Top 20 Movies Based on True Stories
3. American Gangster
The crime world is not glorified, it is recognized in a film about the horrors and struggles of life as a heroin kingpin in Manhattan.
With a passport and a plane ticket to Vietnam, Frank Lucas decides that he is sick of paying off members of the mob for drug deals, so he takes off to visit his cousin in the drug laden country.
Frank figures out an ingenious way to smuggle heroin into the United States. He works out a deal with his cousin and the supplier in Vietnam, and heroin gets smuggled in the coffins of dead US soldiers returning home from the war.
Life for Frank becomes one full of riches, but this success doesn’t last very long. With the end of the Vietnam war, his smuggling opportunities have vanished.
Detective Richie Roberts (played by Russell Crowe) is having a rough time himself. Getting a divorce and never seeing his kid, Roberts spends his time working and trying to figure out how blue magic (the expensive heroin) is getting sold so cheaply in the US.
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He tracks sources to Lucas, but he is kicked out of NYC by detectives who tell him it’s not his jurisdiction.
In the end, Lucas turns in crooked cops and off-shore bank accounts in a deal he makes with Roberts for a more lenient sentence.
