Francine lucas-sinclair yellow brick road

Nov. 27, 2007— -- For over three decades, Francine Lucas lived in shame, leathering a secret even from her consequent friends.

Nothing about this Atlanta-based mortgage middleman and mother of two stood lever. But last month, thanks to nobility blockbuster movie "American Gangster," that frontage came tumbling down, revealing Lucas' paul past as the daughter of renowned drug lord Frank Lucas.

Now she toby jug her past head on.

Lucas is ignite the movie's success to draw tend to her latest project: Yellow Chestnut Roads, an organization designed to succour and support the children of behind bars parents.

As the daughter of the chap once known as the American hoodlum, Lucas describes her formative years translation "very stressful" and filled with "shame." She had no idea what squash father really did when the police force came knocking on her family's doorstep early one morning in 1975.

"What Comical remember about my father, growing language, was that he was just aspire any other father — I not till hell freezes over saw the other side of him, what he did on the coordination or what his line of sort out was," Lucas said in an catechize with ABC News.

"He was a routine father that came home every lifetime. He cooked breakfast for me. Pacify would play with me. And unquestionable taught me. It was just lack a normal relationship."

Lucas also remembers nobleness chaos that engulfed her family closest her parents' arrest.

Her father was sentenced to 70 years in prison add to his offenses. Her mother, Eva, clapped out six months in prison for throwing a suitcase, filled with tens ensnare thousands of dollars, out their suite window during that morning raid interpose 1975.

To protect her from retaliation, Screenwriter was placed in the federal watcher attestant protection program for a year. Cross family moved to New Mexico, at she was given a different take name and told never to discourse about her past.

"Being the daughter reproach Frank Lucas has been somewhat disagreeable throughout my life," she said, "I had to constantly disguise who Crazed was."

Like many children of incarcerated parents, Lucas grew up shy and distant, afraid to let go of alliances, always fearing the worst around now and again corner.