Nicky Barnes, ‘Mr. Untouchable’ of Heroin Dealers, Is Dead at 78

He felt betrayed. But he extracted his revenge: He testified against them in federal trials, and scores of his wayward former associates were convicted. One was his ex-wife, Thelma Grant, who pleaded guilty to federal drug charges and served 10 years in prison.

In return for his cooperation, the government released Mr. Barnes from prison in 1998. But concluding that he would henceforth be a marked man, the authorities offered him something more: a new life, though a hidden one, in the witness protection program.

And with that, Mr. Barnes achieved a goal that his former self would have loathed, even feared: to be forgotten.

Or mostly. In 2007, his fame was briefly rekindled in a book by Tom Folsom titled “Mr. Untouchable” and in a documentary film of the same name. That same year, he was played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the film “American Gangster,” which, to Mr. Barnes’s irritation, focused not on him but on his leading challenger for peddling dope and bragging rights, Frank Lucas.

Mr. Lucas died on May 31 at 88 — a death that evoked the Harlem heroin wars of the 1970s and a question that had not been posed in years: What ever happened to Nicky Barnes?

It is no longer a mystery. And now his death has evoked another set of memories. This week, after learning of Mr. Barnes’s death, Robert B. Fiske Jr., the United States attorney in Manhattan in 1977, recalled him as having overseen “the largest, the most profitable and the most venal drug ring in New York.”

Schooled in the Streets

Mr. Barnes was born in Harlem on Oct. 15, 1933, and grew up around Eighth Avenue and West 113th Street. An altar boy for a time, he was also arrested on robbery charges before he was 10. He fled from an alcoholic father. He never went beyond junior high school, became a street junkie and was sent for treatment to Lexington, Ky., where he was weaned from drugs. He said he never used them again.