains behind the agent connection? Fantasy. Adds Ike, quote, Frank Lucas is a fucking agent. It kind of makes you think, though, too, how many of our, you know, beloved true story gangster legends from, you know, Donnie Brasco to Goodfellas are exaggerated, embellished people.

made up partially maybe made up like whole cloth you know yeah i'm having a similar kind of issue with uh some guys who want to make one of my stories into a film at the moment it's quite funny actually but like i mean american gangster is a good movie i like it it's great it's just not true so cool movie made up bullshit but good i like it anyway we're gonna get back to frank in a little bit for now though let's head back to 1969 times are really good and i could cemented his position as sergeant smack

Jack's American star bar in Bangkok is the HQ of a gigantic Asia to America heroin ring, getting product from the Golden Triangle and shipping it on military planes to the East Coast with dozens of GIs. Says one of his guys later to a journalist, quote, once you've got to the position of sergeant, then you have relative freedom. And in that time, you've learned the military. You make the military work for you. So you've got another sideline, which is narcotics.

And what's the chance of being caught by military police, the journalist then asked this guy. And he says, nil, unless you're stupid. The Asian Connection stashed the gear in chair legs, film canisters, the AWOL bags I mentioned before. And even better, the feds have got way bigger fish to fry with the war going tits up, like I said before. It seems like, unlike in Germany, Ike's hustle is going to pay off big time.

But then he travels to New York, which is the epicenter of the heroin epidemic and home to Italian crime families who, until this point, have dominated the heroin trade via the French Connection. Well, Ike manages to pwn them, but he forgets that the BNDD, the anti-drugs agency, isn't quite so flat-footed on its home turf. In March 1969, Ike does a deal with an informant and the cops are all over him.

They raid Jack's home in Goldsboro, but he skips jail and goes on the run. He reckons that with all the corruption going on at the time, there is a way out of this if he just lays low. Quote, the man was too busy trying to rip off our dope and money to worry about me. Those were some dirty cops.

Jack and Ike then meet secretly in Goldsboro and they agree that Jack is going to turn himself in. Then in July 1969, Ike and Jack are indicted in New York City's Eastern District for selling 2.2 grams of heroin, which, like considering the absolute tankfuls they've been getting from Bangkok, that is not a lot. But the judge does not care and he sentences Ike to 10 years in prison. He hires some hotshot lawyers and appeals.

This is just a weird sequence of events. Yeah, I checked through the notes. Did they really just meet when he's on the lam? They did, and this is all completely what happened. Now, this is where it gets juicy.

Around this time, Ike meets a guy on Broadway. This is a cop called Hart, who tells him about bent cops and a bunch of heroin that went missing in the raid on Jack's home. Hart tells Ike he can get everybody off their charges if Ike pays him 50 grand.

Ike agrees, but he keeps delaying the day of the payment, angering Hart. He's working with his partner, this guy called Patch. Patch and Hart, worst duo ever. Plus, one is short and fat and the other's tall and thin, a bit like us two.

Oh, I look great. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm totally talking about me. And soon the price is 60 grand and Ike just keeps on stalling. By now, Ike has pretty much wrote this crappy comedy duo into a conspiracy. So they just press on with their plan. Just days later, NYPD discovered the case's key witness, a guy named Clemens, dead in the backseat of his Buick in Brooklyn beneath the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

He's been dead for four days with two bullets in his head and another four in his neck. It's an execution. Wait, is it the dirty cops who did it or is it? Well, or did we find that out? I guess we're going to find out or not. I guess hard to drive all the way to Goldsboro for the 60 grand, which is a pretty great little piss off.

But the NYPD arrest Patch and Hart as the key witness in the Clemens case. When Hart lets it slip that the guy had been shot twice in the head, info only the killer would know. I mean, this guy is a complete fucking tool.

Anyway, whether the pair did kill Clemens or not, we'll never actually know because they wind up getting off on a technicality. Either way, with Clemens gone, Mike wins his appeal and gets off everything except for a small charge on failing to pay the duty on the heroin when it arrived in the US, which I don't know, that like seems like an even bigger middle fingers of the cops and not paying anything at all.

