Black Caesar: The Biggest International Black Druglord You've Never Heard Of
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Easter Sunday, 1972.

Tyrone Palmer, a lieutenant in one of the United States' most powerful but little-known mafias, is getting down to a night of drinks and other less legal stuff at Club Harlem, a ritzy joint in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This place is known for attracting some of America's best blues acts, but it's also famed for welcoming some of the country's most notorious mobsters. And Palmer, a heavyset guy whose nickname is Fat Ty, is one of them.

He's just been the key suspect in a murder in Philadelphia. And he's got cops and members of the feared Black Mafia all over him. Tyrone's about to do a reverse Jesus on Easter Sunday. This night, the Harlem's packed. Six to eight hundred folks, all having a wild time. Palmer's there with a bodyguard and a harem of young women. His boss, Frank Matthews, the Black Caesar, is a regular too, but he's decided not to show.

These five guys are sitting across from Palmer and his crew eyeballing them. One of them is this big, built, 215-pound former Black Panther named Sam Christian, founder of the Black Mafia. He's going to be most notorious for the murder of seven Hanafi Muslims at the home of NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a year later in 1973. But this night, Christian walks over to Palmer's table and a row kicks off.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

This is a wild one, man. I mean, when you first brought it up, I thought you were talking about BMF, like Big Meech and them. I'm actually ashamed to say that I've never heard of this guy before. Yeah, I mean, I was just looking around. I mean, I was quite interested in trying to find something that I'd never really heard of. And as we're going to get into in a minute, there's loads of guys who it was this fella's contemporary, but for whatever reason, there are plenty of them. He never really made it.

into the kind of hall of fame but i mean there's no reason why he shouldn't be um i'm just upset that somebody with that accent is going to know more about the american gangsters than me like i should i should fire i should fire myself i mean look your gangsters are better than ours we have these like guys with sort of like sovereign rings and shitty accents like this guy's legit so i'd much rather talk about him than any east end like low level guys anyway

just also some quick housekeeping you know we have a merch site up with uh t-shirts and hats a lot of people were asking for them so if you go to underworldpod.com slash merch you'll find uh you know the stuff that we have for sale up there as always bonus episodes on the patreon patreon.com slash the underworld podcast there's no sovereign rings yet but i guess we could get those in if people like the stuff that we're already getting rid of like a pink pinky ring

Yeah, pinky ring. I mean, that's kind of on point for us, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but this guy, right. So, I mean, I'm sure he had plenty of pinky rings too. His name's Frank Matthews and his story's pretty incredible by all accounts. He rises to become one of the most successful mob bosses of his era, trying to muscle in on the Italian families, like literally as well as with his crew. And by all accounts, he's this business genius, international drug Baron with other buyers be remembered just like the Gravano's and bulges the world, except he's black and from the South. Um,

Wait, when you say remember like the Gravano's and Bolger's, you mean he ends up being a snitch? No, no, no, no. I just mean, you know, kind of written about films about him, that kind of stuff, you know, like going down in this...

The Annals of History or whatever you want to call them. But this guy's kind of like, the story's got left out. I mean, this guy called Ron Chepesyuk, I really hope I'm saying his name right. He came along and wrote a book about him called Black Caesar and credit to Ron, actually. He sent me the book along and it's like this great account of Matthew's full of really top reporting and well worth checking out. We'll put it on the reading list, of course. We always put stuff on the reading list. You can check out on our website.

But thanks to Ron. Shout out to Ron for providing a bunch of the material for this show. He even gave me a quote, actually, like an original quote. Is this journalism? Which sees up Matthews pretty well. I quote him. Frank Matthews is the Al Capone of black organized crime. He was the first drug dealer to expand his operation beyond the hood. He was also the first black drug dealer with an international connection. The

The fact that he disappeared with 30 million large and a beautiful woman never to be found has made him a legend and unique among American gangsters. So, you know, spoiler alert, there's a kind of like cliffhanger at the end of this story. But just to like hammer in the fact that this guy was serious business, here's a quote from William Callahan, who was a prosecutor involved in his case. And he's speaking to a doco crew. I've put the YouTube link in our Patreon too. Quote,

There's been a lot of recent movies on Lucas being the king of drugs. That's not true. Matthews was the number one heroin pioneer. Had his wings not been clipped in 72, he would have ruled the United States.

