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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, The Most Shocking
Speaker 3: Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker Bck. Every week,
Speaker 3: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 3: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 5: Good evening, This is your host Stan Zupaski for the
Speaker 5: program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True crime
Speaker 5: History and the authors that have written about them. True
Speaker 5: crime author ron chepsik uncovers one of the biggest cons
Speaker 5: in the history of the international drug trade with his
Speaker 5: book Sergeant Smack, The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Akittsen,
Speaker 5: Kingpin and his Band of Brothers. Sergeant Smack details a
Speaker 5: true legend of Ike Akittsen, one of the biggest black
Speaker 5: drug traffickers in US history. Atkinson pioneered some of the
Speaker 5: most innovative methods used in international drug smuggling. They ranged
Speaker 5: from duffel and a wall bags to the U. S
Speaker 5: Army postal system, to the use of unsuspecting crew chiefs
Speaker 5: who operated military aircraft transporting teakwood furniture. But contrary to
Speaker 5: popular belief, Atkinson's methods did not include the bogus cadaver
Speaker 5: heroin smuggling connection conspiracy exploited by Frank Lucas in Hollywood's
Speaker 5: blockbuster film American Gangster. The film not only distorted Atkinson's
Speaker 5: historical role in the international drug trade, but falsely depicted
Speaker 5: Lucas as the pioneer of the Asian heroin connection. As
Speaker 5: the book conclusively shows the conspiracies a hoax, as is
Speaker 5: Frank Lucas's claim of participation with Ike in the conspiracy.
Speaker 5: Sergeant Smack with my special guest, ron Chepzick. Welcome to
Speaker 5: the program, ron Chepzik, and thanks you for agreeing to
Speaker 5: this interview.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much and I appreciate it being on
Speaker 4: your show.
Speaker 5: Thank you. Great book. Just want to start with it's
Speaker 5: a great read. Now, first question, what made you decide
Speaker 5: to write a book about this particular story.
Speaker 4: Well, it's an interesting, interesting story. I had done a
Speaker 4: book called Gangsters of Harlem, where I traced the history
Speaker 4: of the criminal underworld in one of the most famous
Speaker 4: neighborhoods in America, Harlem, and one of the gangsters I
Speaker 4: profiled in that book was Frank Lucas, and I was
Speaker 4: able to get an interview with him. And this is
Speaker 4: before he became really famous, you know. The American Gangster
Speaker 4: movie made him almost a household name and one of
Speaker 4: those famous gangsters. And I interviewed him and he kept
Speaker 4: talking about his so called cousin, Mike Atkinson, how I
Speaker 4: had brought him to Asia, how he pioneered the connection,
Speaker 4: how I helped him with coffins to smuggle heroin to
Speaker 4: the US, et cetera, et cetera. And I said that,
Speaker 4: I said, this guy Ike Atkinson played a big role
Speaker 4: in Frank Lucas's career. I should try to talk to him.
Speaker 4: So I did some research on the internet. I found
Speaker 4: out that he was in jail for thirty the past
Speaker 4: thirty two years. He'd been in jails in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 4: and there was hardly anything on him, which is not
Speaker 4: good for a journalist, right you figure, well, you know,
Speaker 4: either probably he doesn't want to talk to anybody, you know,
Speaker 4: And I said, what the heck? I found out that
Speaker 4: he was only like three hours down the road for
Speaker 4: me in Butner Federal Penitentiary. And I said, well, I said,
Speaker 4: that's an easy trip. So I wrote the warden and
Speaker 4: I say, could you uh passes on to onto Ike Atkinson.
Speaker 4: I'm interested in in getting an interview with him for
Speaker 4: a book I'm writing. And uh he kindly consented, and
Speaker 4: uh and normally I really didn't want like to give interviews,
Speaker 4: but I mentioned Frank Lucas in the in the letter,
Speaker 4: and so I'm very curious about Frank Lucas. And so
Speaker 4: I got this interview, and uh, you know, he went
Speaker 4: ballistic in the interview when I told him some of
Speaker 4: the things that Frank was saying. And he says, he said, gee,
Speaker 4: he's not my cousin. You know, he's not related by blood.
Speaker 4: I don't know why he says that, but he always
Speaker 4: says that I never shipped confidence and all this sort
Speaker 4: of stuff. So anyways, uh, we were talking and uh,
Speaker 4: you know, we had some uh some uh energy going
Speaker 4: here between me and him, and you know, we started
Speaker 4: we could tell her we sort of liked each other,
Speaker 4: and uh, I said, well, I want to come back
Speaker 4: and interview because I saw a bunch of questions. Uh.
Speaker 4: Because the interview was limited to about forty five minutes
Speaker 4: and I Warren and said I could come back, So
Speaker 4: I did. I did come back and interviewed him again,
Speaker 4: and then I went back to Lucas, and Lucas went
Speaker 4: ballistic because you know, I was checking out in his
Speaker 4: story and he's sort of a bully. He's not He's
Speaker 4: not at all like like Denzel Washington portrayed him in
Speaker 4: the movie. You know, he's he can barely understand him.
Speaker 4: He's the only guy that sweet things languae where you
Speaker 4: have to use subtitles the History Channel. So anyways, I
Speaker 4: did that. I wrote, I wrote the you know, the profiles,
Speaker 4: one of one of the best chapters in my book,
Speaker 4: Answers the Harlem. And I corresponded with Ike and he
Speaker 4: was getting out in two thousand and seven the following year,
Speaker 4: and we said, well, you know, maybe we could collaborate
Speaker 4: on the book, and we left it like that, and
Speaker 4: then when he got out, we met and decided that
Speaker 4: we were going to do a book. And I promised
Speaker 4: him that I would do my best to remove the
Speaker 4: scarlet letter from his name, the scarlet letter being the
Speaker 4: Cadava heroin conspiracy hoax. And I think I did it
Speaker 4: in the book. You know, I interviewed a lot of people,
Speaker 4: and that's how I ended up operating probably the best
Speaker 4: story I'll ever get in my life as a journalist.
Speaker 4: I don't think I could ever talk this story because
Speaker 4: it's such an interesting story.
Speaker 5: Now you just mentioned and I didn't know if I
Speaker 5: got that from the book so much. Anyway, was one
Speaker 5: of the main reasons why Ike wanted to write this
Speaker 5: book was to deal with that rumor that had persisted
Speaker 5: for over thirty years that they had smuggled heroin and cadavers.
Speaker 5: Was that something that really bothered him?
Speaker 4: Right? Well, yes, it really did bother him. And people say,
Speaker 4: you know, why has it bothered him? I mean, would
Speaker 4: you like to be to find by somebody else you know,
Speaker 4: your life's and would you like to be known as
Speaker 4: the guy that pioneered the cadaver heroin conspiracy. We're using
Speaker 4: coffins of dead gis from Vietnam War to smuggle heroin.
Speaker 4: And I you know, I was a military guy. I
Speaker 4: spent twenty years in the military. He was a master sergeant.
Speaker 4: He had a very good career. He had some problem
Speaker 4: with gambling, which I go into the book, but he
Speaker 4: got he retired twenty years and you know, that's what
Speaker 4: people remembered him from. And it wasn't so bad until
Speaker 4: Lucas made that movie. And if you remember the movie
Speaker 4: American Gangster, I became an international sensation. The highlight of
Speaker 4: the movie is when Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the
Speaker 4: prosecutor that put Lucas and jail uncovers quote, the heroine
Speaker 4: in the in the cadavers, you know, and in the coffins,
Speaker 4: continuing the cadavers, and that's the highlight of the movie.
Speaker 4: And so yeah, so it's understandable why he would want
Speaker 4: to clear his name on that respect.
