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You are now listening to True Murder, The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker Bck. Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening, This is your host Stan Zupaski for the program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about them. True crime author ron chepsik uncovers one of the biggest cons in the history of the international drug trade with his book Sergeant Smack, The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Akittsen, Kingpin and his Band of Brothers. Sergeant Smack details a true legend of Ike Akittsen, one of the biggest black
drug traffickers in US history. Atkinson pioneered some of the most innovative methods used in international drug smuggling. They ranged from duffel and a wall bags to the U. S Army postal system, to the use of unsuspecting crew chiefs who operated military aircraft transporting teakwood furniture. But contrary to popular belief, Atkinson's methods did not include the bogus cadaver heroin smuggling connection conspiracy exploited by Frank Lucas in Hollywood's
blockbuster film American Gangster. The film not only distorted Atkinson's historical role in the international drug trade, but falsely depicted Lucas as the pioneer of the Asian heroin connection. As the book conclusively shows the conspiracies a hoax, as is Frank Lucas's claim of participation with Ike in the conspiracy. Sergeant Smack with my special guest, ron Chepzick. Welcome to the program, ron Chepzik, and thanks you for agreeing to this interview.
Thank you very much and I appreciate it being on your show.
Thank you. Great book. Just want to start with it's a great read. Now, first question, what made you decide to write a book about this particular story.
Well, it's an interesting, interesting story. I had done a book called Gangsters of Harlem, where I traced the history of the criminal underworld in one of the most famous neighborhoods in America, Harlem, and one of the gangsters I profiled in that book was Frank Lucas, and I was able to get an interview with him. And this is before he became really famous, you know. The American Gangster movie made him almost a household name and one of
those famous gangsters. And I interviewed him and he kept talking about his so called cousin, Mike Atkinson, how I had brought him to Asia, how he pioneered the connection, how I helped him with coffins to smuggle heroin to the US, et cetera, et cetera. And I said that, I said, this guy Ike Atkinson played a big role in Frank Lucas's career. I should try to talk to him. So I did some research on the internet. I found out that he was in jail for thirty the past
thirty two years. He'd been in jails in nineteen seventy five, and there was hardly anything on him, which is not good for a journalist, right you figure, well, you know, either probably he doesn't want to talk to anybody, you know, And I said, what the heck? I found out that he was only like three hours down the road for me in Butner Federal Penitentiary. And I said, well, I said, that's an easy trip. So I wrote the warden and I say, could you uh passes on to onto Ike Atkinson.
I'm interested in in getting an interview with him for a book I'm writing. And uh he kindly consented, and uh and normally I really didn't want like to give interviews, but I mentioned Frank Lucas in the in the letter, and so I'm very curious about Frank Lucas. And so I got this interview, and uh, you know, he went ballistic in the interview when I told him some of the things that Frank was saying. And he says, he said, gee, he's not my cousin. You know, he's not related by blood.
I don't know why he says that, but he always says that I never shipped confidence and all this sort of stuff. So anyways, uh, we were talking and uh, you know, we had some uh some uh energy going here between me and him, and you know, we started we could tell her we sort of liked each other, and uh, I said, well, I want to come back and interview because I saw a bunch of questions. Uh. Because the interview was limited to about forty five minutes and I Warren and said I could come back, So
I did. I did come back and interviewed him again, and then I went back to Lucas, and Lucas went ballistic because you know, I was checking out in his story and he's sort of a bully. He's not He's not at all like like Denzel Washington portrayed him in the movie. You know, he's he can barely understand him. He's the only guy that sweet things languae where you have to use subtitles the History Channel. So anyways, I
did that. I wrote, I wrote the you know, the profiles, one of one of the best chapters in my book, Answers the Harlem. And I corresponded with Ike and he was getting out in two thousand and seven the following year, and we said, well, you know, maybe we could collaborate on the book, and we left it like that, and then when he got out, we met and decided that
we were going to do a book. And I promised him that I would do my best to remove the scarlet letter from his name, the scarlet letter being the Cadava heroin conspiracy hoax. And I think I did it in the book. You know, I interviewed a lot of people, and that's how I ended up operating probably the best story I'll ever get in my life as a journalist. I don't think I could ever talk this story because it's such an interesting story.
Now you just mentioned and I didn't know if I got that from the book so much. Anyway, was one of the main reasons why Ike wanted to write this book was to deal with that rumor that had persisted for over thirty years that they had smuggled heroin and cadavers. Was that something that really bothered him?
Right? Well, yes, it really did bother him. And people say, you know, why has it bothered him? I mean, would you like to be to find by somebody else you know, your life's and would you like to be known as the guy that pioneered the cadaver heroin conspiracy. We're using coffins of dead gis from Vietnam War to smuggle heroin. And I you know, I was a military guy. I spent twenty years in the military. He was a master sergeant.
He had a very good career. He had some problem with gambling, which I go into the book, but he got he retired twenty years and you know, that's what people remembered him from. And it wasn't so bad until Lucas made that movie. And if you remember the movie
American Gangster, I became an international sensation. The highlight of the movie is when Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the prosecutor that put Lucas and jail uncovers quote, the heroine in the in the cadavers, you know, and in the coffins, continuing the cadavers, and that's the highlight of the movie. And so yeah, so it's understandable why he would want to clear his name on that respect.
