1970: Frank Lucas's Men Beat Nicky Barnes's Runner to Death — Not One Shot Fired

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Harlem, New York, West 116th Street between Lennox Avenue and 7th Avenue.

[00:00:08]Wednesday night, October 14th, 1970.

[00:00:12]11:47 p.m.

[00:00:15]Three cars sat parked along the left curb of the block. A black Lincoln Continental with tinted windows and a cracked rear left tail light that had never been repaired.

[00:00:27]Behind it, a dark green Buick Electra, its chrome fenders dulled by months without cleaning.

[00:00:35]Behind that, a gray Chevrolet Impala with a bent antenna and a dent above the rear wheel well that someone had pressed out badly and painted over with mismatched gray that was two shades lighter than the original.

[00:00:52]All three cars had their engines off.

[00:00:56]All three cars had their windows up despite the October chill that had settled over Harlem after sunset.

[00:01:04]The men inside weren't talking. They weren't moving. They were doing what men do when they have already made a decision and are waiting only for the moment to carry it out. Across the street, parked on the right curb in the amber shadow between two street lights that were working and one that had been broken since August, sat two more cars.

[00:01:32]a midnight blue Cadillac Deville with white leather interior visible even through the tinted glass. And behind it, a black Ford LTD with a dent in the front passenger door and a Puerto Rican flag air freshener visible from the outside hanging from the rear view mirror. The men in those two cars were also not talking, also not moving, also waiting.

[00:02:02]Between the two rows of vehicles, approximately 40 ft of wet asphalt that reflected the orange glow of the functioning street lights in long, wavering streaks. It had rained earlier in the evening, a hard October rain that had cleared by 10:00 and left the street smelling of wet concrete and something older underneath.

[00:02:28]the particular smell of a neighborhood that had been slowly abandoned by the people who were supposed to maintain it and left to the people who had no choice but to live in it. The block was otherwise empty, no pedestrians, no one lingering in doorways, no taxi cabs cutting through.

[00:02:51]Word had moved through the immediate area through the particular street level communication network that functioned in Harlem without telephones or written notices that West 116th Street between Lennox and 7th was not a place to be on this particular Wednesday night.

[00:03:14]And so no one was there except the men in the five cars and the 40 ft of wet asphalt between them and the 48 hours of accumulated tension that had brought them all to this block at this hour. The men on the left side of the street, six of them across three cars, were loyal to one name. The men on the right side, eight of them across two cars, were loyal to another.

[00:03:47]In the history of Harlem's criminal underworld, no single standoff carried more weight than what was balanced on that block at 11:47 p.m.

[00:03:59]on October 14th, 1970.

[00:04:04]Because the two names those men were prepared to kill and die for were not ordinary names.

[00:04:10]They were the two most powerful names in Harlem at that moment in time. Names that controlled more money, more territory, more men, and more fear than any names Harlem had produced since Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson had walked those same streets a decade earlier. On the left side of 116th Street in the back seat of the Lincoln Continental, sat Leroy Nicholas Barnes, 36 years old, 5' 10 in tall, 175 lb, wearing a charcoal gray wool suit that had been tailored on West 125th Street by a man named Edward Sutton, who charged $300 $ per suit and who made most of his income from Harlem's criminal elite because they were the only men in the neighborhood who could afford to pay $300 for a suit in 1970.

[00:05:16]Barnes had a narrow face, high cheekbones, and the kind of absolute stillness in his expression that men develop when they have spent years making decisions that other men could not unmake.

[00:05:32]He was 36 years old and he had been building towards something for 15 years.

[00:05:39]And he understood, sitting in the back seat of that Lincoln, looking across 40 ft of wet asphalt that what happened in the next hour would either accelerate what he was building or destroy it entirely.

[00:05:57]On the right side of 116th Street, in the front passenger seat of the Cadillac Deville, sat Frank Lucas, 38 years old, 5'9 in tall, 160 lb, wearing dark slacks, a black turtleneck, and a brown leather jacket that he'd purchased at a shop in Midtown Manhattan three weeks earlier.