Speaker 5: Anyways, Okay, let's go back now, because you know there'll
Speaker 5: be a little bit confusing for our audience. So let's
Speaker 5: go back because this is a fascinating story right from
Speaker 5: the beginning. And so let's not talk about the flight
Speaker 5: of as as you do in the book. Let's go
Speaker 5: a little bit back. Let's go back to Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about Ike Akinson. He wasn't always known as
Speaker 5: Ike Atkinson. Tell us about his life. His early life
Speaker 5: is very fascinating. You also have a historical background everything.
Speaker 5: It's America War, America and transition it's a very very
Speaker 5: important time in American history. Give us a little bit
Speaker 5: of the background there, and tell us about Ike Atkinson,
Speaker 5: what his life was like, what was he really like,
Speaker 5: and what was Goldsboro like where he grew up.
Speaker 4: Tell us a little bit about all that he grew
Speaker 4: up in the rural South. And this is kind of
Speaker 4: kind of ironic because for period in the seventies, golds
Speaker 4: World became the drug capital of the United States. Not
Speaker 4: New York City filled out here in Chicago, but this
Speaker 4: little rural hamlet in North Carolina, eastern North Carolina called Goldsborough,
Speaker 4: which probably had about twelve to thirteen thousand people, you know,
Speaker 4: back in the back in the seventies. And I you know,
Speaker 4: was born in nineteen twenty five, and his real name
Speaker 4: is Leslie and he got the name Ike from one
Speaker 4: of his military buddies. We just started calling him Ike,
Speaker 4: and the name stuck, and so he took the name
Speaker 4: of Ike, and so he became known as Ike. He
Speaker 4: grew up in poverty. His father left him when he
Speaker 4: was left the family when he was young, and he
Speaker 4: had several brothers and sisters and his mother raised them.
Speaker 4: She was a domestic and you know, he grew up
Speaker 4: to be a normal kid. I mean Lucas. He claims
Speaker 4: that life was so tough that he had to be
Speaker 4: a criminal. Well, Lucas was born thirteen miles from where
Speaker 4: Ike was, and I don't think Ike's life was any
Speaker 4: any more tough than Lucas. But he grew up, you know,
Speaker 4: free of crime. He didn't didn't get involved with any
Speaker 4: kind of mischief orning like that. But it was, you know,
Speaker 4: a racist times. It was tough to be, you know,
Speaker 4: a black in the Royal South back in the thirties
Speaker 4: and forties. And one year before the war, he went
Speaker 4: up north to New York City to visit his cousin,
Speaker 4: Leonard Peacock, and Leonard took him to Ithaca, New York,
Speaker 4: and he worked at a military base, and he was
Speaker 4: just a kid, he was a teenager. But it really
Speaker 4: opened his eyes to the world. He met a white
Speaker 4: person there as a first white person became a friend
Speaker 4: of his, and you know, he realized that there were,
Speaker 4: you know, good white people in the world. And when
Speaker 4: he came back to Goldsborough, he decided that he wanted
Speaker 4: to get out Goldsborough as fast as he could. You know,
Speaker 4: it was too small for him, so earned too many
Speaker 4: opportunities for him to do it. But he decided that
Speaker 4: he wanted to go into the military, and he was
Speaker 4: under age, but managed to forge a paper which got
Speaker 4: him into the military. And so he got into the military,
Speaker 4: and of course the war started and he served, you know,
Speaker 4: in the army, and he rose quite fast as a
Speaker 4: as a military guy, and before before too long he's
Speaker 4: one of the youngest master sergeants in the military. It
Speaker 4: was a segregated army, of course, you know, and that's
Speaker 4: one of the things that really irritated him a lot
Speaker 4: of other blacks, the fact that they wouldn't serve because
Speaker 4: the white brass thought that black soldiers, you know, wouldn't
Speaker 4: do well in combat. So he set out most of
Speaker 4: the war and he wanted to you know, he wanted
Speaker 4: to fight the Japanese because he was in the Pacific,
Speaker 4: but he never got that opportunity, and so he spent
Speaker 4: you know, the early part of his life into the
Speaker 4: twenties in the military. And then so when the war ended,
Speaker 4: he had to make a choice, and he decided that
Speaker 4: he would stay in the in the military, and the
Speaker 4: military was was kind of a candy shop for him
Speaker 4: because he had learned gambling when he was a young kid,
Speaker 4: and he became an incredible gambler cards and dice and
Speaker 4: took a lot of money away from his fellow soldiers.
Speaker 4: And so when he stayed in the military and retired
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty three, he had close to sixty thousand
Speaker 4: dollars saved up and he was able to buy, you know,
Speaker 4: a swimming pool. He had the first swimming pool in Goldsborough,
Speaker 4: you know, among the black population, in an area called
Speaker 4: New Circle. And the only problem was in the military,
Speaker 4: he got caught gambling where he wasn't supposed to because
Speaker 4: he had risen actually to a second lieutenant, and he
Speaker 4: was gambling with soldiers, you know, privates and all that.
Speaker 4: He wasnt supposed to do that because he was an officer.
Speaker 4: And he nearly got court martials twice because of his gambling,
Speaker 4: and he managed to he was demoted in rank, but
Speaker 4: managed It showed something about his character because he managed
Speaker 4: to work hard and get his rank back and he
Speaker 4: actually graduated, or not graduated, finished the services as a
Speaker 4: master sergeant. So when he got out of the military,
Speaker 4: here he was, you know, professional gambler. He loved adventure
Speaker 4: and you know, he had to make a decision, and
Speaker 4: he says that he made a bad decision because he
Speaker 4: decided to follow the life of an adventurer and a gambler.
Speaker 4: So he stayed in Europe, and there was a whole
Speaker 4: group of fellow of Black soldiers and ex Black soldiers
Speaker 4: that he hung around with, and they developed this really
Speaker 4: close relationship. That's why I have the book subtitled and
Speaker 4: the Band of Brothers. And they developed a sort of
Speaker 4: a gambling colony in Europe, you know, in the in
Speaker 4: the sixties, and he continued to make a living at that.
Speaker 5: And that's excuse me just for just for a second.
Speaker 5: But let's clarify though too, because I think it's important
Speaker 5: later to the entire story. At least it is in
Speaker 5: my mind that he was a routine cheater along with
Speaker 5: his friends. It wasn't just a little They counted cards,
Speaker 5: they counted cards, they loaded dice to use magnets under tables,
Speaker 5: so they were they were hostilgagally.
Speaker 4: Not all the time, but occasionally if he you know,
Speaker 4: if if he was facing a tough competitor, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: he would he would do that, you know, he was
Speaker 4: he would do he wasn't beneath using tricks uh to
Speaker 4: uh to make money, you know, at at gambling. Yeah
Speaker 4: he did it right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well he did. He cheated basically, and his and
Speaker 5: his friends are cheated too. So even if you're counting cards,
Speaker 5: you'd be kicked out at a casino in America for
Speaker 5: counting cards. So yeah, they had a group of guys
Speaker 5: that so I just wanted to clarify that, and I'm
Speaker 5: sorry for interrupting you there. So he had a he
Speaker 5: had a group but you say, sort of a band
Speaker 5: of brothers uh in Europe. He hung around there after
Speaker 5: the war and they were dealing with They were hanging
Speaker 5: around Bangkok and Saigon.
Speaker 4: What happened was he was actually in Europe when one
Speaker 4: of his friends that he made in the service, a
Speaker 4: guy named William Herman Jackson, had gone.
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Speaker 4: Korea to visit a friend called Smitty, but had been
Speaker 4: kicked off the plane or for whatever reason and ended
Speaker 4: up in Bangkok. And he was amazed at the action
Speaker 4: in Bangkok. I mean all kinds of things going on.
Speaker 4: And you know, there was a woman, there was the nightlife,
Speaker 4: there was gambling, et cetera. So he talked Ike into
Speaker 4: coming to Bangkok, and so in nineteen sixty six, that's
Speaker 4: where Ike ended up in Bangkok.