So after all this, Ike and Jack are free. And the dope, it still keeps coming into the States. In 1971, Nixon declares the war on drugs and it is fully on. According to the US Customs Bureau, heroin seizures in 1970 totaled 46 pounds. In 1971, it's 937.

Time magazine is writing about the so-called heroin plague, and there's a full-on moral panic that it's being fueled not by Italian gangsters, but some black guys from the South. I've stuck some old newsreel stuff on the reading list, and watching it back today, it's amazing how much of the intrigue is like, just that black guys are clever enough to pull this off. Like, some even say it outright. And it's around this time that the idea of the cadaver connection really takes hold.

Iker said it could have come from Frank, who said he was told a tall tale about the dope coming in in coffins of fallen soldiers or even stitched into the bodies themselves when he was in Bangkok.

This is Rufus Edmonton. He's North Carolina Attorney General speaking to a news reporter in the early 70s. Quote, we've even had drugs coming in in dead bodies that come in chair legs, that come in duffel bags with fake bottoms. And it's not that we don't welcome the military in North Carolina. It's simply a fact of life that does make the importation of heroin very easy. I mean, prosecutors do love to exaggerate stuff like that. You know, it kind of reminds me of the, uh,

The Jimmy Corneale story, remember? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Besides this one kind of thinly veiled threat, well, not even thinly veiled, but this one threat that one guy texts another that's not even high up in the organization that probably wouldn't know that.

Yeah, actually BBC Africa just bought out a massive expose to the Black Axe this week and it was like a two-year thing they said. That was exactly two years since my story came out. And they also said that they quoted these attorneys and stuff saying that the Black Axe is the most dangerous mafia in the world. And like, is it? I mean, like pwning old ladies into like fake love affairs on the internet.

I don't know if that's as dangerous as like cartel wars. Anyway, I love the BBC. They're great. Hire me.

And this like this cadaver connection, right? It definitely hasn't been proven wrong. And plenty of people have parroted it since that period. For his part, Ike always denies it. He calls it, quote, the biggest hoax ever perpetuated. And he lived long enough for 9-11 truthers. Says Ike, quote, why would I do something so awful as to move heroin in cadavers?

I had so many easier, more effective ways of moving my dope. Besides, whatever wrong I did, I was still proud of my service and I would have done nothing to harm the memory of our brave soldiers who died serving the country. I mean, you could just salute that.

And the authorities say that Ike's been stashing his dope in the body of victims on his way to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland in 1972, which, as you can imagine, I mean, like you said before, it just causes a massive outcry back home. It's definitely an easy propaganda win for the cops, which is pretty suspect, I'd say. Two DEA agents have also talked about uncovering heroin in the bodies of dead GIs. They even arrest a guy they suspect is doing it for Ike, but after a load of interrogation, they let him go.

Da Nang, Vietnam is where bodies are processed at the time. And as you can imagine, a lot of the cadavers are in a pretty terrible state when they get there. So the army uses formaldehyde to preserve them and kind of keep them held together in one piece, which stinks. I mean, it wouldn't be impossible to get drugs into these things, but it'd be really, really tough. Anyway, whether the cadaver connection is true or not, Ike's world starts crumbling from this point.

Jack gets busted over a bad deal in Denver in 1972. It's the biggest drugs case in Colorado history, and he acknowledges the Asian connection on the stand. He gets sentenced to 30 years and 50 grand, but he keeps Ike safe by keeping him in the dark about all the Denver stuff he does so Ike remains a free man.

It just seems kind of stupid for them to go make these deals in the States as opposed to doing them in Bangkok. But I guess necessity, right? Yeah. I mean, when it's also informal as well, right? I guess there's no security. Like I keep thinking of the amount of stuff that you'd have to do to get things over borders these days, but I don't think any of it existed then. So they're just like,

Ah, fuck it. I'll just hop on a plane and do some dealing back home. But yeah, it's like we say, don't try not to involve the States if you don't, if you don't have to. Anyway, tiny Goldsboro population under 30,000. This place is suddenly the heart of American organized crime.

Says a retired SBI agent, that's State Bureau rather than the FBI, quote, I spent hours on surveillance. Informants would tell us that so-and-so from New York City or DC was in Goldsboro. Every workday, I would tour Goldsboro to see what cars were in town. We'd run the place to see to whom these cars belong. It's very fascinating.

