It’s 1983 in East Harlem, New York City. The city is broke. Buildings are burning in the South Bronx. Unemployment is hitting records in black and Latino neighborhoods. And a 17-year-old kid from the East River Houses public housing project is already 4 years deep into the drug game, moving up fast and starting to understand something that most street dealers never figure out.
The real money is not in the corner. It is in control. His name was Alberto Martinez. The streets called him Alpo. And over the next 8 years, he would build one of the most feared crack cocaine empires New York City had ever seen. Expand it into Washington DC, rack up a body count that prosecutors would eventually list at 14 confirmed murders, and somehow stay ahead of the FBI the entire time until he didn’t.
If you follow organized crime history and you haven’t subscribed to this channel yet, now is the time. We cover stories exactly like this one every single week. This is the real story of Alpo Martinez. How a teenager from one of New York’s poorest housing projects built a criminal empire, inspired a generation of rappers, and then became the very thing the streets despise most.
Alberto Martinez was born on June 8th, 1966 in East Harlem into the East River Houses, a sprawling public housing complex sitting along the FDR Drive on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This was not the Upper East Side of Dorman and Private Schools. This was the forgotten edge of a neighborhood that New York City had essentially written off.
Money was scarce. Options were scarcer. And by the time Alpo was 13 years old, he was already out on the block selling marijuana and heroin. You have to understand what New York City looked like in the late 1970s and early 1980s to understand how a kid ends up there at that age. The city had nearly gone bankrupt in 1975.
Federal budget cuts gutted social programs. Schools fell apart. Whole blocks in the South Bronx were literally on fire. In communities like East Harlem, the legitimate economy had packed up and left. What filled the void was the drug trade, and it filled it completely. Alpo did not stumble into this world.
He ran toward it. By his mid- teens, he had a reputation for charm, for nerve, and for not being afraid of anyone. He drove bikes through the neighborhood at speed, dressed better than people twice his age, and had a personality that people noticed. He was not trying to blend in. He never was. By the early 1980s, crack cocaine arrived and changed everything.
The substance was cheap to produce, incredibly addictive, and generated profits that heroin could barely touch at the street level. For someone like Alpo, already embedded in East Harlem’s drug network, it was an opportunity on a scale he had never seen before. He pivoted fast. Around this time, Alpo fell in with two other young dealers who would become the most famous partnership in Harlem Street history.
Rich Porter and Azie Fasin. Porter, born in 1965, had started selling at 12. He was flashy, well-connected, and already moving serious weight. Faison was quieter, more careful. Together, the three of them built something that went far beyond a corner operation. Rich Porter was reportedly moving around $50,000 worth of crack per week at the height of their operation.
He owned over a dozen luxury cars and reportedly never wore the same outfit twice. Alpo matched him step for step. Designer clothes, motorcycles, a lifestyle that turned heads everywhere they went. The streets were paying attention and so were the young artists and musicians coming up around them at the same time. Rappers like LL Cool J were photographed with these guys.
Their style, their money, their attitude shaped what hip hop would look like for the next two decades. But behind the glamour, Alpo was building infrastructure, expanding supplier relationships, moving product across more of Harlem than his rivals thought possible, and getting harder, significantly harder. By the mid 1980s, Alpo had established himself as one of the most feared figures in East Harlem.
His reputation was not just about money. It was about what happened to people who crossed him. He hired hitmen to settle disputes. But when he felt the situation called for it, he handled things personally. And that willingness to cross lines that other dealers respected as limits gave him a kind of authority that money alone cannot buy on the street.
But control of Harlem was never going to be enough. It never is for people built the way Alpo was built. If you’re finding this story as gripping as I do, subscribe before you keep watching. We drop deep dives like this every week and you do not want to miss what is coming next on this channel. By the late 1980s, Alpo made the move that would define the final chapter of his career. He expanded into Washington DC.
The nation’s capital was drowning in its own crack epidemic at the time. In 1990, DC would record 472 murders, a number that made it one of the deadliest cities in America per capita. The political will to address the root causes barely existed. Law enforcement was overwhelmed. For a drug operation with money, connections, and no hesitation about violence, DC was wide open.
Alpo moved product into the city and quickly needed someone to hold it down for him on the ground. He found Wayne Anthony Perry, known as Silk. Perry would become one of the most feared hitmen in DC history. methodical, relentless, and reportedly responsible for dozens of killings during the DC drug wars. With Perry as his enforcer, Alpo’s operation expanded at a pace that drew enemies fast.
And that is the thing about going to war on multiple fronts. The body count climbs, the attention follows, and attention is the one thing a drug empire cannot afford. Back in Harlem, something was rotting inside the partnership that had made Alpo rich. He and Rich Porter had been together since they were teenagers. But by 1989, the trust had broken down.
Money was allegedly going unaccounted for. Porter was reportedly making moves that Alpo believed cut him out of deals. The suspicion once it took root grew fast. On January 3rd, 1990, Rich Porter was found shot multiple times near Orchard Beach in the Bronx. He was 24 years old. Police found $2,239 in his pocket.
Alpo had orchestrated the murder of his closest friend and most trusted partner. For a long time, the streets did not know who pulled the trigger. But eventually, the truth came out, and when it did, it shifted the entire perception of who Alpo Martinez was. Killing a rival was one thing. Killing your partner, someone you came up with, someone who trusted you, that was something else.
Even in a world where violence was the currency of power, this crossed a line. Alpo went from feared to something closer to pariah in certain circles. He did not seem to care. He kept moving product, kept expanding, kept sending Wayne Perry to handle anyone who became a problem. But the federal government had been watching longer than Alpo knew.
