He was known as Sergeant Smack. The term smack originated in the 60s as slang for heroin (perhaps because it also means ‘taste’ or ‘flavour’). Sergeant Smack’s real name is Leslie “Ike” Atkinson. During the Vietnam War, between the late 60s and the early 70s, he was the brains and the operator of a smuggling ring dealing in the purest heroin from the Golden Triangle, where the Mekong River pushes into Thailand, defining the border with Laos on the east and Burma on the west. The opium poppy grows easily in the alkaline soil on that stretch of the river and it is this flower that helped transform this region of Southeast Asia into a hotbed of heroin production.
Moving between here and the Bangkok bars where the American soldiers spent their R&R, Sergeant Smack peddled the heroin that would quickly become an epidemic among soldiers and back in the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), turnover quickly rose to 400 million dollars. To counter the smuggling a special unit was set up by the DEA, code-named Centac 9, which conducted a 3-year investigation spanning three continents.
Smack was arrested in 1975 at his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and later sentenced to 31 years in prison. He was eventually released in 2007. It is said that he never carried a weapon and the officers that framed him called him “a gentleman”.

His story is told in Sergeant Smack: The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and his Band of Brothers. The book was written by Ron Chepesiuk, who analyses and describes the players, associates and crime scenes with the precision of an investigative journalist and the narrative style of a screen writer.
The book reveals the intrigues and dealings of the African-American gangs that operated between the United States and Southeast Asia like so many fish in the murky waters that were American-Thai relations at that time. It tells of a business that involved foreign embassies in Bangkok, senior military, police, government and some of “the most respected Thai families”.
One of the many mysteries that Chepesiuk sheds light on concerns one of the most worrying and macabre legends of the Vietnam War: the so-called Cadaver Connection, according to which heroin was smuggled to the USA inside the coffins of soldiers killed in Vietnam. According to Chepesiuk, this legend was fed by one of the men working for Sergeant Smack, Frank Lucas, who has always boasted that Cadaver Connection was his idea.
Smack is quoted in the book as saying, “When Lucas dies, his epitaph should read: ‘He fooled the world into believing the cadaver connection’”. He did it so well that the legend was even used in the film American Gangster starring Denzel Washington as Lucas.


American Ganster: the trailer

Click here to read an extract from the book