(music) voiceover: 1973 the detroit free press' front page proclaims dope kingpin get away with it. they had names like jesse james, pretty rick, the black greek and mr. klean. 2 of the 12 men listed as detroit's biggest heroin dealers were next door neighbors and in reality, they were the 2 largest heroin dealers in detroit dwarfing the other men on the list.
eddie "the fat man" jackson, charismatic son of a pool hall owner and his chief lieutenant, courtney "the field marshal" brown, a former city bus driver had built an empire on a par with men like nicky barnes and frank lucas of new york. but theirs was a very different and in many ways, more sophisticated operation than barnes' and lucas'. based on family ties and finesse,
more than murder and mayhem. they truly were the motown mafia and the saga of eddie jackson, courtney brown and their families stretch from the 1960 and into the present day. starting in 1969, eddie jackson had built a tight inner circle of lieutenants like charles rudolph, russell clayton, ronald "5-0" garrett, black butch and his right-hand man, courtney brown.
all of them had grown up together in detroit's old black bottom and paradise valley neighborhoods forming an unbreakable foundation for the soon to come heroin empire. black butch: well we all grew up in the same neighborhood. it's called the paradise valley. charles: i came to detroit from alabama in the late 50's. dr. carl: when you looked at black bottom you looked at musicians
but you also looked at more. you had a spirit of great entertainment. voiceover: the saloons and nightclubs that once made paradise valley's hastings street famous around the country are long gone now. replaced by urban renewal and shining new stadiums. but when eddie jackson and his crew were growing up, it was the heart of a vibrant community. dr. carl: a lot of black folks were there
and they needed the very essentials that most people just need. they needed that housing. they need to be able to maintain those houses. they needed employment. they need social relationships. all of that took place in black bottom. charles: during this time you could leave your doors open. cornell: being a young boy growing up in the black bottom
when we talk about neighborhoods and the good old days that was a neighborhood. when they talk about leaving your door open and the ladies down the street or the men of street will whoop you for doing something wrong. dr. carl: you will go out if you were caucasian. you will party in other parts of detroit but after midnight if you really wanted to have a party you really wanted to eat good
you came down to black bottom and the senselessness of crime didn't exist. they weren't going to rob you they enjoyed you. charles: i met eddie jackson, he lived around the corner. my sister used to rent from his father. voiceover: eddie jackson and courtney brown first met in the late 40's when they were kids and formed a fast bond. courtney: eddie had to be at least 5 or 6
and i had to be at least 10. charles: their father used to didn't let them go anywhere unless courtney took them. so he looked up to courtney. eric: eddie when i was about 6, 7, years old i used to rock sit him because he was sort of heavy and i was a little guy. he couldn't catch me but i loved him because he was always a cheerful guy.
voiceover: eddie jackson's father fled the south in the 1920's possibly after some trouble with the law and became a prominent businessman in paradise valley. dr. carl: the audience needs to understand the significance of black entrepreneurship that was not considered simply a doctor or a dentist. they were businessmen. courtney: eddie's father was a very successful businessman. he's one of the few black, he couldn't sell liquor
but he had beer and wine license back then because it was during the war. charles: you came to detroit from hot springs, arkansas. he was a different guy then but he changed his name, he had killed someone. dr. carl: you had black men who were independent like mr. jackson and others will come into the community. they ran legitimate businesses but sometimes they also ran like the numbers business.
courtney: bootleg and continental with push button windows which was unheard of in 1947, 1948. charles: made his fortune at the beginning of his fortune selling homemade liquor, put that into real estate. voiceover: while paradise valley was relatively safe in the 1950's there was a thriving but well controlled underground economy in effect. dr. carl: now you also had your red light district.
there was a great hypocrisy also. courtney: that was drug addict's den, there was alcoholism and all the gambling and all the recipe, but as kids we was ... there's no know. black butch: money everywhere. nothing but hoes and pimps into town. dr. carl: because you had strong prostitution. so i'm speaking of white businessmen,
white [fappy] workers and others will come over to the house of ill repute. black bottom was a spiritual, a social enactment more simply than just economic. charles: even though we was poor and it was hard times, i always think pleasantly you know, back from that time. dr. carl: it all balanced out very well
and then suddenly it got blown up. voiceover: by the early 60's, paradise valley and black bottom were fast becoming memories as urban renewal cleared the area. eddie and his brother elijah, took over their father's pool hall when the elder jackson died. charles rudolph joined the military and courtney brown got married, started a family
and became just another working class guy in the ultimate blue collarship. courtney: i got married 1961. my daughter was born later on that year christmas. my son was born 3 years 3 days later on 28th of december 1964. i started driving a bus, a dsr. voiceover: little did they know, detroit's fortunes were about to take a turn for the worse
but eddie jackson's fortunes were about to take off. charles: this city had started to slide but you couldn't see it yet. it was just barely beginning to go down. dr. carl: i don't think you can ignore the social levies that broke in '67. they were coming all along but once that riot broke then the social norms and the parameters changed immensely.
voiceover: the detroit riot of 1967 was by far the worse to hit the country during that time and was the final nail in the coffin of paradise valley. voiceover: as governor of the state of michigan, i do hereby officially request the immediate deployment of federal troops into michigan to assist [date] local authorities in reestablishing law and order in the city of detroit. voiceover: the city had gone from the land of opportunity
to a nightmare of unemployment and [blight] then the heroin moved in. charles: the heroin is so strong over in the orion. you can't snort it, you can shoot ... they would smoke it. guys came back with a habit. that the local drug couldn't support it. voiceover: when eddie jackson's father died, he left his sons eddie and elijah a substantial inheritance
but by 1969, the money was long gone thanks for the brother's pension for the good life. eddie went to work at an auto plant but was injured. courtney: this one company won't pay me so you got a pretty good understanding of procedure once you read these papers to the [c]. eddie enlisted his childhood buddy courtney to help him receive a disability settlement and use the proceeds to make his 1st foray
into the heroin game. courtney: he gave me $800 then he says then he turns to me and say, "courtney, i'm going into drug business." i say, "is you crazy?" i said, "what do you know about drugs, eddie?" for him you can make a lot of money. jap: i'm the original. as far as selling drugs for eddie jackson,
i'm the first guy that ever did it. me and [sideo] king k. at the time, eddie was just hustling around the pool and hustling crap games, and he went and bought little stuff and put it in the building across from the pool room me and [sideo] went to selling it. courtney: i don't see eddie again for another couple months. i come back down there and he tells me
that the guys had ran off with his money and he broke again. well, i fill his income tax out. so i fill his income tax out. he went back in business again. jap: the guys ran scams on us, sissy sam and buddy. they used to have ... they used to sell the weight down in the valley.
