Watch Brooklyn Gangster: The Story of Jose Lucas Online

This film, The Jose Lucas Story, is said to be based on a fictionalized account of a particular string of criminal exploits, leading to the arrest, conviction, incarceration, and too sudden death of one, Jose Lucas, a local Brooklyn kid whose early life reads like a Dickens novel, and ends like a classic Shakespearean tragedy. He’s convicted and given a 23-year prison sentence for having been a perpetrator in a notorious day-time jewellery heist in Toney, downtown Georgetown, Washington, DC.(2005) Lucas had managed to be caught on a security camera with his homeboy Lex (the one who actually used the gun, shot the shop’s jeweller, and managed also, to be unmasked on camera) by design of the other two culprits, Robert and ‘E,” who when arrested later, in another robbery, make a deal with the DA to escape the heavy sentences given Jose and Lex (who got 24 years as the shooter) by giving them up. The film attempts to get at the story behind that conviction, which many believed resulted in a grossly unfair sentence. After having accepted that Jose has lost in court, they had hoped to fight the verdict; Jose’s defence did file and lose several appeals. They had settled into the reality that most residents-of-colour in Brooklyn find themselves: that of having a loved one incarcerated.