Yeah, I was going to bring up Frank Lucas because I think, wasn't he on the cover of Newsweek back when that meant something? And, you know, there's also Bumpy Johnson, who back in the day went to war with Dutch Schultz. So there are, I feel like he's part of that sort of, you know, contingency that did actually make a name for themselves. Oh, yeah. And these guys all kind of grew up together, kind of like running the same rackets, but...

Yeah, again, like for whatever reason, Frank Matthews gets left behind. But as we're going to find out, there's really little reason why. I don't know why there's more films not being made about this guy. But yeah, this this this movie that I've got a lot of these quotes from is really good. Yeah. Again, we've got it all on the Patreon and the scripts and all that good stuff.

But it also includes Clinton Shorty Buse. Is it Buse or Buise? I don't know. And Melvin Williams. They're two former heroin dealers who would later find stardom playing drug bosses in The Wire. And this is Buse. It was a poor community. We lived in poor housing. From that poor housing, we went to poor schools, received a poor education, which turns us right back into the poor community.

Who were they? Who were they on the wire? Ah, right. Okay. So I think Melvin Williams is, you know, the guy who's like an old preacher man. I think he is. He kind of like is the sort of voice of reason. Uh, I can't remember any of their names in the show. And then Clinton is one of the drug dealers that gets more involved towards the end of it. Yeah.

I'm looking them up right now. I recognize these guys. Yeah, he would have seen them for sure. They play a pretty prominent role. I think Melvin Williams is in it pretty much throughout. You might think that you've heard of Frank Matthews, but you probably haven't. This guy comes from pretty much nothing, really. He was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1944. And he comes of age at this time when two of the biggest kingpins of the US are black and from the same state.

who are Leslie Atkinson and Frank Lucas, who listeners might know from the 2007 Ridley Scott movie American Gangster. That's got Denzel Washington playing Frank Lucas. Did you see that film? I remember it being like really long and shit. I don't remember liking it.

I saw it. I don't remember it being great, but I think it was decent. But it definitely didn't cement itself in the canon of great gangster films. Yeah, I mean, it's got Denzel as well. It should be pretty good. But as you can imagine, Durham at the time has got tons of issue with race. And one of the places at the time was called Black Wall Street. There were no lynchings back in that time, which obviously isn't

I know lynching's back in the day of Jim Crow, which isn't much to aim for, but...

From what I can see, there were plenty of race murders all around Durham at that time, so it's probably just a statistical fluke. As many as 300 in the region between 1877 and 1950, according to some local news report I saw. Wait, so when you're saying there were no lynchings, you mean just in Durham? Yeah, it came up in this film that I watched, and I couldn't quite believe it, so I looked up online, and apparently that's true, but like...

I reckon that's something to do with like city lines and stuff. I mean, I can't, I don't know. I don't know. I, people can look it up themselves. I'm not going to like back it, but it was online. I don't know if that's true. Um, but Matthew seems to grow up a pretty normal upbringing for that time. Uh, he must be poor cause he's only rap shit. Like at the time is stealing chickens as a teenager, but he mostly stays out of trouble and he leaves Durham for Philadelphia pretty young. And like, I guess we don't have to go into Philly's history too. Um,

But like, it's a place that's been a touch point for poverty, crime, race, politics, as Americans know a lot better than me. And, you know, there's going to be the 85 bombing by the city itself on Black Liberation campaign. So, yeah, it's kind of like a ground zero for that stuff as well. But all accounts of these early years of Matthew's life are pretty sketchy and there's not a lot up there online or in books or anywhere.

But he winds up in Bedford-Steyverson, Bed-Stey in Brooklyn, where it seems that he gets in trouble running numbers. Numbers, by the way, is this kind of illegal lottery bonus he played in poor neighborhoods at the time. It still goes on all around the world, though. I doubt it's in New York these days, is it? Dude, they run numbers like on my block. Oh, shit. Like the literal closest storefront to my apartment is a bodega that still runs numbers. And so, yeah, they... I mean, I've heard of other games in other neighborhoods, I'm sure...

