BOOK REVIEW Drug myths debunked Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin and His
Band of Brothers by Ron Chepesiuk
Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
Southeast Asian heroin was never smuggled in the coffins of dead US soldiers.
Nor was Frank Lucas, the protagonist in the 2007 blockbuster Hollywood movie American
Gangster, the main Afro-American smuggler of drugs into New York in the
late 1960s and early 1970s.
Canadian-born crime writer Ron Chepesiuk kills these and several other popular
myths about the Vietnam-era heroin trade in his highly readable new book.
Chepesiuk's research shows that the real "American Gangster" was Leslie "Ike"
Atkinson, whose drug ring smuggled an
estimated US$400 million worth of heroin into the United States at a rate of
500 kilograms per year between 1968 and 1975. Lucas was a mere associate of
Atkinson and his partner, William Herman "Jack" Jackson, who established Jack's
American Star Bar in Bangkok in 1967.
Lucas was an important distributor of the heroin, but he was dependent on
Atkinson and Jackson for crucial supplies. At the street level in New York, he
built up his own drug empire in collaboration with the Sicilian-American mafia.
Yet for most of his drug-smuggling career, Lucas was constantly in hot water
with the mob.
At one point, he even owed two well-connected Mafioso $300,000 "and only
managed to avoid ending up in a dumpster or buried in concrete because the two
mobsters were arrested and carted off to jail", Chepesiuk writes.
Sergeant Smack expands on Chepesiuk's and co-author Anthony Gonzalez's
2007 book on the same subject, Superfly: The True, Untold Story of Frank Lucas,
American Gangster. "Superfly" is Lucas; "Sergeant Smack" is Atkinson, a
former American soldier who settled in Thailand's capital in 1968 where he
teamed up with Jackson.
Their bar was on Bangkok's New Petchaburi Road, then a three-kilometer strip of
bars and massage parlors catering to American GIs on rest and recreation from
the war in Vietnam. Jack's American Star Bar with its blues and soul music
attracted mostly Afro-Americans.
At the time, Bangkok's entertainment was racially segregated by music, and it
was among these Afro-American servicemen that Atkinson, Jackson and their Thai
partner and official owner of the bar, Luchai "Chai" Ruviwat, recruited
couriers to carry drugs into the US. Chai had all the necessary connections in
the Bangkok underworld and Golden Triangle, the Thai border area with Laos and
Myanmar where the heroin was produced.
Contrary to popular portrayal, Lucas visited Thailand only once, and was never
actively involved in the shipments. Atkinson and his partners did use their
military connections to move the drugs, but not in the coffins of dead
soldiers. The heroin was sent mainly through army post offices, aboard US Air
Force transport planes and by retired and active African-American servicemen to
Fort Bragg, Seymour Air Force base and other military installations in the US.
The drugs were variously hidden in film canisters, duffle bags carried by
soldiers returning home, or inside wounded servicemen's leg casts. Jackson was
eventually busted in Denver in 1972, and, three years later, Atkinson - who by
then had taken over the entire operation - was nabbed in the comfortable home
he had built in his native Goldsboro, North Carolina.
About a month before his arrest, Atkinson went on one of his regular "business
trips" to Bangkok, where, according to Chepesiuk, he had helped an associate
pack a $3 million heroin consignment into two false-bottom overnight bags that
were posted to different addresses in Fayetteville, also in North Carolina. An
elderly Afro-American woman lived at each address.
The plan was to have one of Atkinson's associates visit the women and explain
that the bags had been wrongly posted and retrieve them. The ploy had worked
before, but the plan went array when one of the women rang the post office to
let them know that the bag had been delivered to the wrong address.
The other thought that someone had sent her a bomb and alerted the police. When
the bags were searched, police found the heroin, and forensic experts dusted up
Atkinson's palm print on one of the plastic bags containing the narcotic. He
was arrested and spent the next 32 years in prison.
That was not the end of Atkinson's heroin ring - but, perhaps, it was the
beginning of the myth that drugs had been smuggled in coffins. He still pulled
the strings of his drug ring while behind bars, all the way to Bangkok, where
some of his associates remained. While in jail, Atkinson thought up a new
innovative way to smuggle heroin into the United States: in hollowed out teak
furniture.
In 1975-76, with the US withdrawing its troops from Thailand at the end of the
Vietnam War, military personnel were allowed to send home their household goods
after completing their tour of duty. Lucas may have heard of this, embellished
the story, and the "teakwood connection" became the infamous "cadaver
connection".
But by the end of 1976, Atkinson's transnational drug empire had collapsed as
most of his associates ended up behind bars in the US and some in Thailand. The
busts of his ring prompted US authorities to become more active in drug
suppression in the region, a policy that helped to sustain close bilateral ties
with Thailand after the Vietnam War.
Atkinson was released in April 2007, and is now living quietly and alone in
North Carolina in a modest two-bedroom apartment. Chai, who was arrested while
on a "business trip" to San Francisco in 1975, returned to Thailand after being
released from a US prison in 1994. Jackson died in 2006 and not a trace remains
of his once-famous Jack's American Star Bar.
Sergeant Smack is a gripping, highly readable account of how large
quantities of relatively cheap Southeast Asian heroin entered the illicit drug
markets of New York and other US cities during the Vietnam War era. And it
kills more myths than one about how the trade actually worked.
Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and His
Band of Brothers by Ron Chepesiuk. Strategic Media, Rock Hill, South
Carolina and Thunder Bay, Canada, 2010. ISBN: 9780984233311. Price US$22.95,
420 pages.
Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review and the author of Bloodbrothers: Crime, Business and Politics in
Asia. He is currently a writer with Asia Pacific Media Services.
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At one point, he even owed two well-connected Mafioso $300,000 "and only
managed to avoid ending up in a dumpster or buried in concrete because the two
mobsters were arrested and carted off to jail", Chepesiuk writes.
