Frank Matthews (drug trafficker)

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Matthews, who went by Black Caesar and Mark IV, was an American drug trafficker whose reach covered much of the eastern United States. From 1965 to 1972 he sold heroin and cocaine, and his dealers worked in 21 states. The Drug Enforcement Administration ranks him among the ten biggest traffickers in the nation's history. In 1973 the FBI offered a $20,000 reward for him. No federal agency had posted a bounty that high since the Bureau offered the same sum for the bank robber John Dillinger. Matthews was never collected. How did a boy from Durham, North Carolina, who left school in the seventh grade, build an empire the Mafia had refused to share? What did he try to change about the way narcotics reached American streets? And what became of him when the law finally closed in?

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• 2. From Durham to Brooklyn

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  Frank Larry Matthews was born in Durham, North Carolina, on the 13th of February 1944. His mother died when he was four. His aunt, Marzella Steele, raised him. She was married to a lieutenant in the Durham Police Department. Friends called the small boy "Pee Wee." He attended East End Elementary and quit school in the seventh grade. At 14 he led a teenage gang that raided local farms for chickens. A farmer caught him in the act, and Matthews struck the man with a brick. Arrested in October 1960, he spent a year at the Raleigh State Reformatory for Boys. After his release he moved north to Philadelphia and worked as a numbers writer, taking bets for an illegal lottery. There he met Major Coxson and members of the city's Black Mafia, who later became his customers. A 1963 arrest ended without a conviction, but only because he agreed to leave town. He settled in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He cut hair, collected numbers bets, lent money at a profit and enforced debts. By 1965 he found the numbers racket too small for his ambitions.

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• 3. The Cocaine Connection

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  In those years the American Mafia held the best door into wholesale heroin, through the famed French Connection. Matthews tried to join the Gambino and Bonanno crime families as a partner. Both turned him down. He found another path through "Spanish Raymond" Márquez, a busy Harlem numbers operator. Márquez introduced him to Rolando Lucas Gonzalez Nuñez, a Cuban mafia boss. Gonzalez owned a share of a gambling casino on San Andres Island, Colombia, and moved large amounts of cocaine. He was about to flee to Venezuela ahead of an indictment when he sold Matthews a single kilogram of cocaine for $20,000. He also promised more. The arrangement grew into a steady flow of cocaine and heroin from South America. Within a year Matthews ranked among the major figures in New York's drug trade. He kept hunting for fresh suppliers and would deal with nearly anyone, so long as the product was pure. Meanwhile, he developed a cocaine habit of his own, and it grew alongside his fortune.

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• 4. Mills and Mansions

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  The DEA put its verdict on Matthews in one sentence: "Matthews controlled the cutting, packaging, and sale of heroin in every major East Coast city." His business stayed anchored in Brooklyn, where two fortified buildings served as drug mills. The one at 925 Prospect Place was called the "Ponderosa." The other, at 101 East 56th Street, was the "OK Corral." Their walls were reinforced with steel and concrete, and guards carried automatic weapons. Matthews did not only sell on the street. He supplied other big dealers with multi-kilogram loads at prices reaching $26,000 per kilogram. One customer was Coxson, who passed heroin on to the Philadelphia Black Mafia. By the early 1970s the organization handled loads worth millions, and Matthews personally earned about $10 million in 1972. He spent loudly. He owned luxury houses, cars and clothes, and he sat in prime seats at sporting events. One home stood at 7 Buttonwood Road on Staten Island's Todt Hill, a Mafia enclave. Gambino boss Paul Castellano lived three blocks away on Benedict Road. Matthews flew to Las Vegas with suitcases of cash, and casinos laundered it for a fee of 15 to 18 percent. His savings were estimated at $20 million.

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• 5. The Summits

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  In 1971 Matthews invited leading African-American and Hispanic traffickers from around the country to a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The agenda was simple. How could they import heroin without the Mafia? The DEA learned of the gathering and watched who came. The dealers resolved to build their own ties with the Corsican mafia and perhaps the Cuban mafia. They also agreed to add cocaine, which was reaching the market in huge quantities. The meeting mattered because of what it signaled. The Mafia had long controlled imports and wholesale supply, which let it decide who could rise. Black dealers sold to their own neighborhoods but answered to suppliers above them. Now they were forging their own pipelines and taking charge of their home turf. That shift later went further. Local black gangs began driving out black suppliers who tried to run neighborhoods from afar. Matthews held a second summit in 1972 in Las Vegas, at the Sands Hotel, during the Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry rematch. Soon afterward, police gained permission to tap his phone lines. The recordings captured him discussing drug deals.

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• 6. Blood on Easter Sunday

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  Easter Sunday in 1972 brought the worst violence of Matthews's career. Tyrone "Mr. Millionaire" Palmer, his main dealer in Philadelphia, was in a nightclub in Atlantic City. A gunfight broke out there, and Palmer was killed. Bystanders were caught in the shooting. Five people died and twenty-six were wounded. The clash grew out of Matthews's conflicts with the Philadelphia Black Mafia. Nobody was ever prosecuted. Of the 799 people who might have testified, none came forward. The Black Mafia also murdered three of Matthews's top lieutenants. The man who had once supplied Philadelphia through Coxson now faced a hostile city, and the law was gathering evidence against him as well.

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• 7. Out on Bail

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  In December 1972 federal prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted Matthews. The charge was trying to sell 40 pounds of cocaine in Miami, Florida, between April and September of that year. The DEA arrested him in January 1973 at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. He was about to fly to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. The charges were tax evasion and conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine. A federal magistrate set bail at $5 million, the highest figure ever set at that time. It dropped to $2.5 million when Matthews agreed not to fight extradition to New York. After a few weeks in detention there, a judge lowered it again to $325,000. He faced six counts and a possible 50 years in prison. Free on bail, he kept dealing. In April 1973 Ernie "Coco" Coralluzzo, an associate of the Genovese family's Greenwich Village Crew, agreed to sell him 40 kilograms of heroin for $375,000. They met at the Waldorf Astoria New York. Matthews sent the money through an intermediary the next day. Coralluzzo never delivered and fled to the Bahamas. Matthews and his men kidnapped James "Big Jimmy" Capotorto, Coralluzzo's underling and bodyguard, to force repayment. Hearing of this, Coralluzzo flew back to New York. He returned the $375,000 and handed over 25 kilograms of heroin on consignment.

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• 8. The Vanishing

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  On the 2nd of July 1973, a Brooklyn courthouse waited for Frank Matthews. He did not appear. He is believed to have fled the country with his girlfriend and around $20 million. Behind him he left his common-law wife, their three sons and the mansion on Staten Island. Nobody ever saw him again. His disappearance became the last chapter of his story. Former DEA agent Frank Panessa later described unconfirmed reports that the Genovese family had lured Matthews to the Bahamas and killed him. In this account the motive was twofold. They wanted to stop him from becoming a state's witness, and he was feuding with Coralluzzo. Since the reports remain unconfirmed, the question of whether he escaped or was killed is still open.

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