Anyways, Okay, let's go back now, because you know there'll be a little bit confusing for our audience. So let's go back because this is a fascinating story right from the beginning. And so let's not talk about the flight of as as you do in the book. Let's go a little bit back. Let's go back to Goldsboro, North Carolina. Let's talk about Ike Akinson. He wasn't always known as Ike Atkinson. Tell us about his life. His early life
is very fascinating. You also have a historical background everything. It's America War, America and transition it's a very very important time in American history. Give us a little bit of the background there, and tell us about Ike Atkinson, what his life was like, what was he really like, and what was Goldsboro like where he grew up.
Tell us a little bit about all that he grew up in the rural South. And this is kind of kind of ironic because for period in the seventies, golds World became the drug capital of the United States. Not New York City filled out here in Chicago, but this little rural hamlet in North Carolina, eastern North Carolina called Goldsborough, which probably had about twelve to thirteen thousand people, you know,
back in the back in the seventies. And I you know, was born in nineteen twenty five, and his real name is Leslie and he got the name Ike from one of his military buddies. We just started calling him Ike, and the name stuck, and so he took the name of Ike, and so he became known as Ike. He grew up in poverty. His father left him when he was left the family when he was young, and he had several brothers and sisters and his mother raised them. She was a domestic and you know, he grew up
to be a normal kid. I mean Lucas. He claims that life was so tough that he had to be a criminal. Well, Lucas was born thirteen miles from where Ike was, and I don't think Ike's life was any any more tough than Lucas. But he grew up, you know, free of crime. He didn't didn't get involved with any kind of mischief orning like that. But it was, you know, a racist times. It was tough to be, you know, a black in the Royal South back in the thirties
and forties. And one year before the war, he went up north to New York City to visit his cousin, Leonard Peacock, and Leonard took him to Ithaca, New York, and he worked at a military base, and he was just a kid, he was a teenager. But it really opened his eyes to the world. He met a white person there as a first white person became a friend of his, and you know, he realized that there were,
you know, good white people in the world. And when he came back to Goldsborough, he decided that he wanted to get out Goldsborough as fast as he could. You know, it was too small for him, so earned too many opportunities for him to do it. But he decided that he wanted to go into the military, and he was under age, but managed to forge a paper which got
him into the military. And so he got into the military, and of course the war started and he served, you know, in the army, and he rose quite fast as a as a military guy, and before before too long he's one of the youngest master sergeants in the military. It was a segregated army, of course, you know, and that's one of the things that really irritated him a lot of other blacks, the fact that they wouldn't serve because the white brass thought that black soldiers, you know, wouldn't
do well in combat. So he set out most of the war and he wanted to you know, he wanted to fight the Japanese because he was in the Pacific, but he never got that opportunity, and so he spent you know, the early part of his life into the
twenties in the military. And then so when the war ended, he had to make a choice, and he decided that he would stay in the in the military, and the military was was kind of a candy shop for him because he had learned gambling when he was a young kid, and he became an incredible gambler cards and dice and took a lot of money away from his fellow soldiers.
And so when he stayed in the military and retired in nineteen sixty three, he had close to sixty thousand dollars saved up and he was able to buy, you know, a swimming pool. He had the first swimming pool in Goldsborough, you know, among the black population, in an area called
New Circle. And the only problem was in the military, he got caught gambling where he wasn't supposed to because he had risen actually to a second lieutenant, and he was gambling with soldiers, you know, privates and all that. He wasnt supposed to do that because he was an officer.
And he nearly got court martials twice because of his gambling, and he managed to he was demoted in rank, but managed It showed something about his character because he managed to work hard and get his rank back and he actually graduated, or not graduated, finished the services as a master sergeant. So when he got out of the military,
here he was, you know, professional gambler. He loved adventure and you know, he had to make a decision, and he says that he made a bad decision because he decided to follow the life of an adventurer and a gambler. So he stayed in Europe, and there was a whole group of fellow of Black soldiers and ex Black soldiers that he hung around with, and they developed this really close relationship. That's why I have the book subtitled and
the Band of Brothers. And they developed a sort of a gambling colony in Europe, you know, in the in the sixties, and he continued to make a living at that.
And that's excuse me just for just for a second. But let's clarify though too, because I think it's important later to the entire story. At least it is in my mind that he was a routine cheater along with his friends. It wasn't just a little They counted cards, they counted cards, they loaded dice to use magnets under tables, so they were they were hostilgagally.
Not all the time, but occasionally if he you know, if if he was facing a tough competitor, yeah, yeah, he would he would do that, you know, he was he would do he wasn't beneath using tricks uh to uh to make money, you know, at at gambling. Yeah he did it right.
Yeah, well he did. He cheated basically, and his and his friends are cheated too. So even if you're counting cards, you'd be kicked out at a casino in America for counting cards. So yeah, they had a group of guys that so I just wanted to clarify that, and I'm sorry for interrupting you there. So he had a he had a group but you say, sort of a band of brothers uh in Europe. He hung around there after the war and they were dealing with They were hanging around Bangkok and Saigon.
What happened was he was actually in Europe when one of his friends that he made in the service, a guy named William Herman Jackson, had gone.
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Korea to visit a friend called Smitty, but had been kicked off the plane or for whatever reason and ended up in Bangkok. And he was amazed at the action in Bangkok. I mean all kinds of things going on. And you know, there was a woman, there was the nightlife, there was gambling, et cetera. So he talked Ike into coming to Bangkok, and so in nineteen sixty six, that's where Ike ended up in Bangkok.