Speaker 5: Now, can you tell us Maybe I'm getting a little
Speaker 5: bit ahead, but can you tell us what MPCs are
Speaker 5: and why it's important and why it's important to this
Speaker 5: Why it's important to this story.
Speaker 4: Well, that was the intermediate thing between gambling and the
Speaker 4: heroin trafficking, which eventually made Ike of fortune and eventually
Speaker 4: put him in jail for such a long time. But
Speaker 4: there were military payment certificates and they were used instead
Speaker 4: of money by the military to prevent speculation, and Ike
Speaker 4: was able to manipulate the system and to make a
Speaker 4: lot of money by going to Vietnam. So he spent
Speaker 4: some time doing this until one day herman Jackson called
Speaker 4: him over to his house of his girlfriend, her name
Speaker 4: was Nidia, and UH showed him an article about, you know,
Speaker 4: the heroin situation in the United States, and he told
Speaker 4: her that that his girlfriend's family had connections to the
Speaker 4: Golden Triangle, the famous Golden Triangles, one of the major
Speaker 4: sources of poppy cultivation in the world. Right that borders
Speaker 4: and borders of Mayan mar which was the Burma back then,
Speaker 4: layouts and Thailand and Union Province in China, and so
Speaker 4: so he said that you know, they should go into uh,
Speaker 4: into trafficking, that it was you know, really exploding and
Speaker 4: there were opportunities to uh to get money. And I
Speaker 4: was sort of reluctant to do that because he didn't
Speaker 4: know anything about it. You know, he was mainly uh,
Speaker 4: you know, he was a hustler and a gambler and uh,
Speaker 4: but he was getting a board with board with mcbcs
Speaker 4: because it was so easy. Number one and number two,
Speaker 4: Vietnam was getting dangerous. This was getting near, you know,
Speaker 4: the ted offensive and all that right, and he always
Speaker 4: always got killed one time when he was in Saigon,
Speaker 4: so he decided to So he was started to think
Speaker 4: about it, and essentially Jackson you know, talked him into
Speaker 4: it and they were able to you know, they decided
Speaker 4: to develop you know, this this network that that could
Speaker 4: be used to smuggle Heroin back to back to the US.
Speaker 5: Now, they used military planes primarily because obviously they could
Speaker 5: get according to any book, he said, they could get
Speaker 5: free rides and they were like that.
Speaker 4: Right. There was an embacy embassy flight where which I
Speaker 4: could take because he was a retired officer and fly
Speaker 4: anywhere in the world long or space available, and he
Speaker 4: used the embassy flight. It originated in Charleston, South Carolina,
Speaker 4: and which was close to Goldsborough, and it flew all
Speaker 4: around the world and he was able to use that flight,
Speaker 4: you know, to get free rise and so he'd go
Speaker 4: gambled all over the world. He was gambling, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: in Spain, Turkey, Greece, wherever there was where there was action.
Speaker 4: And he was saying that he knew about Halliburton because
Speaker 4: a lot of these uh uh contractors were gamblers, and
Speaker 4: uh he said he knew about Halliburton. And that that
Speaker 4: type of activity along before Dick Cheney made it famous,
Speaker 4: you know when when he became vice president.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for runners of those military contractors. He said, they're
Speaker 5: throwing a lot of money around and they were.
Speaker 4: There, right, so he would, you know, and and he
Speaker 4: had he had a game in in Spain which involved
Speaker 4: a lot of US embassy personnel that were in Spain
Speaker 4: at the time, and uh and uh he said, you know,
Speaker 4: I said, what about the fact that you were black?
Speaker 4: And that bothered them and he said, no, as long
Speaker 4: as your money was green, right, And you know, they
Speaker 4: didn't care. So he ended up he ended up doing that.
Speaker 4: That was the embassy flight. And it was very lax
Speaker 4: security in those days, and they really didn't check you.
Speaker 4: They had no X ray machine, they had no dogs,
Speaker 4: et cetera. And Ike was able to exploit the system
Speaker 4: to get started. And he started off with Duffel bags
Speaker 4: and he just put him in the plane and nobody
Speaker 4: ever checked him. And he'd go through security, nobody ever
Speaker 4: checked him. He began to hire or employ some fellow
Speaker 4: black xgis and gis and if they weren't in the military,
Speaker 4: he would he would get them uniforms and fit them
Speaker 4: out with orders and everything, and they put them on
Speaker 4: the plane and they would move the heroin back to
Speaker 4: the US. And it became very successful because the heroin
Speaker 4: that that Ike was moving was so called China white,
Speaker 4: you know, which could be up to ninety ninety percent pure,
Speaker 4: and it was like the best best heroin on the planet.
Speaker 4: And so the Italian the time mafia, which in the
Speaker 4: late sixties still controlled the heroin trade through the French connection.
Speaker 4: It's kind of misnomer because it was run by the
Speaker 4: Italian mafia. You know. They sold really bad, bad stuff,
Speaker 4: you know, and they didn't care about the product. And
Speaker 4: he had ninety five percent of the markets when I
Speaker 4: started to shift this stuff, you know, became really in demand,
Speaker 4: and he was able to build up a really good,
Speaker 4: uh criminal business, uh smuggling heroin and he dealt mostly
Speaker 4: with well, he dealt exclusively with black dealers. So Lucas
Speaker 4: you know, makes the claim in the movie that he,
Speaker 4: you know, he was the first black to to uh
Speaker 4: not have to deal with the Italians they came to him,
Speaker 4: which was not true. Uh I did. I did research,
Speaker 4: and Lucas was your traditional black gangster at that period.
Speaker 4: He dealt he dealt with the mafia, and he got
Speaker 4: his stuff from from the mafia. UH. And then later
Speaker 4: when Ike became a real prominent dealer, he started to
Speaker 4: buy his stuff off.
Speaker 5: I now, how did Ike Atkinson actually you did the research?
Speaker 5: How how did he actually make that connection? You talk
Speaker 5: about a Chinese go between uh for this for this heroine.
Speaker 5: Tell us a little bit about that connection.
Speaker 3: How did he do that?
Speaker 4: Well, he was a relative from the family and I,
Speaker 4: you know, I didn't really know that much about the connection.
Speaker 4: He didn't care as long as he got the do
Speaker 4: But but like like I said, Jackson's wife had connections
Speaker 4: to the Golden Triangle where they can get a heroin.
Speaker 4: And the main connection was a mysterious UH member of
Speaker 4: the family. And he was all I knew him was
Speaker 4: was Papasan. That was called Papasan and Ike only met
Speaker 4: him and him twice, but he was the main supplier
Speaker 4: of the heroine for Ike's organization. And like I said,
Speaker 4: he you know what, he didn't know. He didn't bother
Speaker 4: him because he was getting this stuff. He was able
Speaker 4: to able to move it without any problems. And then
Speaker 4: when Pavasan died about nineteen seventy two or seventy three,
Speaker 4: one of Ike's partners, a guy named Luchai rub Watt,
Speaker 4: who was a Thai Chinese guy from Bangkok, took over
Speaker 4: and became the guy that made the connection to the
Speaker 4: Golden Triangle and moved the heroin.
Speaker 5: How much heroin you say in the book that they
Speaker 5: were smuggling, if I'm not correct, two kilos about five
Speaker 5: pounds per a wall bag. And in your story you
Speaker 5: talk about him and Sonny coming back on the plane,
Speaker 5: so they'd each have five pounds. And he said that
Speaker 5: because of its purity of the heroin, they could ask
Speaker 5: anywhere from fifty thousand and upwards for kilo, So an
Speaker 5: incredible profit. So and so how many am I correct
Speaker 5: with that? How many kilos and how many? How many
Speaker 5: thousands of pounds did they did the DA you're.
