By Lisa Collins

The success of films like “Goodfellas”, “Scarface”, the Godfather trilogy and TV series like the Sopranos document all too well America’s fascination with the gangster lifestyle. With this month's release of “American Gangster” starring Hollywood A-listers Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, Universal Pictures is betting a combined $180 million in production and marketing costs that the love affair is far from over. The film is poised to tap the billion dollar-plus hip hop market—a market fueled by the obsession of Black America’s youth with gangster imaging as reflected in the phenomenally successful gangster rap genre.

With the film comes the release of rapper Jay-Z’s "American Gangster" CD as a companion to the movie's soundtrack and inspired by scenes from the film, the gritty story of Harlem drugpin Frank Lucas, who became one of New York’s most ruthless black crime bosses while smuggling heroin out of Asia in the caskets of soldiers killed in Vietnam.

 The film comes just a week after the release of Magnolia Pictures' highly anticipated documentary, “Mr. Untouchable”, based on the life of Nicky Barnes, also dubbed by some as the “Al Capone of Harlem”. A contemporary of Lucas, Barnes in his prime, owned five homes, had 300 expensive, hand-tailored suits and furs, flashed diamond jewelry, had beautiful women hanging on his arms and was protected by half a dozen bodyguards.

Both films are expected to do well among a culture that reveres the gangster lifestyle and all of its trappings as witnessed by the near pop culture popularity of such fictional drug lord/mafia leader protagonists as the blaxploitation era’s Superfly, “the Mack”, and later New Jack City's Nino Brown.

So deep is the admiration hip hop artists have for gangster lore that many of them fashion their own images after such heroes and many like Scarface, Junior Mafia, Freeway Rick Ross, Nas (formerly Nas Escobar) and Noriega have adopted notorious underworld names. Not to mention rap cult heroes like R. Kelly’s “Mr. Big”.

 The glamorization of such lifestyles and the reinforcement of stereotypes that have negatively impacted the African-American community while fostering a thuggish adversarial stance as the authentic response to a society long viewed as racist, experts say have done little more than to short circuit the progression—and hopes—of young blacks. Perhaps worse as pointed out by critics of the genre is that the music has evolved into a misleading caricature of the world it claims to represent—the streets.

In the two decades since the advent of hip hop, countless rap tunes have celebrated a lifestyle of unending violence, profanity, misogyny and criminality reinforced in the flashing of weapons and gold jewelry and gyrating, scantily clad women seen as objects to be used and discarded at will.

So successful was the gangster image at penetrating the very core of the hip-hop community that its biggest stars became casualties.  Blurring the lines between depicting bad boys in videos and then being one in real life is for many the reason why a great many hip hop artists ultimately find themselves in trouble with the law; and worse, led to the untimely death of two of its biggest stars—Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. With his debut “Ready To Die”, Smalls seems to have also been scoring his epitaph.

50 Cent’s real life brushes with death—complete with the bulletholes to prove it—helped to fuel his rise to rap superstardom with the 2003 debut of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the success of which led to a motion picture of the same name.

“You watch movies like ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘The Godfather’ and you become fascinated by what they’re doing -- but these men are criminals," says Wu-Tang Clan member RZA, who plays a detective in "American Gangster". "A movie is a movie; it’s based on a true story, but it’s not a true story.

 “Those who get influenced by the negative side, I hope they remember what happened at the end," RZA continues. "Even though Frank Lucas did only 15 years jail time, if you meet him on the streets now he’s basically crippled. Even though he got out of it, he didn’t get out it. Life will get back at you. And I’m certain sitting in that wheelchair he has a lot of reflecting to do.”

 “I have remorse,” Lucas told a New York Magazine interviewer. “I never sold nothing to a kid in the street, but I found out that my people had. I didn’t want to sell to kids. I didn’t want to make them junkies. I didn’t want to be a part of it. I justify it by saying during my time I couldn’t get a job on Wall Street, not even washing toilets. I went to school three days and the teacher wasn’t there two of them. I had to make a living. I didn’t want to be just a damn bum in the street. So that’s what I did. But it’s complicated. When you get there, every rat in the goddamned woods is gonna come running to you. And anytime you don’t got no money, everybody disappears.”

    Nicky Barnes, currently in a witness protection program, is also remorseful.

  “No one should be elevated because of what they did in the drug business,” Barnes has said. The way we operated—there was a lot of violence, like, ten to twelve homicides, to keep the whole operation running. You can’t glorify that.

“Heroin wreaked a lot of havoc and a lot of pain in the black community," he continues. "I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe I was aware, but I wanted to make money, and that’s what I did. Looking back, I wouldn’t have made those decisions, but it’s a hell of a lot different and much easier to sanitize yourself after the fact.”

Actor Idris Elba, who portrays a drug dealer in "American Gangster" and on TV in "The Wire" feels that more often than not moviegoers just get half of the story.

"Let’s show the reality," Elba says. "I think it is stereotypical of black actors that play gangsters to always get the girl or end up in jail. No. Some of them get shot. We can’t all be Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro and make illegal money."

In fact, notorious drug dealer Ricky “Freeway” Ross, considered to be one of the biggest crack dealers in American history was a “Superfly” enthusiast.

“We were going to do it like Superfly,” Ross said of the movie many thought to be loosely based on the life of Nicky Barnes. “I have always loved that movie--he got in, got his money and got out. We would do it like Superfly--that was our goal from Day one."

Now serving out a 20-year sentence, Ross, hardly got away clean.