Now, can you tell us Maybe I'm getting a little bit ahead, but can you tell us what MPCs are and why it's important and why it's important to this Why it's important to this story.
Well, that was the intermediate thing between gambling and the heroin trafficking, which eventually made Ike of fortune and eventually put him in jail for such a long time. But there were military payment certificates and they were used instead of money by the military to prevent speculation, and Ike was able to manipulate the system and to make a
lot of money by going to Vietnam. So he spent some time doing this until one day herman Jackson called him over to his house of his girlfriend, her name was Nidia, and UH showed him an article about, you know, the heroin situation in the United States, and he told her that that his girlfriend's family had connections to the Golden Triangle, the famous Golden Triangles, one of the major
sources of poppy cultivation in the world. Right that borders and borders of Mayan mar which was the Burma back then, layouts and Thailand and Union Province in China, and so so he said that you know, they should go into uh, into trafficking, that it was you know, really exploding and there were opportunities to uh to get money. And I was sort of reluctant to do that because he didn't
know anything about it. You know, he was mainly uh, you know, he was a hustler and a gambler and uh, but he was getting a board with board with mcbcs because it was so easy. Number one and number two,
Vietnam was getting dangerous. This was getting near, you know, the ted offensive and all that right, and he always always got killed one time when he was in Saigon, so he decided to So he was started to think about it, and essentially Jackson you know, talked him into it and they were able to you know, they decided to develop you know, this this network that that could be used to smuggle Heroin back to back to the US.
Now, they used military planes primarily because obviously they could get according to any book, he said, they could get free rides and they were like that.
Right. There was an embacy embassy flight where which I could take because he was a retired officer and fly anywhere in the world long or space available, and he used the embassy flight. It originated in Charleston, South Carolina, and which was close to Goldsborough, and it flew all around the world and he was able to use that flight, you know, to get free rise and so he'd go
gambled all over the world. He was gambling, uh, you know, in Spain, Turkey, Greece, wherever there was where there was action. And he was saying that he knew about Halliburton because a lot of these uh uh contractors were gamblers, and uh he said he knew about Halliburton. And that that type of activity along before Dick Cheney made it famous, you know when when he became vice president.
Yeah, for runners of those military contractors. He said, they're throwing a lot of money around and they were.
There, right, so he would, you know, and and he had he had a game in in Spain which involved a lot of US embassy personnel that were in Spain at the time, and uh and uh he said, you know, I said, what about the fact that you were black? And that bothered them and he said, no, as long as your money was green, right, And you know, they didn't care. So he ended up he ended up doing that. That was the embassy flight. And it was very lax security in those days, and they really didn't check you.
They had no X ray machine, they had no dogs, et cetera. And Ike was able to exploit the system to get started. And he started off with Duffel bags and he just put him in the plane and nobody ever checked him. And he'd go through security, nobody ever
checked him. He began to hire or employ some fellow black xgis and gis and if they weren't in the military, he would he would get them uniforms and fit them out with orders and everything, and they put them on the plane and they would move the heroin back to the US. And it became very successful because the heroin that that Ike was moving was so called China white, you know, which could be up to ninety ninety percent pure, and it was like the best best heroin on the planet.
And so the Italian the time mafia, which in the late sixties still controlled the heroin trade through the French connection. It's kind of misnomer because it was run by the Italian mafia. You know. They sold really bad, bad stuff,
you know, and they didn't care about the product. And he had ninety five percent of the markets when I started to shift this stuff, you know, became really in demand, and he was able to build up a really good, uh criminal business, uh smuggling heroin and he dealt mostly with well, he dealt exclusively with black dealers. So Lucas you know, makes the claim in the movie that he, you know, he was the first black to to uh not have to deal with the Italians they came to him,
which was not true. Uh I did. I did research, and Lucas was your traditional black gangster at that period. He dealt he dealt with the mafia, and he got his stuff from from the mafia. UH. And then later when Ike became a real prominent dealer, he started to buy his stuff off.
I now, how did Ike Atkinson actually you did the research? How how did he actually make that connection? You talk about a Chinese go between uh for this for this heroine. Tell us a little bit about that connection.
How did he do that?
Well, he was a relative from the family and I, you know, I didn't really know that much about the connection. He didn't care as long as he got the do But but like like I said, Jackson's wife had connections to the Golden Triangle where they can get a heroin. And the main connection was a mysterious UH member of the family. And he was all I knew him was was Papasan. That was called Papasan and Ike only met him and him twice, but he was the main supplier
of the heroine for Ike's organization. And like I said, he you know what, he didn't know. He didn't bother him because he was getting this stuff. He was able to able to move it without any problems. And then when Pavasan died about nineteen seventy two or seventy three, one of Ike's partners, a guy named Luchai rub Watt, who was a Thai Chinese guy from Bangkok, took over and became the guy that made the connection to the Golden Triangle and moved the heroin.
How much heroin you say in the book that they were smuggling, if I'm not correct, two kilos about five pounds per a wall bag. And in your story you talk about him and Sonny coming back on the plane, so they'd each have five pounds. And he said that because of its purity of the heroin, they could ask anywhere from fifty thousand and upwards for kilo, So an incredible profit. So and so how many am I correct
with that? How many kilos and how many? How many thousands of pounds did they did the DA you're.