[00:06:25]Lucas had a broad face and narrow eyes that missed very little, and he carried himself with the particular confidence of a man who had done something in public that everyone said couldn't be done, and had never faced consequences for it.

[00:06:44]He had been in Harlem since 1946, had been in the drug trade since 1961, and had been for the past four years steadily building an operation that was becoming something none of his competitors had anticipated.

[00:07:04]Neither man had planned to be on West 116th Street on this Wednesday night.

[00:07:11]Neither man had wanted this confrontation, but a 22-year-old runner named Roosevelt Carter had been beaten to death on a corner three blocks north two days earlier, and that death had made the confrontation unavoidable in the way that certain things become unavoidable once they begin. to understand what brought Nikki Barnes and Frank Lucas to opposite sides of 116th Street on the night of October 14th, 1970.

[00:07:46]You need to understand what Harlem looked like in the month before that night.

[00:07:52]You need to understand who these two men were separately, what they had each built, and why the 48 square blocks between 110th Street and 155th Street had become too valuable and too contested to accommodate both of them without something eventually breaking.

[00:08:16]Harlem, New York.

[00:08:20]summer through early fall 1970.

[00:08:25]By the summer of 1970, Harlem's underground narcotics economy was generating an estimated 35 to40 million annually.

[00:08:36]A figure drawn from DEA internal assessments that were presented to Congress in 1971 as part of arguments for increased narcotics enforcement funding. And that reflected the combined revenue of dozens of dealers, distributors, street level sellers, and the Italian and Jewish wholesale suppliers who provided product to most of them.

[00:09:04]The money flowed upward from addicts who spent their welfare checks and their stolen goods and their last dollars on heroin that was cutting purer through Harlem streets than it had been at any point in the previous decade. And it accumulated at the top of various organizational hierarchies in amounts that allowed the men who controlled those hierarchies to live in ways that were visibly conspicuously different from everyone else in the neighborhood. Frank Lucas had been ascending toward the top of one of those hierarchies since 1966 when he had walked across 116th Street in broad daylight and shot a 270lb enforcer named Tango Nicholls four times in the head in front of approximately 50 witnesses, establishing in a single public act the reputation that he had been methodically building toward for nearly a decade.

[00:10:13]In the four years since that afternoon, Lucas had done something that most Harlem dealers of his era had not managed to do. He had eliminated the middlemen.

[00:10:26]Beginning in 1968, Lucas had established a direct supply connection to heroin producers in Southeast Asia. initially through a contact introduced to him by a cousin who had served in Vietnam and later through his own relationships developed over two trips to Bangkok that Lucas made in 1968 and 1969 traveling under his own name through legitimate channels presenting himself as a clothing importer with business interests in Thailand. And the heroin he imported came back to New York through methods that law enforcement would not fully understand until years later. And it arrived at purities that were significantly higher than what Italian suppliers were providing to Harlem's dealers through the established French connection networks.

[00:11:28]Lucas's product sold under the brand name Blue Magic was testing between 40 and 60% pure at street level compared to the 10 to 15% purity that characterized most competing product. His dealers diluted it further before selling, which meant that buyers who purchased Blue Magic from a Lucas Street seller were still receiving heroin that was meaningfully better than what other dealers were moving. By October 1970, Frank Lucas was generating, by his own later estimates, between 50 and $80,000 per week in net revenue. He controlled distribution in a concentrated territory in central Harlem, operated through a network of approximately 30 direct employees, including street sellers, runners, enforcers, and the family members he trusted with the most sensitive parts of his operation.

[00:12:38]He purchased from no one. He answered to no one. and he was in the fall of 1970 beginning to expand northward into blocks that had not previously been part of his territory.

[00:12:54]Nikki Barnes had spent the same four years building something structurally different but financially comparable.

