American Gangster

And Other Tales of New York

Mark Jacobson

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781843547303
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848872653
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

The untold story of Frank Lucas, New York's most notorious drugs lord during the 1970s. Now a blockbuster movie, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. In 1970s New York, the ruthless Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in more than a million dollars a day. At the height of his power there were so many heroin addicts buying from him on 116th Street that he claimed the Transit Authority had to change the bus routes. Lucas lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with sport stars, musicians, and politicians, but he was also a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States and before his fall, when he was sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City. In American Gangster, Marc Jacobson's captivating account of the life of Frank Lucas (the basis for the forthcoming major motion picture) joins other tales of New York City from the past thirty years. It is a vibrant, intoxicating, many-layered portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world from one of America's most acclaimed journalists.

DOWNTOWN

8. THE MAGICIAN AND THE EXPERT

A few days after Webster Tarpley's lecture, I went to a Community Board #1 forum on Building Safety where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was held in the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest structure when it was completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed as good a place as any to talk about the only former world's tallest building(s) to fall down.

I was tagging along with William Rodriguez, who attends all NIST meetings and brings a video camera "so they know I'm watching them." There are people who believe their whole lives have been lived for a singular moment and purpose and William, a jovial forty-five-year-old with close-cropped black hair marked with a small streak of white "like a skunk," is one of these people.

Growing up shining shoes in a poor section of Bayamon, Puerto Rico, William was already dreaming of the day when he would be wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down by a flaming rope. "That was going to be my trick, the one that would make me famous. It was my goal to become a magician, the youngest illusionist in the Caribbean basin," says William.

It was in P.R. that William met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi. Once the magician on the children's show Wonderama, Randi is best known as a debunker of supernatural claims by psychics and the like, offering the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate verifiable evidence of their powers. No one has yet taken him up on it.

"Randi became my mentor," William relates. "I admired him because he knew a lot of good tricks. But also because he never said they were nothing but tricks. He could separate the truth from what was fake."

In his early twenties William moved to New York, but his magic career never quite took off. He wound up working for a cleaning company in the World Trade Center. He'd stay there twenty years, the last few in charge of the stairwells in the North Tower. "I'd get there at eight, eat breakfast with my friends at Windows on the World, and then start mopping on the 110th floor. By the time I got to the lobby, it was time to go home."

On the morning of September 11, 2001, William arrived late, at around 8:30, a half hour that probably saved his life. This way, instead of being at the top of the building where everyone died, he was chatting with others from the maintenance crew on level B-1 of the WTC sub-basement. It was then that, he says, "I heard this massive explosion from down below. Somewhere in the subbasements, like level B-2 or B-3. I thought a generator blew up. But it was too big for that. The walls were cracking. Then I see this guy I worked with, the skin on his arms was peeled away, like … hanging. That was when we heard another explosion. This one from upstairs. Later I found out that was the first plane, hitting the building."

William's account of what happened next makes for harrowing listening. His first instinct was to try to save his friends, but as one of only five people in the building with the master key to all the offices, he soon found himself leading firefighters up the stairwells. "They were all carrying seventy pounds of equipment, the lights were off, and the sprinklers on. Huge chunks of the building were falling all around us. As we climbed the stairs I kept hearing these explosions. I was going on adrenaline. All I could think of was trying to save my friends … before it was over I helped twelve people out of the building.

"I don't know what happened to me once the Tower fell. I found myself under a firetruck, in a hole. It was hard to breathe. I told myself this is going to be a slow death, but I should make it last as long as I could. This is when my training as an escape artist helped me. It taught me how to be calm. But eventually they came and found me."

Acclaimed as "the last man pulled from the rubble," William became a hero of 9/11, touted in the Latin press all over the country. "They had me down to White House. I had my picture taken with Hillary Clinton. President Bush too."

Now, four and half years later, after repeatedly being rebuffed in his attempts to get this story on the record with both the 9/11 and NIST commissions about the explosions at the Trade Center, William is suing the United States government under the RICO statue, legislation originally drafted to prosecute Mafia families. The suit itself, filed by lawyer Philip Berg, reads like some Air America wet dream, with George Walker Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, George J. Tenet, Karl Rove, Thomas Kean, Paul Wolfowitz, and dozens of others listed as defendants.

"RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations," William says. "They say I'm a conspiracy theorist, I call them conspirators too. It is like the Amazing Randi told me. There's reality and there's illusion. Both are fine. But when you tell me the illusion is reality, we have a problem. September 11 is this gigantic illusion. I owe it to my two hundred dead friends to keep working to expose these lies. What can they do to me? I'm a national hero. Bush told me so himself."

"That's him, the NIST guy," William said, indicating Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, the agency's Deputy Director for Building and Fire Research and Lead Investigator for the Trade Center report.

A smallish, elegantly attired man in his fifties, Dr. Sunder, degree holder from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and MIT, took his seat beside Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects of the brand-new, not-yet-occupied, fifty-two-story, $700 million replacement for WTC #7. Behind the men was a large slide of what the moderator called "the new downtown skyline" dominated by another Skidmore project, the planned "Freedom Tower," at an iconic 1,776 feet slated to be the next in the line of world's tallest buildings. Like the new WTC #7, which featured "a two-foot-thick vertical core encasing the elevators, utility infrastructure, and exit stairs," the Freedom Tower promised to be "among the safest buildings ever built," Galioto said. This was important, he said, because "constantly building and rebuilding" was what New York was really all about.

Dr. Sunder delivered his summary of the NIST findings (the plane impact and fire did it) with bureaucratic aplomb, after which the meeting was opened up for a brief question-and-answer period. A woman from NY9/11truth stood up and with great emotion said that her best friend, an NYPD officer, had died at the Trade Center. "I cannot sleep at night," she said. She had hoped the NIST report, supposedly written by "scientists, not politicians," would settle some of the questions about what happened to her loved one. But this wasn't the case.

"I have here a report which contradicts much of what you say," the 9/11truth woman said, placing a paper by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University, in front of Dr. Sunder. Jones's paper makes the case for controlled demolition, claiming the persistence of "molten metal" at Ground Zero indicates the likely presence of "high-temperature cutter-charges … routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel."

"I hope you read this; perhaps it will enable you to see things a different way," the woman said.

"Actually, I have read it," Dr. Sunder said with a sigh.

Later, asked if such outbursts were common, Dr. Sunder said, "Yes. I am sympathetic. But our report … it is extensive. We consulted eighty public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who's Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we can't worry about that. Facts are facts."

I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building barely mentioned in the final report?

This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year.

NIST did have some "preliminary hypotheses" on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. "We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors."

Then Dr. Sunder paused. "But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7."

9. CAN 49.3% OF THE PEOPLE BE CRAZY?

In the late summer of 2004, as Republicans gathered inside Madison Square Garden to nominate George Bush for a second term largely based on his touted strong leadership during 9/11, the Truth movement commissioned a Zogby poll, which asked whether people believed "some of our leaders knew in advance attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and consciously failed to act."

A total of 49.3 percent of New York City residents (41 percent throughout the state) said yes.

A year and a half later the level of doubt had risen, at least according to my own informal canvassing. Basing the inquiry on Nick Levis's "Hop level" paper, I offered respondents four choices: A was the Official Story; B, the Official Story plus government incompetence; C, LIHOP; and D, MIHOP. Of the fifty-four respondents, twenty-seven said C, twenty-two picked B, with four (including two Muslim cab-drivers) opting for MIHOP.

Almost every white person said B. As much as many of these people hated the Bush administration, they couldn't bring themselves to believe that it would take part in the deaths of three thousand of its countrymen. An investment banker drinking at a downtown bar said, "I can see them wishing it would happen. I can see them being happy they lucked into their dream scenario. But doing it on purpose? Look at the way they've managed Iraq. They couldn't have pulled off 9/11 without getting caught. Not possible."

Uptown, the responses were different. "Yeah, they knew," said a man eating at Amy Ruth's Restaurant on 116th Street. A sixty-one-year-old retired transit worker, he was one of sixteen out of twenty black people questioned who picked C. Just the other night, he said, a friend told him that Marvin Bush, the president's youngest brother, was one of the heads of the company that did most of the security work for not only the Trade Center but also United Airlines and Dulles Airport, from where Flight 77 departed.