Fancy English. And it's a bit like a Roman Empire job, right? I mean, Ike's got so many different guys working for him in different states. And once they start falling, they're all rolling on him. Ike uses the country boys more at this point because they're still standing somehow. But the cops are circling around them too.

In 1973, America signs the Paris Accords and pulls out of Vietnam in defeat. Jack's American Star Bar closes and the BNDD, that becomes the DEA. And local agents find a bunch of files on the Asian connection just hidden away in some office units. Ike's boys are locked up, all away, and Papa Sun dies.

Up north, the balance of power is changing too. Kansar negotiates his way out of a Burmese prison and he starts knocking over the region's power brokers to become the Golden Triangle's number one kingpin. And yeah, like I said, if you don't know about that stuff, go back and listen to our show on him and his mentor who just happens to be someone called Miss Hairy Legs. Ike's kind of scrambling at this point.

He's way past his early plan to cash out and live it easy. And he even considers smuggling teak, which is a wood. And it actually also makes a lot of cash even today. I'm researching Chinese teak gangsters for some magazine at the moment. It's pretty interesting. Then in 1974, he meets a vet named Freddie Thornton who convinces Ike to switch his operation to a combination of unwitting Air Force pilots coming into the US and the good old Postal Service.

Yeah, I mean, they're the biggest drug traffickers in the world, right? Yep, definitely. I didn't realize that the Postal Service Police, they're pretty full on as well, right? I didn't know that either. I just know that that's like an old joke that the biggest drug dealers in the world is UPS or something along those lines. But it's also a testament to these guys, right? They have a new idea every time something falls through. They actually do seem pretty sharp.

For the Nigerian stuff, again, I remember interviewing some postal service cop and they were like, I was looking into them. They're pretty full on. They have like task forces and like SWAT teams and stuff. Anyway, in the end, Ike gets caught. And actually, it's quite poetic.

He's been sending mysterious packages to old ladies back in his old stomping ground in North Carolina and then getting folks to pick them up from these pensioners at the other end. I mean, that's not the poetic part, guys. Stay tuned. Well, Ike, he could build the Golden Triangle, the Thai government, the NYPD and the DOJ, but Ethel Waters of Goldsboro? No chance.

On Jan 22nd, 1975, she receives a typewritten letter from, quote, people to people telling her she's about to receive a package of clothing. I'm doing air quotes here, of course. Only Ethel doesn't believe in free stuff. She thinks it might even be a bomb. And this is three years before the Unabomber. So well done, Ethel. So she calls the local sheriff's office and cops pick up the resulting package before Ike's boys can come over and grab it from her.

They find the AWOL bags hidden stitching and the heroin. And they discover another shipment two days later when it's sent to Dolores Burney, an old lady's cop. I thought that would be hard to say again. They find the AWOL bags hidden stitching and in it the heroin. And they discover another shipment two days later when it's sent to Dolores Burney, an old lady cops believe is actually in on the scam herself.

After surveilling Bernie's home, cops stop her car and they uncover four pounds of heroin with a street value of $3.35 million. That's 17 million bucks today. It's the biggest drugs bust on the East Coast ever. Is this like local small town sheriffs making the bust or were the feds already there monitoring? No, I think it was, if I remember rightly, it's like Wayne County Sheriff and that's it. So they like did what the biggest agencies in the US couldn't.

On Jan 27th, that's just a few days later, a package arrives at the home of a Mr. Dallas Lewis. Cops get a warrant, discover the same's happened with him as with old Ethel, and they trace this package to a guy called Herman Lee Gayard, a.k.a. Peter Rabbit. I don't know where that nickname's come from. One of Ike's old army buddies. The package even has Ike's palm print on it. Like, he's been getting down and dirty with the shipments himself. I guess he's a bit of a micromanager.

And by now, cops have connected these three packages and they track postage tape used with them to a Nike associate. And it's not just going through Carolina. Cops are going to later find packages sent to Jersey and even Water Reed Army Hospital. In February, they raid Ike's home and arrest him on a conspiracy charge. It's only nine days after Frank Lucas had been arrested in his home of Teaneck, New Jersey.

That June, Ike goes on trial. He's convicted on the print evidence and he gets sent down for 19 years.

