American Gangster facing legal action from former cops
Story by Jack Foley
SIR Ridley Scott’s Golden Globe nominated crime drama American Gangster is facing legal action from three former drug enforcement agents in New York.
The officers are suing Universal Studios for $55 million (£28m) according to papers filed in Manhattan for falsely making them out to be villains.
The film, starring Denzel Washington as real-life drug lord Frank Lucas and Russell Crowe as the cop who brought him to justice, shows several drug enforcement officers being charged with corruption in the aftermath of Lucas’ arrest.
But the agents in question dispute the claims and have brought the legal action which, according to a spokesman for Universal Pictures, is “without merit.”
A report on the BBC and in The Times newspaper states that ex-US federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents Louis Diaz, Gregory Korniloff and Jack Toal have accused NBC Universal of falsely claiming that the movie was based on a true story.
They claim that hundreds of DEA agents and New York police officers were defamed by a caption at the end of the film that asserts that Lucas’ collaboration with prosecutors “led to the convictions of three quarters of New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency”.
The prosecutors say no DEA agents or New York police officers were ever convicted as a result of Lucas’s information.
The papers state: “With this utterly false and defamatory statement, the defendant has ruined and impugned the reputations of these honest and courageous public servants in the eyes of millions of people.”
But NBC Universal hit back by maintaining that their film “does not defame these, or any, federal agents”, adding: “It specifically refers to members of ‘New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency’ – not the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, where the plaintiffs formerly worked.”
The papers were filed by the three former agents on behalf of themselves and 400 of their former colleagues who worked in New York between 1973 and 1985.
In addition to the financial damages they are seeking, the officers are further seeking to stop the film’s distribution or change the text at the end of the film and turn over all of its profits to a fund for federal DEA agents.