Most Powerful

• #1 Frank Lucas
  HarlemNorth CarolinaUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  Frank Lucas (1930–2018) was an American heroin trafficker who became one of the most famous figures of the New York drug trade in the late twentieth century. Operating primarily in Harlem, he cultivated an image of independence from traditional Mafia control and claimed to have built direct international supply connections. Some of the lore surrounding his career was later challenged by investigators and journalists, but there is no serious doubt that he became a major narcotics wholesaler whose enterprise depended on disciplined distribution, secrecy, corruption, and violence. His story is significant not because of cinematic myth, but because it reveals how drug markets can create temporary but enormous concentrations of cash and coercive power.
• #2 Nicky Barnes
  HarlemNew York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal EnterpriseFinancial Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthIllicit Networks Power: 62
  Nicky Barnes (1933–2012), born Leroy Nicholas Barnes, was an American heroin trafficker who became one of the most infamous drug figures in New York City during the 1970s. Centered in Harlem, his network thrived during a period when heroin devastated neighborhoods, generated large pools of cash, and exposed the limits of conventional policing. Barnes was important not only because of the scale of his operation, but because he represented a shift in urban criminal power: the rise of highly visible narcotics entrepreneurs whose authority rested on supply, street discipline, corruption, and public image rather than on the older ethnic hierarchies associated with traditional organized crime. His later transformation into a cooperating witness only deepened the symbolic weight of his story. Barnes’s career is therefore a study in both the construction and the collapse of drug-market prestige.