Speaker 4: Dealing with the drug trade. You're dealing with the drug trade.
Speaker 4: It's not like you're you're dealing in commodities, legal commodities.
Speaker 4: You know, you're dealing with a criminal activity. So anything
Speaker 4: that people say, you know, it's just speculation. Sure, you
Speaker 4: hear a lot of you know, wild figures, And I
Speaker 4: always smile because I know that a lot of those
Speaker 4: figures aren't even closed. But according to the DEA, you know,
Speaker 4: this is the d own statistics and reports that I
Speaker 4: looked at between sixty five and seventy sixty eight and
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy five when I was active, he was smuggling
Speaker 4: a thousand pounds a year. They're they're estimating, and they
Speaker 4: estimated that during that period, if you sold that that
Speaker 4: heroin on the street, it'd be worth four or four
Speaker 4: hundred million dollars. And Don Diva, which is a big
Speaker 4: hip hop magazine, has a cover story and Ike in
Speaker 4: their in their current issue, and they projected that was
Speaker 4: close to over two billion dollars in today's prices. And
Speaker 4: I just laughs at that, you know, because he said,
Speaker 4: as he said, I didn't see hardly any of that money, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, and and he thinks the figures were, you know,
Speaker 4: were inflated. But anyway you look at it, you know,
Speaker 4: he was a major, a major drug dealer. And it's
Speaker 4: so important in fact, that the DEA set up a
Speaker 4: special pass force, one of the so called SENTAC units,
Speaker 4: have to go specifically after Ike. It was a three
Speaker 4: continent investigation and they only set these SENTAC operations up
Speaker 4: for kingpins, you know, really big dealers, and Ike was
Speaker 4: the ninth one his his his oper the operation that
Speaker 4: tried to get him was called Sentac nine, and it
Speaker 4: was set up over three continents, Europe, Asia and and
Speaker 4: the United States. And they went specifically after Ike because
Speaker 4: he was a very uh you know, they considered him
Speaker 4: very important. And also it was contributing to you know,
Speaker 4: the heroin you know, epidemic. I was sleeping in the
Speaker 4: US in the seventies, early seventies.
Speaker 5: Okay, Now let's go to his friend, Ike's Ike Atkinson's
Speaker 5: friend Thomas Sonny Sutherland, and let's get to the flight
Speaker 5: that you talk about early in the book where everything
Speaker 5: falls apart. Ike Atkinson boards a military plane along with
Speaker 5: his friend Sonny, and Mike Atkinson, with his connections, is
Speaker 5: able to get the Sonnier uniform. So Sonny is trying
Speaker 5: to pass himself self off as a sergeant thanks to
Speaker 5: Atkinson's connections and privileges. So go from there. It's a
Speaker 5: fascinating story of what happened that day.
Speaker 4: Well, it's it's a weird, a weird story. And I
Speaker 4: started off because it's it's the whole town absolutely book
Speaker 4: Ike was going back to the United States and he
Speaker 4: took his friend Sunny Sutherland, who, by the way, I
Speaker 4: just saw this Sunday at a book signing. I hadn't
Speaker 4: seen him since I researched the book, and he was
Speaker 4: looking very good. Uh. And he took Sonny back with
Speaker 4: him to the United States. But you know, he also
Speaker 4: made it a business trip, and he had a couple
Speaker 4: of kilos hidden in his A wall bag. The A
Speaker 4: wall bags were these sort of overnight bags that soldiers
Speaker 4: carried and were very popular in that day. And there
Speaker 4: was a false bottom, which a lot of people didn't
Speaker 4: know existed, and Ike was including the authorities. And Ike
Speaker 4: was able to fit, uh, you know, the the the
Speaker 4: bottom of the A wall bag and would fit about
Speaker 4: two kilos. And so Ike had had that on the
Speaker 4: plane and he was going back to back to the
Speaker 4: United States, making you know, flying from Bangkok to Okinawa
Speaker 4: to Hawaii, you know, to the United States, you know,
Speaker 4: to Andrews Air Force Base. And the trip got really
Speaker 4: strange because there was supposedly a couple of the cadavers
Speaker 4: of American soldiers on there. And when he landed finally
Speaker 4: landed in Washington, he was interrogated about the about the trip,
Speaker 4: and evidently someone had tipped him off and it was
Speaker 4: actually a false tip, but tipped him off that there
Speaker 4: was heroin on the on the on the in the
Speaker 4: coffins and cadavers of American soldiers that were coming back,
Speaker 4: that were the bodies were being transported back to the
Speaker 4: United States. And they interrogated Ike uh and they arrested
Speaker 4: Sonny because they found out that he was carrying bogus papers,
Speaker 4: which was a serious offense. He was impersonating a military
Speaker 4: officer and uh. They did everything except to check the
Speaker 4: a wall bags that Ike was carrying, so he managed
Speaker 4: to get it. He managed to get the bag back
Speaker 4: after the arrested son he was able to go down
Speaker 4: to the station and pick up his belongings and walk
Speaker 4: away with it. But the thing was, the press got
Speaker 4: wind of it, and they sensationalized the the trip and
Speaker 4: it became that you know, the trip that where uh,
Speaker 4: where Heroin is being smuggled uh in the bodies of U.
Speaker 4: S Service and back to the United States. And you know,
Speaker 4: it was a type of story. You know, the press
Speaker 4: couldn't resist and so it was also helped by the
Speaker 4: by the assistant US Attorney for Baltimore at the time,
Speaker 4: who said he was convinced that Atkinson and Sutherland were
Speaker 4: trying to smuggle heroin back to the United States, even
Speaker 4: though they didn't find any uh you know, they checked
Speaker 4: the bodies, No, nothing was found. But he said, well,
Speaker 4: I could they could have They could have got the
Speaker 4: heroin off in Hawaii. So it said, you know, it
Speaker 4: was a story that really fueled, uh, the the the
Speaker 4: heroin cadaver conspiracy. And it was a strange story which
Speaker 4: you know ended up in a bizarre uh, in a
Speaker 4: bizarre way, but also very badly for Sutherland because he
Speaker 4: went to jail, uh for about five years.
Speaker 5: Well let me go back just the second. Here you
Speaker 5: were you were talking about the media, and the media
Speaker 5: got a hold of this story. Now, let me make
Speaker 5: sure I understand this where I thought it was the
Speaker 5: Attorney General mar that says that there was looked like
Speaker 5: an incision made in one of the bodies and some
Speaker 5: stitching done. I mean, you don't have to give some
Speaker 5: Did he give that to the media or did the
Speaker 5: media make that up? Because that would feel my fire too.
Speaker 4: I don't know, because I couldn't trade I couldn't find
Speaker 4: the reporters that were reporting that, and I doubt whether
Speaker 4: they could remember it. Anyways, it was very unclear, uh
Speaker 4: you know, in the press what happened. But I ended
Speaker 4: up interviewing people that were actually there. I interviewed a
Speaker 4: US Customs retired agent that was actually called to that plane,
Speaker 4: and he said there was nothing wrong with the bodies there.
Speaker 4: He said, there was absolutely nothing. It was normal. There
Speaker 4: was no incisions, nothing, and he was there and he
Speaker 4: should know because he had training as a mortician.
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Speaker 4: I actually gone to mortuary school at one time, so
Speaker 4: he knew what he was looking at, and that was
Speaker 4: part of the evidence that I presented, you know, in
Speaker 4: my book to show that this this cadaver heroin conspiracy
Speaker 4: thing was was a complete hoax. But it's very interesting
Speaker 4: because when I went went to prison, went to trial
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy five, there was absolutely no mention of
Speaker 4: Ike using coffins or and or cadavers to move heroin,
Speaker 4: and I asked to prosecute, you know, why he didn't.
