On the morning of January 4th, 1990, a homeless man pushing a cart through the bushes near the City Island exit of the Hutchinson River Parkway found a body. 25 years old, two shots to the chest, one to the head. $2,200 still folded inside the front pocket of his pants. $2,200 and change untouched.
The killer hadn’t bothered. The body belonged to Richard Thomas Porter. In Harlem, they just called him rich. At 24 years old, he had owned more luxury cars than most adults will see in their lifetime. Fed kids on his block who weren’t his own and turned the corner of 144th Street into a cocaine business, the NNYPD, valued at $50,000 a week.
What nobody knew at the time was that the warning signs had been screaming for almost a decade. The man who set him up was someone he called brother. The man who killed him was someone he loved. And the reason he was even in that van on that Wednesday night had nothing to do with money and everything to do with a 12-year-old boy whose finger had been delivered to a McDonald’s bathroom 30 days earlier.
This is the story of how a kid who sold newspapers at 9 years old became the most photographed drug dealer in Harlem history and the four weeks that ended him. If you’d asked anyone on West 132nd Street about Richard Porter back in 1977, they would have told you he was Velma’s oldest polite kid. Worked the local supermarket bagging groceries, sold newspapers in the morning, 12 years old. They had no idea.
The porters lived at 155 West 132nd Street on the block between Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard and Frederick Douglas Boulevard. Central Harlem. Vilma Porter raised three children there on her own. Pat, born 1966. Richard, the oldest, born July 26th, 1965. And the baby, William Darnell, born 1977, 12, 12 years younger than Rich, and the only one of them who would be too young to remember the 70s as anything but a feeling.
By the time Darnell was born, Velma was already losing her grip. Pat Porter has said it directly in interviews. Around the same years Rich began selling, their mother began using heroine. The kind of slow disappearance where the parent is still in the house but the parenting isn’t.
Rich, 12 years old, became the man of 155 West 132nd Street. Not metaphorically, practically. Pat was a year younger. Darnell was a newborn and nobody else was coming. Psychologists have a term for what happens to children put in that position. They call it parentification. It’s when a kid takes on responsibilities that belong to an adult and absorbs the identity that comes with those responsibilities.
The kid stops being a kid. The role becomes who they are. For Rich Porter, the role was simple. I provide. I protect. I show up. That sentence lived out over the next 12 years would be the thing that built him and the thing that killed him. So, he hustled. At 9 years old, he was bagging groceries and selling newspapers.
By 12, he was selling weed in dollar joints. Some accounts say he was making fake hash out of eggs and sage, which is the kind of detail you can’t make up. By 13, he had moved to heroin. By 15, he had a black BMW, 15 years old, a brand new BMW. His first real mentor in the streets was a man named Donald Johnson. Everybody called him LA. LA had 144th Street locked down.
And he saw something in the Porter kid. He brought him in, taught him the business, and treated him like a younger brother. For a few years, that’s what Rich had, a teacher, a protector, someone older than him in the game who actually wanted him to make it. Then in 1984, LA was killed. Rich went after the people responsible.
There was a shootout. He was arrested, convicted on a weapons charge in April of that year, then a controlled substance charge in November. He served about a year, his only convictions ever. He was 19 years old when he came home and he came home harder than he left. This decision seemed small at the time. It wasn’t.
The man who would replace LA in his life, who would step into that older brother dynamic, but in reverse as a younger associate, Rich cosign from prison was a kid named Alberto Martinez. Everyone called him Alpo. By the time Rich came home in 1985, Harlem was changing. Cocaine had been moving through the neighborhood for years, but the product itself was about to mutate.
Then in 1985, the drug changed. Crack arrived in Harlem. Powder cocaine had been a luxury product. Crack was something you could sell in $5 vials to people who used it every day, multiple times a day, and would do almost anything to keep using it. The economics of the corner flipped overnight.
A small operation could become a large operation in a matter of months. A large operation could become an empire in a year. And the violence, the violence scaled with it. Rich Porter caught that wave at exactly the right age, 20 years old, already known, already trusted, already with a structure in place from the LA years. He came out of prison and built.
He set up his cocaine operation at 145th Street in Amsterdam Avenue, then anchored it on 144th Street. He branded one of his products much better. friends from childhood became employees. His third partner in this triangle, and this is where the story gets distorted in pop culture, so listen carefully, was a kid named Azie Faison.