eddie think and he's under the impression, he's buying a quarter pure because he gave him 250 for it. it's not pure, it's mix jag. me and [sideo] we're struggling selling this, you know? voiceover: eddie kept at it. parlaying his income tax return into another small load. this time he started making money. charles: i was visiting eddie once
and he had a guy over his house. it was a heroin dealer. he had an eldorado, a guy named young blood. he was snorting some heroin and i was looking at him hard, and eddie hunched me and said, "don't look at the man like you're crazy." this guy had a grocery store, drove an eldorado, he was real sharp.
he was dealing drugs because i was over there helping them cap up dollar caps. they used to call them penny caps. voiceover: while the italian mafia still dominated the heroin trade in detroit by the late 60's black dealers were striking out on their own. chief among them was henry marzette. dr. carl: now in my research we go back to the 50's and found out that heroin was there.
you start talking about henry marzette. scott: marzette was really the first urban godfather here in detroit. dr. carl: who was a police officer and then became a big v man in drugs but he wasn't the only one. scott: he was kicked off the police force in i believe 1956 or '57 for shaking down numbers operators in detroit
as well as drug dealers and purveyors. huckabuck: i knew him. i ain't like milo but i knew him. i knew all of them. see marzette then was into murder and kidnapping and all that. scott: as a police officer, everything he learned about the drug game and now he was gonna apply it to himself
becoming the godfather. dr. carl: i was given money as a young man on washington boulevard by henry marzette. i had an uncle who was a major player and i was bedazzled by marzette. he was wearing house shoes. he had a black fleetwood 1965, he had a black fleetwood cadillac that i thought was the coolest car in the world
and he gave me money for school and that's what he said. the money wasn't for me to go and get clever in those italian [knit]. he gave me that money and he said, "i expect for you to go and use this for school "and nothing else." voiceover: eddie jackson's meteoric rise in the dope game came when he met a shadowy figure in detroit's underworld,
john classen. courtney: marzette had the name but actually classen was the guy who we really had to wait. scott: the italian mafia around here in detroit had really been the primary wholesalers dating back to prohibition. you had men like giovanni "papa john" pritziola and raffaele "jimmy q." or "jimmy "the goon" quazarano.
mr. quazarano as well as mr. pritziola had very, very solid ties over in sicily as well as ties into the french connection. courtney: classen he had met a connect out an old park some italians. voiceover: classen was being fed top quality heroin through sam "the mustache" norber. a remnant of detroit's infamous jewish purple gang. courtney: he was getting some of the best dope in the city.
no question about it. scott: this territory was always recognized nationally as not just a hub for detroit italians but a hub for national italians to get their drugs. jap: we're scuffing and scuffing with it, you know? we did this for like 4, 5 months. voiceover: in '69, eddie jackson finally caught a break. a well-known junkie in paradise valley by the name of box claimed he could hook eddie up with someone big.
jap: box, he was just another average guy, an addict who happen to know classen. courtney: first name box, give me a blow i'm sick. eddie said, "man, you ain't dumb, what you say? "don't worry about it man, big man. "don't worry about it. "who is this guy you're talking about? "john classen. "man and you junkie and you don't ...
"i know him. "he just bought a house in palmer park cost $40,000." i said, "man, ain't no nigger got $40,000." so showing him, he did know classen. he took eddie out there. eddie came back with some jag. i'm looking at the pack i figure sugar flour. i said, "what is that?" he said, "that's dope."
i said, "man, a person pay you for this shit?" he said, "yeah." he started capping up the jag. i'm fascinated because i had never seen heroin or cocaine in my life. i'm 30 years old, i've never seen it. i say, "what do you do?" he's capping up these penny caps and he'd sell them for a dollar a piece.
voiceover: with eddie now being supplied by john classen, his operation took off. and soon eddie could be seen riding the streets in a brand new red convertible cadillac. black butch: i was working at the gas station on [grayson] and madison. eddie used to come through it in cadillac and stuff this thing but you know, every black guy in this town wanted to drive a cadillac.
i used to tell eddie to let me hustle with him. he said, "man, you know i can't hustle with you "because you understand, "you know, your mama would kill me." courtney: eddie come flying around the corner in a 1969 red cadillac convertible brand new. jap: sand [boteo] red. i know where to get it because we had went out to the car dealership
out on grand river and he had picked that car out when we were first starting and i was like, "man, if we gonna make that kind of money "to buy a new cadillac, you know?" because i'm not thinking that beat but he is. and when i came home he had that cadillac. courtney: get in the car. i said, "i'm not getting in the car, it's stolen "and lodge it let him broke [lapse]."
"no, eddie just bought it at coffee cadillac for $6,900." i say $6,900? "yeah, he paid cash for it." jap: once eddie hooked with classen, he started getting a product that he could work with, you know? voiceover: seeing his buddy's business was now booming, courtney brown decided to supplement his day job by moonlighting with eddie.
cornell: my mother and father had separated and my father went to stay at this house on mark twain street and that morning, i woke up in the morning and i hear these men talking in the kitchen and i peeped in the kitchen and it was a powder, a white substance on the table. i had no idea what it was. the powder had to be like 4 feet high. my father he ushered me back in the room.
voiceover: eddie soon assigned him the task of finding an apartment building he could purchase to use as a headquarters for the operation. courtney founded on hancock street and john r in midtown detroit. charles: they was getting a little bigger. they opened a place on hancock. jap: he kept saving his money and then he bought that building up there on hancock
and then he started selling quarters. charles: they wanted somebody that could come and pick up the money. and courtney was already working with him. courtney: he said, "berming, you 5-0, "you're all gonna stay upstairs then. "when he asked for the dope you all drop it down here, "he bring you all the money." voiceover: as detroit was changing
and crime was skyrocketing in the city, the hancock building quickly became one of the city's most thriving heroin spots. charles: on my shift, i would open the door. customer give me the money. i will go up the steps, put the money through a chute in the door. they had made a pipe in the ceiling. they would drop the dope down right in front of the door.