Dealing with the drug trade. You're dealing with the drug trade. It's not like you're you're dealing in commodities, legal commodities. You know, you're dealing with a criminal activity. So anything that people say, you know, it's just speculation. Sure, you hear a lot of you know, wild figures, And I always smile because I know that a lot of those
figures aren't even closed. But according to the DEA, you know, this is the d own statistics and reports that I looked at between sixty five and seventy sixty eight and nineteen seventy five when I was active, he was smuggling a thousand pounds a year. They're they're estimating, and they estimated that during that period, if you sold that that heroin on the street, it'd be worth four or four
hundred million dollars. And Don Diva, which is a big hip hop magazine, has a cover story and Ike in their in their current issue, and they projected that was close to over two billion dollars in today's prices. And I just laughs at that, you know, because he said, as he said, I didn't see hardly any of that money, uh, you know, and and he thinks the figures were, you know, were inflated. But anyway you look at it, you know,
he was a major, a major drug dealer. And it's so important in fact, that the DEA set up a special pass force, one of the so called SENTAC units, have to go specifically after Ike. It was a three continent investigation and they only set these SENTAC operations up for kingpins, you know, really big dealers, and Ike was the ninth one his his his oper the operation that tried to get him was called Sentac nine, and it was set up over three continents, Europe, Asia and and
the United States. And they went specifically after Ike because he was a very uh you know, they considered him very important. And also it was contributing to you know, the heroin you know, epidemic. I was sleeping in the US in the seventies, early seventies.
Okay, Now let's go to his friend, Ike's Ike Atkinson's friend Thomas Sonny Sutherland, and let's get to the flight that you talk about early in the book where everything falls apart. Ike Atkinson boards a military plane along with his friend Sonny, and Mike Atkinson, with his connections, is able to get the Sonnier uniform. So Sonny is trying to pass himself self off as a sergeant thanks to
Atkinson's connections and privileges. So go from there. It's a fascinating story of what happened that day.
Well, it's it's a weird, a weird story. And I started off because it's it's the whole town absolutely book Ike was going back to the United States and he took his friend Sunny Sutherland, who, by the way, I just saw this Sunday at a book signing. I hadn't seen him since I researched the book, and he was looking very good. Uh. And he took Sonny back with him to the United States. But you know, he also made it a business trip, and he had a couple
of kilos hidden in his A wall bag. The A wall bags were these sort of overnight bags that soldiers carried and were very popular in that day. And there was a false bottom, which a lot of people didn't know existed, and Ike was including the authorities. And Ike was able to fit, uh, you know, the the the bottom of the A wall bag and would fit about
two kilos. And so Ike had had that on the plane and he was going back to back to the United States, making you know, flying from Bangkok to Okinawa to Hawaii, you know, to the United States, you know, to Andrews Air Force Base. And the trip got really strange because there was supposedly a couple of the cadavers
of American soldiers on there. And when he landed finally landed in Washington, he was interrogated about the about the trip, and evidently someone had tipped him off and it was actually a false tip, but tipped him off that there was heroin on the on the on the in the coffins and cadavers of American soldiers that were coming back, that were the bodies were being transported back to the
United States. And they interrogated Ike uh and they arrested Sonny because they found out that he was carrying bogus papers, which was a serious offense. He was impersonating a military officer and uh. They did everything except to check the a wall bags that Ike was carrying, so he managed to get it. He managed to get the bag back after the arrested son he was able to go down to the station and pick up his belongings and walk
away with it. But the thing was, the press got wind of it, and they sensationalized the the trip and it became that you know, the trip that where uh, where Heroin is being smuggled uh in the bodies of U. S Service and back to the United States. And you know,
it was a type of story. You know, the press couldn't resist and so it was also helped by the by the assistant US Attorney for Baltimore at the time, who said he was convinced that Atkinson and Sutherland were trying to smuggle heroin back to the United States, even though they didn't find any uh you know, they checked the bodies, No, nothing was found. But he said, well, I could they could have They could have got the
heroin off in Hawaii. So it said, you know, it was a story that really fueled, uh, the the the heroin cadaver conspiracy. And it was a strange story which you know ended up in a bizarre uh, in a bizarre way, but also very badly for Sutherland because he went to jail, uh for about five years.
Well let me go back just the second. Here you were you were talking about the media, and the media got a hold of this story. Now, let me make sure I understand this where I thought it was the Attorney General mar that says that there was looked like an incision made in one of the bodies and some stitching done. I mean, you don't have to give some Did he give that to the media or did the media make that up? Because that would feel my fire too.
I don't know, because I couldn't trade I couldn't find the reporters that were reporting that, and I doubt whether they could remember it. Anyways, it was very unclear, uh you know, in the press what happened. But I ended up interviewing people that were actually there. I interviewed a US Customs retired agent that was actually called to that plane, and he said there was nothing wrong with the bodies there.
He said, there was absolutely nothing. It was normal. There was no incisions, nothing, and he was there and he should know because he had training as a mortician.
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I actually gone to mortuary school at one time, so he knew what he was looking at, and that was part of the evidence that I presented, you know, in my book to show that this this cadaver heroin conspiracy thing was was a complete hoax. But it's very interesting because when I went went to prison, went to trial in nineteen seventy five, there was absolutely no mention of Ike using coffins or and or cadavers to move heroin, and I asked to prosecute, you know, why he didn't.