[00:13:03]Barnes had come of age in Harlem's criminal underworld under the mentorship of Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson, who had died in July 1968 while eating breakfast at Wells Restaurant on 7th Avenue, collapsing from a heart attack at age 62, while a plate of ham and eggs went cold in front of him. Johnson's death had left a power vacuum in Harlem that was less a single position to be filled than a general condition of reorganization.

[00:13:39]With half a dozen men simultaneously calculating what the new landscape would look like and how to position themselves advantageously within it.

[00:13:50]Barnes had been calculating faster than most.

[00:13:55]Within six months of Johnson's death, Barnes had begun quietly approaching the dealers and distributors in Johnson's former network with a proposition that was different from what they were hearing from other wouldbe successors.

[00:14:12]Barnes was not offering to be the new Bumpy Johnson, was not positioning himself as a replacement authority figure to whom they should pay tribute and deference.

[00:14:25]Barnes was proposing something he described in later interviews as a horizontal structure rather than a vertical one.

[00:14:35]Dealers working in adjacent territories would share purchase costs for wholesale product, reducing what each individual paid per kilo. They would respect territorial boundaries that would be agreed upon collectively, eliminating the constant friction and occasional violence that came from disputed geography.

[00:14:59]They would share intelligence about law enforcement activity, about rival dealers, about supply chain disruptions in ways that would allow each member to make better decisions than any of them could make operating in isolation. By October 1970, Barnes had four men working within this informal arrangement with him, men who would later become founding members of what eventually organized itself into the council. Their combined territory stretched from 110th Street in the south to approximately 145th Street in the north and from the East River West to the boundary with what Lucas controlled in central Harlem.

[00:15:52]their combined wholesale heroin purchases, which Barnes coordinated through his own relationship with an Italian supplier named Carmine Russo, who operated out of a social club on East 116th Street in East Harlem, were running approximately 20 kilograms per month, generating gross street revenue that Barnes later estimated at somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000.

[00:16:21]monthly across all five operations combined.

[00:16:27]two empires, one neighborhood, and through most of 1969 and into 1970, an equilibrium that held not because of any formal agreement, but because both operations were expanding in directions that did not directly threaten each other, and because both men were, in their separate ways, intelligent enough to recognize that conflict was expensive.

[00:16:56]that equilibrium ended at approximately 3:20 in the afternoon on October 12th, 1970 on the corner of West 118th Street and 7th Avenue. Roosevelt Carter was 22 years old, 5' 7 in tall, and had been working as a runner for Barnes's operation for approximately eight months. His job was to carry packaged product from a storage location on West 122nd Street to distribution points throughout Barnes's territory.

[00:17:36]A job that required him to move quickly, to avoid drawing attention, and to stay within the boundaries of the territory he was supposed to be working. Those boundaries were understood by every employee in Barnes's operation.

[00:17:55]The east side of 7th Avenue between 115th Street and 125th Street was the informal western boundary of Barnes's central distribution area, a line that existed in practice rather than on any document that had been observed without incident for the better part of 2 years.

[00:18:18]On the afternoon of October 12th, for reasons that would never be definitively established, Roosevelt Carter crossed that line. He was walking west on 118th Street when he crossed 7th Avenue and continued two more blocks into territory that was understood by everyone who operated in that area to belong to Frank Lucas.

[00:18:47]Whether Carter was given incorrect instructions, whether he misunderstood his route, whether he made a deliberate decision to take a shortcut through a territory he shouldn't have entered, was something that could not be determined after the fact.

[00:19:06]What could be determined was that two men who worked for Lucas spotted Carter on that corner recognized him as a Barnes runner by the package he was carrying and by his known association with Barnes's operation and stopped him.

[00:19:24]According to witnesses who were present on the corner and who spoke to Barnes's people in the hours following the incident, the confrontation began as an argument about territory and escalated within minutes to physical violence.