customer would pick it up. i took their money but i never hand them any product then i would open the door and let them out. cornell: with hancock's rebuilding, my father was the caretaker there. and i used to go and visit my father and at this time, courtney and eddie used to be in and out this building and so they gave me the job when i get out of school to come over there and vacuum the floor,
you know, tidy up the building, i'll stay at the building. courtney: pretty catch downstairs and we sell what we call weed then was like a gram or 2 grams or 8 [boulder]. charles: penny caps which is dollar caps at the backdoor and they were selling half quarters and eighths out the front. dr. carl: the drug dealer's the first time that we begin to see money that went well beyond pimps.
you started seeing a different type of young black men. you started seeing mercedes benzes, you started seeing a rolls-royce occasionally. cornell: my father used to tell me, "do not go in the basement." but me being a young guy and you know, being mischievous, i go in the basement anyway and i see the same thing again.
amp bags full of money only this time, another section of the basement had amp bags and these little brown packages in it which what we've known as eighth. each bag was filled all the way to the top. courtney: first time we made a $1,000. we thought we just held them doing a hell of a thing, that was '69. the first time we ever made a $1,000 in 1 day.
cornell: i just see people come there and get packages. a whole bag full of eighth. i've never seen nobody come get a single nothing. voiceover: violence and other problems were avoided by strategy and focus. eddie jackson ran things differently than most dealers. customer service was his number 1 commandment. charles: we didn't have security problems at the joint because only 1 person,
you couldn't come in 3 people and only 1 person buying. that doesn't leave room for a robbery on that part. courtney: on the average we was doing $10,000 a day. on a weekend we do 15,000. charles: you needed 2, 3, 4, 5 people that'd be going through it different times picking up the money. courtney: we had guys working 3 shift and [unintelligible] they working the fourth. we pay vacation.
they work 8 hours a day. they got paid for overtime and we had a bunch of law workers. cornell: my father would call me and say, "the fat man wants you to go to store for him." i used to have to catch some bus from lafayette and chene all the way to hancock and john r just to go to store for him for orange pop
and he would give me $100. voiceover: as the hancock took off, an arrangement was made with the 13th police precinct to provide protection from raids in exchange for a share of the drug proceeds. charles: after the business really got big, yeah, police used to come once a month to get paid. voiceover: this paid off when eddie and courtney got tipped by the detroit police of an impending raid
by federal narcotics officials. courtney: they approach eddie and told him, "look here man. "we got word that they're gonna raid "because they hear there's a big dope house on hancock." voiceover: the local cops told the dealers to leave a small amount of heroin packs in the spot but diluted to less than normal strength, so when the feds came,
they'd think the hancock building was just another small time operation. courtney: showed up, they raided that night. showed up they found the few packs that we left around. the workers seem they they're just junkies, let them go. dr. carl: but he was a thinker and i think that's what you saw. a thinker minus the violence temporarily anyway. when i say that, he knew how to move his kilos.
he knew about connections. for the first time, we were seeing a young black man with an option of you can do this not be on wall street but you can do this and be a thinker, and that was very different. cornell: he was always ... he was the business man. he was always ...
people would come and talk to him and it was like he was giving directions. it was like he was the facilitator. eric: i've never seen courtney do a whole lot of talking and stuff. he was always smooth. cornell: i never seen him get loud with nobody. i never seen him with a confrontation in a way. he was always cool.
a well [armor] scene all the time. charles: people see eddie as a great businessman which he was and he got this from his father. but i've always said myself, eddie was the expert on understanding human nature and a lot of people might not remember well enough to give him credit for that. courtney: that's one of the stands that eddie would always apply and look at you,
"you do not mistreat the customer period." if they ain't got no money, enough money, so what? you take the $8 and ride with him and call in whatever he needs. his philosophy was this: "as long as i get 95% of the money, "i could care less about the 5%." charles: this another reason probably that kept a lot of things from happening to him
is how he didn't get played on his life, because a lot of drug dealers did. courtney: no harassment, no talking about him, no degrading him and not trade sex for favors and sex for drugs. if a woman come in there and they have no money, you can't tell her to have all sex with you and you will give her the credit. that was a no-no.
if you cut that you were fired. cornell: i've never been in a situation where a guy might owe someone some money and he can't pay him and anybody will. you got your daughter in the backroom, let me go back there with her and you know, we'll kill this deal. we never did nothing like that. voiceover: though the money was beginning
to really pour in for eddie and his crew, courtney brown decided he'd had enough and went back to working full time as a bus driver. courtney: i went on back to work and bought a house on mark twain. for a whole year i didn't see eddie then. voiceover: by 1970, eddie was one of the biggest dealers in the city and courtney was growing tired of the street life.
courtney: later in the year of 1970, halloween, i don't know, it came to a crossroad in my life where i said, will i go back to work for the state or go back and hustle with eddie. i decided to go to see eddie. he said, "you can help rudolph, 5-0 and russell and farah lee mix up. i was behind in my house and all that and he said, "don't worry about it.
i'll speak to you when i get back." black butch: every street between here and port called american car park, it was a joint and everybody was getting money. everybody was getting money that time. this was since ... like i say at '69 all the way to early 70's. no guy selling drugs can make as much money who's making [unintelligible] or selling mix jag.
that's where your money was made. that was quinine, dorman and lactose. we would take a key and make 9 keys. voiceover: just as courtney returned to the crew, john classen, eddie's main supplier disappeared. under indictment and facing a lengthy jail sentence, he fled detroit and became one of dea's number 1 fugitives. classen was never seen again. eddie continued to briefly do business with classen's wife
but he desperately needed a new source for heroin if he wanted to keep getting rich. eddie had a plan. courtney: they had just granted ali his license back to fight. and the buzz was everybody's going new york. when eddie goes to the fight, he go dressed all up and drive his fleetwood bank to the fight. voiceover: eddie jackson and his entourage
made such an impression at madison square garden that ebony magazine published a photo of them alongside the now infamous shot of frank lucas in his chinchilla hat. in new york, eddie, so the story goes, bumped into some italians. most likely members of the bronx-based gambino crew, that distributed most of the french connection heroin entering the country.
the italians observed that eddie appeared to be in the same business as them and that maybe they could work together. courtney: he comes back and so we meet. he said, "look here man. "i met some italians and they say "they let the stuff go for 16,000 a key." he asked me, he say, "what do you think?" i said, "eddie, you know more than i know."
