To the residents of a quiet street in Maine, Abraham Rodriguez was a jovial and obliging neighbour who did factory work and construction jobs and drove surprisingly expensive cars. He also seemed to have quite a lot of girlfriends.
This week, however, news reached them of a shooting in Harlem, New York, in which a former drug lord had been killed at the wheel of an enormous red pick-up truck.
Kaileigh Tara shouted with amazement when she saw it: “‘Oh my god! That’s Abraham’s truck,” she told the Lewiston Sun Journal.
Her neighbour Abraham, it emerged, was actually Alberto Martinez, 55, known on the streets of Harlem as Alpo, who had risen up during the drug wars of the 1980s to command a cocaine-trafficking enterprise that reached as far as Washington DC.
In 1990, he was said to have murdered his best friend and business partner Rich Porter; a claim Martinez himself confirmed in interviews. Arrested in Washington in 1991, he was charged with 14 murders and decided to co-operate with investigators and give evidence against his associates to avoid a life sentence.
Advertisem*nt
“Alpo” was sent to prison and later disappeared into a witness protection programme but his name became a staple of rap lyrics and his story became a documentary called Game Over that in turn inspired a film called Paid in Full.
Back on the streets nearly a quarter of a century after his arrest, he was given a new identity as Abraham Rodriguez, of Lewiston, Maine. The city, which lies 36 miles north of Portland, was named by Forbes magazine in 2017 as one of the best places to retire due to its low crime rates and cost of living.
Martinez moved into a ground-floor flat on a quiet street, where he was said to have taken a job in a warehouse before moving into building work. A neighbour named Hanlon Brown told the Lewiston Sun Journal that he appeared to be working hard and seemed in good shape for a man in his early fifties.
He had “muscles on muscles”, Brown said. When Brown broke an ankle, Martinez and his girlfriend had cooked him meals or brought him pizza, he said. “You couldn’t have asked for a better neighbour.”
Tara, who lived upstairs from Martinez, told the local paper that his flat was sparsely furnished but for the electronics – the security cameras, the enormous television and the sound system that was once turned up so loud that she felt as if “my whole sofa was shaking”.
Advertisem*nt
She also recalled telling him off for being unfaithful to a woman who thought she was his fiancée. “I did that to a drug lord,” she marvelled. “He could have disappeared me.”
The neighbours also recalled Martinez making trips to New York, 300 miles to the south, where he had, at best, a mixed reputation. Hours after he was shot dead last Sunday, relatives of Porter, the friend he had killed, were seen drinking champagne in the street.
“It’s a celebration for Harlem, period,” one of them told the New York Daily News. A passer-by told the paper: “They finally got that rat.”
The New York Post quoted a police source admitting they had a very broad list of suspects: “Everyone he knew is a suspect in this.”
Kamilah Stevens, 39, a magazine writer who met Martinez in August, felt he had ventured back to Harlem partly to see his family. “He had his mother, he had his sister, he had a son there. I think that’s why he ended up returning to Harlem.” She added: “I think he wanted to explore some things as well.”
Advertisem*nt
He had begun giving interviews. In one of these he said that although he had become a government witness, “I still did 25 years”. He added: “You call me a rat, a government witness, whatever. Don’t ever forget, I’m still a man. I’m not going to let no one disrespect me.”
He seemed eager to reminisce. “Let’s talk about back in the day, real quick,” he said. “The Eighties. I ran these streets.” Such was his confidence that he would ride about in convertible cars, with the roof down, he said. He said he was working on one or two projects and he may have been referring to another documentary by Troy Reed, the film-maker behind Game Over.
A clip, apparently from that production, surfaced in 2019 showing Martinez riding in a car to the spot where he had picked up his friend Porter, in 1990. “I was asking him, like, ‘Hey, yo, Rich, where did you get that co*ke from, man?’” he said. He knew, from his friend’s answer, that “he was lying”.
He described signalling to his henchman, who shot Porter twice as they stopped at a traffic light, before driving to an island off the Bronx to dump his body. They drove to the spot, Martinez serving as a sort of tour guide.
After the video clip was broadcast Reed apologised to the Porter family, saying his video-sharing account had been hacked and the footage had been released in a raw form. He also apologised to Martinez, saying the former drug lord had actually shown himself to be “very sorrowful of some of the things he’s done”.
Advertisem*nt
Stevens, a writer and founder of Volume 82 Magazine, concurred. “He was very remorseful about the choices he made,” she said. “I don’t think he was the monster that he was described to be. I think he lived based on what he was taught and how he was encouraged to represent himself as a man on the streets of New York City.”