Most neighborhoods have, not most neighborhoods, but most, you know, there are some places where you're definitely going to find numbers games going on. But I'm sure it's definitely not what it used to be. All right. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it was a pretty big deal back then. And like Matthews certainly seems like he did pretty well out of the stuff.

because he's soon up and running trying to get the heroin game going in New York, which actually, by the way, is massive at the time. By the end of the Vietnam War, the US has over a million heroin addicts, and New York is the drug's downtown. This is when New York is a pretty awful place to live. Crime is sky high, gangs are running riot, politicians and the cops are deeply corrupt. According to a survey at the time, 33% of black and Latino residents of Spanish Harlem are addicted to heroin.

okay one i don't like you talking about new york and two that is a crazy like that's a crazy statistic yeah i mean you've got to get over the first one but the second one yeah uh i can't believe that it's absolutely insane but like if you look at all the old like real footage and stuff i've seen and stuff in the books i was reading about frank matthews um yeah i mean spanish harlem seemed like a pretty horrible place um

And at the time, most dope is coming into the US by saying called the French Connection.

Which I think I want to do an episode on that relatively soon. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Like a little sort of rundown of it. It had been happening since the 1930s, whereby heroin was smuggled from Indochina, Lebanon, and Turkey into Europe via Marseille on the southern French coast before it headed across the Atlantic. This route's going to be made famous by the 1971 film French Connection starring Gene Hackman. Absolute must-watch. That's a classic. And...

By the time Matthews is getting big on the scene, it's kind of already coming to an end or it's kind of plateauing, right? In 1968, Copse sees a record 246 pounds of smack that's been hidden in a Citroen car on a French ship worth 22.4 million, which is about 150 million today's money. Also like drugs hidden on a Citroen on a French ship. That's very French.

It's only going to continue for a few years into the 70s. And the DEA gets wise and the route becomes real tricky for the traffickers. But the French connection is still king when Matthews is coming up.

At first he tries reaching out to the Gambino crime family to do a deal, but they turn him down. The Italian mob deals almost all the heroin in the United States at this time, and no one really believes that a black man can muscle in on white turf. So Matthews goes another route, or route, whatever.

through this freaking guy he's doing numbers with. Frank meets this guy called Rolando Gonzalez, who's a Cuban who's about to flee from a federal recharge to Venezuela. But before he goes, he sells Matthews his first kilo of heroin and that gets Matthews underway.

Then Matthew starts making trips down to Venezuela himself. First the barter for groups of gangs, then for himself. He's the only non-mafia black guy to be picking up dope from the French connection.

So wait, the French connection dope was also making it to Venezuela? Yeah, so it's like, usually it's going across the Atlantic straight into the US, but some of it's stopping off in Central and South America and then making its way up from there. And that's kind of where Matthews makes his name. But yeah, like...

By 1971, so just coming out of nowhere, right? Matthews is making the equivalent of 60 million bucks a year in today's cash. And he's supplying a wave of clubs and music that comes out of New York City at the time. This is a quote. We talk about Frank Lucas, Nicky Barnes. They were New York dealers, New Jersey dealers. If he wasn't investigated, he would have set up a truly national and eventually an international network that would have boggled the mind. That's Ron Chepesik again.

Now,

This guy doesn't Instagram his crimes. Of course, there's no Instagram. The only Facebook poke is guys shouting, I'm walking here, drivers. No, just stop, man. I knew you'd fucking hate that. I knew you'd hate that. It kind of makes it worth it. He doesn't show off his well-being for Frank Matthews. He's pretending to be his own, like, he's not pretending to be his own PR in the New York Post, for example. That's a good reference. Okay, that's all right. All right. He buys up a bunch of land in the city when he's told a federal highway is going to pass through.

He has a wife who's named Barbara Hinton, and he's got three kids. But he's known to get about a ton, and one time he beats a girlfriend really badly, so he's not really a nice guy at all, just carry it that. Yeah, I mean, we all love Howard Marks, but I figure the moving kilos of heroin thing, that kind of makes that clear. Yeah, yeah, I guess that's pretty straightforward. But in 1971, the cops get their first real sniff of Matthews, and it seems like a bit of a fluke.

Matthews is living in an apartment down on Clarkson Ave on the south side of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Kind of Lefferts Heights area if anyone knows New York. From what I remember that's like really weird little corner like low slung places and big Victorian homes. Apparently it's a great place to run a giant drug network anyway.

