The Heroin is twice as potent and cheaper to buy this way. Frank sets up his connections and the Heroin is flown in on U.S. Planes inside the coffins of fallen G.I. Soldiers. Frank stays under radar for years until one night a detective notices him at a fight where he is sitting in front row in front of all the MOB Fathers wearing a chinchilla fur coat with a match hat that his wife had bought him. It is because of this flashiness that he is recognized and from there his organization starts to spiral and eventually taken down. He was tried and convicted but to receive a lesser sentence he becomes an informant taking down over 100 corrupt officers. The ethnical view lens is a presentation of decoding Frank Lucas's beliefs, his pride family, and the fear of losing ownership to all of what he cared most about them most his power and wealth. The argument I am going to argue through this lens is that even though people of Harlem considered him a hero because he had money and power, he should not be deemed a hero because many lives were ruined, families torn apart and people died from over dosing on the heroin that Frank was distributing on the streets that came from Vietnam. .
For the people of Harlem in 1970's were a time of violence and loss according to Erin Kelly in Galleries, New York City and photography. "With crumbling infrastructure and trash-lined streets, the New York Times described the neighborhood this way: "Since 1970, an exodus of residents has left behind the poor, the uneducated, and the unemployed. Nearly two-thirds of the households have incomes below $10,000 a year. In a community with one of the highest crime rates in the city, garbage-strewn vacant lots and tumbledown tenements, many of them abandoned and sealed, contribute to the sense of danger and desolation that pervades much of the area." (New York Times,) Some people simply had to stay in Harlem just because they were way to poor to move.