Speaker 4: He didn't bring that up in the trial. I said,
Speaker 4: you know, that could really get the jury, you know, going,
Speaker 4: and he said, well, he said, we thought I would
Speaker 4: jeopardize our case because there was absolutely no evidence that
Speaker 4: that Ike moved or anybody moved heroin in that way.
Speaker 4: He said, there was a lot of you know, gossips
Speaker 4: in North Carolina drug trafficking circles, but no concrete evidence.
Speaker 4: But the thing was, when Ike try to revive his
Speaker 4: network in nineteen eighty six and it was caught because
Speaker 4: of a sting, the press started to talk about Ike
Speaker 4: moving heroin in a cadaveric connection. So they like ten
Speaker 4: years went by and there was no mention in seventy six,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden they started to mention it again.
Speaker 4: And where they got that from. Probably they went back
Speaker 4: to did their research on Ike and went back to
Speaker 4: seventy two, you know, when the Ike was on that
Speaker 4: same as flight, and so they so they got him
Speaker 4: mixed up and mixing, you know, you know, Ike was
Speaker 4: the guy that that was moving Heroin on on in
Speaker 4: the bodies and or confidence of dead servicemen. And then
Speaker 4: of course it was fueled by Lucas. You know, it
Speaker 4: would have been a very little key thing, but then
Speaker 4: Lucas sensationalized it by by saying that you know, yeah
Speaker 4: he did it and that it actually existed.
Speaker 5: I say so a combination, a confluence of all those things,
Speaker 5: Lucas talking about it after the media brought it back up,
Speaker 5: after the media erroneously reported in the first place. I
Speaker 5: think that's where you got that was from. I can't
Speaker 5: see an attorney general or any police spokesman giving those
Speaker 5: kinds of details like incisions and stitching. They would never
Speaker 5: give that information to the media. So I've seen the
Speaker 5: media before extrapolide or exaggerate or outwardly alive.
Speaker 4: I believe it, but you know, but but you mentioned,
Speaker 4: you know, mar All that he did. He did feel it,
Speaker 4: and I interviewed him and he still believes to this day.
Speaker 4: You know that that that there was that there was heroin,
Speaker 4: you know, in in the confidence and average but somehow
Speaker 4: I can manage to get an off and uh, you know,
Speaker 4: you could probably talk to him for the rest of Uh.
Speaker 4: I could probably talk to the rest of my life
Speaker 4: and present all kinds of evidence and say this, and
Speaker 4: he's still probably believe it. That's that's the nature of conspiracies.
Speaker 5: What did he say in response to this evidence that
Speaker 5: you had that you been presented to him?
Speaker 4: Well, when I when I when I had interviewed him,
Speaker 4: I didn't I didn't have as much evidence later because
Speaker 4: I interviewed, you know, a lot of different people regarding
Speaker 4: the thing, and I told him, I said that, Uh,
Speaker 4: the people that I interviewed at that point, you know,
Speaker 4: really didn't believe it. And you know, I interviewed like
Speaker 4: like journalists from the from the Vietnam War. There was
Speaker 4: a guy named Al Dawson who were who was up
Speaker 4: I Bureau chief and he said they were like going
Speaker 4: crazy kind of find find evidence of this because the
Speaker 4: rumors were so strong and no journalists found anything and
Speaker 4: he said he was really excited because he thought he
Speaker 4: was going to win to Plitzer Prize. You know, he said,
Speaker 4: because he was right there in Vietnam. He said, if
Speaker 4: I could prove this, I probably went to Plitzer Prize.
Speaker 4: And he concluded, after about a year of trying to find,
Speaker 4: you know, some evidence of it, that it didn't exist.
Speaker 4: And today he says, it's it's a complete hoax, you know.
Speaker 4: And I haven't quoted in the book now. Now.
Speaker 5: Part of the story, though, that I think the audience
Speaker 5: needs to know, is that at the same time that
Speaker 5: they were that there was this you know, they were
Speaker 5: you tell the story of them both being on the plane,
Speaker 5: and then there was a diversion. The plane was re
Speaker 5: routed to another city, and they thought, jeez, what's with
Speaker 5: all the military on the on the tarmac here? What's
Speaker 5: going on? Then they had look like FBI guys say,
Speaker 5: don't anybody go in the back. We've got a couple
Speaker 5: of dead Giyes and and all along Sonny and and
Speaker 5: Iker going this is unusual.
Speaker 4: Now, when it was a strange, it was a strange trip.
Speaker 4: Because I think they're they're probably getting the evidence or
Speaker 4: they're getting the uh the tip that something was going
Speaker 4: on while the fight was going on, and uh uh
Speaker 4: you know, from someone in North Carolina that was trying
Speaker 4: to ingratiate themselves, you know, with the with the authorities,
Speaker 4: and so he was giving them this hot tip. I
Speaker 4: sort of have a theory of who it was, uh
Speaker 4: and I mentioned it in in in the book, But
Speaker 4: who is that? Well? I mentioned this guy named Ellis Sutton,
Speaker 4: who is a part of like halfway in the Ikes
Speaker 4: group of brothers and half way out. He sort of
Speaker 4: hung around with them, and I liked him, uh, you know, personally,
Speaker 4: but he didn't he didn't trust them. And I have
Speaker 4: a transcript in there which I uncovered where he's being
Speaker 4: interrogated by one of the D agents and you could
Speaker 4: see that he's really playing the D agent and he
Speaker 4: doesn't know what he's talking about because and he refers
Speaker 4: to that trip, you know, in that in that transcript.
Speaker 4: But you can see when you read, when you read
Speaker 4: that transcript that he's really playing the agent and he
Speaker 4: doesn't really know anything, but the the agent's trying to
Speaker 4: get him to say something that it somehow confirmed, you know.
Speaker 4: The suspicions of the authorities very interesting because I don't
Speaker 4: believe as much what I read in the press as
Speaker 4: I used to do, you know about about sure fire,
Speaker 4: sure fire theories and all this sort of thing, because
Speaker 4: when when the American Gangster came out, uh, they were
Speaker 4: like twelve I didn't. I was doing my research, you know,
Speaker 4: because researching book, and there were like twelve thousand articles
Speaker 4: on the internet about the Heroin conspiracy and you know
Speaker 4: how it existed, But they're all the same article.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: And they all went back to that original original article
Speaker 4: back in a series of articles back and said too,
Speaker 4: which fuel the speculation.
Speaker 5: They only go back, they only go back to. There's
Speaker 5: maybe like I'm living in a city of a quarter
Speaker 5: three quarters of a million people. There's two people at
Speaker 5: a trial, one newspaper and the other newspaper, maybe one
Speaker 5: of the television networks. But in terms of reading about
Speaker 5: the story in any kind of in depth nature of
Speaker 5: covering a trial, it's only those two people, and the
Speaker 5: biggest uh newspaper or the biggest circulation that will be
Speaker 5: taken by, say in Canada, the Canadian press in America
Speaker 5: would be associated. So it might be one journalist and
Speaker 5: if he's off or he's biased, or he's sleeping. That's
Speaker 5: what you got, and it's cut in a paste. He'll
Speaker 5: just keep repeating himself, add nauseum from his earlier stories
Speaker 5: and might not even add on. And that's what that's
Speaker 5: what you're facing.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right. And you know, I know from direct
Speaker 4: experience that there was a vested interest in the keeping
Speaker 4: that story alive by the media because I went on
Speaker 4: I went on several shows. I went on the History Channel,
Speaker 4: Biography Channel, Discovery, you know, when Lucas was really big
Speaker 4: and I was being interviewed, you know, about about him,
Speaker 4: and I would explain that the cadaver theory you know,
Speaker 4: uh that didn't exist and all that, and they would
Speaker 4: take one half of my statement, you know, and put
Speaker 4: it out of context, you know, to support the uh
Speaker 4: the really general line you know, yeah, because they were
Speaker 4: promoting the movie, you know, I mean the History Channel.
