On this day in 1944 the World was introduced to Frank Matthews who was also known as Black Caesar or Pee Wee. During his career he ran a major heroin and cocaine empire and also managed to flee the country in 1973 when he was under indictment.

He left with some $15 – $20 million, never to be seen again.

On this day, February 13, 1944, the city of Durham, North Carolina, welcomed into the world a boy named Frank Matthews, a man who would grow up to become one of the most formidable and elusive drug lords in American history. Known on the streets by the nicknames Black Caesar and Pee Wee — the latter a nod to his relatively slight stature — Matthews would eventually build a criminal empire so vast and so profitable that it commanded the respect and attention of the Italian-American mob families who had long considered the narcotics trade their exclusive domain.

Matthews came of age in Durham before relocating north, eventually settling in Philadelphia and later Brooklyn, New York, where he began his ascent through the criminal underworld during the 1960s. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Matthews refused to operate as a subordinate to the established power structures controlled by the Five Families of New York. Instead, he forged his own independent network, cultivating direct relationships with South American cocaine suppliers and major heroin connections, effectively cutting out the traditional mob middlemen who had profited handsomely from Black drug dealers for decades.

At his peak in the early 1970s, Matthews was distributing heroin and cocaine across more than two dozen American cities, overseeing a network that stretched from New York to Los Angeles. His annual earnings were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, making him a genuine rival to the organised crime structures that Lucky Luciano had so carefully engineered decades earlier. Federal authorities considered him one of the most significant drug traffickers in the country, and the Drug Enforcement Administration dedicated considerable resources to bringing him down.

In 1973, with a federal indictment hanging over him and the walls closing in, Matthews made a decision that would cement his legend. He vanished. Taking an estimated fifteen to twenty million dollars in cash with him, he simply disappeared, leaving investigators, prosecutors, and rivals alike utterly baffled. Despite numerous reported sightings over the years in locations as varied as South America, Africa, and Europe, Frank Matthews was never apprehended, never tried, and never heard from definitively again.

His disappearance remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of American organised crime, and his story continues to inspire debate among historians, law enforcement veterans, and true crime enthusiasts who wonder whether Black Caesar is still out there somewhere, living quietly on his stolen fortune.