The scourge of heroin use by Black Americans in cities like New York in the 1970s sparked Richard Nixon’s War of Drugs. The goal was to “associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin” and to “disrupt those communities” by “criminalizing both heavily,” Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman said in 2016.
Legs McNeil uses that quote in his documentary, Pusherman: Frank Lucas & The True Story of American Gangster, distributed by MVD Entertainment, which arrives on streaming service Tubi today (June 24). “I’d never heard it before,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought it was a fantastic quote. It made sense because they would raid you, they’d target you. I was targeted as a kid for going to antiwar demonstrations.”
McNeil’s movie focuses on Frank Lucas, the Harlem dope pusher made famous in Ridley Scott’s 2007 druggy saga American Gangster, which was based on a New York magazine article by Mark Jacobson. McNeil and Jacobson team up to take down American Gangster. “Most of the story was bullshit,” Jacobson says on screen as he lays out Lucas’ role as a Harlem kingpin who imported pure heroin from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Jacobson and Steve Zailian are credited with co-writing the screenplay.
Denzel Washington, who played Lucas “was too pretty” for the part,” says McNeil. “I liked the movie. I thought it was entertaining, but it wasn’t true.”
McNeil learned this from Jacobson, who interviewed Lucas for his story, and from Richie Roberts, the persistent detective played by Russell Crowe (Roberts is a talking head in the film). Both writers, Jacobson and McNeil, have been friends for 46 years. Jacobson did gonzo-style articles for the Village Voice and New York and McNeil co-founded PUNK magazine, co-authored Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and wrote for music magazines like SPIN.
“We would have dinner two or three times a year,” McNeil recalls. “He told me the whole story of working with Frank Lucas. I never read the original story, and I finally read it, and I said, ‘This will make a great movie.’ So I thought, why not? Bring the writer to the viewer.”
The biggest revelation in both movies is that throughout the war Lucas had heroin shipped to the U.S. from Vietnam in coffins containing dead soldiers. He visited the Golden Triangle — where Thailand, Laos and then-Burma meet — several times. The region was teaming with poppy fields and jungle-based operations that converted raw opium into the devilish white powder. Lucas made lucrative deals and created his highly sought after Blue Magic brand.
“Yeah, that’s not true, right?” Jacobson said when he first learned of this clever smuggling technique from GoodFellas writer Nicholas Pileggi. It was. And so McNeil dove into the project, his first film after so many years writing articles and books.
“I hated music writing,” McNeil says. “I’d do anything to get out of writing about music. I’d even go to wars. When crack came to rural America, I did that story. And I’m sure if I’d still been writing, I would have done a story about fentanyl in rural America. I just love really good stories and I loved mining ’70s New York, which I thought was kind of like the Wild West. It seems like there are unlimited amounts of stories from that time period and Frank Lucas seemed to me to be one, to tell the real story instead of what happened in American Gangster.”
Mostly, he and Jacobson complain about Lucas’ portrayal, that Washington didn’t imitate his gruff voice and other character inconsistencies. Roberts chimes in with gripes as well.
McNeil arrived in New York in the mid-’70s from Cheshire, Connecticut. “Horrible, horrible place,” he says. “Still is. I moved to New York to get away from all the assholes in Connecticut. And now all the assholes from Connecticut have moved to New York.”
He’s since relocated to Pennsylvania but during those years McNeil lived on 14th St. “Junkies would pass out in the doorway, and I couldn’t open the door to get in,” he says. “That’s what New York was like. Dope dealers would lower a basket down from a window, collect your money and hoist it back up.”
McNeil preferred drinking to smoking pot or shooting heroin. “I hated opioids,” he says. “I had a leg operation when I was a kid. They shot me up with morphine four times a day and I hated it. I still hate opioids.” Hence, where he got his nickname.
McNeil’s next project takes him to Los Angeles and to another drug-themed story: the Wonderland Ave. murders (the movie Wonderland , released in 2003, stars Val Kilmer). “I’m just going to tell the real story,” he says.
Just like he does with Pusherman, which ends with an animated Lucas in a wheelchair stealing beer mugs from a bar. “I think he was always like that,” McNeil notes. “I mean, not when he was making a million dollars a day. He just wanted the beer mugs.”