Speaker 4: The History Channel was owned by the same company own
Speaker 4: Universal and uh you know, like when I when I
Speaker 4: got on Dayline, like NBC for example, Uh that I
Speaker 4: was calling Dayline, uh, you know, to do a show
Speaker 4: that they're they're going to try to promote the movie.
Speaker 4: And this NBC's Dayline, and I lined up like three
Speaker 4: or four people. I said, well, you got to you
Speaker 4: got to get a true story. So I lined up
Speaker 4: a prosecutor that put Lucas in jail, a couple of
Speaker 4: d agents that that knew Lucas because they investigated him
Speaker 4: and actually interrogated him. And we were there for like
Speaker 4: five or six hours, and then I get a call
Speaker 4: from the producer of Dayline saying that they decided that
Speaker 4: they were going to use the show, uh you know,
Speaker 4: and and he said, but we're going to do it someday.
Speaker 4: They were going to use our information, but someday, you know,
Speaker 4: we're going to do it, you know, right now. All
Speaker 4: that meantime, they get Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe on
Speaker 4: a special half hour in Matt Lauer and they're supposed
Speaker 4: to be the experts, you know in Frank Lucas, and
Speaker 4: all they did was hype the movie. Sure, and you know,
Speaker 4: like Black Entertainment for example, I was on that show,
Speaker 4: and they had a special our infomercial that's what it
Speaker 4: really was, where they were given exclusive access to to
Speaker 4: Denzel and all that, you know, to hype the movie.
Speaker 4: So they didn't want anything negative to be said, you
Speaker 4: know about Lucas, about how he's you know, he's essentially
Speaker 4: a liar and his story is bogus.
Speaker 5: No, but you could also get quashed by basically, you know,
Speaker 5: the journalists. The journalist basically says, well, I got to
Speaker 5: call the other people for a response, and those people
Speaker 5: give a response like we've got this from this so
Speaker 5: and this is the you know, so you can understand
Speaker 5: where they're coming from. But it's an interesting thing.
Speaker 4: Well, also, you know, there's there's really very little investigative
Speaker 4: journalism going on today. Sure, and a lot of them
Speaker 4: you know, it's to that, you know, to not defend journalism,
Speaker 4: but you know, there's a point that that they're always
Speaker 4: on deadline too, you know, so there's only so much
Speaker 4: research that they can do. And like I was doing
Speaker 4: a book, so you know, I had much more time
Speaker 4: to uh to uh investigate it. Uh. But you know
Speaker 4: to the Associated Press credit uh they did, they retracted
Speaker 4: their story because uh, you know, they came out really
Speaker 4: usual stuff that Yeah, well the interviewed they interviewed me,
Speaker 4: and I was actually in Columbia, uh, South America at
Speaker 4: the time, and they called me and I told him,
Speaker 4: I said, you can't you can't believe this whatever, And
Speaker 4: they came out with the usual stuff. This one reporter
Speaker 4: and then uh a reporter that had connections to the
Speaker 4: AP that had been in Bangkok, and John macbeth, who
Speaker 4: was one of my sources for the book up the
Speaker 4: or email the AP to complain about the story and
Speaker 4: it's saying that you should really look at it closely.
Speaker 4: And so they finally did and interviewed more sources and
Speaker 4: got actually Lucas to retract his statement about the cadaver
Speaker 4: connection where he said, quote, I may have done it
Speaker 4: one or twice, you know, from being you know, a
Speaker 4: major method of shipping heroin to saying that I may
Speaker 4: have done it once or twice, you know, which was
Speaker 4: pretty well meant that he never did it at all.
Speaker 5: Right, do you think that racism played and discrimination and
Speaker 5: just the history of the old self had something to
Speaker 5: do with well, we'll say primarily white media not wanting
Speaker 5: to discount the story where you have a black soldiers,
Speaker 5: dead soldiers and black heroin smugglers so despicable that they
Speaker 5: you don't think that had anything to do.
Speaker 4: No, and that enjoyed it was just a great story
Speaker 4: story that nobody wanted to see die. You know that
Speaker 4: that was essentially it, and it was it's so easy
Speaker 4: to check out. You know, there's never been an instance
Speaker 4: of anybody being arrested, or anybody being convicted, or any
Speaker 4: incident of heroin being shipped in in the bodies or
Speaker 4: the and or the confidence of dead gis during the
Speaker 4: Vietnam War. And like I said, I checked with journalists
Speaker 4: and that period and they said they were running around
Speaker 4: because they really wanted to prove it to be true,
Speaker 4: but they couldn't find any evidence. It's really incredible. It
Speaker 4: makes it's kind of frightening because you know, I've sort
Speaker 4: of looked at all conspiracies, you know, the ones that
Speaker 4: I sort of believe in, like you know, the you know,
Speaker 4: the mafia having something to do with the killing of Kennedy, right,
Speaker 4: you know that sort of thing. I'm the same. Well,
Speaker 4: you know, you know, maybe there you know, there isn't
Speaker 4: any truth because uh, this this story was a sure winner.
Speaker 4: Everybody believed that it happened, but you know, there was
Speaker 4: no evidence of it, and it's so easy to check out,
Speaker 4: you know, but people wanted to believe it because it's
Speaker 4: such a great story, you know, It's a ghooly story,
Speaker 4: and people love reading about stories like that.
Speaker 5: Now I have a question before we get a little
Speaker 5: bit more into Ike Atkinson and you going to prison
Speaker 5: and interviewing him and how he really ended up getting
Speaker 5: caught for heroin smuggling and imprisoned. So I just wanted
Speaker 5: to ask you in your interviews with him, did he
Speaker 5: ever attempt did you ever ask or was there any
Speaker 5: attempt to reconcile him? The honest, basically honest. He was
Speaker 5: a little bit of a hustle. He was a gambler,
Speaker 5: but basically he was proud of his military service. He
Speaker 5: was called a gentleman's gentleman. He was basically a good guy.
Speaker 5: Didn't hold any hatred towards towards anyone. He was the
Speaker 5: antithesist of Frank Lucas. Did he ever have any qualms
Speaker 5: about selling heroin? Did he have any ideas or any
Speaker 5: did he have any qualms about the perceived damage?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we we we talked about that, and uh, you know,
Speaker 4: we talked about that, and uh, he does he does regret,
Speaker 4: you know, having to do that, and he realizes that
Speaker 4: he that he uh you know, caused damage you know,
Speaker 4: by by by smuggling, uh by smuggling heroin. And he
Speaker 4: always said that the biggest mistake he made was right
Speaker 4: after World War Two. I mentioned that earlier, where he
Speaker 4: decided the life professional gambler. He didn't take advantage of
Speaker 4: the g I bill and uh, you know, go to
Speaker 4: college because he was quite smart, you know. He he
Speaker 4: had finished high school, which was you know, no small
Speaker 4: feet in those days, you know, for for young black
Speaker 4: and uh, and he was very bright, you know, uh,
Speaker 4: brilliant in fact in a lot of ways. And uh,
Speaker 4: he didn't do that. And one of his friends, Uh
Speaker 4: did do that, he says. And he became an engineer,
Speaker 4: you know, and did quite well for him. Well, he
Speaker 4: had the spen the rest of his life. And but
Speaker 4: he doesn't really dwell in the past. You know. He's
Speaker 4: a very he's a very upbeat guy. And he says that,
Speaker 4: you know, he's he's talked with his maker about it,
Speaker 4: and he thinks he's you know, uh, you know, he's
Speaker 4: he's he's asked for forgiveness and he thinks he's been forgiven,
Speaker 4: you know, for his sins. He's a he's a religious
Speaker 4: religious man and uh, you know, life has to go on.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, he can be contrite forever. He
Speaker 4: has to he has to live. He's eighty five years old,
Speaker 4: and and you know, try to make it up, you know,
Speaker 4: with being a good person today, uh and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: Now, how did he eventually get caught? And what was
Speaker 5: his sentence? Tell us a little bit about the trial
Speaker 5: to capture the whole.
