This week, one of his daughters and a former prosecutor, both speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Mr.

The new Nicky Barnes promptly submerged himself so thoroughly in mainstream America that barely anyone beyond his immediate family knew his new name, his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive.īut now it can be said that Nicky Barnes is definitely not around anymore, in any form. Convicted in 1977, imprisoned for more than two decades, he ultimately testified against his former associates, ensuring their convictions, and was released into the federal witness protection program under a new identity. Moreover, he was in fact no longer Nicky Barnes even by name. He was the antithesis of the old Nicky Barnes, a flamboyant Harlem folk hero who had owned as many as 200 suits, 100 pairs of custom-made shoes, 50 full-length leather coats, a fleet of luxury cars, and multiple homes and apartments financed by the fortune he had amassed in the late 1960s and ′70s, first by saturating black neighborhoods with heroin and later by investing the profits in real estate and other assets.

With that, the man asked the waitress for a doggy bag for his grilled salmon, and left. “Nicky Barnes’s lifestyle and his value system is extinct,” he went on, speaking of himself in the third person in a restaurant interview with The New York Times in 2007.

“Nicky Barnes is not around anymore,” said the balding, limping grandfather in the baggy Lee dungarees.

Hers to Protect by Nicky F. Grant