Azie had met Rich years earlier when Rich used Azy’s job at a Harlem dry cleaner to stash drugs, guns, and money. By 1985, Azie was running his own thing. So was Rich, so was Alpo. Most people who tell this story call them a trio, a unified crew. Rich, Ay, and Alpo running an empire together. That’s not what they were. Pat Porter has been clear about this in interview after interview.
Each of them had their own plug, their own clientele, their own corners. What they had was friendship and overlapping supply. They sometimes pulled product. They moved in the same circles. They wore Dapper Dan together on 125th Street, but they weren’t partners on a single ledger. They were three friends who came up in the same business at the same time and who between them ran most of what mattered in Harlem.
I mean, think about that for a second. Three black kids, all under 25, all from the same handful of blocks, controlling more of the local cocaine economy than anyone else in the burrow in the most photographed neighborhood in black America during the cultural inflection point that would become hip hop’s golden era. You couldn’t write it. It happened.
The aesthetic alone is part of why this story refuses to die. Rich and Alpo bought matching Porsche 944 Turbos, burgundy for Rich, silver for Alpo, paid in cash. A paper bag with $75,000 in it dropped on a dealer’s desk. They were the first owners of convertible BMWs in Harlem. Rich had a champagne colored Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.
316 valve Cossworth, the kind of car you didn’t see in Harlem in 1988 or anywhere else. He kept more than a dozen luxury cars in a Manhattan garage. Azie has said publicly that Rich was rumored to have never worn the same outfit twice. The people closest to him stand by it. Custom pieces from Dapper Dan’s boutique at 43 East 125th Street.
Open 24 hours where Rich was among the original drug dealer clientele. For a quiet moment, things actually seemed fine. Rich and Ay were each spending around $20,000 a year renting buses to take Harlem kids to Dorney Park and Six Flags Great Adventure. Rich threw block parties so big they became annual events. The kind of thing where decades later, Rick Ross and Funkmaster Flex and Kid Capri would still show up to commemorate the date.
He paid bills for neighbors. He looked after elders on his block. The same person who was selling crack five blocks away was in his own building treated as someone worth protecting. That didn’t last. On August 21st, 1987, AZ Fasin was at his aunt stash apartment at 1295 Grand Concourse in Morrisania, the Bronx. He was 23 years old.
He was there with five other people. Two armed men came through the door. They tied everyone up. They began executing the room. Ay was shot nine times in the chest, in the face, in the head. Three of the people in that apartment died at the scene. Myra Enoch, 50 years old. Joanne Blue, 44. Charles Parker, 23. The robbery was set up by the ex-boyfriend of Azy’s own sister. Azie survived.
Lincoln Hospital, critical condition. He would carry bullets and scars for the rest of his life. The two shooters, Henry Bold and Ronald Timmons, would later be sentenced to 112 years to life. This is the moment in the story where the analyst in you needs to pay attention because what happened next inside A’s head is the explanation for what happened later inside Rich’s.
A lying in that hospital bed made a decision. He was out. He had been making by his own account close to $100,000 a week at the peak. He had a mother. He had a sister. He had a partner. He had a future and he had just felt what the future of the business actually was. He pulled back.
He started winding things down. By 1989, he was effectively retired from dealing. Rich didn’t pull back. You’d think someone would have said something. Nobody did. Or maybe they did and he didn’t hear it. Either way, he kept going. The man who had been more disciplined than Alpo, the one Azie described as the businessman, up at 6 and by 9, finished by seven, kept the operation running through 1988 and into 1989.
Even as the streets in A’s own words became nasty, ugly, evil, and mean. It’s like the stage lights in Harlem were cut off. There was never a version of Rich Porter who walked away with what he had and lived quietly. That option didn’t exist in his psychology because he wasn’t a businessman who sold drugs. He was a provider. And the day you stop providing is the day you stop being the person your family relies on.
He had been that person since he was 12 years old. Walking away wasn’t a business decision. It would have been an identity collapse. The other thing he was, and this is the part that explains the next four weeks, was Darnell’s brother. Dell was 12 years old in the fall of 1989, a sixth grader at PS92 on West 134th Street.
Family members have described him as the heart of the household. Rich named one of his own children after him. The bond between them was the kind of thing that gets dismissed as folklore until you realized that Rich, 12 years older, had been functionally co-parenting Darnell since the day he was born. He spoiled him. He showed up.
He was the older brother who actually became the older brother. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected. On the morning of December 5th, 1989, Donald Porter left 155 West 132nd Street to walk to school. He never made it to PS92. By 4:00 that afternoon, Velma realized he was missing. By 5:00, the first phone call came.