The FBI had been building a case around DC’s drug networks throughout the 1980s. When Alpo moved into the city and started sending Perry to clean up his problems, investigators started pulling on threads connected to him. The picture that emerged was not just of a dealer. It was of a criminal enterprise tied to murders in multiple cities, a supply chain moving enormous quantities of cocaine, and a man who had been operating largely untouched since he was a teenager in East Harlem.
Prosecutors in a separate case would later allege that Alpo shipped more than 1,200 lb of cocaine into Washington DC during his time there. That is not a corner operation. That is a logistics network. The FBI spent close to a year building the case specifically targeting Alpo before they moved. wiretaps, surveillance, turning informants inside his circle who could speak to both the drug trafficking and the murders.
The work was slow and methodical because the charges they intended to file were not going to be for possession. They were going for everything at once. On November the 7th, 1991, federal agents arrested Alberto Martinez in southeast Washington DC. He was 25 years old. The charges included federal drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit murder, and 14 counts of murder.
The next day, Alpo sat in a courtroom and heard the full list of what the government had on him. The Washington Post reported that he was sniffling loudly as tears welled in his eyes. The guy who had made himself untouchable for 8 years. The guy who had Wayne Perry handling his problems. The guy who had shot his best friend in the head was crying in a federal courtroom.
And no, I am not saying that without some complexity here. 14 murder charges in federal court with a potential death sentence on the table would shake almost anyone. But it was the next move that the streets would never forgive. Alpo began cooperating with the federal government almost immediately. He confessed to all 14 murders.
He testified against Wayne Perry, the man he had sent to kill people on his behalf. He gave prosecutors information about his former associates, his supply chain, his operations across New York and DC. In exchange, he received a 35-year sentence instead of life without parole or the death penalty. This is the part of the Alpo Martinez story that eclipsed everything else in the culture.
In street mythology, cooperating with the federal government, snitching is the one transgression that cannot be undone. It does not matter what you built. It does not matter how feared you were. Once that line is crossed, the legacy changes permanently. Wayne Perry, the hitman Alpo used to enforce his empire, received a life sentence.
Perry would later say publicly that he felt betrayed at a level that went beyond anything the drug game had prepared him for. Alpo had used him, then handed him to the government. He served his time at the ADX Supermax Federal Prison in Florence, Colorado, one of the hardest facilities in the United States.
In 2015, after 24 years inside, he was released and placed in witness protection under the name Abraham Rodriguez in Lewon, Maine. His neighbors there described him as pleasant and approachable. They had no idea who he was, but Alpo could not stay away from the life, not fully. On October 31st, 2021, Alberto Martinez was shot multiple times while sitting in a Dodge Ram truck in Harlem at around 3:20 in the morning.
As he tried to drive away from the scene, he reportedly threw more than a dozen baggies containing what appeared to be heroin out of his window. He crashed his truck near 147th Street. By the time EM got him to Harlem Hospital, he was declared dead on arrival. He was 55 years old. The ID in his pocket said Abraham Rodriguez, Lewon, Maine.
It was not a hit from a former associate, which is what most people assumed. Investigators determined it was a road rage incident. Someone he had upset that night in traffic. After everything, after 14 murders, after snitching on his own crew, after witness protection and a new name in a new state, Alpo Martinez was killed in a road rage shooting while still apparently dealing drugs.
Make of that what you will. If this is your first time on this channel, that is the kind of story we tell here. Real history, real stakes, real consequences. Subscribe so you do not miss the next one. The cultural legacy Alpo Left Behind is genuinely complicated. The 2002 film Paid in Full dramatized his story with Cameron playing a character based directly on him.
The movie introduced his name to a generation that was too young for the 1980s Harlem crack wars. It gave the story glamour it probably did not deserve. But it also gave it truth. The desperation underneath the designer clothes. The paranoia that comes with that kind of power. The way ambition without limits leads directly to the kind of ending Alpo got.
In 2025, 50 Cent acquired the rights to develop a television series expanding on the story with the original Cameron involvement and disputes with producer Dame Dash already making headlines before a single frame was filmed. Even dead, Alpo Martinez generates attention. Rich Porter has no television series. Azie Faison, the third member of their crew, got out and eventually became an advocate, telling the story from a reformed perspective.
Wayne Perry is still in federal prison, serving a life sentence for murders he committed at Alpo’s direction. The math on all of this is brutal. If you sit with it long enough, eight years of running an empire, 14 lives, one partner murdered, one enforcer handed to the FBI, 24 years at ADX Florence, a new name in Maine, and then a road rage shooting at 3:20 in the morning.
Still dealing, still in Harlem. What did Alberto Martinez actually build? He built something people are still talking about 35 years later, which is its own kind of answer. But the people who loved Rich Porter are also still out there. The families of the 14 people he confessed to killing are out there. The communities that Alpo’s operation helped hollow out during the crack epidemic are still dealing with the generational weight of that era.
These stories matter because they are not just about one man’s rise and fall. They are about what happens to a generation of young men when a city turns its back on entire neighborhoods. The crack epidemic did not come from nowhere. It arrived in a vacuum that policy created and poverty sustained. Alpo Martinez was a product of that vacuum as much as he was a predator who made things worse.
Both things are true. They usually are. The story of Alpo Martinez is the story of East Harlem in the 1980s, of hip hop mythology, of federal investigations that take years to close, and of what happens when a man is too dangerous to be on the street, but too smart to be caught for almost a decade. It is not a hero story, but it is a story that America made block by block and budget cut by budget cut long before Alberto Martinez ever walked out of the East River houses and decided the streets were the only game worth playing.
If you want more stories about the people and organizations that shaped American crime history from the inside out, click the video on your screen right now. And if you have not subscribed yet, do it now. This is exactly the kind of content we put out every week, and we are nowhere near done.
