Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Another American Gangster
Flamboyant seventies drug dealer Nicky Barnes is a likely topic for a documentary, but not a very likable one. Recent biopic American Gangster on Frank Lucas was maybe enough of on this topic saturating the big time Harlem players of this era.
Mr. Untouchable, coming on the coattails of the biopic of American is straight forward in its approach and topic. Old players reminisce, the soundtrack pulls Mr. Big Stuff, Superfly and other likely choices and the cops and prosecutors add their story as well. Barnes went to the big house as a young junkie, kicked his habit and connected with Italian mobsters on the inside who schooled him and set him up with product when he came out with resolve to make a whole lot of money in the drug game. And he did--"quality" product in six. The film has inter titles with quotations from Machiaveli as his rise and fall is described. Barnes' ex-wife Thelma's soundbytes are the most forthright and seemingly candid in what the life was like. The house that Barnes bought her in Jersey looks uncannily like the one the Sopranos lived in.
The pivot point for Barnes came when he was the subject of a NY Times Sunday magazine cover story as Mr. Untouchable (due to no convictions never sticking to him) looking like a swaggering CEO. That was too much for a late seventies federal government who sought prosecution. Barnes went down in a trial where the case and evidence was not tied to drug evidence as it was the fact he had been engaged in a "continued criminal enterprise."
During his life sentence, Barnes later went balistic when he lost control of his business partners and women on the outside. So he spilled testifying in a black hood leading to nearly eighty convictions The viewer is not sure if he is bragging or not when he Barnes reminisces in the shadows of his unknown witness protection location about how a portion of the Louisburg Federal Pen is known as the Nicky Barnes Wing because of all the folks who reside there due to his cooperation.
The most intriguing component on this DVD is a speaker phone interview between Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas, now in a wheelchair, who was the subject of American Gangster. The mundane, at times fawning, discussion between these two now somewhat elder men talking contemporary Presidential politics and comparing their notes of "back in the day" is another strange example on what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. These men were directly or indirectly responsible for scores of deaths of "business associates." And provided product to the streets that helped thousands become addicted to heroin. Yet the tone of their telephone reunion seemed more like folks who had played against each other on basketball teams during one or another's championship season.
There isn't room left, at least in my consciousness, for another treatment of 70s mack Harlem drug kingpins, at least until I return to another round of Slaughter-Superfly-Shaft-Mack- Cleopatra Jones junk food from the day back. I'll take my street product cut with classic blaxploitation, thank you very much.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:51 AM
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