By Jeff Burbank It was the first week of January 1973. Frank Matthews and his young girlfriend had just spent the holidays in Las Vegas and were about to board a flight to Los Angeles. In the previous several years, Matthews had made many trips to Las Vegas, carrying suitcases full of cash to be secretly laundered at casinos for a fee of 15 to 18 percent. This time, federal drug enforcement agents were waiting and placed him and the woman under arrest at McCarran International Airport. Two weeks before, U.S. prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, had issued an arrest warrant for Matthews, the top black drug kingpin in America whose heroin and cocaine trafficking gang of mostly African-American dealers extended to 21 states on the Eastern Seaboard. He was charged with trying to sell about 40 pounds of cocaine in Miami from April to September 1972, a small fraction of the drugs he’d pushed since 1968. The feds believed Matthews had millions in currency stashed away in safety deposit boxes
Richard Simmons is a legend that was born in Charleston, South Carolina. In the 1970s, he and his family moved to New York City. They settled themselves on 112 th Street in Harlem. One of their fellow tenants in the same building, 109, was a woman who originally worked in the city as a nurse. She was known on the streets as “ Queen Bee ”. * Simmons (c. 1970s) * She earned that alias through hustling. Bee also introduced Simmons to the local heroin trade because she was connected with the Lucchese family of the Mafia. With her supply and guidance, Richard was earning $60,000 per week. Their relationship inevitably dissolved, in part due to Queen Bee’s cocaine addiction. Simmons’ block of 112 th Street saw other legends come before him in addition to Queen Bee, like Horse and Jerome Harris. But now there was space for a new big shot to step up. In the midst of exploring his other options for a plug, Simmons purchased a bad batch of drugs from one supplier and got shot 5 times when