He didn't bring that up in the trial. I said, you know, that could really get the jury, you know, going, and he said, well, he said, we thought I would jeopardize our case because there was absolutely no evidence that that Ike moved or anybody moved heroin in that way. He said, there was a lot of you know, gossips in North Carolina drug trafficking circles, but no concrete evidence.
But the thing was, when Ike try to revive his network in nineteen eighty six and it was caught because of a sting, the press started to talk about Ike moving heroin in a cadaveric connection. So they like ten years went by and there was no mention in seventy six, and all of a sudden they started to mention it again.
And where they got that from. Probably they went back to did their research on Ike and went back to seventy two, you know, when the Ike was on that same as flight, and so they so they got him mixed up and mixing, you know, you know, Ike was the guy that that was moving Heroin on on in the bodies and or confidence of dead servicemen. And then
of course it was fueled by Lucas. You know, it would have been a very little key thing, but then Lucas sensationalized it by by saying that you know, yeah he did it and that it actually existed.
I say so a combination, a confluence of all those things, Lucas talking about it after the media brought it back up, after the media erroneously reported in the first place. I think that's where you got that was from. I can't see an attorney general or any police spokesman giving those kinds of details like incisions and stitching. They would never give that information to the media. So I've seen the media before extrapolide or exaggerate or outwardly alive.
I believe it, but you know, but but you mentioned, you know, mar All that he did. He did feel it, and I interviewed him and he still believes to this day. You know that that that there was that there was heroin, you know, in in the confidence and average but somehow I can manage to get an off and uh, you know, you could probably talk to him for the rest of Uh. I could probably talk to the rest of my life and present all kinds of evidence and say this, and
he's still probably believe it. That's that's the nature of conspiracies.
What did he say in response to this evidence that you had that you been presented to him?
Well, when I when I when I had interviewed him, I didn't I didn't have as much evidence later because I interviewed, you know, a lot of different people regarding the thing, and I told him, I said that, Uh, the people that I interviewed at that point, you know, really didn't believe it. And you know, I interviewed like
like journalists from the from the Vietnam War. There was a guy named Al Dawson who were who was up I Bureau chief and he said they were like going crazy kind of find find evidence of this because the rumors were so strong and no journalists found anything and he said he was really excited because he thought he was going to win to Plitzer Prize. You know, he said, because he was right there in Vietnam. He said, if I could prove this, I probably went to Plitzer Prize.
And he concluded, after about a year of trying to find, you know, some evidence of it, that it didn't exist. And today he says, it's it's a complete hoax, you know. And I haven't quoted in the book now. Now.
Part of the story, though, that I think the audience needs to know, is that at the same time that they were that there was this you know, they were you tell the story of them both being on the plane, and then there was a diversion. The plane was re routed to another city, and they thought, jeez, what's with all the military on the on the tarmac here? What's going on? Then they had look like FBI guys say,
don't anybody go in the back. We've got a couple of dead Giyes and and all along Sonny and and Iker going this is unusual.
Now, when it was a strange, it was a strange trip. Because I think they're they're probably getting the evidence or they're getting the uh the tip that something was going on while the fight was going on, and uh uh you know, from someone in North Carolina that was trying to ingratiate themselves, you know, with the with the authorities, and so he was giving them this hot tip. I sort of have a theory of who it was, uh and I mentioned it in in in the book, But
who is that? Well? I mentioned this guy named Ellis Sutton, who is a part of like halfway in the Ikes group of brothers and half way out. He sort of hung around with them, and I liked him, uh, you know, personally,
but he didn't he didn't trust them. And I have a transcript in there which I uncovered where he's being interrogated by one of the D agents and you could see that he's really playing the D agent and he doesn't know what he's talking about because and he refers to that trip, you know, in that in that transcript.
But you can see when you read, when you read that transcript that he's really playing the agent and he doesn't really know anything, but the the agent's trying to get him to say something that it somehow confirmed, you know. The suspicions of the authorities very interesting because I don't believe as much what I read in the press as I used to do, you know about about sure fire, sure fire theories and all this sort of thing, because when when the American Gangster came out, uh, they were
like twelve I didn't. I was doing my research, you know, because researching book, and there were like twelve thousand articles on the internet about the Heroin conspiracy and you know how it existed, But they're all the same article.
Well yeah, you know what I mean.
And they all went back to that original original article back in a series of articles back and said too, which fuel the speculation.
They only go back, they only go back to. There's maybe like I'm living in a city of a quarter three quarters of a million people. There's two people at a trial, one newspaper and the other newspaper, maybe one of the television networks. But in terms of reading about the story in any kind of in depth nature of covering a trial, it's only those two people, and the biggest uh newspaper or the biggest circulation that will be taken by, say in Canada, the Canadian press in America
would be associated. So it might be one journalist and if he's off or he's biased, or he's sleeping. That's what you got, and it's cut in a paste. He'll just keep repeating himself, add nauseum from his earlier stories and might not even add on. And that's what that's what you're facing.
That's exactly right. And you know, I know from direct experience that there was a vested interest in the keeping that story alive by the media because I went on
I went on several shows. I went on the History Channel, Biography Channel, Discovery, you know, when Lucas was really big and I was being interviewed, you know, about about him, and I would explain that the cadaver theory you know, uh that didn't exist and all that, and they would take one half of my statement, you know, and put it out of context, you know, to support the uh the really general line you know, yeah, because they were promoting the movie, you know, I mean the History Channel.