[00:19:44]Carter, who was 22 years old and who had no particular history of fighting, apparently tried to explain himself, tried to walk away, tried to deescalate a situation that was moving faster than he could manage.

[00:20:02]The two Lucas men, neither of whom was identified by name in any subsequent account, were not interested in deescalation.

[00:20:13]They beat Carter on the sidewalk in front of several witnesses, took the package he was carrying, and left him on the pavement where he remained until someone called for an ambulance.

[00:20:26]Roosevelt Carter was admitted to Harlem Hospital at 4:47 p.m. on October 12th, 1970 with a fractured skull, two broken ribs, and what the admitting physician described as severe cranial trauma consistent with repeated blows to the head with a blunt object. He was 22 years old and he had never been in serious trouble in his life. Had been working for Barnes's operation because it paid better than any legitimate job available to a young black man in Harlem in 1970 who had not finished high school and who had no particular skills beyond a willingness to work hard and follow instructions carefully. Roosevelt Carter died at 6:23 a.m. on October 13th, 1970 from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the blunt force trauma to the back of his skull. Nikki Barnes received word of Carter's death at 8:49 a.m. on October 13th through one of his associates who had been monitoring the situation at the hospital since the previous afternoon.

[00:21:52]Barnes was at his apartment on West 147th Street. a three-bedroom unit he had furnished expensively enough to signal success without being conspicuous enough to attract the kind of attention that would create problems. He was drinking coffee and reading the Amsterdam news when the call came. He put the coffee down. He folded the newspaper.

[00:22:22]He sat for 22 minutes without speaking, which was not unusual for Barnes, who processed information internally before responding in ways that other men, less patient men, would find difficult to understand.

[00:22:39]Then he made three calls and began to move.

[00:22:43]Frank Lucas received his version of the events through a different channel approximately 2 hours after Barnes had received his.

[00:22:52]Lucas's account of the incident differed from Barnes's in several ways that would matter enormously in the 48 hours that followed.

[00:23:03]In Lucas's account, his men had encountered an unauthorized runner in his territory carrying product.

[00:23:12]The beating had not been specifically ordered. The death had not been intended or anticipated.

[00:23:20]These were true facts as far as they went, but they existed within a context that made them insufficient as a response to what had happened. Because in the economy of Harlem's criminal underworld in 1970, the distinction between an authorized killing and an unintended death was a distinction that the dead man's employer was not required to find meaningful.

[00:23:50]By 900 p.m. on October the 13th, less than 15 hours after Roosevelt Carter died, Barnes had assembled six men and positioned them in three cars on West 116th Street. By 1000 p.m., word had reached Frank Lucas that Barnes had men on the street, and Lucas had assembled eight men of his own, positioned them in two cars across from Barnes's vehicles, and driven to West 116th Street himself to take the passenger seat of the Cadillac Deville.

[00:24:29]Both men understood, sitting across 40 ft of wet asphalt from each other in the dark, what the next step in the sequence looked like. And both men understood, with the particular clarity that comes from having built something over years that you are not willing to lose in a single night, what it would cost.

[00:24:54]Inside the Lincoln Continental, Nikki Barnes was doing mathematics that men in his position are always doing when they find themselves in situations like the one he was in. If shooting started tonight, some of his men would die, perhaps more than some.

[00:25:15]Frank Lucas was not a man who employed incompetent people, and the eight men across the street had been selected for exactly the same qualities that Barnes had selected his six men for.

[00:25:29]Beyond the immediate casualties, there would be consequences.

[00:25:35]The NYPD's tactical patrol force, which had been looking for justification to escalate its presence in Harlem since the civil unrest of the late 1960s, would have an open street war to justify operations that would damage both Barnes's and Lucas's organizations simultaneously.

[00:25:58]Carmine Russo, the Italian supplier from whom Barnes purchased wholesale product, would interpret an open war between two of his largest customers as instability that made extending credit more risky and raising prices more reasonable.