he said, "i'll tell you what, "we're gonna send dolph up there with 50,000 get 3 keys." voiceover: eddie didn't know it at the time but he had just made one of the great connections of the golden age of heroin. charles: back at the hotel room, i put the heroin in the clothes. when i get on the plane, i put it in the overhead compartment and it was just that easy.
voiceover: realizing the gold mine they had on their hands, eddie and courtney began flooding the streets of detroit with their new product. black butch: that was my first job. transporting from new york to detroit. i would take 2 or 3,000,000 at a time. courtney: every couple weeks or month we make a trip up to new york and cap and come on back.
black butch: i never had no problems because like i said, we were protected from the time i pick it up to the time i get across george washington bridge. voiceover: as the organization grew, eddie stuck to his old circle of childhood friends from the bottom. jap: when i came home from the joint, that's who he had running. we had 5-0, rudolph, courtney was there and russell was there, yeah.
that's who he had around. black butch: everybody had a bag from different people, you understand they was getting from eddie. at that time, eddie was supplying if not everybody direct or indirect. courtney: eddie had an uncanny ability to inspire people. charles: he had a very good grasp on human nature. you know, what people might do, what people wanna do.
courtney: he would say, "look here man." he is a couple ounces then after that he would say, "you ain't no half ounce person. "you're half a kilo man here. you know, pay me when you get [fan]." and eddie is dialing him up from the the ground floor up. voiceover: eddie jackson's legend was growing in the streets just as fast as his bank roll.
eddie jr.: well, first of all, i told you he was a people person and a lot of people that was his audiences, customers and their family and kids, even people that wasn't in his class. you didn't have to be his customer to be in his audience. you understand, all you had to do was catch him on a right day
and be there and you was on. you was gonna see something that you probably ain't gonna witness again in your lifetime. a lot of stories other people told to me because he was sort of bashful in telling me this. when he came home, we go out hanging together and other people kept telling me stories that he sit there kind of bashful. that's my ...
did you really do that pop? "ah, you know how that is. "you understand, niggers push your button on me "and at that time i had to be superman. "you understand, when they push that button, "i turn into superman, you understand. "and that's how it was." richard: we've turned the corner on drug addiction in the united states.
drug addiction in the united states is under control. voiceover: richard nixon might have thought he had the country's drug problem under control but he certainly didn't have eddie jackson under control. jap: it was eddie jackson, eddie jackson's crew and then it was just everybody else that probably got stuff through eddie jackson. courtney: everybody in the city knew eddie jackson and everybody knew he was on top of the pyramid.
i was his right-hand man. charles: yeah, he was real charismatic. wore diamonds, flashy stuff. wear his hair in this super fly hairstyle and so forth. jap: ain't nobody compare with eddie jackson since eddie jackson left. he could be emulated but never duplicated. eric: he used to come to the joints that i used to be at and buy everybody everything they want
and give us some money and do the same thing. open up the crack table and have us to gamble with him. he beat us all because he keep on betting. sooner or later he gonna throw us some more and he'd turn around and give us all back the money that he gave and leave out. eddie jr.: if he go out, he rolling.
okay, i'm gonna take 250 people. i've got a meeting to blow. we all gonna go down and blow this meeting together. so, we all go into the fight. we all going wherever we're going. nobody gonna be short changed. you ain't got to worry about being hungry if you got enough money to gamble. eric: eddie was an entertainer.
he entertained us. when he walk, he talks shit all the time. jap: he had a bag full of $1 bills in the car it was all the $1 bills that came from the joints and from the streets, he throw that away. you know, he'd ride down in wheelers street and just throw that out the window. charles: he was throwing money out of the car down in the brewster projects.
eric: eddie used to ride down john r and throwing money out the window and everything. black butch: we'd be riding down the street and i don't have nothing to do and we have a sack of money. eddie say, "man, we just take this money, "just throw it out the window, right now with it." charles: he just go crazy grabbing the money and so forth. black butch: a stampede, stampede and running.
turning cars would try to get the money. (chuckles) jap: all the $1 bills he ain't keep them. he kept $100 in his pocket. damn, you got all the $100 bills in america. charles: i remember eddie giving a lot of people money and say "we need you all." and turn them on to the business. eric: and then sometimes the personal ones he would stop and ask you, "are you all right?"
you would say, "yeah, well, i'm sort of all right." he would go in his pocket and no telling what he might give. no telling. that was a life that they don't have nothing, you know? charles: this is another reason i believe that he threw the money out of the car. because he appreciated his customers. he also knew without his customers
even though they was using heroin, there would be no him dr. carl: what these men represent was a new way of entrepreneurship and also what he did with that money. they're the ones who start showing up at the fights. that were ali and frazier. they were the ones that were traveling for the first time. we never saw that before.
you talked about travel, you get in your cadillac and go to chicago. you get in your cadillac go to alabama. but suddenly these young men that had drug money and it spread very quickly. the girl i want to get with eddie or whoever because they're going down to the bahamas. be there all day even someone talking about going overseas.
they were really just a whole new frame of thinking that the black community had not seen before. black butch:we've been to amsterdam, holland. paris, france. [be true] i was the only one really traveling you understand going around just any country, you know? if you guys would you understand, but like i said most of everybody else are getting homesick and me and him we keep on going.
it was beautiful. whenever you see a black guy with eddie, the way he was dressed and the way kind of [journeys] that we had they thought we was entertainers or something you understand, but we wasn't. south america from rio de janeiro all the way up to the panama canal. voiceover: by 1971, eddie and courtney's crew were so legendary that when courtney bumped in
to prolific black author donald goines, a detroit native and heroin addict. goines told him that the streets of the city knew that they were the best that ever did it in the heroin game. goines even based many events in his novels on the real exploits of eddie jackson and his crew. courtney: his [own company] knows going i've been seen at all. from all the guys who saw come from marzette,
nick the greek to john classen, the whole crew. as far as we're concern, you all number 1. voiceover: with their strong plug to the french connection heroin pipeline , the jackson organization was operating at the absolute highest levels of the drug world. dr. carl: it's a very complex subject i would say but it was a time that was i think revolutionary. these new men came on the scene
and they were doing cutthroat business, but they were businessmen. no different than al capone and company doing prohibition. voiceover: along with men like nicky barnes, frank matthews and frank lucas' supplier, ike atkinson, eddie jackson was on the short list of most powerful black gangsters in the country. courtney: there's only it was 2 or 3 people
that i'd tell you the black were dealing with. eddie was one, frank matthews and one [gold fingers]. voiceover: september 1971, the jackson organization suffers its first setback. eddie's girlfriend farah lee is spotted at the airport traveling with 2 men and a large sum of cash to new york. courtney: when they get to new york,
the team dea was tipped off by the clerk at the airport. a black woman with 2 black guys had large sums of money going to new york. she calls my house and tell me, tell eddie she got the package. i tell eddie to tell her don't go back to the airport, get away from the airport. anyway, she gets to the airport they stopped her. she had 2 kilos of heroin.