Donell crying, a male voice on the line. The demand $500,000. The next day, December 6th, the family was directed to the McDonald’s at 125th Street and Broadway. In the men’s bathroom, under the sink, a family friend found a paper coffee cup. Inside the cup, Donald severed right index finger, two of his rings, and a cassette tape.
On the tape, the family heard Donald’s voice. They cuted my finger off. Please help me. They said, “If you don’t do as they say, they are going to cut my hand off. Please help. Get the money.” I love you, Mommy. Tell Pat I love her. That’s a 12-year-old child. The kidnappers reduced the demand to $350,000 when Rich said he didn’t have 500. He didn’t, by the way.
Most people assume that someone making 50,000 a week from crack has millions sitting in cash. He didn’t. The street economy doesn’t store money in vaults. It cycles it through re-ups, lifestyle, debts to suppliers, and the kind of expenses you can’t put on an accountant’s books. Rich told the kidnappers honestly that what he could raise was around 200,000.
He went to his cocaine supplier, Richard Fritz Simmons, a connect from 112th Street. Fritz fronted him 30 kilos of cocaine. No money up front. Pat Porter has called this proof that Fritz was quote a stand-up guy. 30 kilos of free weight on consignment to a man whose little brother was being held for ransom. The understanding was simple.
Rich would liquidate the product, raise the cash, pay the ransom, get Donald back. He had about a month of debt overhead, and a brother to save. What nobody in the family knew yet was who was actually holding Donald. Most people never heard about this part. The man who orchestrated Darnell’s kidnapping was not a rival drug dealer.
He was not a stranger. He was Donnell’s own uncle, Velma’s brother, Pat Porter’s uncle, a man known on the street as Johnny Apple Porter, who was connected to a Harlem and Bronx extortion crew run by Clarence Preacher Heatley. They called themselves the Black Hand of Death. According to investigative reporting and Pat Porter’s own testimony, the motive was jealousy.
Uncle Johnny had watched his nephew get rich, and he wanted in. You’d be hardressed to find a more brutal version of betrayal than that. The man sitting in Velma’s living room consoling his sister while her 12-year-old son was held in a basement somewhere was the man who had ordered it. Pat Porter has said this directly.
Uncle Johnny later admitted it to her. He and Preacher attended Darnell’s funeral. For roughly 4 weeks, Rich Porter walked Harlem in a bulletproof vest with a loaded pistol looking for his brother. He stopped sleeping. He stopped working with the consistency Azie had described. The man who used to be in bed by 7 up at 6 became a man who didn’t know what time it was.
Pat went outside for almost the entire month to the FBI against Rich’s wishes to grocery stores anywhere. But the night her brother left for the last time was the first time she had really left the house in weeks. That’s the level of consumed they were in. The trauma response to a kidnapping like this is the kind of thing psychologists call hypervigilance with grief impairment.
It’s when your nervous system stays on full threat alert for so long that judgment, the part of the brain that evaluates risk and decides whether to get in a car with somebody, starts to deteriorate. For a man who had built his survival on careful decisionmaking, this was the worst possible psychological state to be in. And it was the state he was in for 28 days.
If this is the kind of story you want more of, Harlem history, the names behind the names, the psychology underneath the headlines, street archives is the channel, hit subscribe. We’re just getting started. By the time the FBI C11 squad was deeply involved, the case had become something larger than a missing child. Donald Porter had been the focus of an active investigation for almost a month.
Federal observers were now circulating through the periphery of the Porter family’s life. They had recordings. They had the cassette. They had the finger. They had a theory about who Rich Porter was and what business he was in. And they were watching. This is the context that nobody who tells this story tends to put together at the right moment.
Because what happened on the night of January 3rd, 1990 doesn’t make sense unless you understand what was sitting in Rich Porter’s head and what was visibly building around him. He had 30 kilos of fronted cocaine he needed to move. He had a brother who had been missing for 4 weeks. He had federal agents in his orbit.
He had Uncle Johnny in his living room pretending to grieve. And he had somewhere in the back of his mind the only person left from the original three who was still active and operating at scale. Alpo, the friendship between Rich Porter and Alberto Martinez was real. Azie has said it on the record. The respect was real.
The love was real. They had been doing this together since Rich came home from prison in 1985. Matching Porsches, trips to Washington DC block parties, funerals, the whole thing. But underneath it by late 1989, something was off. Alpo would later claim in a 1999 interview with Feds magazine and then again in 2019 with director Troy Reed that Rich had been overcharging him on cocaine by $3 to $5,000 per kilo.