But the DEA, it is not done. It launches a tactical unit to figure out the breadth of Ike's operation and estimates that between 1968 and 75, Sergeant Smack brought $400 million worth of No. 4 heroin into the US. That's over $2 billion today. And they keep chatting to Frank, whose story changes more times than Jussie Smollett.

First, he barely knows Ike. Then their powers. Then they barely exchange drugs. Then Ike is the biggest heroin kingpin in the country. It's all pretty dizzying, but it suits the Fez just to go along with it. And all this time, tons of folks involved with the country boys trials. They're dropping.

In 1975, a witness called Marjorie Morris is murdered. Next up is informant Albert Pratt in a Harlem bar. Then in 1973, an informant called Stanley Peake, who's been wearing a wire, he disappears, presumed dead. The next year, a guy named George Ford, who's thought to have trafficked 12 grand of heroin each day from a Harlem candy shop, he's shot dead at a block party down the street. No suspects. I mean...

I guess it's slightly off topic, but what I'm trying to show is that Frank Lucas and the Country Boys, these guys are a brutal, murderous bunch of gangsters. They are not cut from the same cloth as Ike, who, like I said, never packs heat, never commits a murder. Although, I guess dealing smack is hardly caring the community. Were the two trials intertwined? Were they conspiracies or were they separate prosecutions at that point?

They were separate prosecutions, but Frank's testimony is used against Ike, which I think does come up in the movie, if I remember rightly as well. He rolls pretty quickly. In 1981, Frank walks out of prison a free man. Ike's 44-year sentence, mounted after subsequent trials, is just beginning in upstate New York.

Frank has ratted on him, which he despises, but so has Jack. Except Ike forgives his old best mate, quote, Jack did what he had to do. Man, he was crazy about his woman attire.

What happened to Natalia? I don't know. I don't know. I tried to figure it out. Actually, guys, get in touch and tell me what the hell happened to Natalia. And did Frank, I mean, did Frank Lucas stay out of prison after that, after 81 or was he sentenced again? I think he was sentenced again. Right. And then he, he got out not that long afterwards though. Yeah.

He did get out in like the nineties, I think. Yeah. I think late nineties. Cause that's when the Jacobson article kind of takes place. That's right. Yeah. That's like the, I think it's called the return of super flies in it. So it's like, yeah, he must be just out.

So Ike actually carries on dealing inside, but he gets busted again in 1987 when he's lured into a sting with a fake German diplomat. Ike's second act is brought to an abrupt close. Here I am in prison and they put handcuffs on me, he laughs. I felt as if I was falling off a cliff. I thought I could beat the system, but I lost.

This is former DEA agent John Sutton speaking to Al Proffitt, who's done a ton of documentaries on American gangsters on YouTube. Check him out. Quote, Ike Atkinson and Herman Jackson were probably the predecessors to guys like Frank Matthews and the other major narcotics traffickers in the New York area. Sutton says that when he first saw a packet of the Asian heroin, he actually thought it was flour. He'd never seen anything like it before. But when he tested it, hey presto, purest smack he'd ever discovered.

Ike isn't actually released from prison until 2007, aged 82, and that's just about the time American gangsters getting tons of media hype.

His final act is to take a swipe at Frank Lucas's stolen mobster valor. In 2010, the year he releases his own book, Sergeant Smack, Ike says, quote, What's done is done. But for Lucas to twist and distort the truth in an effort to manipulate history for his own personal gain is just as despicable as the drug dealing we were both engaged in.

Damn, it kind of sounds like he might have made a better movie than Frank Lucas. I think he definitely would have done, Mike.

I mean, he's kind of like, he's got a bit of integrity, right? Like I kind of, I've got a bit of time for Ike, but yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed the story. Yeah. He sounds pretty sharp too. Definitely not, not what's the usual, you know? Yeah. Yeah. As always, I want to thank all our people really helping us out. Our top tier Patreon folks, Patrick Rowland, Tanner McLeave, Sam Ramsey, Juan Ponce,

Keith Thomas, Michael Rich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusimano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, and Doug Prindle. Thank you guys so much for your support. And thanks to everyone actually who's been listening and sending us emails and doing all that. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Merry Christmas, guys.