Speaker 4: Wow, he he eventually, you know, Uh, the war was
Speaker 4: winding down and he was trying to trying to get
Speaker 4: more and more heroin out because the war was his cover.
Speaker 4: And uh, he started to uh develop increasingly more sophisticated methods,
Speaker 4: you know, to shift heroin into the smuggle heroin into
Speaker 4: the US. And you mentioned some of them, and one
Speaker 4: of them was the postal service where he bribed people
Speaker 4: working in the postal in the military APO system. And
Speaker 4: what he would do would be to smuggle money back
Speaker 4: to Bangkok and Thailand to buy the drugs and then
Speaker 4: he would use the postal system to smuggle heroin back
Speaker 4: into the US. And he had he had people on
Speaker 4: his payroll on both ends of it, and he was
Speaker 4: shifting some heroin back to the back to the US,
Speaker 4: and he had him shipped to some old ladies houses,
Speaker 4: but somehow it got screwed up. One of his h
Speaker 4: lieutenants didn't pick up the heroin in time, and the
Speaker 4: woman got suspicious and she called the authorities, and the
Speaker 4: authorities examined the bag and the box and they found
Speaker 4: this a wall bag inside and they opened it up.
Speaker 4: They saw the stitching was not exactly right, and then
Speaker 4: they found the heroine and then Ikes. She shipped a
Speaker 4: couple of more boxes back to the back to the
Speaker 4: US from from Bangkok, and they, you know, intercepted them
Speaker 4: and one of the bags had ikes pom print. Ike
Speaker 4: had forgotten that he had his pomferend taken before in
Speaker 4: the military before he left, and they were able to
Speaker 4: to identify him. So I was on the major pieces
Speaker 4: of evidence that got him convicted. And he got forty
Speaker 4: four years prison and he was fined fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: And he was like fifty two years old when he
Speaker 4: went in about fifty two, so it was a seventy
Speaker 4: five about fifty years old, right, and so uh, he
Speaker 4: looked like he was going to be spending you know,
Speaker 4: the rest of his life in prison, and so the
Speaker 4: he tried to continue is his operation from jail but
Speaker 4: it didn't work, and he tried and then in nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty six he tried to revive his network from inside
Speaker 4: the jail, and yeah, he was set up by a sting.
Speaker 4: And I don't want to get don't want to give
Speaker 4: the whole book away because no one's going to read.
Speaker 5: That's right, That's right. Yeah, that's a twet. That's a
Speaker 5: that's another twist in the story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, there's there's a lot of twists in the story.
Speaker 4: But that's an incredible chapter, you know, which is sort
Speaker 4: of a you know, quota to his life. And it's
Speaker 4: amazing that he's out, you know, he's out. He finally
Speaker 4: got out at uh at eighty two.
Speaker 5: Why why was he given such a harsh sentence? I
Speaker 5: mean even by anybody's standards, I mean forty something years
Speaker 5: is why.
Speaker 4: What were Well? Because because they because you know, he
Speaker 4: was a major, major drug trafficker, and they were trying
Speaker 4: to make a statement because when they were trying, when
Speaker 4: they were pumping up the trial, you know, the prosecutors
Speaker 4: they had him being responsible for a half billion dollars.
Speaker 4: This is what they were saying. They did this real
Speaker 4: fancy mathematics in one of the statements that the prosect
Speaker 4: when they were when they were beginning to trial, and
Speaker 4: he did this fancy mathematics and came up with a
Speaker 4: figure of five hundred five hundred billion dollars. And he
Speaker 4: was a kingpin and he was a major trophy in
Speaker 4: the war on drugs, right, And so they really wanted to,
Speaker 4: you know, to maximize the benefit of of of getting
Speaker 4: Ike uh and uh and putting him off the street.
Speaker 5: How did they come to being able to prove did
Speaker 5: they just did they just speculate or how did they
Speaker 5: did they present information to say, listen, we were we
Speaker 5: uh suspected Ike Atkinson for years and we think he
Speaker 5: upted the system.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, he had the promprint, but he also there
Speaker 4: was also and like I said, I don't want to
Speaker 4: give no book away, but there was also an informant
Speaker 4: who worked with an Ike's organization who was very who
Speaker 4: was and you know, I mentioned him in the book,
Speaker 4: Freddie Thrton, which is a very interesting chapter. But Freddy
Speaker 4: Thurman proved to be an incredibly effective witness. And he
Speaker 4: was when I went to the courthouse or the archives
Speaker 4: in Atlanta, there was eight hundred pages of his testimony.
Speaker 4: He was on for days. And he had great memory,
Speaker 4: and he was very smart and he uh presented evidence
Speaker 4: and I always calls him the worst mistake he made
Speaker 4: as far as being drug trafford was and was was
Speaker 4: making throwing his right hand man while he was in prison.
Speaker 5: Right, So when you met like Atkinson, you he was
Speaker 5: scheduled to leave prison in a year or so. So
Speaker 5: how long did you correspond with him to be able
Speaker 5: to write this book?
Speaker 4: Well, we we kept we kept in touch while we
Speaker 4: were in prison, and uh, you know, I went on
Speaker 4: to other projects. I had another book about Chicago, uh
Speaker 4: like Answers Chicago and uh, and I was being in
Speaker 4: to research into the book about Miami. So I was
Speaker 4: uh not too interested at that point because I didn't
Speaker 4: know if it would work out or not. I don't
Speaker 4: know how he would feel when he got out got
Speaker 4: out of prison, what kind of health he was, you know,
Speaker 4: if you had any energy to spend you know with
Speaker 4: me and uh. And then when he got out, we
Speaker 4: re established con tact. I called him and we met
Speaker 4: for you know, for coffee, and we discussed the discussed
Speaker 4: the book and uh, and what you know I can
Speaker 4: do for him in terms of writing the book, and
Speaker 4: he thought about it and he decided and on the
Speaker 4: end that it would it would be worth it. I
Speaker 4: don't think he has any regrets now because he's really enjoying. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, the experience of being the subjects of a book.
Speaker 5: Are you taking are you going on am I correct,
Speaker 5: you're going on tours with him as well? Speaking?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we do. Yeah, we've been doing books. We've
Speaker 4: been Uh it's really funny because you know, eighty five
Speaker 4: almost eighty five, and we're on a lot of hip
Speaker 4: hop shows. Yeah, you know, there was these shows that
Speaker 4: you know, young guys. You know, I could barely understand him,
Speaker 4: you know, because they're speaking the ago of hip hop
Speaker 4: and all that. Yeah, and uh, we we've done several
Speaker 4: books Signs Winton, New York, and uh, it's amazing, like, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, the Italian mafia, you know, is very famous,
Speaker 4: you know, your names like God. But also in the
Speaker 4: black community, black gangsters, you know, have a sort of
Speaker 4: standing too, and so Ike is well known. Not many
Speaker 4: people know much about him, but they know who he is.
Speaker 4: It's really amazing because one day we were in Harlem.