Yeah, there's some beautiful old Victorian houses down there that kind of look like they're somewhere out of a suburb in suburban Boston. Shout out to the old Czech lady who was going to give me a rent there and then backed out the day before I was going to fly to America. So yeah, thanks to that. I was going to live down in Prospect, Lefferts High, so one of those weird houses. There are some beautiful... It's almost like suburban down there with some beautiful yards and those wraparound porches. But yeah, a good place, I would think, to set up a

a drug network. Well, I mean, you would think in bio accounts, like he pretty much did that Matthews, but,

He doesn't know that one of his neighbors is this guy called Joe Kowalski, who's this NYPD cop who's just been given a raise, and he moves into the same building. And Kowalski notices that on weekends, a bunch of cars without estate plates are clogging up his parking lot, and they're all heading into one apartment. It's kind of red flag. When Kowalski runs the place, he discovers that most of them belong to big-time drug dealers from the East Coast and Midwest.

18 months later, Kowalski hands the info over to his superiors and the operation against Frank Matthews kicks off. I mean, that might as well have been Instagramming your crimes. Like that's the 1970s version of that is just having all these drug dealers show up to your house all the time and a cop lives next door to you. Every time we say stuff like this, I just want to make another t-shirt now. I think we're going to have to make a whole ton. But yeah,

Until then, right, this is crazy. Matthews is on no lists, no taps, nothing. This guy's making 60 mil a year. They soon find out he's setting up 100 key deals with the French Connection in Venezuela, which are making one of the richest drug dealers in America. Matthews is working in 21 states and controlling a huge amount of the East Coast heroin industry. Yeah, that is massive. And I think heroin was definitely, you know, crack wasn't invented yet. Heroin was the drug of choice everywhere back then.

Yeah, it's just going wild in the tail end of the Vietnam War. I mean, all of these veterans coming back, all of them getting hooked on dope. It's crazy at the time. But Matthew's organization processes its own dope at a place they call the OK Corral. And that's at 101 East 56th Street in Brooklyn, which is kind of like East Flatbush. Pretty hairy part of town. I don't know. Like even today, it seems like a pretty wild part of town. I don't know. You know better than me.

Yeah, I mean, East Flatbush, you can still get it in there, especially in that area they're talking about. Yeah. Yeah, like this guy, he's got like folks near naked, cutting drugs with playing cards, that kind of thing. When cops bust the place, they find half a key of residue just on the floor, which is like $20 million worth of the stuff. And guys are mixing it with canoe paddles.

One time one of Matthew's workers dies from inhaling a ton of heroin over a long shift. And this isn't even Matthew's only trap house. He's got another one he calls the Ponderosa and that's at 925 Prospect Place, which is pretty close by. Wait, hold on. 20 half a key is not 20 million. Did you mean 20,000?

Oh, wait. Yeah. I think I mean half a ton. Wait, I've got my stuff mixed up. Half a key of residue. I mean, half a key of residue on the floor sounds reasonable. And $20,000 for half a key sounds reasonable, too. Yeah, yeah. I've clearly fucked that up. Anyway, trust me, guys. I know what I'm talking about.

In 1971, Matthews moves his family into this like giant colonial style home on Buttonwood Road in the Staten Island neighborhood of Tothill. He's the only black guy in the neighborhood. It's like old money, white money, that kind of stuff. Highest point on the East Coast till Miami. Great views of the city. And actually one of its buildings doubled as the Corleone compound during the filming of The Godfather.

Yeah, that's not a move. If you're a rich black dope dealer, you don't move to a nice neighborhood in Staten Island if you're trying to stay off the radar of NYPD. That's basically, like, you might as well just walk into the station and tell them to start paying attention to you. Well, I mean, I think that's kind of what, certainly on one level, I think he wanted to do that, right? Because...

One of these white guys he lives next to, like literally the guy across him, is a relative of Tommy Three Fingers Lucchese, the Cosa Nostra boss who died a few years earlier in 67. And down the street is Big Paul Castellano, underboss of the Gambinos, who's later killed by John Gotti. Yeah, I mean, a bunch of those guys still, I think, live out there. Not obviously those specific ones, but yeah. Those neighborhoods down the island, they definitely have their share of major players.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the place where the feds really build their case against Matthews. This is the era of Nixon, war on drugs, and a task force called Group 12 is assigned to Matthews, which he calls Case 459. They're all over Buttonwood, and they end up calling Matthews the bat because he only leaves his place at night.

They're after decisive info on what they're now calling the Frank Matthews Syndicate, and they do pretty well. I mean, Group 12 finds out, for example, how Matthews is playing stewardesses with Allegheny Airlines, a grander pop to bring shipments of heroin into the country. The crew pick up the goods from an airline locker, pack it on their flight bags and just drop it at another locker on the other end.

