“Nicky Barnes is not around anymore,” said the balding, limping grandfather in the baggy Lee dungarees.

“Nicky Barnes’s lifestyle and his value system is extinct,” he went on, speaking of himself in the third person in a restaurant interview with The New York Times in 2007. “I left Nicky Barnes behind.”

With that, the man asked the waitress for a doggy bag for his grilled salmon, and left.

He was the antithesis of the old Nicky Barnes, a flamboyant Harlem folk hero who had owned as many as 200 suits, 100 pairs of custom-made shoes, 50 full-length leather coats, a fleet of luxury cars, and multiple homes and apartments financed by the fortune he had amassed in the late 1960s and ′70s, first by saturating black neighborhoods with heroin and later by investing the profits in real estate and other assets.

Moreover, he was in fact no longer Nicky Barnes even by name. Convicted in 1977, imprisoned for more than two decades, he ultimately testified against his former associates, ensuring their convictions, and was released into the federal witness protection program under a new identity.