Speaker 4: I was researching the book, and you know, Ike was
Speaker 4: saying I'm not that well known, I said, I said,
Speaker 4: you want to believe it? And I just turned to
Speaker 4: somebody on the street, so I was walking down. I said, hey, man,
Speaker 4: I said, you know Mike Atkinson. He said who, I answer,
Speaker 4: you mean the drug dealer. I said, yeah, yeah, he goes, yeah,
Speaker 4: I know him. Yeah, you knew about him, and I
Speaker 4: was Ike was amazed, you know, on that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of interest in Ike's story, especially
Speaker 4: because you know, everybody thinks that Frank Lucas story is
Speaker 4: supposed to be true, and then when they find out
Speaker 4: when they read the book, you know, and there's so
Speaker 4: much compelling evidence that is presented to show that his
Speaker 4: story is basically a lie. You know, it's it's He's
Speaker 4: created a lot of interesting We've got people now we're
Speaker 4: talking about filming that are interested in doing film. So
Speaker 4: we're talking to some people now, both a documentary and
Speaker 4: feature film. So we think it's not going to end
Speaker 4: anytime soon, but we're both enjoying it.
Speaker 5: What does he feel now about Frank Lucas, because in invertently,
Speaker 5: Frank Lucas has helped him, if you really think about it,
Speaker 5: Frank luc I mean well, Frank Lucas said that way.
Speaker 4: He wouldn't look at it to ask you what. You
Speaker 4: can invite him on the show, ask him that question
Speaker 4: and then sit back for sixty minutes. He'll go off
Speaker 4: on on on Lucas. He's just you know, he's just
Speaker 4: he's really upset with Lucas and you know he thinks,
Speaker 4: you know, that he's a liar. I mean just you know,
Speaker 4: he just started his life and he's happy that we've
Speaker 4: done the book so he can reclaim it, you know,
Speaker 4: because everything that's known about like Addison came from Frank Lucas,
Speaker 4: and Frank Lucas used like Akison to promote his own story. Uh.
Speaker 4: So he's you know, he's.
Speaker 5: Uh, he's having to get the record set straight.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And he's challenged Frank to a debate, you know,
Speaker 4: public debate, saying let's talk about let's talk about our
Speaker 4: lives and see who's who's telling the truth or not.
Speaker 4: But we haven't heard anything, uh, you know, back from him,
Speaker 4: although we did hear from from one of Lucas's managers.
Speaker 4: Uh who believe it or not. Frank Lucas has a
Speaker 4: clothing line. Oh really yeah, right, and he's evidently it's
Speaker 4: been used for charity and he's trying to clean up
Speaker 4: his image. So uh so uh he called called me
Speaker 4: about getting Ike and Frank Lucas on the Save the
Speaker 4: Children tour, you know, like where they get out talk
Speaker 4: about the evils of drug and I said, well, I
Speaker 4: know what I's gonna say, but I'll mention it to him,
Speaker 4: and I just you know, I'm not going on tour
Speaker 4: that guy. So you gotta be kidding on that. So
Speaker 4: you know, that was Nick's very very quickly.
Speaker 5: He's had his come up. He's had his come up,
Speaker 5: and still because he you do report in a book
Speaker 5: what he says about Frank Lucas, and none of it
Speaker 5: is really any good. You know, he basically calls him
Speaker 5: in and nobody you know, but.
Speaker 4: It's also not just Ike, because I interviewed you know,
Speaker 4: like scores of law enforcement officials, you know, I interviewed
Speaker 4: law enforce officials that were in Bangkok in the early
Speaker 4: seventies that never heard of Frank Lucas. And if he
Speaker 4: was such a big dealer as as he claims to
Speaker 4: be in as the movie presented, you know, they would
Speaker 4: have a lot of information on him, you know, because
Speaker 4: they would they would have been investigating him because he
Speaker 4: would have been prominent. And Ike, the the head of
Speaker 4: the Bangkok Bureau of d eighth office, said he spent
Speaker 4: days when coming up to speed with Ike when he
Speaker 4: when he took over the office, he said, it was
Speaker 4: just files and files and files on him, going all
Speaker 4: the way back to Germany. I mentioned about his early
Speaker 4: life in Europe and you know, but there was nothing
Speaker 4: on Lucas. And you know, it's really amazing because he's
Speaker 4: he's been able to get you know, away with it,
Speaker 4: and he's one of the luckiest guys that that I
Speaker 4: think I've ever met in my life because he was
Speaker 4: on welfare when the journalists from the New York magazine
Speaker 4: approached him about doing a profile of him, which got
Speaker 4: him the movie. Because that movie is based on a
Speaker 4: magazine article that appear in a New York magazine and
Speaker 4: that turned his life around, where you know, Denzel Washington
Speaker 4: ends up giving him a house and he gets, you know,
Speaker 4: made close to a million dollars and he gets you know,
Speaker 4: rap song, you know, and an album with jay Z
Speaker 4: you know, in the top tough rappers in the world.
Speaker 4: And so it's really amazing, especially when when you don't
Speaker 4: have to do much searching, really researching to realize that
Speaker 4: his life is is a sham.
Speaker 5: But basically, the film of the film people film producers
Speaker 5: wanted the same thing that the media wanted. They wanted
Speaker 5: him to admit, Yeah, that we put Heroin in the
Speaker 5: Bodies of Dead gis. So if you can sell out,
Speaker 5: you sell out the entire truth and you're lying about everything. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I can see why Atkinson would want a little piece
Speaker 5: of Frank Lucas, to say the least, because I mean,
Speaker 5: Atkinson wouldn't have went along with this, but for Lucas
Speaker 5: to get fame and fortune from basically a crapload of
Speaker 5: lies that implicate Atkinson and stuff he would never dream
Speaker 5: of doing. Yeah, I can see it right right.
Speaker 4: And so so you know, we feel that our book
Speaker 4: has reclaimed Lucas's life, and as time goes by and
Speaker 4: you know, more and more people read it, hopefully we
Speaker 4: get a movie out of it that you know, it'll
Speaker 4: be put back into perspective and and I will be
Speaker 4: very happy about that because you'll be able to control
Speaker 4: over his own life again.
Speaker 5: Yes, well we're almost winding down here, Ron, maybe you
Speaker 5: can tell us what what new project are you working
Speaker 5: on or what's the update with this book? And I
Speaker 5: can see you're just basically on tour with us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll be in New York on the sixteenth and seventeenth.
Speaker 4: We'll be in Philadelphia, that's October. The weekend of October sixteen,
Speaker 4: we'll be at Human Bookstore in Ireland, and then we'll
Speaker 4: be at Blackstar the Music and Video the following day.
Speaker 4: And we'll be in Philadelphia in October thirteenth at a
Speaker 4: place And people can go to www. Ike Atkinson Kingpin
Speaker 4: dot com a t K I N s O n
Speaker 4: as w w Ike Atkinson Kingpin dot com for more
Speaker 4: information about the book and about what we're doing in
Speaker 4: Ikes on Facebook too, and I got them to work
Speaker 4: with the new technology. Yeah, although it's a challenge. You know,
Speaker 4: this guy's been in jail for thirty two years and yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, computers are a little alien to him still.
Speaker 4: But anyways, you get on his Facebook page and keep
Speaker 4: up with what's going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I saw that. That's interesting. It looks pretty good too. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I just want to Yeah, I just want to thank
Speaker 5: you very much, Ron for a great interview. And I
Speaker 5: had a great book. I want to thank you very much.
Speaker 3: I want to tell.
Speaker 5: People the book that they've been we've been talking about
Speaker 5: today is Sergeant Smack. The Legendary Lives and Times of
Speaker 5: Ike Atkinson, Kingpin and his band of Brothers and Sergeant Smack.
Speaker 5: And that's what the DEA called Dike Atkinson Sergeant Smack.
Speaker 5: I want to thank you very much for this interview,
Speaker 5: Ron and have yourself a good evening.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Dan, I really appreciate being on.
Speaker 5: Thank you for a great interview. You have yourself a
Speaker 5: good eveningwbye. Even listen to the program True Murder the
Speaker 5: most shocking killers in true crime history, and the authors
Speaker 5: have written about them. Have a good evening, Good night,