WITNESS PROTECTION DRUG SNITCH BLOWN AWAY!
Alpo Martinez paid ultimate price for going back to the hood
WITNESS protection didn’t save turncoat drug kingpin Alberto “Alpo” Martinez — the underworld rat who’d squealed on his cronies was riddled with bullets as he sat in his truck on a Harlem street years after starting a new life in Maine.
The 55-year-old Puerto Rico native was visiting his former Spanish Harlem haunts in a 2017 Dodge Ram truck with Texas tags when he was snuffed by a barrage of bullets from a drive-by vehicle at 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 31.
Alpo, who was played by rapper Cam’ron in the 2002 flick Paid in Full, was shot five times and passed out, crashing into a parked vehicle. He was rushed to a hospital, where he died.
Alpo was believed to be living in Maine as part of the FBI’s witness protection program, but foolishly returned to his old neighborhood, says a police source.
“You were in the witness protection program because you testified against other drug dealers,” the source says. “You’d make a lot of enemies who have a score to settle. When you return to the same area, word will get out very fast. He’s back in the zone.”
Alpo had plenty of enemies. Growing up in the area where he became a drug kingpin, he sold pals to the feds after he was busted and charged with 14 murders in the early 1990s.
Even with his cooperation, he was sentenced to 35 years and sent to a supermax pen in Colorado.
He was reportedly released and given a new identity in the witness protection program in 2015. While it’s not known why he returned to his old turf, his stool pigeon ways and drug dealing days apparently weren’t forgotten.
Sources say he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time — but definitely the target of the drive-by assassination — and was tossing packets of dope out of his ride after being shot.
“It seems pretty intentional when you shoot somebody five times,” says the source.
Like in the movie, Alpo was Paid in Full!