Geographic index for Crime Encyclopedia entries concerning organized drug trafficking, homicide investigations, and federal prosecutions in Washington, D.C.
This page indexes crime-history entries associated with Washington, D.C. It is not a general history of the District and should not be used to reduce the city or its neighborhoods to the crack-era crime crisis.
During the late 1980s, Rayful Edmond III led a large cocaine organization centered in Northeast Washington. Federal records identify Morton Place and Orleans Place NE — “the Strip” — as a principal open-air market and 407 M Street NE as a hub of the conspiracy. The organization also operated wholesale relationships and an interstate supply chain extending to California.
Curtis “Curtbone” Chambers, one of Edmond’s co-defendants, later became an important participant source on this era and collaborated on a documentary about Edmond.
Alberto “Alpo” Martinez later operated between New York and the Washington region and became associated with Wayne “Silk” Perry and other D.C. figures. This Martinez–Perry branch should be treated separately from the Edmond organization unless a direct relationship is established by evidence. Geographic overlap is not itself proof of membership in the same organization.
Late-1980s D.C. figures such as Shelton “Shorty Pop” Walker/Watkins belong to the social environment in which later oral histories place Martinez and Perry, while the Matthew N. Blake homicide provides a contemporaneously documented crime node connected to Shorty Pop’s 1989 fugitive case.
Washington is also where several important investigation and prosecution nodes converge: the Rayful Edmond federal case, the Alberto Martinez investigation, the Wayne Perry murder case, D.C. narcotics officer Angelo Parisi, and FBI investigator Dan Reilly. These entries make it possible to reconstruct the history from court and investigative records rather than relying solely on participant accounts.