Richie Roberts

Richard M. Roberts (born June 23, 1941 in Bronx , New York ) is an American attorney and former police officer from New Jersey. He was best known for the film adaptation American Gangster , which thematized his role in connection with the arrest, prosecution and later defense of the Harlem drug king Frank Lucas .

Roberts was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York, but grew up on the other side of the Hudson River in Newark . After high school, he went to the US Marines and was then stationed as a reservist on Parris Island for six years . During his reserve time, he began studying at Uppsala College in East Orange , New Jersey . After three years, however, he dropped out without a degree and instead became a police detective in the Essex County Attorney's office in 1963 . While working as a police detective, he began to study law at Seton Hall University and passed his bar examination in 1971 . He was appointed assistant attorney in Essex County and shortly thereafter became chief of a special anti-drugs unit. In this capacity Roberts was involved in the arrest of the drug king Frank Lucas in 1975 and the exposure of the " Cadaver Connection ". Lucas was initially sentenced to a 70-year prison term. Due to his cooperation with the police after his arrest, this was reduced considerably, so that he was released from custody in 1981. Roberts ended his police work in the following years and began working as a criminal defense lawyer. He developed a friendly relationship with Lucas and became the godfather of his son Ray, who also represented him as a lawyer when he was charged a second time in 1984 with a new drug offense and violation of the parole conditions. Lucas received a seven-year prison sentence in the process, which he served until 1991.

In the movie American Gangster , Roberts is played by Russell Crowe . Due to the great publicity of the criminal case itself as well as the film, he became a well-known personality, with whom numerous newspaper articles and also some books deal.

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• William Kleinknecht: From Foes to Friends and Now on to Fame . In: The Star-Ledger , October 5, 2006
• Mary Waldron: American Hero: Richard Richie Roberts on lawcrossing.com (accessed October 23, 2009)
• Richard G. Jones: A New Jersey Crime Story's Hollywood Ending in the New York Times November 1, 2007