God, it was so easy to run a trafficking ring back then. I know, man. You didn't need a million dollar tunnel. Like you just pay to store this and they just snuck it on the plane. Like, I don't know. I mean, it reminds me of, you know, the Patreon interview we did with Mike Ritter who ran that weed trafficking operation from Thailand and just made a fortune just putting it in sailboats and sending it to the US. Yeah, it's like...

Just imagine doing that these days. This is a golden era of dope smuggling. But like things are going to tighten around Matthews elsewhere, right? In 71, this anonymous tipser calling themselves Aquarius sends cops a letter in Atlanta, giving a bunch of detailed info, phone numbers, associate names, properties. And it's all true, this stuff. He must have pissed off somebody who knows him really, really well, Matthews.

And at the same time, somebody on Buttonwood, probably the Italians who are like racist and hate having this wealthy black guy living among them, is giving the DEA all kinds of stuff on license plates and comings and goings.

That's anti-Italian discrimination. I'm really sorry to Italian gangsters in the 70s. I'm really doing you down. But the investigation then heads south, right, to Matthew's home state. A pharmacist alerts cops when a black man walks in and asks to buy 50 gallons of quinine, which is his cutting agent. I mean, 50 gallons, what? And have it shipped to New York.

I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of racism going on at the time, but a 50-gallon drum of quinine, which is, is it quinine? I think I'm saying it right. This is like a drug mostly used for malaria, but of course, this cutting agent. I guess I'd probably call the cops as well.

Yeah, it's a metaphorical Instagramming of crimes. Yeah, this guy is Instagramming everything, right? Anyway, this guy turns out to be Frank Matthews, who to them is just some local who copped a chicken theft rap years back.

They use this beat up jalopy. I thought that was a type of food till I researched this, by the way. And a black officer, like, so they don't raise suspicion. And then the cops figure out that Matthews is laundering cash all over North Carolina. And by now, Matthews is definitely getting wind. He's getting spied on. He speeds away from deals, loses cops in his fancy cars. There's this one crazy incident in New York, and I'll let one of the guys involved in the story as told to Black Caesar. That's Ron Chepesio's book.

Tell it right. So quote, we were tailing Matthews in Harlem during the daytime. He was driving at a very slow speed. My partner, Jack Kwarczak, was hidden in a big flower box positioned on top of our surveillance car. I tried to stay back, but because of the traffic, I found myself directly behind Matthews Cadillac.

Then Matthew suddenly stops his car. Maybe he spotted us. Meanwhile, I'm looking ahead to the sides, staying in touch with Jack in the box and all of a sudden, I'm jammed on the brakes to avoid a collision with Frank's car. That caused Jack to fly out of the box and fall across the hood of the car and land on the roadway. Jack is laid out there on the street. I get out of the car. Frank gets out of his car and starts yelling at me for hitting the pedestrian. I

I played the role. I picked Jack up and profusely apologized to him. Shit, says Matthews. Not a goddamn cop around when you need one. Then Frank drove away, laughing. I don't understand. Like, what? Like, was there a big flower pot on top of the car? Like, some sort of, you know, I don't know, botanist van? Like, I don't understand. What kind of, like, super trooper shit is this? Yeah, I don't know. Like, I know. Aren't they supposed to, like...

And they're supposed to be TV. I don't know. What are they hiding as anyway? So he's, he's hidden out on a flower box on top of a van. What would even, what would that even be?

Like a flower delivery service? Yeah, I'm picturing like a van for like a flower company. And on top they have like a decorative sort of, you know, like instead of like a pizza slice or something like that, they have like a flower. I don't know, man. We should find out. Yeah, this just reminded me of The Simpsons, right? Don't the FBI have a van outside that says flowers by Irene? Yeah, yeah. But anyway, Matthew's like...

Just kind of plays the fool at this time. And like Matthews is running gigantic amounts of coke and heroin at this time. He's dealing with Italians in the Bronx and some Jewish group of businessmen in Brooklyn who the feds never figure out who these guys are. And he's honing his contacts in Venezuela. And the feds are building a case there too until the CIA gets solved. And they cut off the whole part of the indictment. And they say it's like doing a bunch of stuff against the Soviets in Venezuela and can't risk it for a dope king thing. What?