she refused to cooperate period. she wouldn't tell them nothing. but one of the guys, reynolds who was with her, tipped them, told the dea that she was working for a guy named eddie jackson, she was his girlfriend, and that's where the dope was going to. voiceover: with lee incarcerated and eddie's name now known to federal drug agents,
the field marshal, courtney brown was dispatched to new york to deal with the problem. courtney: when eddie got ready to post the bond for her, they said no they're gonna do harm to the girl if she got out to tell mr. jackson to post another $50,000 if he wanted the girl out. so, i flew back to detroit. picked up $50,000, took it back to the bond in company. the girl got out.
voiceover: after being hooked up with f. lee bailey's legal partner, h. ross black, farah lee was finally granted bond. but eddie jackson and his crew were on the fed's radar in a major way. courtney: they gave her a 7-year. she done 3 years or something like that. voiceover: with all the heroin they had coming in, eddie decided to get out of the retail business
and become strictly wholesale. he called a meeting at courtney brown's house. courtney: he calls a meeting charles rudolph, ronald garrett and myself and eddie. charles: eddie figured he had went as far as he could in the business that way. courtney: meeting in my kitchen. eddie announced that he's getting out of that part of the business.
you all gonna have in. you're all gonna split it up among yourself and beyond bolts. he says only person got a choice in this is courtney. "he can stay with me "or he can be is own boss "and i can understand that." he says, "plus you all been good and loyal workers. "i'm gonna give each one of you all $10,000 a piece.
"you're all free to do whatever you want to do. "the business is yours. "as of monday, i'm through with it." charles: myself, 5-0 we set our own operation up. 5-0 had his crew and i had my crew. jap: him and 5-0 feuded a lot. he started the price war thing and ran the prices stuff down to half a quarter for $20 and they was just ...
charles: instantly my business took off. 5-0's took off anywhere from $40 to $50,000 a day. jap: rudolph was my man. he would drop off the big bags of quarters to me. big shopping bags full of quarters and pick up the shopping bags full of money. black butch: i started off with 5-0 ronald garrett and then like i said, he was the fool. he was the fool out of the whole group.
you understand i'm saying? i'm not gonna pull this out and all that. like i said when i started off with him you understand i stayed in jail fighting the police with him. i mean he used to knock them out 2 and 3 and 4 at a time. 5-0,he was a renegade. (laughs) i used to pick up his money. anywhere and no never no less than 50,000, you understand, a day.
voiceover: by this time, eddie himself was grossing roughly $2,000,000 a month. over $10,000,000 in today's dollars. triple that figure by the time rudolph, 5-0 and others sold it in the street. courtney: eddie by the time would after to tell you what i mean, eddie has shot past everybody in the city put together. when we do we can dump 10 kilos at one time
and we're gonna see the guys for 2 weeks. i go collect the money. 2 weeks they get another package. voiceover: insulated from the streets, eddie and courtney spent their time with family and have nabbing with every black celebrity that passed through detroit at the height of the motown era. eric: eddie comes on to heatwave bar
it was all right off of vernon in the express way. he's sitting there with every gang people out there, waiting on him and they close the bar down so he can eat chicken in the basket. (chuckles) that's all he would want chicken in the basket. and then goddammit, he have to sneak out the backdoor and then goddamn rolls or one limo pull up in the back and pick him up you know, because eddie looked up one
so they would see if they could get a few boxes of it. basically, he did give everybody something. he said that he comes to see about you, he ask somebody butch or one of them to come find you and give you what he said. dr. carl: i'm not there to glorify but it was a time of wine, women and song. the entertainers wanted to take pictures with the likes of those men like eddie jackson.
you'd see the ojays and the beautiful like felice [hayman]. they were the ones that will go to the little private parties after a concert and those men were utterly good. voiceover: redd foxx crossed paths with eddie and courtney at a show in detroit and they showed him all the best hospitality. courtney: he say,"where are you all guys from?" we say, "detroit."
and he said, "you know, i like the white girl." white girl? me and eddie look [unintelligible]. there's no white girls around here. we knew he was talking about cocaine. "i'm having a new tv show." "yeah, what's it?" "name's sanford and son." so, we got his cocaine.
he had his own suite up in the [ponsel] training. voiceover: it was once said that 80% of motown music at that time was done under the influence of eddie jackson's drugs. black butch: anytime any entertainers came to the city, we were supplying them with cocaine because we was giving it to them. richard [prah], the deo, the ojays. charles: [luigi], the dramatics, eddie kendricks.
black butch: you name them, we served them and they got it all free because me and eddie used to buy 2 and 3 keys of cocaine just for our personal. eddie was more of a celebrity himself than many of the motown acts. and he floated through streets like a movie star. dr. carl: there were these names of guys who also hung out
with the very stylish and important men who were part of berry gordy's motown. you're looking at that [halen doge or halen doge] those are young men writing songs making money. you had this whole image of who that had changed. courtney: but back then it wasn't about no territory. it was about having a good time who was the sharpest,
who had the biggest diamond ring. voiceover: while the jackson organization handled their business like a fortune 500 company, most of detroit's other dealers seem more concern with murder than making money. charles: it was coming up in the paper then. people was getting crossed out their life you know and large sums of money missing. voiceover: by '72, detroit's murder rate led the country
and detroit had become known all around the world as the murder city. voiceover: the 750 murders last year was a record for detroit, murder capital of the country. detroit's murder rate is twice that of new york and chicago. it is 4 times that of some cities. scott: and for the next 2 to 3 years you had an all out drug war in detroit. voiceover: drug pushers, procurers, killers
are considered heroes of sorts. huckabuck: [unintelligible] murder or shooting and all that. that was the law for me. that's what me and eddie wouldn't agree at. the guys i was running with that was the norm for them but eddie wouldn't ... he would never tolerate that and- scott: a lot of people that i've spoken to
have referred to him as the gentleman gangster. you know, the guy that was street savvy, that knew how to make a living on the street, in the underworld, knew how to ... you know, the ultimate politician. meet the right people, make the right connections and make everyone happy and do it all without having to really brandish a gun.