Whether that’s true, exaggerated, or self-serving rationalization, nobody who isn’t Alo Martinez can say. What we can say is that on the night of January 3rd, Alo presented himself to Rich as a buyer. Rich needed to move the weight. Alo was the most obvious customer. He had the network, the cash flow, and the access. They agreed to meet.
Rich got into a van. Alo locked the doors. What comes next is the part that still doesn’t make sense. Inside the van, Alo would later describe asking Rich about the source of the cocaine. Yo, Rich, where did you get that coke from? That stuff was good. He framed it as a way to make Rich comfortable. Make him relax.
Make him think they were having a normal conversation. They weren’t. According to Alpo’s own narration of the night, he was already mad. He was already past the decision point. Garrett Terrell, known on the street as Big Head Gary, shot Rich twice in the chest. Rich didn’t die. Alo fired the third shot into his head.
They drove from Harlem to the City Island exit of the Hutchinson River Parkway. They dumped his body in the bushes less than a mile from where Donald’s body would be found 24 days later. $2,239. They took the cocaine. They didn’t take the cash. That detail matters because if this had been a robbery, the cash would have been gone.
The cash being left behind is the tail. This was about removing rich from the equation entirely while keeping the consigned product. The 30 kilos Fritz had fronted the kilos meant for Darnell’s ransom. Alpo would later frame it as a business dispute about pricing. The street version told most clearly by Kevin Chile of Don Diva magazine is harsher.
It was a robbery dressed up as a meeting ending in murder dressed up as discipline. Alpo himself said it cleanest years later. I just killed somebody that I loved, somebody I called my brother, which looking back was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to say into a camera, depending on whether you think Alpo understood what he was doing when he said it.
Most people who heard that quote think he did. He was bragging. Rich Porter was buried on January 10th, 1990. Pat Porter has described in interview after interview the surreal experience of standing at her brother’s wake while Alpo Martinez walked in with scratches on his face, hugged the family, pledged in public to find the people who had killed his brother.
Azie in his own account saw the scratches and knew immediately. He didn’t say it out loud. Nobody did. For more than a decade, Harlem did not know Alpo killed Rich. The wake was theater. The funeral was theater. The scratches on Alpo’s face had a story attached to them. Riches possibly in his last seconds. And that story was hidden behind a performance of grief that fooled the entire neighborhood.
Alpo even reportedly offered the Porter family $50,000 to make rumors disappear. The offer was refused. 24 days after Rich’s body was found on January 28th, 1990, a homeless man collecting cans along a bicycle path off the Hutchinson River Parkway found a second body wrapped in 14 black plastic garbage bags stuffed one inside the other.
Clean white sneakers, blue jeans, a white shirt less than a mile from where Rich had been dumped. It was Darnell. The cause of death confirmed by the New York City medical examiner was a blow to the head. The body, contrary to street legend, was not dismembered. Only the finger that had been delivered to the McDonald’s had been severed.
The rest of him had been kept alive somewhere through Christmas, through New Year’s, through the four weakest his older brother spent walking the neighbor neighborhood in a vest looking for him until the people holding him decided he was no longer useful and killed him. I mean, think about that for a second. 12 years old, sixth grade.
His older brother had been murdered three weeks before he was. The man who had ordered his kidnapping, his own mother’s brother, would attend his funeral as a mourner and live another decade before being held to account by the people who knew. And if that were the only problem, the Porter family might have survived it intact. But then came the next layer.
Velma never recovered. Pat Porter has said it as plainly as anyone could. She expired in 2011, but she died when they killed her sons. My mother wasn’t right. The damage was permanent. The family unit Rich had built his entire identity around providing for had been hollowed out by the same set of decisions that had built it in the first place.
Azie Fasen left the game. He had already been on his way out since 1987. After Rich’s death, he made it permanent. He formed a rap group called Mob Style in 1989, released an album in 1991, and over the next two decades transformed himself into one of the most respected antiviolence voices in Harlem. His 2007 book, Game Over: The Rise and Transformation of a Harlem Hustler, is the closest thing we have to a primary source account of what it actually felt like to live through that era.
He has spent the rest of his life telling kids the version of this story that doesn’t get told and paid in full. And Alpo Alpo moved his operation to Washington DC in 1990 with Wayne Silk Perry as enforcer. He was a fugitive for 2 years. The federal government arrested him in southeast DC in November of 1991 and indicted him on 14 counts of murder, including Rich Porters.
