Flamboyant heroin kingpin who taunted authorities dies
“Nicky Barnes is not around anymore,” said the balding, limping grandfather in the baggy Lee dungarees.
“Nicky Barnes’ lifestyle and his value system is extinct,” he went on, speaking of himself in the third person in a restaurant interview with The New York Times in 2007. “I left Nicky Barnes behind.”
With that, the man asked the waitress for a doggy bag for his grilled salmon, and left.
He was the antithesis of the old Nicky Barnes, a flam- boyant Harlem folk hero who had owned as many as 200 suits, 100 pairs of custom-made shoes, 50 fulllength leather coats, a fleet of luxury cars, and multiple homes and apartments financed by the fortune he had amassed in the late 1960s and ’70s, first by saturating black neighborhoods with heroin and later by invest- ing the profits in real estate and other assets.
Moreover, he was in fact no longer Nicky Barnes even by name. Convicted in 1977, imprisoned for more than two decades, he ultimately testified against his former associates, ensur- ing their convictions, and was released into the federal witness protection program under a new identity.
The new Nicky Barnes promptly submerged him- self so thoroughly in main- stream America that barely anyone beyond his immediate family knew his new name, his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive.
But now it can be said that Nicky Barnes is definitely not around anymore, in any form. This past week, one of his daughters and a former prosecutor, both speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Barnes had died of cancer in 2012. He was 78, or possibly 79.
“My sister and I have kept his passing private and have not released it publicly,” his daughter wrote in an email. “It still remains a sensitive topic given all that occurred. Our dad was very private and we wanted to respect that.”
She also said that she and her sister may write a mem- oir about growing up as the daughters of a notorious criminal.
The U.S. Marshals Service declines to provide information on individuals in the wit- ness protection program. Barnes’ daughter had also been given a new identity under the program. Because of his new guise, his death, in an unidentified place, was never reported under the name Leroy Nicholas Barnes.
That name was once as notorious as any in New York City and beyond. He had headed a lucrative and lethal drug-dealing enter- prise that seemed impregna- ble, thanks to lost evidence, lapsed memories and miss- ing witnesses.
His record of avoiding conviction inflated his ego, to the point where in 1977 this dashing dope peddler flaunted his supposed invulnerability by posing — reck- lessly, as it turned out — in a blue denim suit and a red, white and blue tie for the cover of The New York Times Magazine.
He loomed from the page defiantly in dark glasses next to the headline “Mr. Untouchable,” followed by what amounted to a thumbin-the-eye taunt: “The Police Say He May Be Harlem’s Biggest Drug Dealer. But Can They Prove It?”
The cover so affronted President Jimmy Carter that the White House ordered Barnes, who had been indicted again only weeks before, to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The Justice Department did just that. And later in 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
While Barnes languished behind bars, though, his former cronies, his wife and his girlfriends began squander- ing the criminal enterprise that had made them millionaires.
He felt betrayed. But he extracted his revenge: He testified against them in federal trials, and scores of his wayward former associates were convicted. One was his ex-wife, Thelma Grant, who pleaded guilty to federal drug charges and served 10 years in prison.
In return for his coop- eration, the government released Barnes from prison in 1998. But concluding that he would henceforth be a marked man, the authorities offered him something more: a new life, though a hidden one, in the witness protection program.
And with that, Barnes achieved a goal that his former self would have loathed, even feared: to be forgotten.
Or mostly. In 2007, his fame was briefly rekindled in a book by Tom Folsom titled “Mr. Untouchable” and in a documentary film of the same name. That same year, he was played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the film “Amer- ican Gangster,” which, to Barnes’ irritation, focused not on him but on his leading challenger for peddling dope and bragging rights, Frank Lucas.
Lucas died on May 30 at 88 — a death that evoked the Harlem heroin wars of the 1970s and a question that had not been posed in years: Whatever happened to Nicky Barnes?
It is no longer a mystery. And now his death h as evoked another set of memories. This past week, after learning of Barnes’ death, Robert B. Fiske Jr., the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in 1977, recalled him as having overseen “the largest, the most profitable and the most venal drug ring in New York.”
Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Michigan.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.
In retrospect, living up to his legend in the maga- zine may have seemed perfectly justified to this man, even though he was fac- ing federal charges at the time that carried a life sentence. This was a man, after all, who could plunge into books about black history one moment and, the next, lead the police — who were constantly tailing him — on 100-mph wild goose chases around the city for no appar- ent reason, returning to his apartment without even having been issued a ticket for speeding.
Tongue in cheek, Barnes told Folsom for his book that he had always wondered why Carter had been so offended by the magazine cover, since he had been sporting the most understated items in his wardrobe. “It’s a wash-and-wear blue denim suit,” Barnes was quoted as saying in mock amazement.
Still, as columnist Pete Hamill told The Daily Beast in 2017, referring to the photograph: “You can’t have The Times write about you if you are a gangster and expect to get away with anything. Successful gangsters cannot be known.”
Barnes insisted on his innocence even after he was found guilty in 1977 of heading a major drug distribution enterprise in Harlem that had conspired to sell, wholesale, $1 million in heroin a month.
He also denied that he was a murderer; he had only ordered others to kill, he said. The authorities believed he was capable of both.