2008 Woodie Awards
Gangster movies glamorize the real deal
By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Issue date: 4/4/08 Section: Nation
ARLINGTON, Va. - Desperate to wiretap their target, federal drug agents early one morning scaled the roof of an auto garage that by day served as a well-protected Harlem headquarters for Mr. Untouchable, Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, a major New York heroin dealer who had eluded prison for a decade. They dropped by rope through a skylight and placed the bug.
It didn't work.
Several nights later, rope in hand, they were back on the roof. They installed another bug.
This time, "all we got was a loud buzz," said Mary Buckley, recalling an investigation three decades ago in which the Drug Enforcement Administration sent her undercover at age 26 to help catch Barnes.
Buckley and another retired DEA agent, Lew Rice, who once headed DEA's New York office, described their role in convicting Barnes and one of his major competitors, Frank Lucas. Their lectures Tuesday at the DEA Museum kicked off a series celebrating the agency's 35th birthday by recalling its biggest triumphs.
Rice and Buckley provided a stiff dose of reality about the 1970s clash between drug dealers and cops in New York City, which has provided rich lore for the movies. Hollywood has transformed this collision into a mythic era through films like "Serpico," "Prince of the City," "The French Connection" and its sequel, and most recently "American Gangster." HBO is planning a series.
"It's hard to defend against that Hollywood machine," said Rice, who spent 18 months prepping Lucas to testify for the government in return for a reduced sentence. Rice said Lucas was nothing like the man portrayed by actor Denzel Washington in "American Gangster."
Born in a 1973 merger of drug agencies, the DEA was devoted to undercover work but inexperienced and ill-adapted to it, Buckley said. Far from glamour and high-tech wizardry, her world in the mid-1970s meant sleepless nights on spike heels in smoke-filed joints with dangerous men, wearing a bulky concealed transmitter that burned her skin, using index card files rather than computer databases and searching for functioning pay phones in a world without cell phones.
It didn't work.
Several nights later, rope in hand, they were back on the roof. They installed another bug.
This time, "all we got was a loud buzz," said Mary Buckley, recalling an investigation three decades ago in which the Drug Enforcement Administration sent her undercover at age 26 to help catch Barnes.
Buckley and another retired DEA agent, Lew Rice, who once headed DEA's New York office, described their role in convicting Barnes and one of his major competitors, Frank Lucas. Their lectures Tuesday at the DEA Museum kicked off a series celebrating the agency's 35th birthday by recalling its biggest triumphs.
Rice and Buckley provided a stiff dose of reality about the 1970s clash between drug dealers and cops in New York City, which has provided rich lore for the movies. Hollywood has transformed this collision into a mythic era through films like "Serpico," "Prince of the City," "The French Connection" and its sequel, and most recently "American Gangster." HBO is planning a series.
"It's hard to defend against that Hollywood machine," said Rice, who spent 18 months prepping Lucas to testify for the government in return for a reduced sentence. Rice said Lucas was nothing like the man portrayed by actor Denzel Washington in "American Gangster."
Born in a 1973 merger of drug agencies, the DEA was devoted to undercover work but inexperienced and ill-adapted to it, Buckley said. Far from glamour and high-tech wizardry, her world in the mid-1970s meant sleepless nights on spike heels in smoke-filed joints with dangerous men, wearing a bulky concealed transmitter that burned her skin, using index card files rather than computer databases and searching for functioning pay phones in a world without cell phones.
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