The Harlem Man Who Supplied Rich Porter's C*caine | Richard 'Fritz' Simons
The Harlem Man Who Supplied Rich Porter's C*caine | Richard 'Fritz' Simons
It's the summer of 1990. Harlem is running on fumes and violence. The crack era that started with so much money has curdled into something uglier — kidnappings replacing robberies as the preferred method of extracting wealth from men who couldn't call the police when something went wrong, task forces sweeping entire blocks, informants multiplying inside every organization that had survived long enough to have something worth telling. The streets were producing body counts at a pace that made the newspapers sound like they were reporting the same story over and over with new names. Rich Porter had been killed in January of that year. Azie Faison was watching everything around him collapse. Alpo Martinez was already calculating his next move, which would eventually lead him to the government. The men who had defined Harlem's drug era were disappearing, one way or another. And in the middle of all of that, on some unremarkable Harlem block, a group of men posing as federal agents pulled up on a man named Richard Simmons.