courtney: somehow we avoided all that. we knew who the characters was but like i said, they wouldn't bother us and we didn't bother them. scott: he fancied himself a businessman that happen to sell drugs as opposed to a psychopathic drug dealer killer that happen to also kind of dab on business. voiceover: while courtney and eddie were able to
steer clear of much of the killing, they were also prepared and ready to deal with dangers that lurked in the murder city. charles: somebody had mentioned to somebody else that they was gonna rob him because he used to wear diamonds and stuff. i remember they were shooting at the people down the alley. jap: i remember this one guy. he had robbed eddie a couple times over in chicago
where farah lee used to stay. he'd call eddie in the hallway and he'd rob him once, took the jewelry and stuff and he'd call him again and he rob eddie at times. look man, i'm gonna hit you a couple of [licks]. you know, i know you're a hustler just like i'm a hustler but cut those [own] now. dude didn't pay heed so you know, he came up on the missing end.
huckabuck: he was one of the main figures that they stick up man, all that one dude again. courtney: everybody knew in the city, also called bad guy, good guys. 5-0, charles rudolph, courtney and eddie ain't nothing to play with. if it comes down to a gun play, they're gonna be scared to do what they got to do. dr. carl: they were players
and they were also part of urban legend. there would be a lot of younger guys looking at them. they would watch eddie jackson. they wanna see what he was wearing. if he wore a certain style even if they couldn't afford it, they ... it's kind of like the nike commercials with michael jordan, be like mike. they wanted to be like that gangster.
he was the man and it wasn't a lot of puffing up. i never even saw anything remotely close to violence because those guys were too smart. they didn't do anything violent. courtney: went to the house of [men] to alleged conduct some vendor with this guy norman burton and him and i was in the kitchen talking. a friend of mine's who was with me named joe weaver,
he overheard a conversation, he didn't get all the conversation but it was enough to alert him to come in the kitchen and call me aside and say, "courtney, this guy come in robbing us." i said, "give me the pistol." i came back in the kitchen and i'm near [vasquez] i put it to his head and i said, "i should blow your goddamn brains out right now."
he pleaded to me, "jay, john, sean. "get courtney, man i ain't done nothing. "i ain't said nothing." i said, "that's only the way you ain't dead now." voiceover: december 1971, courtney and eddie received a huge load of heroin from new york. courtney: december the 14th, the italians called me and said, "tell your man eddie, everything is straight." eddie and i have a meeting
to plot how we're gonna do this. we agreed that we weren't gonna go back to this address on hubbell, 19315 hubbell voiceover: unknown to them, in the 3 months since farah lee's arrest at the airport with 2 keys of pure heroin, they had been under constant surveillance and wiretap monitoring. courtney: got 12 kilos.
we gonna cut it 10 times at the minimum. so it had to be 120 kilos. voiceover: just as the cutting process of the pure heroin began, federal agents burst in the stash on the 19000 block of hubbell in northwest detroit. courtney: it was the last day of the wiretaps. eddie and george black gets on the phone and tells 4 or 5 people that the dope is there. police, police and then all of hell broke loose.
eddie and i runs upstairs, closed it upstairs. we see the dope not put in the stash like it's supposed to have been. the guy who's supposed to be watching reggie, went down watching television and went to watch in the door. voiceover: 22 kilos of heroin were discovered which stood for 40 years as the largest heroin seizure in michigan history. courtney: eddie threw the dope up in the air.
it was so strong they had to get gas masks. they arrested us all the 5 of us. eddie paid everybody bond, we bond out. when they raided eddie's house, my house they don't find no drugs. but with eddie's house, found a lot of paperwork from real estate he owned. voiceover: free on bail, eddie and courtney laid low for several weeks
but in january '72, a massive 32-person indictment came down on the crew. charles: i remember i was at home, i got a call one morning and i answered the phone and then they hung up. and the next thing the door went crashing in. voiceover: after everyone was picked up by the feds, eddie hired famed civil rights attorney and malcolm x's confidant milton henry
to lead the criminal defense team and bailed out all 32 co-defendants with his own money. charles: that was it. it was a 16-count indictment. manufacturing and distribution of heroin and cocaine. voiceover: the indictments did little to slowdown the jackson organization. scott: a side note to the jackson story that i find interesting
is that most of jackson's biggest making months or years were at the time that he was dealing with a lot of legal wranglings. he was under several indictments under the same time that he was making himself the biggest wholesale drug dealer in all detroit and possibly all of the mid west. that's a very fascinating aspect of it. courtney: the italians called.
they're always checking on us. we informed them what happened. they said, "don't worry about it. "send your men back up here." voiceover: with the heroin still flowing, eddie and courtney got right back to work. courtney: and they came back with 2 kilos. out of the 2 kilos we made 30 kilos out of it. but everybody then got busted
got scared to deal with us now because due to the bust. for about 1 to 2 weeks, i mean we couldn't sell nothing. then about 2 days later eddie come to my house. blowing the horn bamming, bamming here. i say what? gave me the bag of money. i said, "what's this?"
"$60,000, this guy named jz is flipping this stuff." from that on things picked up. voiceover: despite their legal troubles, 1972 and '73 became the biggest money making years for the crew. eddie jackson decided to buy a home which he tore down and rebuilt in one of detroit's most exclusive suburbs. the mostly jewish city of southfield.
charles: when eddie moved to southfield he said, "i want these people to know i got some help "and i want you all to come out here everyday." voiceover: eddie then made courtney his official partner in the business. courtney: "why don't you move out here with your man?" i said, "move where?" he say southfield. i say, "i can't afford to live in the southfield.