 "I have two kids whose mother is smoking crack, and my babies and I felt the effects of it,” Ross told BET. “I got uncles, cousins, and many friends strung out, and I feel awful about it. I just hope people can understand I didn't mean for it to be this way."

  Sheila Frazier, who starred along with Ron O’Neal in “Superfly”, rebuffs the notion of Barnes as the inspiration behind Superfly and decries the depiction of Barnes in “Mr. Untouchable”; she was further irritated by the incorporation of the Superfly soundtrack in the documentary.

 “I felt sick to my stomach watching the documentary that in one breath glorified the man while soft pedaling the damage he did to the community.

“They talked about him like he was really powerful, and during that time, he became more powerful than the Mafia. But there was no disdain. One of them spoke about how he gave out turkeys at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, his henchmen dressed up as Santa Claus, bringing gifts to the kids, some of whose fathers and mothers they were probably killing —at the very least through the drugs he was flooding the community with."

Bill Cosby characterized the media violence as a pollutant in his co-written book "Come On People: The Path from Victims to Victors".

"It amplifies the toxic atmosphere that gives support to violence, and it undermines efforts at violence prevention," Cosby wrote. "Viewers seldom see the aftereffects of nonfatal violence--the paralysis, the blindness, the brain damage, the lifetime dependency. Nor do they experience the emotional damage--the broken hearts, the shattered lives, the abandoned children. As a result, young people who commit violence for the short-term thrill have little appreciation for the long-term harm they inflict on themselves and on others."

Wrote one hip hop observer, “The sobering fact is that the streets as 50 Cent presents them, brimming with shoot-outs and crack fiends, do not exist [...] Millennial black America is hardly the Wild West scene it was during gangsta rap's prime. Gangsta rap could once fairly claim to reflect a brutal present. Now it mythicizes a past that would fade away much faster without it. The streets that gangsta rappers claim as their source are no longer as angry as they are sad, and in any black community you can find the rubble—uneducated, unemployable, young, black men.”

It was in the late seventies and early eighties that hip hop rose out of the South Bronx as a cultural expression—rappers telling their gritty life stories in their own terms as part of a historically marginalized segment of America rising out of its blighted inner cities. The cultural product they created and sold—be it in music or the consumption of hip hop inspired tennis shoes, jeans, colognes, champagne, cars, and sports drinks to, in huge numbers, white suburban youth—generates an estimated $12 billion a year in annual revenues.

With the violent and profane imagery, gangsta rap has become a breakdown in social mores, further damaging the black family core.

Cosby reports in his book, “Child-case professionals believe that kids who are exposed to a lot of violent media are more likely to use violence. The older they get, the more they see, the more violent they get. TV shows and movies almost inevitably make their violent actors attractive, whether they are the good or the bad guys.”

Constance Rice, who currently works with the LAPD on gang intervention, sees these imitations from kids on the streets:  “If a kid sees nothing but hopelessness then he’s going to follow the psychopaths. Who has the girls? Who has the cars?”

“There is not any counterbalance to that image and it is so destructive the glamorization of violence in general,” said community activist and director of Maximum Force Enterprises, Aquil Basheer. “When you have the imagery of negative light and no counterbalance as an option, young kids are susceptible to grab at what is in front of them.”

"Instead", counters Basheer “[We need to] create a vision and the ability for the young adults to see themselves in the line of greatness and to seek success in all entities of life. They need to see they're going to make something of themselves. They also need individuals they can emulate out of respect and relate to.”

A 1979 survey of attitudes towards employment among black males by a Georgetown public policy professor found that sixty percent of black males felt they had a better chance of making a living legally than illegally. Ten years later—with the advent of hip-hop and gangster rap—that number dropped to 40%.

"Crime is a cancer that eats away at our communities," said Reginald Hudlin, BET President of Entertainment. "But for a generation that grew up thinking greed is good -- whether on Wall Street or Martin Luther King Boulevard -- they're not quite so sure whether crime pays or not”.

To that end, BET heralded the launch of a six-part docudrama series last year titled "American Gangster", exploring the lives and times of some of Black America's most notorious crime figures.

“We wanted to take an honest look at the criminal life, demystify that world, and show what it does to our community," Hudlin said.

"One of the things that we have in our show is basically that 'hood gangster,' 'hood legend' story that turns out negative. It is to teach that whenever you do something that is destructive to your community, to your people, to mankind, it will come back on you and you eventually wind up to destroying yourself."

The biggest balance to the images—either real life or silver screen— is intervention, according to Captain Bob Green of the 77th district office says from his 28-year experience in the South Central/Watts area.

“We can't continue to incarcerate kids," says the 28-year veteran. "Intervention has got to be the thing that works, whether it’s parenting classes or reaching out and giving kids some kind of support system through sports or family programs. The private sectors, churches and faith based programs work the best.”

Notes Ving Rhames, the narrator for BET's American Gangster docudrama: “I grew up around a lot of criminals, thugs, dope dealers, gangbangers, whatever you want to call it. What I like about American Gangster is it reveals the true side and future of this sort of lifestyle if one chooses to go down that road."

“The characters I play that are gangsters always have demises,” said Idris Elba. “I mean you want to be a gangster? Great. Just know you can and will be shot and your life can end.”

As for Rickey "Freeway" Ross, who is currently sitting in a prison cell, death comes with the turf.

"Every chance I get," Ross reveals, "I'm telling kids everywhere: 'don't do what I did'. Think, become educated and stay away from drugs."