"That's true?"

Yeah, I said. The younger Bush was a significant stockholder in the Securacom company, later renamed Stratesec, which was reputedly backed by Kuwaiti money. According to several reports, he left the company on September 10, 2001.

"There anywhere Bush ain't got no brother?"

"His cousin worked there too, Wirt Walker III."

"Wirt? The third? You're shitting me."

This was pretty much the opinion above 110th Street. If Katrina proved Bush was willing to let people die, right there on TV, why should 9/11 been any different? Many attested that "Jadakiss had it right." This was a reference to the song "Why?" in which the rapper asks a long series of questions pertaining to the existential state of African-Americans, including the couplet, "Why do niggas push pounds and powder?/Why did Bush knock down the towers?" The line caused a good deal of controversy, Clear Channel bleeping the President's name like any other four-letter word.

In all my polling only one person picked A, the official story. This was a fireman, who was smoking a cigarette outside a downtown engine company. This isn't the kind of material you feel too comfortable asking firemen—this particular house had lost a number of men on 9/11—but I knew the guy's brother from high school.

"Not answering that," he said, warning me about going around querying other firefighters. This didn't mean that he'd ever seen anything as "corrupt, bullshit and sad as what happened down at the World Trade Center.

"They got their gold and shipped us to Fresh Kills," he said. Call it one more conspiracy theory, but it is not an uncommon opinion among uniformed firefighters: that the powers that be only cared about finding the massive gold reserves held in vaults beneath of the Trade Center (the $200 million in gold and silver from the Bank of Nova Scotia alone), not the bodies of fallen heroes. After the gold was secured, the fireman said, the body recovery detail was severely curtailed, leading to the massive protest in which firefighters duked it out with NYPD officers guarding the Ground Zero site.

It was clear, the firefighter blamed the city, primarily Rudy Giuliani, for the post-9/11 battle over finding human remains. "Giuliani, the great hero of 9/11," the fireman spat. "He's supposed to be a prosecutor? What kind of prosecutor goes along with taking evidence away from a crime scene?" It was the firefighter's belief that the effort to remove the debris around Ground Zero was nothing more than a "business decision," a heartless, premature attempt to jump-start downtown commerce.

It was just about "the money," the firefighter said. It was always about "the money." On the other hand, the fireman couldn't go along with any of the "crazy" theories about what might have happened on September 11. Sure he heard explosions, but "things blow up all the time in fires." He didn't believe "any of that shit about bombs in the Towers."

The truth was, he said, "the way they were built, you didn't need bombs to bring the WTC down. The Port Authority didn't have to follow City building codes, and they didn't." More steel than concrete, "those towers were made to fall down." That was "the real inside job" if you asked him, the fireman said, what made the WTC such a perfect target. Whoever did it knew airplanes would be enough.

All this said, the fireman said that if there was a gun to his head and he had to pick a letter in my poll, it would have to be A.

"That's the only choice I got," he said. "Osama fucking bin Laden, just like President Bush says. I have to think that, because of all those friends of mine who died that day. If I thought it wasn't Osama bin Laden, if I thought it was someone else, then I'd have to do something about it. And I don't want to think about what I'd do."

10. DISINFORMATION

It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting aftermath. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface. Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.

With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: "That in 2006, we will crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11–heads and return to normality." A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued, quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden's supposed CIA code name, "Tim Osmond … as in Donny and Marie," to speculation about the role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani's former OEM guy, in the post-9/11 anthrax threats.

However, all conviviality fled as the conversation slipped into the matter of whether, on the morning of 9/11, the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines flight #77 or not. Sounds kind of crazy, debating if a 150-ton airplane slammed into the world's largest single building, but this is the way it is with the slippery discourse of 9/11truth.

The matter was first broached by Thierry Meyssan in his 2002 book L'Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), a #1 best seller in France, which said the damage at the Pentagon was caused not by Flight #77 as reported...

Table of contents

• Also by Mark Jacobson
• Contents
• Foreword
• Never Bored: The American Gangster, the Big City, and Me
• UPTOWN
• DOWNTOWN
• ALL AROUND THE TOWN
• Afterword