Frank Matthews' longtime girlfriend and their three sons lived in a Todt Hill, Staten Island home.
Frank Matthews had a knack for organizing, especially crime.
He got his start in the late 1950s stuffing poultry into gunny sacks in Tobacco Road chicken shacks. Success inspired him to drop out of seventh grade and put together his first criminal enterprise, a band of chicken-thief kids who operated on the poor side of Durham, N.C., his hometown.
Matthews got caught and spent a year in crime finishin g school the state juvenile reformatory then took his new know-how to North Philadelphia, where he hustled numbers in the shadow lottery.
He was a 21-year-old crime striver when he landed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in 1965. He operated out of a barber shop but didnt waste time on hair. His interests were wholly illegit.
Matthews would loll at the barber pole and gripe that Italian mobsters were decimating Brooklyns black neighborhoods by selling heroin and cocaine.
So he started pushing the junk himself. Using a Latino crime ally, he forged a direct link to the French Connection heroin processing operations in Marseille and was ordained high priest of the new Black Mafia during an Atlanta sit-down in 1971. He led a sophisticated operation that imported pure heroin from Venezuela in 50-pound lots, dusting white powder over Bed-Stuy and other black neighborhoods from Atlanta to Boston.
Narcs eventually caught wind and put a wiretap on an a partment rented to Matthews at 130 Clarkson Ave. in Flatbush. They were expecting a modest bust since no one in law enforcement had ever heard of him until then.
But they were astonished to learn over the wire that Matthews was doing narcotics business in 21 states. In a few short years, he had gone from an obscure numbers runner to kingpin of what federal officials called the biggest black drug ring in the nation.
During a raid at one of his strongholds, a Brooklyn drug lab nicknamed The Ponderosa, investigators found a gargantuan heroin-packaging operation. The drug was cut with Mannitol and quinine in 32-gallon garbage cans, with a canoe oar used to stir. A half-pound of residue was found lying abandoned too little to bother with.
Cops found a stock of 2.5 million glassine envelopes waiting to be filled with heroin. Informants said they had seen cash stacked eye-high in neat columns in a closet.
Matthews was not shy about his nouveau-narco wealth.
He formed two companies that went on real estate buying binges in New York and down South. He ensconced his longtime girlfriend, Barbara Hinton, and their three sons in a mansion on Buttonwood Road in Todt Hill, Staten Island, an exclusive precinct favored by majordomo Mafioso. He enjoyed $ 200,000-a-day gambling binges at Las Vegas casinos, which returned the favor by laundering his pillars of greenbacks.
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