The History Channel was owned by the same company own Universal and uh you know, like when I when I got on Dayline, like NBC for example, Uh that I was calling Dayline, uh, you know, to do a show that they're they're going to try to promote the movie. And this NBC's Dayline, and I lined up like three or four people. I said, well, you got to you got to get a true story. So I lined up a prosecutor that put Lucas in jail, a couple of d agents that that knew Lucas because they investigated him
and actually interrogated him. And we were there for like five or six hours, and then I get a call from the producer of Dayline saying that they decided that they were going to use the show, uh you know, and and he said, but we're going to do it someday. They were going to use our information, but someday, you know,
we're going to do it, you know, right now. All that meantime, they get Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe on a special half hour in Matt Lauer and they're supposed to be the experts, you know in Frank Lucas, and all they did was hype the movie. Sure, and you know, like Black Entertainment for example, I was on that show, and they had a special our infomercial that's what it really was, where they were given exclusive access to to Denzel and all that, you know, to hype the movie.
So they didn't want anything negative to be said, you know about Lucas, about how he's you know, he's essentially a liar and his story is bogus.
No, but you could also get quashed by basically, you know, the journalists. The journalist basically says, well, I got to call the other people for a response, and those people give a response like we've got this from this so and this is the you know, so you can understand where they're coming from. But it's an interesting thing.
Well, also, you know, there's there's really very little investigative journalism going on today. Sure, and a lot of them you know, it's to that, you know, to not defend journalism, but you know, there's a point that that they're always on deadline too, you know, so there's only so much research that they can do. And like I was doing a book, so you know, I had much more time
to uh to uh investigate it. Uh. But you know to the Associated Press credit uh they did, they retracted their story because uh, you know, they came out really usual stuff that Yeah, well the interviewed they interviewed me, and I was actually in Columbia, uh, South America at the time, and they called me and I told him, I said, you can't you can't believe this whatever, And
they came out with the usual stuff. This one reporter and then uh a reporter that had connections to the AP that had been in Bangkok, and John macbeth, who was one of my sources for the book up the or email the AP to complain about the story and it's saying that you should really look at it closely.
And so they finally did and interviewed more sources and got actually Lucas to retract his statement about the cadaver connection where he said, quote, I may have done it one or twice, you know, from being you know, a major method of shipping heroin to saying that I may have done it once or twice, you know, which was pretty well meant that he never did it at all.
Right, do you think that racism played and discrimination and just the history of the old self had something to do with well, we'll say primarily white media not wanting to discount the story where you have a black soldiers, dead soldiers and black heroin smugglers so despicable that they you don't think that had anything to do.
No, and that enjoyed it was just a great story story that nobody wanted to see die. You know that that was essentially it, and it was it's so easy to check out. You know, there's never been an instance of anybody being arrested, or anybody being convicted, or any incident of heroin being shipped in in the bodies or the and or the confidence of dead gis during the
Vietnam War. And like I said, I checked with journalists and that period and they said they were running around because they really wanted to prove it to be true, but they couldn't find any evidence. It's really incredible. It makes it's kind of frightening because you know, I've sort of looked at all conspiracies, you know, the ones that I sort of believe in, like you know, the you know, the mafia having something to do with the killing of Kennedy, right,
you know that sort of thing. I'm the same. Well, you know, you know, maybe there you know, there isn't any truth because uh, this this story was a sure winner. Everybody believed that it happened, but you know, there was no evidence of it, and it's so easy to check out, you know, but people wanted to believe it because it's such a great story, you know, It's a ghooly story, and people love reading about stories like that.
Now I have a question before we get a little bit more into Ike Atkinson and you going to prison and interviewing him and how he really ended up getting caught for heroin smuggling and imprisoned. So I just wanted to ask you in your interviews with him, did he ever attempt did you ever ask or was there any attempt to reconcile him? The honest, basically honest. He was a little bit of a hustle. He was a gambler, but basically he was proud of his military service. He
was called a gentleman's gentleman. He was basically a good guy. Didn't hold any hatred towards towards anyone. He was the antithesist of Frank Lucas. Did he ever have any qualms about selling heroin? Did he have any ideas or any did he have any qualms about the perceived damage?
Yeah, we we we talked about that, and uh, you know, we talked about that, and uh, he does he does regret, you know, having to do that, and he realizes that he that he uh you know, caused damage you know, by by by smuggling, uh by smuggling heroin. And he always said that the biggest mistake he made was right after World War Two. I mentioned that earlier, where he decided the life professional gambler. He didn't take advantage of the g I bill and uh, you know, go to
college because he was quite smart, you know. He he had finished high school, which was you know, no small feet in those days, you know, for for young black and uh, and he was very bright, you know, uh, brilliant in fact in a lot of ways. And uh, he didn't do that. And one of his friends, Uh did do that, he says. And he became an engineer, you know, and did quite well for him. Well, he had the spen the rest of his life. And but he doesn't really dwell in the past. You know. He's
a very he's a very upbeat guy. And he says that, you know, he's he's talked with his maker about it, and he thinks he's you know, uh, you know, he's he's he's asked for forgiveness and he thinks he's been forgiven, you know, for his sins. He's a he's a religious religious man and uh, you know, life has to go on. I mean, you know, he can be contrite forever. He
has to he has to live. He's eighty five years old, and and you know, try to make it up, you know, with being a good person today, uh and stuff like that.