[00:26:16]and Frank Lucas, whose operation complemented Barnes's in geographic terms that Barnes had been thinking about carefully in recent weeks, would either be weakened in ways that would create a vacuum filled by competitors, who might be harder to manage than Lucas, or would be strengthened by the war into something even more consolidated and difficult to deal with in the future.

[00:26:46]None of those outcomes served what Barnes was building.

[00:26:51]Barnes reached into the center console of the Lincoln and picked up the radio telephone handset that his driver kept charged and ready.

[00:27:01]It was a large, heavy device, roughly the size of a brick, with a short antenna and a coiled cord connecting the handset to a base unit under the passenger seat. Radio telephones were not common in Harlem in 1970.

[00:27:18]Barnes was aware of perhaps six men in the neighborhood who had them, and he had purchased his specifically because he understood that there would be moments when being able to communicate without getting out of a car would determine outcomes.

[00:27:36]He dialed a number from memory.

[00:27:39]The number belonged to a man named Clarence Webb who drove for Frank Lucas and who carried a separate radio telephone that Lucas used for exactly this kind of situation.

[00:27:53]The phone rang three times. Then Frank Lucas answered.

[00:27:58]Barnes identified himself without preamble. He said he could see Lucas's cars from where he was parked and that he assumed Lucas could see his. Lucas confirmed that he could. Barnes said, "I know what happened to my runner. I know the beating wasn't ordered from the top." Lucas said he was in my territory.

[00:28:22]Barnes said he was 22 years old and he is dead.

[00:28:27]Lucas said nothing. Barnes said, "You and I both know what the next move looks like. You've done the calculation.

[00:28:37]I've done the calculation."

[00:28:39]He paused for a moment, the kind of pause that communicated thought rather than hesitation.

[00:28:45]Then he said, "If we move tonight, we both lose men." The police use it to come into Harlem the way they've been trying to come in for 3 years.

[00:28:57]The Italians raise our prices because instability costs them money, too. And we spend the next year replacing people instead of building what we're each building. None of that is what either of us wants.

[00:29:13]Lucas was quiet when he spoke. His voice was level and without particular warmth.

[00:29:20]He said, "What do you want?" Barnes said, "Three things. The value of the product my runner was carrying when your men took it. $14,000.

[00:29:34]Acknowledgment between us, not in writing, not publicly, of the boundary lines that we both already know exist, and that both of our people should have been respecting, and an understanding that we are both worth more to this neighborhood, and to our own operations.

[00:29:54]continuing separately than we would be if one of us spent the next year trying to destroy the other. Lucas let the silence run for several seconds. Then he said, "You're parked across the street from me with six men asking me for money." Barnes said, "I'm parked across the street from you with six men offering you the option that keeps both of us in business." in 1975.

[00:30:24]Another silence, longer than the first.

[00:30:27]Then Lucas said, "Send your men home."

[00:30:31]Barnes said, "You send yours first."

[00:30:34]A pause of perhaps 10 seconds. Then through the Lincoln's passenger window, Barnes watched the lights come on inside the Ford LTD parked behind the Cadillac.

[00:30:46]The engine turned over, a sound Barnes could hear faintly, even with his window up. The car pulled away from the curb slowly without hurrying. Moved down the block to the intersection and turned.

[00:31:02]The Cadillac's engine started next, and the Deville followed the LTD to the intersection, where it turned in the opposite direction.

[00:31:12]Barnes lowered his window 2 in, nodded once at the driver of the Buick behind him. That car's engine started. Barnes's driver started the Lincoln. One by one, the three cars on Barnes's side of 116th Street pulled away from the curb and moved in separate directions.

[00:31:35]Within four minutes of Lucas sending his cars home, Barnes had done the same.

[00:31:41]Barnes was the last to leave.