"i work for you. "oh bummer, fuck that shit. "all right, here what i tell you what, "from now on, you ain't on salary no more. "you get percentage of whatever comes in. "so every time something come in "you get x amount of dollars. "now can you afford it?" i said yeah.
he said, "all right then." courtney jr.: i remember vividly when my parents told me and my sister that we were moving to southfield and that we were gonna moving next to eddie and i knew eddie from coming by when we lived off out a drive on mark twain you went out to northland gardens and it's got this olympic size swimming pool.
voiceover: while eddie focused on the streets, courtney focused on his family life. courtney: paid cash for the interior decorating cost $50,000 for the interior decorator. paid $65,000 cash for the house. bought 3 new cars, jewelry and stuff. courtney jr.: you knew once i saw the new neighborhood we were gonna be moving into that this was a lot nicer
than where most people lived. cornell: first time i walked in their house i'm talking about it was some ... it was like it was magical. yellow carpet, powder blue furniture and a black baby grand piano. i didn't see stuff like that on tv and there's a stairwell leading upstairs to the bedroom. charles: smokey robinson down the street,
pete moore, [dart neta], one of the [halen doge] in harlem. courtney jr.: at this time there may have been 6 black kids in the whole public school system. most all their parents were professionals, pharmacists, doctors or lawyers. there was a few of the motown people who stayed around. there's smokey robinson and the temptations and spinner. cornell: me and my brother, we became celebrities because people knew that we were family.
we're like 16, 15, 16 and 17. we used to drive out to southfield and show these people, our cousins live in that house there. courtney: they never saw me with no drugs. there's no call to my house and telling "tell courtney joe blow's on the corner "or can we come back and pick up a package?" it didn't happen, it wasn't gonna happen.
they didn't see nothing and all they see me was with a lot of money. courtney jr.: it seemed like there was always bags of money coming and going in the house. eddie jr.: the stack almost to the ceiling just a room full of money stacked to the ceiling. courtney jr.: even as a kid you're able to put together the fact that things i want i can get. eddie jr.: just being spoiled to death.
getting anything that your mind could even think you wanted and more. courtney jr.: the doorbell rings, i get on the intercom and i ask who is it and the guy says joe weaver. i know joe weaver. i know he's a good friend of my father and i know he's working with my dad and everything. he goes on to explain to me
that he needs to tell my father that he's with muhammad ali. and i look out the window and i see somebody's with joe weaver and i'm like, "okay, let me go tell father "that muhammad ali's at the door." i tried to tell my father who was asleep basically. i tried to explain to him that joe weaver is saying
that he's got muhammad ali at the door and that we got to let him in. my father's having no patience. "tell joe weaver to see me in the morning. "i don't got time for this shit." i go back and tell joe that my father says he's not getting out of bed. and then the next morning, joe weaver comes back with a bunch of pictures
of him and muhammad ali. black butch: what really started the problem with us was me and eddie started getting half cocaine. huckabuck: just about the 74 fleetwood that blew him until we went and got 4 ounces cocaine. black butch: i had drove all the way to texas. we ran out of cocaine. he said, "well, let's turn around and go back." and another 300 miles, huckabuck,
he was with me at the time and he was really mad at me and eddie because he thought me and eddie was 2 biggest fools in the world. (chuckles) huckabuck: we get to riding and they're getting high. we had about maybe 100, $150,000 in the backseat with me. [unintelligible] missouri and state too was pulling over. well, we couldn't hide the money
because we didn't ... the money wasn't in a suitcase or no bags. we just had it spreaded on the backseat. he look and see the money so he get on the radio talking about we got 3 bank robbers. so the next morning milton henry came and got us and we got out. voiceover: the problems in missouri were small time
compared to what happened in pennsylvania. he was pulled over driving courtney brown's wife's cadillac in the trunk, state police found 11 pounds of heroin and 3 kilos of cocaine. milton henry got eddie out of that jam too. the pennsylvania supreme court dismissed the case after certain donations were delivered to philadelphia by courtney brown. courtney: i went in to that foolishness.
it was business to me and family came first. i could separate the one from the other. courtney jr.: he kept it so separate. he's my little league baseball coach. he's my little league basketball coach. a lot of the kids from the neighborhood came by and played at our house. if you asked most of the kids i grew up with
their memories of my father would be him out shooting the hoops with us. cornell: and he had taught basketball. come on, i ain't too old, i'll whoop you. i don't care how you are. we started playing basketball, he used to bet me. he used to bet me that i couldn't whoop him. i never whooped him in basketball. voiceover: but any illusions anyone may have had
about their new suburban lifestyle was shattered in march of '73, when the front page of the detroit newspaper listed eddie and courtney as 2 of the cities kingpins. courtney jr.: third grade on my way to school like every morning i walk out and i pick up the newspaper and i bring it back in the house and the front page of it is
a picture of eddie's house and of our house. and the caption reads, "kingpin eddie jackson lives in life of luxury and the house to the left is his chief associate, courtney brown," and i read it and i throw the paper back into the house like always and then me and eddie walked to get on the school bus and it hits me as i'm getting on the bus that everybody else just read the same paper and-
jap: the investigation that the feds had when they indicted all those guys, i was running the house on benson and i was selling like anywhere from like $25,000 worth of quarters a day. my name never came back in that indictment so the indictment had to be kind of ephemeral, you know? a little short and compact.
you know what i'm saying? they didn't know the whole story. it was a whole lot of people that didn't get indicted man that should have gotten indicted but didn't. voiceover: when courtney took his daughter to enroll in an elite private school, they knew just who he was. courtney: so we went to country day.
we get to country day, joe [jewel] with us and the guy opened up a folder. and i look in the folder that got headlines drug kingpin lives in southfield. let me tell you like this, i got enough money to send them anywhere in the world to school and i would not allow my daughter to be harassed or victimized by what some odd men did. i mean i did because that time
i hadn't been convicted of anything. courtney jr.: one christmas, my mother and father took us to toys "r" us and you know, most kids have a shopping list or a santa claus wishlist but we didn't have a list. they just told us to pick out what we wanted. they didn't put a limit on how many toys to get or what toys to get.
