FROM CHAPTER 4 (“TAKEDOWN")

Lucas and the others were named in an indictment that was unsealed on June 23, 1974. The alleged conspiracy—the defendants were accused of involvement in a network that sold up to 20 pounds of heroin during the previous five years. The prosecutor identified Tutino as the principle heroin supplier and Lucas and Stepeney as the major distributors. The defendants faced a possibility of 10 to 15 years in prison, while Lucas could spend the rest of his life in prison for supervising the alleged conspiracy. This was the trial that boxing legend Joe Louis attended in a show of support for his friend, Frank Lucas.

The prosecution looked as if it had a solid case. It presented a parade of witnesses, most of whom were informants and undercover detectives, and they provided impressive testimony about heroin deliveries and cash payments. Charles Morris, the prosecution’s key witness, stayed on the stand for nine solid days, as the defense hammered away, trying to trip him up and blow holes in his testimony.

But the prosecution had a big problem. Important witnesses kept dying. The situation got so dire that Thomas M. Fortuin, the case’s chief prosecutor, complained to Judge Irving Ben Cooper that there is “an extensive amount of blood in the case.  We constantly have had more protection problems that any case I am aware of, really, in the history of the court.”

The series of murders was indeed disturbing and made the trial look like a casualty of war. The first victim cited by the prosecution was Marjorie Morris who was murdered in 1973, two weeks after she had been interviewed by defense investigators. Next to die was Albert Pratt, who was shot to death in front of a Harlem bar shortly after he began cooperating in the case. On February 22, 1973, Stanley Peek became the next witness to fall. He was an informant who tape-recorded conversations with Zack Robinson, one of the defendants in the trial. Robinson subsequently disappeared, and police did not know if he had fled or was killed.

The next victim was George Ford, one of the key witnesses against Lucas. Ford, himself, was a suspect in the case, but he agreed to testify against Superfly before a grand jury. Police suspected Fort of trafficking as much as $12,000 worth of heroin a day from his candy shop in Harlem. On July 24, 1974, “Candy Man” was shot dead at a block party in Harlem. Police had no suspects.

The bodies just kept dropping, the case against Superfly and the co-defendants got weaker and the authorities could do nothing about it. On May 29, 1975, three weeks after the defendants were indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, Oswald Peterson, one of the indicted, was found slumped in a van on 122nd Street. Peterson was an informant who had been cooperating with investigators in a number of narcotics cases, including the one involving Lucas.

Not every hit was carried out with chilling efficiency.  The brother of witness Charles Morris, was in a friendly card game, in which one of the other players looked like a dead ringer for Morris’s brother. The look-a-like decided to leave the card game early. Bad move. Once outside, he was blow away with a shotgun and then pumped full of holes with a .357 magnum for good measure. Prosecutors believe that the killer mistook the hapless card player for Charles Morris’s brother. Coy Smith, one of the defendants in the case agreed to testify, but gun men wounded him in a Harlem Street, and he began doubting the wisdom of cooperating.

Incredibly, there were more murders, although the prosecution did not present any information about them to the court. “There have been murders that I’m not referring to now, but which are connected to the case,” was all the prosecution would say in its complaint to the court.