[00:31:44]He sat alone in the Lincoln for an additional 3 minutes after his other cars had gone, looking at the empty block at the wet ass fault that reflected the street lights without the shadow of five cars breaking the reflection anymore. Then he brought the phone back to his ear. Lucas was still on the line. Barnes said the 14,000.

[00:32:09]Lucas said before Friday at your usual location. Barnes said I'll expect it. A pause. Then Lucas said. Barnes. We are not friends. Barnes said, "I'm aware of that." Lucas said, "But you're the only man I've talked to in this city who comes to a situation like this with logic instead of noise. I respect that, even if I don't like the situation." Barnes said, "The feeling is mutual on the logic." Lucas made a sound that might have been a short laugh. Then he said, "Friday, the 14,000, and the lines stay where they are." Barnes said, "Agreed."

[00:32:58]The call ended. Barnes sat in the dark car in the empty street for another moment, not thinking about anything in particular, simply letting the tension of the last 48 hours dissipate in the way that tension dissipates when a decision has been made and cannot be unmade.

[00:33:19]Then he told his driver to take him home. The $14,000 arrived on Friday, October 16th, 1970, exactly as Lucas had said it would. It came in a paper bag left at a Lennox Avenue location that Barnes's network used for receiving packages, delivered by a man Barnes did not recognize without note or ceremony.

[00:33:49]Barnes did not send acknowledgement. He did not need to.

[00:33:54]In the days and weeks following the phone call, both men returned to what they had been doing before Roosevelt Carter walked across the wrong intersection on the wrong afternoon.

[00:34:09]Barnes continued organizing the structure that would become the council, continued expanding his collective purchasing arrangement with his four associates, continued negotiating with Carmine Russo for better prices that his increased volume had made reasonable to request.

[00:34:30]Lucas continued running Blue Magic through his distribution network, continued importing product through the channels he had established in Southeast Asia, continued building the kind of operation that federal agents would later describe in court documents as the most sophisticated individual narcotics distribution network in the history of New York City. The territorial boundary that Barnes had referenced in the phone call held for the remainder of 1970 and through all of 1971 and 1972.

[00:35:10]There were no further incidents between Barnes's people and Lucas's people. No runners were beaten. No product was taken. The informal line that both men had understood existed was observed with a consistency that suggested both organizations had been clearly instructed to respect it, which was in fact what had happened because both Barnes and Lucas had communicated to their respective people in the days following October 14th that the boundary was not to be tested.

[00:35:50]What happened on West 10016th Street on the night of October 14th, 1970 was not a peace treaty, and neither man would have accepted that characterization.

[00:36:05]A peace treaty would have implied that a war had been imminent enough to require formal terms, and both men were careful to ensure that no one who worked for them understood the encounter as having been that serious, because seriousness of that kind communicated vulnerability, and neither Barnes nor Lucas could afford to communicate vulnerability to the men whose confidence in their leadership was a structural element of how both operations functioned.

[00:36:42]What Barnes described to his associates in the days following the encounter was a business decision.

[00:36:50]Two rational men, he said, who understood that what they were each building was more valuable than any single confrontation.

[00:37:00]What Lucas described to his own people in considerably fewer words was that certain territorial understandings had been clarified and would be respected going forward in the years after 1970.

[00:37:17]As both operations grew larger and more formally organized and more visible to law enforcement, the memory of West 116th Street, faded into the background of everything else that was happening in Harlem's criminal landscape.

[00:37:35]Barnes's council, formally organized in 1972, grew to seven members, controlled at its peak, and estimated 80% of Harlem's heroin trade.

[00:37:49]Lucas's operation expanded its importation to volumes that would eventually supply not just Harlem, but portions of New Jersey, Connecticut, and other northeastern markets.

[00:38:02]Both organizations became wealthy enough and prominent enough that they could no longer avoid the law enforcement attention that had been building since the early 1970s.

[00:38:15]Frank Lucas was arrested by federal agents in January 1975 at his home in Tene, New Jersey. An arrest that came after years of investigation by a joint DEA and FBI task force that had been monitoring his operation through wire taps, surveillance, and the cooperation of several former associates.