and me and my sister just went isle, isle after isle and then after we got our cart loaded of stuff we just and that was christmas. cornell: i had a little younger brother and sister. we used to come over their house on the weekends and when they used to come back home sunday night it's like they've been in macy's. used to come home with bikes, bags of clothes and i'm like i wish i was younger
so i can get some of these stuff too. courtney jr.: like any good father, my father would pass out candy at halloween but he would keep a pistol at the bottom of the halloween bag. voiceover: the jackson trial finally came to a hit and nearly 30 of the 32 defendants were convicted on almost all counts. but incredible milton henry's legal maneuverings
kept everyone free on appeal bond. and they kept right on going in the streets. in 1975, eddie and black butch were arrested in las vegas for violating the terms of their bond by leaving the state of michigan. courtney: well, i turn myself in april the 1st 1977. voiceover: eddie jackson got 30 years. courtney brown got 21. courtney: i was immediately transferred to
atlanta penitentiary which was so called hard core. i mean you have from baby snatchers to stealing a check to top mafia families in the world. charles: i kept going on and they came on me and i got a revoke bail. so me and eddie wound up at the same federal prison which was 11-worth. 11-worth was ... i used to watch that on untouchables
walter winchell narrating. i never thought i'd grew up to go some place like that. 40-foot wall. when they me put in, i said my life is over because you can't see out. voiceover: eddie and courtney's legal maneuverings continued from prison and eddie was finally released in 1984 with courtney not far behind.
the streets had changed since the early 70s. detroit was a more violent place and a new breed of teenage drug dealers like the infamous young boys incorporated ruled the streets. cornell: as the atmosphere got younger it got wilder because i was part of that scene. it's like everybody lost their mind. it just wasn't no honor no more. courtney: i mean it was central for fame then.
no one had really no connections. be connected like eddie had. these guys had low connection and they were local and there was no direction, nobody really, no leadership. it just ... charles: that's the problem with drugs now. you got people still selling drugs
but they ain't like the horse trade as we was back in the old days. voiceover: after only 18 months on the street, eddie jackson was arrested in a massive new indictment and sent back to prison for heroin distribution. courtney brown managed to maintain a lower profile but he was still the field marshal. his son courtney jr. was now old enough to learn more about the family business.
courtney jr.: the time my father got out of prison following the case with him eddie was in '84 which was at the exact time that i was starting college at wmu university. courtney: they got a good education and go to the right schools. got the right connections. they can make just as much money one way or they could the other way.
if they become educated legitimately and if he decide whatever he gonna do it wasn't gonna be on part saying, come on join the club. voiceover: running errands for his father in the late 1980's, courtney jr. got a unique perspective on the way the world really works. courtney jr.: father once sent me to see some guys in new york, some banking guys.
they were like on 6th avenue right in the middle of midtown manhattan. it's got these fancy offices and pretty secretaries and the stock market machine printing out stock market quotes, and it looked like a legitimate brokerage firm. but you know, the real deal is when you go in the back, it's just a couple of old white guys
sitting around a desk with a whole bunch of people bringing the money in. what they were doing were they were money launderers. some people from israel, there's some people from south america. there's some people from west africa and then it's myself. we were all taking advantage of the services
that these people in lower manhattan did. they were people that you could bring $200,000 of singles and $5 bills and then they'd end up writing you a check from some company, boom. and it's funny because at the same time i'm going to class and i'm taking economics and business 101 and marketing. it's kind of a hypocrisy of the world
because i'm like that ain't how the real world works. the difference between corporate america and the narcotics world, that line is so much thinner than people really, really know. voiceover: courtney jr. eventually became a successful retailer and real estate developer. his sister was a lawyer. courtney jr.: most people start their businesses
start it from the money they saved or family or relatives giving them their money to get started. in this case i asked my father for some money to start a store in harlem. i was fortunate enough that he had the resources and he did and it allowed me to live what i call a poor man puffy's lifestyle.
i'm a 27-year old african-american guy store across the street from the apollo. i made a lot of money at the store but a lot of drugs, a lot of girls, a lot of escorts, a lot of limo rides. and fortunate thing is i was actually able to go back to my family again and get some more money to keep my business going.
voiceover: the legacy of eddie jackson and courtney brown is a complex one. charles: really only regrets was that that i got caught, you know? (chuckles) it showed me that i learned a lot. i got a chance to see a lot of the world. cornell: but that's all i knew at that time. that's all we knew dude was our role models. that's not the road to take.
you don't have to live like that. there's a better way today. eddie jr.: well to be honest with you, i'm tired of all these glorified snitches such as frank lucas standing up there beating hrs like they was hell of fellows and in the end they turned out to be worst than women. so if you cannot handle the pressure and the weight don't get in the game.
if you got to tell on anybody you know and your mama your daddy, everybody you know to get out of trouble. just stay doing what you do now because that game ain't for you. most people today you look at cannot handle the weight. nicky barnes snitched, frank lucas snitched. where's the real ones? this is a story about a real one.
from the beginning to the end, never telling on nobody. courtney jr.: you know as i've grown older i understand that the fact that i've been able to travel the world, the fact that i hung out with princes, fortune 500 people and i've been able to experience some things just very few people on earth that ever gonna be able to experience
and a lot of those things come from the fact of the lifestyle that my father and education opportunities some of the things that he did allowed me to do. cornell: all these gangster movies on tv about they're sending their kids off and it becomes successful and things like that but this is the only black family i've seen do that. it really did it. courtney jr.: you know, as a grown man,
as a 46-year old man, i understand that you take the bitter with the sweet that me and my sister have often conversed well, what would life have been like if father would have just, you know, kept driving the bus? who knows, you know? it wasn't in the cards, you know? it is what it is
and it was what it was. dr. carl: actually it's no different than all of america but for some reason, those who report to history have always left the blacks on the plantation even in those type of activities. i don't see a great deal of difference except that kennedy was making a lot more money just when kennedy became an ambassador. eddie jackson didn't become an ambassador.
voiceover: on the streets of detroit though, eddie jackson and his crew are still remembered as the best that ever did it. and the ties of friendship and family that started in black bottom and paradise valley so many years ago, still holds strong. dr. carl: we use crime as a commodity when we talk about economics.
you know, you ask yourself questions like tobacco. how many people died last year from tobacco? when we started talking about the moral value of what eddie jackson and others do. i'm not condoning what they do. what i'm simply saying is that they're many on that playing field. courtney jr.: i don't separate our story from the story really i mean,
of the history of ... i mean of the of the immigrant group. the jews,the irish. as every group in america has attempted to go to the next level economically, the story of organized crime and narcotics has played a part at it. dr. carl: and the jury is still on. we don't know what's gonna happen
to the african-american families that were involved with serious crimes and their children. courtney jr.: these are the trials and tribulations that go on as a family goes from black bottom or paradise valley to working class jobs to sometimes that bridge that set family into the professional world, into the entrepreneurial world, into the next levels or status of life. in our case and the many other families in america,
that bridge has been paid for by activities in the underworld. (end credits music)
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