By Jeff Burbank It was the first week of January 1973. Frank Matthews and his young girlfriend had just spent the holidays in Las Vegas and were about to board a flight to Los Angeles. In the previous several years, Matthews had made many trips to Las Vegas, carrying suitcases full of cash to be secretly laundered at casinos for a fee of 15 to 18 percent. This time, federal drug enforcement agents were waiting and placed him and the woman under arrest at McCarran International Airport. Two weeks before, U.S. prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, had issued an arrest warrant for Matthews, the top black drug kingpin in America whose heroin and cocaine trafficking gang of mostly African-American dealers extended to 21 states on the Eastern Seaboard. He was charged with trying to sell about 40 pounds of cocaine in Miami from April to September 1972, a small fraction of the drugs he’d pushed since 1968. The feds believed Matthews had millions in currency stashed away in safety deposit bo...
BY STEVE COLLINSSUN JOURNAL
A New York City man, 27, already in custody, was charged late Sunday with the Halloween slaying of the convicted murderer and drug dealer, who moved to Lewiston and lived quietly here for 5 years.
Police in New York City made an arrest late Sunday in the Oct. 31 murder of Alberto “Alpo” Martinez.
Police charged 27-year-old Shakeem Parker, a New York City resident, with murder and criminal possession of a weapon, according to the Daily News in New York.
Details are scant, but the tabloid said Parker was already behind bars in the city’s Rikers Island jail on a separate case involving a gun.
Martinez, 55, a notorious drug dealer in the 1980s, spent almost a quarter-century in federal prison after acknowledging his role in at least 14 murders.
After his release, he went into a federal witness protection program that landed him in a College Street apartment in Lewiston under the name Abraham Rodriguez for more than five years. He moved back to New York permanently about a month before he was shot to death while driving his truck outside a Harlem nightclub on Halloween.
Martinez rose to prominence in the crack trade in New York City and Washington, D.C. during the 1980s, when he became a figure so well known that one of his nicknames was “The Mayor of Harlem.” He was often seen with flashy cars, glamorous women and lots of jewelry.
He became something of a role model for the hip-hop generation coming of age in those days and wound up as a major character in the 2002 movie “Paid in Full,” which captured both his glamor and his duplicity in naming names to escape the death penalty at the hands of federal prosecutors.
There has been a swirl of speculation about Martinez’s murder, but it is unclear why police say Parker shot him.
Parker was one of more than two dozen Rikers Island prisoners who filed a request in April 2020 to be released because of the threat posed by COVID-19.
At the time, Parker was in jail because of an alleged parole violation. He said in the legal paperwork he could not afford his $30,000 cash bail.
Parker said in the petition to the court that he had asthma and was at high risk if he were to contract COVID-19.
If a judge released him, he said, he would live with his mother and “safely isolate” in order to protect himself and the New York community.
It is unclear whether a judge granted his release.
Parker has been held at Rikers Island since November 6, according to a report in Complex.com, which said that city records say he faced multiple weapons violations.
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