Yeah. So they have this big case going on down south of the border. And then the CIA cuts in and says, like, this is going to jeopardize stuff that we're doing against the Soviets there. And you just like can't risk that. I don't know. I mean, that kind of echoes something that I'm working on at the moment, actually, with the CIA stepping in. But yeah, so they kind of save his bacon at the time.

This is all coming at a time, by the way, when black self-determination, black pan-Africanism, the nation, black power, the Panthers, black movements all around get really gathering pace. And so it's the same in the drug industry. Matthews wants to form a collective of black-only gangs, bringing in gear on their own and cutting the Italians out altogether. But it doesn't pay off. And before long, cops are circling Matthews. They're picking up associates and other major gangsters at the time.

And there's more. Something called the Black Mafia is running around Philly, and it gets notorious when it cuts a dealer's head off and displays it in the window of a bar where a lot of drug stuff is going down. These are Nation of Islam guys working out of a temple in the city, and they're just sweeping up rival gangs, selling, extorting. I mean, they're saying all Islamist terror groups are fond of today, I guess. It actually, you know, it sounds like Jamaat al-Muslimim from Trinidad that we talked about in the last episode. Yeah.

Yeah, totally does. Yeah, people should check out that episode as well. The last one we did is amazing. So interesting. So then we're back to the club, right? And Sam Christian pops Tyrone Palmer. And it seems that things get pretty medieval on the East Coast. The Black Mafia is hitting all kinds of folks. And that's getting mixed up in some other crazy shit too.

On July 13, 1972, the body of James Turk Scott, a Baltimore State delegate who's believed to be running dope, shows up in the garage of a high-rise called Sutton Place. Some folks think it's Matthews, but next to the body, there's a message. Quote,

These persons are known drug dealers. Selling drugs is an act of treason. The penalty for treason is death. And the message was signed Black October. Turns out Black October is this black Muslim vigilante group that wants to rid the streets of drug dealers. So they're like the sparrow in Game of Thrones, if you need a Game of Thrones reference at this point. Yeah, I don't get the reference, even though I like Game of Thrones. I'm going to leave that and just kind of try to catch up here. Like, walk me backwards. The black mafia...

is the Nation of Islam types, and they're actually dealing drugs while attacking other drug dealers? And Black October is similar, but they're actually out after drug dealers and not dealing drugs? Yeah, so to center it all around Matthews, he's kind of sweeping up, but there's other gangs muscling on his turf, and of all of those, the Black Mafia, who are based out of Philly, they're like...

the most violent and the most kind of ruthless. So they're trying to take out rival gangs and his is one of them. But at the same time, this Black October group, this like kind of guardian angels kind of outfit, they're going around neighborhoods on the East Coast and they're trying to wipe out drug dealers, this kind of like religious fanatics or just like kind of a neighborhood watch gone crazy. So everything's tightening around Matthews at the time.

Sherban Dobson, who's the son of a preacher, by the way, he's implicated in that murder in the garage. And he says he's done it on behalf of Black October.

And this was all the same time as Dirty Harry was coming out and street crime was out of control in major US cities. The Guardian Angels is going to come out in 79. Vigilantism is cool, kids. Like, seriously, if you look at footage from back then, whole swathes of Baltimore, Philly, New York, they just look like war zones. Empty lots, abandoned high-rises, hydrants just spilling out all over the streets. It's pretty awful. And in all of this, you've got the dope and the addicts and the pimps and the gangs.

And Matthews is the leader of a ton of that world.

Now, by the early 70s, like I said, the cops have got wires all over Matthews, and they catch him making a deal in a Bronx hotel room, putting four mil cash on the table. That's like 20 million today. Imagine throwing that on the table. It's a big fucking table. But by the fall of 1972, Group 12 is ready to move in. They raid the Clarkson Ave apartment, and they recover 145 grand, guns, drugs, and details of Matthews' hookups in Philly.

Then they raid the processing plant. This is where it really hits the fan. There are 2.5 million glassine envelopes stuffed with smack piled to the ceiling. 25 mil worth of drugs just sitting there waiting to be shipped out. The Matthews Syndicate is basically the Amazon of heroin, controlling every aspect of the sale from shipping to production to delivery.

That's just a massive amount of heroin and massive. But what's going on with the other gangs? Like is Matthews at war with them? Is it just like in a couple of cities or is this like a full fledged thing?