Now, how did he eventually get caught? And what was his sentence? Tell us a little bit about the trial to capture the whole.
Wow, he he eventually, you know, Uh, the war was winding down and he was trying to trying to get more and more heroin out because the war was his cover. And uh, he started to uh develop increasingly more sophisticated methods, you know, to shift heroin into the smuggle heroin into the US. And you mentioned some of them, and one of them was the postal service where he bribed people
working in the postal in the military APO system. And what he would do would be to smuggle money back to Bangkok and Thailand to buy the drugs and then he would use the postal system to smuggle heroin back into the US. And he had he had people on his payroll on both ends of it, and he was shifting some heroin back to the back to the US, and he had him shipped to some old ladies houses,
but somehow it got screwed up. One of his h lieutenants didn't pick up the heroin in time, and the woman got suspicious and she called the authorities, and the authorities examined the bag and the box and they found this a wall bag inside and they opened it up. They saw the stitching was not exactly right, and then they found the heroine and then Ikes. She shipped a couple of more boxes back to the back to the US from from Bangkok, and they, you know, intercepted them
and one of the bags had ikes pom print. Ike had forgotten that he had his pomferend taken before in the military before he left, and they were able to to identify him. So I was on the major pieces of evidence that got him convicted. And he got forty four years prison and he was fined fifty thousand dollars.
And he was like fifty two years old when he went in about fifty two, so it was a seventy five about fifty years old, right, and so uh, he looked like he was going to be spending you know, the rest of his life in prison, and so the he tried to continue is his operation from jail but it didn't work, and he tried and then in nineteen eighty six he tried to revive his network from inside the jail, and yeah, he was set up by a sting.
And I don't want to get don't want to give the whole book away because no one's going to read.
That's right, That's right. Yeah, that's a twet. That's a that's another twist in the story.
Yeah.
Right, there's there's a lot of twists in the story. But that's an incredible chapter, you know, which is sort of a you know, quota to his life. And it's amazing that he's out, you know, he's out. He finally got out at uh at eighty two.
Why why was he given such a harsh sentence? I mean even by anybody's standards, I mean forty something years is why.
What were Well? Because because they because you know, he was a major, major drug trafficker, and they were trying to make a statement because when they were trying, when they were pumping up the trial, you know, the prosecutors they had him being responsible for a half billion dollars. This is what they were saying. They did this real fancy mathematics in one of the statements that the prosect when they were when they were beginning to trial, and he did this fancy mathematics and came up with a
figure of five hundred five hundred billion dollars. And he was a kingpin and he was a major trophy in the war on drugs, right, And so they really wanted to, you know, to maximize the benefit of of of getting Ike uh and uh and putting him off the street.
How did they come to being able to prove did they just did they just speculate or how did they did they present information to say, listen, we were we uh suspected Ike Atkinson for years and we think he upted the system.
Well, yeah, he had the promprint, but he also there was also and like I said, I don't want to give no book away, but there was also an informant who worked with an Ike's organization who was very who was and you know, I mentioned him in the book, Freddie Thrton, which is a very interesting chapter. But Freddy Thurman proved to be an incredibly effective witness. And he was when I went to the courthouse or the archives in Atlanta, there was eight hundred pages of his testimony.
He was on for days. And he had great memory, and he was very smart and he uh presented evidence and I always calls him the worst mistake he made as far as being drug trafford was and was was making throwing his right hand man while he was in prison.
Right, So when you met like Atkinson, you he was scheduled to leave prison in a year or so. So how long did you correspond with him to be able to write this book?
Well, we we kept we kept in touch while we were in prison, and uh, you know, I went on to other projects. I had another book about Chicago, uh like Answers Chicago and uh, and I was being in to research into the book about Miami. So I was uh not too interested at that point because I didn't know if it would work out or not. I don't know how he would feel when he got out got out of prison, what kind of health he was, you know, if you had any energy to spend you know with
me and uh. And then when he got out, we re established con tact. I called him and we met for you know, for coffee, and we discussed the discussed the book and uh, and what you know I can do for him in terms of writing the book, and he thought about it and he decided and on the end that it would it would be worth it. I don't think he has any regrets now because he's really enjoying. Uh, you know, the experience of being the subjects of a book.
Are you taking are you going on am I correct, you're going on tours with him as well? Speaking?
Oh yeah, we do. Yeah, we've been doing books. We've been Uh it's really funny because you know, eighty five almost eighty five, and we're on a lot of hip hop shows. Yeah, you know, there was these shows that you know, young guys. You know, I could barely understand him, you know, because they're speaking the ago of hip hop and all that. Yeah, and uh, we we've done several books Signs Winton, New York, and uh, it's amazing, like, uh, you know, the Italian mafia, you know, is very famous,
you know, your names like God. But also in the black community, black gangsters, you know, have a sort of standing too, and so Ike is well known. Not many people know much about him, but they know who he is. It's really amazing because one day we were in Harlem. I was researching the book, and you know, Ike was saying I'm not that well known, I said, I said, you want to believe it? And I just turned to somebody on the street, so I was walking down. I said, hey, man,
I said, you know Mike Atkinson. He said who, I answer, you mean the drug dealer. I said, yeah, yeah, he goes, yeah, I know him. Yeah, you knew about him, and I was Ike was amazed, you know, on that sort of thing. So there's a lot of interest in Ike's story, especially because you know, everybody thinks that Frank Lucas story is supposed to be true, and then when they find out when they read the book, you know, and there's so much compelling evidence that is presented to show that his
story is basically a lie. You know, it's it's He's created a lot of interesting We've got people now we're talking about filming that are interested in doing film. So we're talking to some people now, both a documentary and feature film. So we think it's not going to end anytime soon, but we're both enjoying it.
