(Credit: Netflix)

The 2007 mobster movie American Gangster often gets overlooked when it comes time to rank cinema’s greatest crime epics. But director Ridley Scott and lead actor Denzel Washington barely put a foot wrong in telling the story of Frank Lucas.

Lucas was a real gangster who was still alive at the time the film was made, and its script was based on Mark Jacobson’s non-fiction article ‘The Return of Superfly’, which was published in New York magazine around the turn of the millennium. And while his story might not be as notorious as that of a figure like Al Pacone, Lucas was the man sitting at the very top of Harlem’s heroin racket during the worst period of organised crime in New York’s history. He was someone to be feared, and, as the protagonist in a crime biopic, is someone to be revered.

American Gangster starts out charting the consolidation of his position at the top of the mafia food chain, as he became pivotal in smuggling heroin wholesale from Southeast Asia to New York in the latter stages of the Vietnam War. The tragedy of traumatised Vietnam veterans feeding a heroin habit they started during their army service once they returned home to the world’s richest city was facilitated by Lucas more than anyone else. And he got rich from it, extremely rich.

So rich that his fiancee is able to get him a $50,000 chinchilla fur coat as a gift. It’s the coat he wears in the movie’s pivotal scene, when Russell Crowe’s police detective Richie Roberts first lays eyes on him. The two are both attending ‘The Fight of the Century’, a historic boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, and Lucas has front row seats. He’s even blocking the view of New York’s biggest Sicilian mobsters, who have to make do with seats behind him.

When one of them complains that the chinchilla fur hat Lucas is wearing to match his coat will block their view of the fight, he jokes, “You paid for it.” And when Ali walks to the ring, the crime boss is there to shake his hand on the way up. Yet less than five minutes later, we see him tossing his most prized material possession into the fireplace on his wedding night. As his fur coat smoulders in the flames, Frank’s new bride weeps.

So, why did he get rid of the gift?

For Lucas, his gift is symbolic of the mistake he made by showing off his wealth too overtly, drawing the attention of police specials. He’d got right to the top of the chain in terms of the drugs game, to the extent that he could command the service of Italian mobsters, schmooze with celebrities and shake the heavyweight champion’s hand. But he flew too close to the sun, and now his cover is blown.

Roberts was at the boxing match to take pictures of any criminals he could find. “Who’s that laughing with Cattano?” asks corrupt police detective Trupo, sitting nearby. “There. How’d he get so fucking close to the ring?” His comments draw Roberts’ attention to Lucas, and it soon becomes clear that he’s caught a big fish on camera.

As his car drives away from the church following his wedding, Lucas is pulled over by the police, and Trupo confronts him. “You know, a man walks around in a $50,000 chinchilla coat and never even bought me a cup of coffee,” he tells him, “there’s something wrong there.” In his own taunting manner, Trupo is letting Frank know he’s a marked man. He asks for hush money, “Ten grand, first day of each month,” to be specific, in exchange for keeping the FBI off his tail.

In a wider sense, Lucas burning his coat is a metaphorical turning point in the entire film, which signals the beginning of the end for his reign at the top of New York’s criminal underworld. When Roberts and his team finally catch him, he’s forced to take a plea bargain to avoid several full-life sentences. In the process, though, he puts many of his city’s crooked police officers behind bars, a fate which Trupo only avoids through suicide. Which didn’t exactly making amends for all the suffering he’d caused, but it meant there was a silver lining even to this darkest of clouds.