Facing the death penalty, he cooperated. His testimony helped convict Wayne Perry, who was sentenced to five consecutive life terms. In the capital of the United States, the man who ran more of Washington’s drug trade than anyone had been brought down by a kid from Harlem, who 3 years earlier had killed his best friend in the back of a van.
Alpo served around 24 years at the Federal Supermax in Florence, Colorado. He was released in 2015 into witness protection, given a new identity, Abraham G. Rodriguez and relocated to Lewon, Maine. By 2018, he had been removed from the program for violations. By 2019, he was back in Harlem doing interviews on Instagram about killing Rich Porter, bragging, wearing furs, riding motorcycles down the same blocks.
On October 31st, 2021, OPO was shot five times through the driver’s side window of a red Dodge Ram pickup on Frederick Douglas Boulevard between West 151st and West 152nd Streets. He drove four blocks south, tossing baggies out the window before crashing into parked cars at West 147th. He was pronounced dead at Harlem Hospital. He was 55 years old.
A man named Shikim Parker was arrested for the killing in February of 2022. He was acquitted in July of 2024. The case is for the public record unsolved. Rich Porter’s niece, Lurel, told the New York Daily News on the day of Alpo’s death. We waited for a long time for this day to come.
Now my uncle can finally rest in peace 32 years later. Every dog has their day and today was his. Rich Porter’s story isn’t unique. The pattern repeats every time a community is left without legitimate investment, denied a path into formal capital and forced to watch its smartest, most ambitious kids build wealth in the only economy that will hire them.
It repeats with Rael Edmund in DC. It repeats with Frank Matthews in the 70s. It repeats with the Chambers brothers in Detroit. It repeats with names that never made it into a movie. The specifics change. The psychology doesn’t. A kid absorbs the role of provider before his brain is finished developing. He builds a self-image around taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves.
He enters an economy that rewards that identity with status and money. He becomes in his own neighborhood the king. And then at the exact moment when stepping back would save his life, the identity that built him refuses to let him. There was never a version of Rich Porter who walked away from 144th Street in 1988 and lived quietly in New Jersey selling cars.
Not because he wasn’t smart enough. He was one of the smartest people anyone who knew him has ever described. Not because he didn’t have the money. He did, but because at 12 years old, he had decided who he was going to be. And at 24 years old, he was still being that person. And the same trait that built the empire guaranteed its collapse. Pat Porter is still alive.
She has been petitioning New York City to co-ename the corner of West 132nd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, William Donald Porterway after the 12-year-old whose body was found in the Bronx in January of 1990. She runs an annual day of remembrance for him on his birthday. Her stated mission, in her own words, is to make sure her younger brother becomes the symbol of all the black children erased during the crack era whose names never got written down.
The corner still belongs to the family in the only way that matters, not on a deed. In memory, Azie Fasin is 60 years old. He runs Charia 126, a charity that supports the children of incarcerated and deceased drug dealer parents. He spent the rest of his life telling kids what the next part of this story actually looks like.
The film Paid in Full came out in 2002. Mechy FIFA played the character based on Rich. Wood Harris played the character based on Aziz. Cameron played Alpo. The film made about $3 million in theaters and became one of the most quoted hip hop documents of the next two decades. Pat Porter has said publicly that there are parts of it she would correct.
The most important one is the trio framing. They were never a unified crew. The second is the wirew wearing scene at the end which Azie Fasen has flatly stated never happened. Some people will tell you Rich Porter got what was coming. That at the end of the day he was a crack dealer and the rest is just sentiment.
Some people will tell you he was a victim of an economy that gave him no alternative. Some people will tell you both. A psychologist might tell you that the most useful lens isn’t moral. The most useful lens is that a 12-year-old child took on a role he should never have had to take on and grew into a young man who could not stop being the person he had taught himself to be at 9 years old, selling newspapers on West 132nd Street, trying to keep his family fed.
He made 50,000 a week at his peak and died with $2,200 in his pocket and a frontage shipment of cocaine that was never meant to be sold. He named one of his children after the little brother he could not save. He was 24 years old. Whether he ever had a real choice the same way you have a real choice. That’s the part nobody can answer for him.
The streets remember the cars and the parties. The family remembers Darnell. The numbers in his pocket the night he died are public record. The rest you decide. If this is the kind of work you want to keep seeing, names told right, streets named right, the psychology underneath the headline, that’s what street archives is here for. Subscribe.
Stories like this take weeks to research and one click to support. On screen now, the Aussie Faison story. Different angle, same era, same lesson. We’ll see you on the next one.
