Santiago Luis Polanco-Rodríguez (born June 16, 1961) is a Dominican American former drug dealer considered to be the first mass marketer of crack cocaine in United States.
[1] Officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration have portrayed him as a calculating and disciplined criminal who organized Dominican, Jamaican and American street dealers into a marketing empire.
According to the DEA, in 1982 Polanco-Rodriguez began developing a small group that sold high quality cocaine outside his apartment near the corner of Audubon Avenue and West 174th Street.
[3] While doing this, he was building an empire in the Dominican Republic, hiring elderly women to hand-carry cash back to Santo Domingo.
He adopted the organizational schemes of the Colombian cartels: some employees cooked and packaged the drug, others transported and stored it, and others sold it on the streets.
In 1987, US Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani signed a 58-count federal indictment charging Polanco-Rodriguez with drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering.
On July 3, 1987, federal authorities announced they had successfully terminated the drug ring, which they described as the biggest distributor of crack in New York City.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1996, Polanco-Rodriguez said he had retired from his life of crime, and DEA and Dominican drug officials said they had no evidence to the contrary.