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 bo...
By Willoughby Mariano
His trade may have been cocaine and heroin dealing, but Elgin DeMarco Jordan was an Atlanta businessman just the same.
And when the suspected head of a major area drug-trafficking organization had money to spare, he did just what amateur investors, venture capitalists and other businessmen tend to do in Atlanta nowadays. He snapped up blighted, cut-rate real estate in the city's struggling Westside neighborhoods, looking to cash in on the intown boom.
“I got so many properties, I can’t think sometimes,” Jordan, 42, told an undercover agent, a federal court filing states.
Owners in Atlanta's blighted neighborhoods often remain hidden behind shell companies and non-existent addresses, but Jordan's criminal prosecution for drug dealing lifts the veil on how a single owner can impact a community.
Jordan and his associates bought up much of a pocket of the struggling northwest side Grove Park neighborhood where he spent most of his life, plus a half-dozen other properties scattered across the city’s poorer areas. There were 21 properties in total, with an estimated taxable value is $1.5 million, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors seized them as part of a multi-agency effort to halt drug sales in nearby English Avenue, the area nicknamed “The Bluff” that is known as a hub of the Southeast’s heroin trade. Jordan forfeited a majority of them in recent weeks when he was sentenced in Atlanta federal court to eight years in prison for drug and money laundering charges.
Prosecutors said they hope the seizures will loosen drug dealing’s grip on Westside neighborhoods.
“When a drug dealer has the resources and abilities to more deeply insinuate himself into a community through ownership of properties and businesses … the more visible he can become, and the more he may feel part of the fabric of the neighborhood,” said John Horn, Atlanta U.S. Attorney. “And the more difficult it is for law enforcement to extract that component and allow the neighborhood be a healthy and safe community again.”
But to Jordan’s defenders, the northwest Atlanta native was just was a real estate investor who went astray. Before drug addiction took hold of him, he was a credit to North Eugenia Place, the narrow, woody strip of bungalows where he lived and owned most of his property.
“But for these drugs, this was a local hero in that area of the city,” said Akil Secret, Jordan’s longtime attorney. “He was somebody who rose from very humble beginnings to being a productive businessman in that community.”
$200,000 in a hidden compartment
Jordan began drinking at 8, smoking marijuana at 12 and snorting cocaine at 18, a court filing by his attorney states. Still, he managed to graduate Benjamin E. Mays High School in 1993, where he ran track, played football, and joined the debate team. He majored in business at Atlanta Technical College, but left after one year to work in construction fixing and selling old homes.
“He majored in business, and business was his passion,” said Secret.
Federal authorities think that’s roughly when Jordan’s career in drug dealing began. Secret said his client was no kingpin, but one confidential informant said he worked as a major supplier as early as 1997, selling eight to ten kilos of cocaine at a time for as much as $24,000 each, a federal forfeiture filing states.
Jordan’s next 15 years were filled with close calls with the law, law enforcement records show.
In 2002, Jordan was one of 23 people arrested in a federal drug conspiracy prosecution, but his charges were dropped. A 2005 Fulton County case that included charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm as a convicted felon ended with pre-trial diversion.
On Feb. 2, 2010, Jordan was stopped on I-65 near Montgomery, Ala., in a Ford F-150 with a hidden, hydraulically-controlled compartment in its dashboard. State troopers seized $199,950 in cash they discovered in 13 vacuum-sealed plastic bags, court records state, but Jordan denied that the money was his and no charges were filed.
The following year, a dirt bike rider told police that Jordan intentionally struck him with a green Honda Accord, but aggravated assault charges were later dropped. A mug shot from that arrest shows him nattily dressed in a paisley shirt of brown, orange and green.
During that time, Jordan was investing the proceeds in real estate, a confidential informant told investigators, court records show. Some of the properties were acquired under “A New Way of Living,” a company prosecutors said was linked to him. During the real estate bust, he was snapping up properties for as little as $1,800 a piece.
The appeal was location, location, location, Jordan told an undercover agent who posed as a potential buyer for one site. There is “a lot of revitalization,” occurring, he said, according a court filing. His property was poised to make money.
“I have had offers for it, a lot of people wanting to buy it, but I just, that’s one piece that I just kinda holding on to,” he told the agent.
Properties boarded up
North Eugenia Place was Jordan’s territory. He lived there in a rundown condo he owned, an informant told investigators, and his grandmother lived in a brick house steps away. City records show chronic code enforcement problems at some of his properties there.
Jordan sold drugs on North Eugenia Place too, investigators said. A 2015 search of one of his properties found what appeared to be heroin, cocaine and hashish, scales and a semi-automatic handgun under a pillow in the master bedroom, court records state. In June, less than one month after charges were filed, Jordan pleaded guilty to counts of money laundering and conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.
Prosecutors returned seven of the 21 properties it seized from Jordan as part of a plea agreement, but only three of them were located on North Eugenia.
On a recent afternoon, most of the dozen North Eugenia houses and condos that investigators tied to Jordan stood empty or boarded up, but others looked well-kept. Residents approached by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said they knew of Jordan, but declined to speak about him.
A demolition team tore down a condemned apartment building with three condos tied to Jordan. Workers said it would be completely gone in a week.
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