So this is kind of what I couldn't work out. And I want people to reach out to us about this. Like this is at the same time. I mean, at the very least as Frank Lucas and all the Italian families, like I think Frank Matthews just swept up a bunch of their business. And instead of going after him, I think that a lot of people said that the Italians, especially were just tipping off the cops and trying to get him sent down. Um, but like,

He doesn't really go to war with that many people other than the Black Mafia, which we're going to get into in a second. But says Burton B. Roberts, who's a Bronx US attorney at the time, he quote,

These raids are only the beginning. We will hunt them all and we will go into Brooklyn and any other borough to kick them out. The raids and seizures will continue until we break the back of the narcotics network. So the feds, like they realize that this is a big, big deal. And by the summer, by the summer of 1973, it's all ready to go on Matthews. A bunch of his guys have flipped group 12 as a mountain of evidence. It's on.

What's more, the French connection is crumbling as law enforcement is finally getting around to stopping the big shipments. And Matthews actually has a shortage of the cutting agent quinine, and he has to graft around looking for this stuff. Actually, if this giant Venezuela order that Matthews is ordering at that time, which is like 100 kilos, comes off, he'd need 10 times the amount of quinine he's got on the tank.

So Matthews winds up finding this dodgy Bales bondsman called Walter Rosenbaum, who first agrees to get his hands on almost $2 million of this quining stuff. Then Rosenbaum gets cold feet and he goes to the feds. And Matthews is getting pinched more by the Black Mafia, which is picking off his lieutenants and a growing number of these vigilante groups like Black October. And they're all pushing like this line of shooting drug pushers, selling to the neighborhoods, this kind of thing.

they're getting on top of him too. Matthews buys a shipment of automatic weapons and sends his boys off looking for some of these guys. But it doesn't seem like his group is really looking for an all-out war. On July 2nd, 73, Matthews skips a Brooklyn court day. The next day, cops declare him a fugitive. And poof, just like that, Frank Matthews, Black Caesar, one of the biggest drug lords in the world, is gone.

Feds get tip-offs from the narcotics world that he's driven out of town, or hopped on a plane to the Caribbean with a fake passport. His young girlfriend at the time, Cheryl Denise Brown, is believed to have jetted off with him. But cops keep in touch with her folks and she never once gets back with them. At least not that the authorities know. A lot of people would think she could have wound up dead. Anyway, Matthews is thought to have washed about 20 mil before skipping town, so he's not short on a few quid. And so begins one of the biggest manhunts in US history.

Feds announce an indictment of Matthews and associates for conspiracy to violate federal law going all the way back to 68. A load of guys are picked up. They make plea deals. They turn on each other, the usual fake loyalty in the criminal underworld. But the cops just end up chasing shadows. So they head abroad.

This is just a mad, mad story. And you can kind of see, I don't know, the movie writes itself. Like, I'm shocked there isn't a movie about this yet. Yeah, I saw something about a movie being made down the line or something on Gangsters Inc., which is a website that we go to a lot for a lot of really cool information. But yeah, I don't think it is. Yeah.

So the DEA kicks off a special unit called the Central Tactical Unit 2, which if you're in the business of naming anti-drug squads, this is like pretty lame. They end up shortening it to Centrac 2, but like, come on guys, Black Caesar? Like call it Brutus or something.

That's pretty good. Yeah, I was pretty proud of that. And this is something I'm still amazed is a thing when it comes to big man hunts, but apparently the FBI won't get involved in this because back then it doesn't get into drug stuff. So Matthews gets another break and Sentak's on his own chasing him down.

There are two officers assigned to Matthews day and night. They're called Al Parrish and Glenn Kism, which sound like Raymond Chandler characters anyway. But they convinced the DEA to get to offer a 20 grand reward for Matthews, which is the first time it's done that. And they get the idea from a federal rule for John Dillinger, by the way.

Should we option this for a book? Should we delete this episode and just try to get this made into a movie? Because this is unbelievable. Yeah, this could be a solid chat, actually. We might make a bunch of money. These guys, right? So these Raymond Chandler guys, they need to narrow down Matthew's whereabouts to like...

anywhere from Philly to Venezuela, Africa, Europe, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, where he owns property, or even Algeria, which is weirdly a big option because it's like a Cold War enemy of the US at the time and has hosted anti-government radicals like Stokely Carmichael, Tim Leary. Chapessiuk's book says that Matthews would have been unlikely to get into a rigid socialist country like Algeria, but I don't know. Sipping wine on the Corniche in Algeria is a pretty good way to live.

