American Gangster|Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum — The Chinchilla Coat at the Fight

Everything Frank Lucas does right, he undoes in one evening. March 8, 1971: Ali and Frazier at Madison Square Garden, the hottest ticket in America, and Frank arrives in a full-length chinchilla coat with the matching hat and takes a ringside seat better than the one the Italians have. Across the arena, Richie Roberts is working the crowd with a long lens and sees a man he cannot place sitting in front of every boss in New York. The coat was a gift from Eva. Frank knows exactly what it will cost him and wears it anyway.

The Garden itself was not available, so the production rebuilt 1971 inside the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, some thirty miles east on Long Island: thousands of extras in period clothes, lookalikes salted through the good seats, a whole arena dressed to be another arena.

There is a small joke in that. The Coliseum opened in 1972 — one year after the fight it was standing in for — on the flat ground of the former Mitchel Air Force Base. It was home to the New York Islanders for forty-three seasons and four consecutive Stanley Cups, closed in 2015 for a full gut renovation, and reopened in 2017 at a smaller capacity. The Long Island Nets play there now, and concerts fill the rest of the calendar.

Buy a ticket to anything. The bowl is steep and it sits close to the floor, and from the lower rows you can see the point the scene is making: a man in a white fur coat could not have hidden in that room even if he had wanted to.

Photo: Pexels (free licence) — an indoor arena, illustrative rather than the Coliseum itself.