What does he feel now about Frank Lucas, because in invertently, Frank Lucas has helped him, if you really think about it, Frank luc I mean well, Frank Lucas said that way.
He wouldn't look at it to ask you what. You can invite him on the show, ask him that question and then sit back for sixty minutes. He'll go off on on on Lucas. He's just you know, he's just he's really upset with Lucas and you know he thinks, you know, that he's a liar. I mean just you know, he just started his life and he's happy that we've done the book so he can reclaim it, you know, because everything that's known about like Addison came from Frank Lucas,
and Frank Lucas used like Akison to promote his own story. Uh. So he's you know, he's.
Uh, he's having to get the record set straight.
Yeah. And he's challenged Frank to a debate, you know, public debate, saying let's talk about let's talk about our lives and see who's who's telling the truth or not. But we haven't heard anything, uh, you know, back from him, although we did hear from from one of Lucas's managers. Uh who believe it or not. Frank Lucas has a clothing line. Oh really yeah, right, and he's evidently it's been used for charity and he's trying to clean up
his image. So uh so uh he called called me about getting Ike and Frank Lucas on the Save the Children tour, you know, like where they get out talk about the evils of drug and I said, well, I know what I's gonna say, but I'll mention it to him, and I just you know, I'm not going on tour that guy. So you gotta be kidding on that. So you know, that was Nick's very very quickly.
He's had his come up. He's had his come up, and still because he you do report in a book what he says about Frank Lucas, and none of it is really any good. You know, he basically calls him in and nobody you know, but.
It's also not just Ike, because I interviewed you know, like scores of law enforcement officials, you know, I interviewed law enforce officials that were in Bangkok in the early seventies that never heard of Frank Lucas. And if he was such a big dealer as as he claims to be in as the movie presented, you know, they would have a lot of information on him, you know, because they would they would have been investigating him because he
would have been prominent. And Ike, the the head of the Bangkok Bureau of d eighth office, said he spent days when coming up to speed with Ike when he when he took over the office, he said, it was just files and files and files on him, going all the way back to Germany. I mentioned about his early life in Europe and you know, but there was nothing
on Lucas. And you know, it's really amazing because he's he's been able to get you know, away with it, and he's one of the luckiest guys that that I think I've ever met in my life because he was on welfare when the journalists from the New York magazine approached him about doing a profile of him, which got
him the movie. Because that movie is based on a magazine article that appear in a New York magazine and that turned his life around, where you know, Denzel Washington ends up giving him a house and he gets, you know, made close to a million dollars and he gets you know, rap song, you know, and an album with jay Z you know, in the top tough rappers in the world.
And so it's really amazing, especially when when you don't have to do much searching, really researching to realize that his life is is a sham.
But basically, the film of the film people film producers wanted the same thing that the media wanted. They wanted him to admit, Yeah, that we put Heroin in the Bodies of Dead gis. So if you can sell out,
you sell out the entire truth and you're lying about everything. Yeah, I can see why Atkinson would want a little piece of Frank Lucas, to say the least, because I mean, Atkinson wouldn't have went along with this, but for Lucas to get fame and fortune from basically a crapload of lies that implicate Atkinson and stuff he would never dream of doing. Yeah, I can see it right right.
And so so you know, we feel that our book has reclaimed Lucas's life, and as time goes by and you know, more and more people read it, hopefully we get a movie out of it that you know, it'll be put back into perspective and and I will be very happy about that because you'll be able to control over his own life again.
Yes, well we're almost winding down here, Ron, maybe you can tell us what what new project are you working on or what's the update with this book? And I can see you're just basically on tour with us.
Yeah, we'll be in New York on the sixteenth and seventeenth. We'll be in Philadelphia, that's October. The weekend of October sixteen, we'll be at Human Bookstore in Ireland, and then we'll be at Blackstar the Music and Video the following day. And we'll be in Philadelphia in October thirteenth at a
place And people can go to www. Ike Atkinson Kingpin dot com a t K I N s O n as w w Ike Atkinson Kingpin dot com for more information about the book and about what we're doing in Ikes on Facebook too, and I got them to work with the new technology. Yeah, although it's a challenge. You know, this guy's been in jail for thirty two years and yeah, you know, computers are a little alien to him still. But anyways, you get on his Facebook page and keep up with what's going on.
Yeah, I saw that. That's interesting. It looks pretty good too. Yeah, I just want to Yeah, I just want to thank you very much, Ron for a great interview. And I had a great book. I want to thank you very much.
I want to tell.
People the book that they've been we've been talking about today is Sergeant Smack. The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin and his band of Brothers and Sergeant Smack. And that's what the DEA called Dike Atkinson Sergeant Smack. I want to thank you very much for this interview, Ron and have yourself a good evening.
Thank you, Dan, I really appreciate being on.
Thank you for a great interview. You have yourself a good eveningwbye. Even listen to the program True Murder the most shocking killers in true crime history, and the authors have written about them. Have a good evening, Good night,