Speaking of which, the DEA guys are having a pretty good time too, right? They even got to go search for Matthews at the second Ali Frazier's fight at Madison Square Garden in 74. This is from Chisholm. Quote, I had a lot of fun going all over the place. It was just like being in a James Bond movie. Yeah, that's the old, you know, try to get an assignment in a beach country during February move, which I highly recommend. Yeah, yeah. Trinidad looks like a pretty nice, pretty nice good, right? I mean, Costa Rica, I think would be a better, better one.

Better one. I've actually, we pulled that off. I think, um, producer I was working with in 2015, pitch this like story in Costa Rica in February or March. So we got to go down there for two weeks. Uh, it was pretty solid.

Yeah, I mean, I like taking a few days around the side of trips. Makes it makes a little bit more fun as well. But yeah, not like these guys. I mean, these are just getting ferried everywhere. And like, I think that James Bond, I might be wrong, but James Bond usually gets the bad guy in the end. And these agents like barely lay a glove on Matthews in years. He's just like vanished into thin air.

U.S. Marshals take over a few years after CENTAC. They get some tips. Someone says they've seen Matthews and Brown at the home of a reverend in Houston, by the way. Houston. Houston? There you go. Houston. There's a bunch of small-time crooks who by all accounts seem to have lost everything, turned to drugs, that kind of path. And they tip the Marshals to places in Ohio, California, but nothing really sticks. Yeah, no one with money is going to hide out in Ohio.

No, no. I mean, this guy owns houses in the Caribbean. Like, why? And what's weird is that the feds have never really gone to the media with the Frank Matthews story the way they did, like, with Whitey Bolger, for example. Even though Matthews in his heyday is on a par with Bolger and supplying a massive amount of the country's heroin.

And there are some clues about Black Caesar's location. As you'd expect, there's a bunch of like fruitcake stuff on the internet, but he's basically been forgotten by history where other guys of his time like Frank Lucas are getting multi-million dollar Hollywood movies with Denzel Washington. At the 2013 funeral of Baltimore's Clinton Buse, the guy who appeared in The Wire, feds lined the funeral possession route with wanted posters from Matthews. The posters go unanswered and that seems to have been the last roll of the dice in the hunt for him.

He was born in 1944, so he'd be like 77 today, which if he was on the gear all the time, which people have said about him, it'd be debatable if he was alive today. Although I kind of feel like all the time Keith Richards is alive, death's just focused on him and not on anyone else. But why is Frank Matthews not better known than other major gangsters of his era?

It's probably racism, maybe? I mean, it took four decades for Lucas to get his movie, and the entire 80s were packed with stories about Italian mobsters who'd taken over the US drug scene. I think they got Lucas or Nicky Barnes. One of them had, I think it was a Newsweek cover or a Time cover. You know, maybe it was just that he didn't get enough press, which, again, if you're a gangster...

and you want to leave a legacy, you should the underworld podcast at gmail.com. Just email us. We'll make sure you get that movie and you get that article and whatever else you need. And we'll promise you an exclusive interview for one of our bonus episodes as well. It's a good offer, man.

Anyway, here's a good quote to end this show on because A, it kind of sums up the business first attitude of Matthews with which he sourced goods from Latin America and the French connection. Very American dream, rise and grind kind of stuff. And B, it comes from one of the guys who was actually trying to catch him, Roger Garay of Group 12. Quote,

If he'd had the opportunity and had gone the legitimate route, he could have bought one McDonald's franchise and that McDonald's would have become five, 10, 30 McDonald's. I have no doubt about that.

So, yeah, that's the story of Frank Matthews, the Black Caesar. As always, we're going to put a bunch of notes, reading this stuff on the Patreon. And there's always new stuff coming out there as well. Bonus episodes with some really interesting folks. But yeah, if anyone knows where Frank Matthews is, reach out to us. We're always up for hearing more about this guy because I just found this really, really fascinating to research. And yeah, I hope it's been good to listen to.

Yeah, it's a great, great story. I'm surprised it isn't more well-known, but also if you are Frank Matthews, you know, hit us up. We'll, we'll, we'll make something happen.