[00:38:40]At the time of his arrest, Lucas was wearing a chinchilla coat that had cost $100,000, which became one of the most reproduced images from his case in later years.

[00:38:54]because the coat communicated something about how completely Lucas had believed that his operation had made him untouchable.

[00:39:04]He was charged with narcotics trafficking and tax evasion, eventually cooperated with federal prosecutors, and served portions of a sentence that was reduced in exchange for the information he provided about the broader narcotics economy he had operated within. Nikki Barnes was arrested by federal agents in January 1978 at his apartment on Central Park West, which he had been renting under an assumed name for several months in an unsuccessful attempt to lower his profile during a period of intensified surveillance.

[00:39:45]He was charged with continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to distribute heroin, and multiple related offenses.

[00:39:55]convicted in August 1978 following a 9-week trial in the Southern District of New York and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole by Judge Henry Bramwell, who described the sentence as necessary to ensure that Barnes would never again be in a position to damage the community he had spent a decade poisoning. Barnes served a substantial portion of that sentence before cooperating with federal prosecutors in the early 1980s, providing testimony that led to the conviction of every remaining member of the council and eventually receiving a reduction in his sentence that resulted in his release into witness protection where he lived under an assumed identity until his death from cancer in 2012 at the age of 78.

[00:40:58]Both men built empires that shaped Harlem through the 1970s in ways that went beyond the criminal economy.

[00:41:07]Because the money those empires generated circulated through the neighborhood in patterns that affected legitimate businesses, community organizations, political relationships, and the everyday life of people who had never bought or sold a gram of heroin in their lives. And both men were eventually brought down by the same force, which was the combined federal law enforcement apparatus that had been building the capacity to prosecute major narcotics organizations throughout the 1970s and that had by the late years of that decade become effective enough to reach even the most insulated and sophisticated criminal operations.

[00:42:01]But on the night of October 14th, 1970, none of that was yet determined.

[00:42:08]On that night, both men were 36 and 38 years old. Both were in the middle of building something that had not yet reached its full scale. And both were sitting in cars on opposite sides of a rainwet Harlem street with enough men and enough arms to destroy each other and enough intelligence to understand why doing so would be a mistake.

[00:42:38]One of them picked up a telephone. The other one answered it. They talked for 11 minutes, and Harlem did not burn that night, though it had been closer to burning than anyone except the two men in those five cars ever knew. Roosevelt Carter was buried at Woodlon Cemetery in the Bronx on October 17th, 1970, 3 days after the standoff on 116th Street.

[00:43:10]Approximately 40 people attended his funeral, including his mother, two sisters, and the associates from Barnes's operation who had worked alongside him. Nikki Barnes attended, which was noted by two NYPD detectives who were conducting surveillance on Barnes at the time and who documented his presence in their field reports.

[00:43:35]Barnes stood at the graveside without speaking during the service and left before the grave was filled. He never spoke publicly about Roosevelt Carter.

[00:43:48]He never spoke publicly about the phone call on October 14th, 1970, or about what had been decided that night, or about how close two of the most powerful men in Harlem had come to destroying each other and taking large portions of the neighborhood with them.

[00:44:09]What remained from that night was the empty street and the wet asphalt, and the understanding between two men that some calculations lead to only one answer, and that the man who does the math first and fastest is the man who controls what happens next. That was Nikki Barnes. That was Frank Lucas. That was West 116th Street on a Wednesday night in October 1970.

[00:44:41]That was the phone call that nobody knew about and that nobody talked about. And that kept Harlem from burning at a moment when Harlem had enough other things burning it already.

[00:44:55]One call, 11 minutes. Two men who were not friends and who never became friends, but who were in the end both smart enough to know the difference between a war worth fighting and a war worth avoiding.

[00:45:13]That made all the difference.