They are the new Mafia, a ruthless Bronx-based cabal of drug dealers and gun runners that officials call the most dangerous gang in the city.
The Mac Baller Brims, a set of the national Bloods gang, form a terrifying band of crime-happy hoods who own much of New York's street drug trade and dominate Rikers Island, where they control the contraband and decide who lives and dies, police and jail sources say.
"Top dogs in the city," said one law-enforcement source. "There are more of them than any other Bloods, and they're highly organized, extremely violent, very powerful. Other gangs fear them."
The gang, which also calls itself the "Mac Balla Family," is based in the Morrisania section of The Bronx but has tentacles across the city, especially in Brooklyn and Staten Island, as well as upstate and New Jersey.
Its violence has claimed at least five innocent bystanders, three of them teenage girls, authorities say.
They include Vada Vasquez, 15, a Bronx student who miraculously survived being hit in the head with a stray bullet during a revenge attack on the gang by its well-armed rival, the Gorilla Stone Bloods, in 2009.
Another victim was not so lucky. Bronx prom queen Samantha Guzman, 18, died in a spray of bullets on Mother's Day 2006 when she and her friends wandered into a Mac Baller shootout in Morrisania.
Their reach extends along the Eastern Seaboard, where the gang's operations — gun running, robbery and kidnapping — can be found in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Georgia.
In one remarkably brazen assault in March, jailed Mac Baller member Kelvin Melton orchestrated the abduction of a North Carolina prosecutor's father.
The snatching was retaliation: Victim Frank Janssen's daughter Colleen, an assistant district attorney in Wake Forest, had put Melton away for life in 2012. Eight thugs pistol-whipped Janssen and held him for five days before the FBI rescued him.
The leader is convicted killer Larry "O" Calderon, 37, a Bronx-born career criminal who spent 17 years in state prison in two stints and is now facing life for murdering a subordinate, according to a top investigator familiar with the gang.
Calderon is known as the "godfather" or "don" of the Mac Baller Brims.
Larry Calderon, the leader of the Mac Baller Brims.
Eli "Blood Eli" Rios, the deputy leader of the Mac Baller Brims
The decisions of this "board of directors" — conveyed with the help of girlfriends and family through cryptic messages on Facebook and Twitter — affect what happens on the street and behind bars, the source said.
There are at least 525 confirmed members, although police suspect the actual number is much higher as it doesn't count scores of associates and wannabe "YGs," or young gangsters, who hope to join.
Initiation rites range from being "jumped in" — the proposed member must endure a group beating — to committing murder. Not all survive. Shaaliver Douse, 14, was told last year he needed to carry out a hit to be accepted. He missed his target, then was killed by cops.
One notorious member is Scott "Murder One" Fields, who earned his nickname for "beating two murder raps," said one source, including the slaying of a john he allegedly set up for a robbery in the Park Hill section of Staten Island.
Fields, who has been arrested many times and eventually served seven years for manslaughter for a separate slaying, dared to try to launch his own Bloods set but was turned down by the Mac Baller leaders. Fields was lucky not to be targeted himself, the source said.
"He was looking to trying to get authorization. He was going to call it the Staten Island Rangers. He tried to drop his flag. That's a violation."
The gang features a money unit and a murder unit.
The money unit rakes in millions from dealing heroin, crack, pot and prescription pills like OxyContin. Members trade extensively in illegal handguns brought to New York though the "Iron Pipeline" and earn cash from home robberies, street muggings, extortion, prostitution and kidnapping.
That doesn't include their control of a bustling underground market of contraband at Rikers, where a single loose cigarette known as a "finger" can fetch $10 and vulnerable inmates pay protection money to avoid being stabbed or beaten.
Assault in the big house also pays well: the MBBs supply hospital-grade scalpels for $100 apiece: tiny, razor-sharp weapons favored by inmates for slashing enemies.
Some of these guys have a lot of money… There are Mac Ballers who have properties, businesses, real-estate companies, houses in New Jersey. They're not stupid. - A source
One alleged supplier was gang associate Michael "Lucky" Walcott, an employee at St. Luke's Hospital, who took used scalpels straight from the surgical discard bins and had women smuggle them into jail by hiding them in body cavities, the sources said.
The gang is also heavily involved in the rap industry, law-enforcement sources say. A young artist calls himself Balla Mac, though it's unclear if he's a member of the gang.
"Some of these guys have a lot of money," said one source. "There are Mac Ballers who have properties, businesses, real-estate companies, houses in New Jersey. They're not stupid."
Like Italian gangsters, the MBBs have their own language and customs, which date to 1969 in California and a group once called the LA Hat Gang. Their named changed in the 1970s to the 5-9 Brims (their home turf being at 59th Street in South LA's Harvard Park) as the Bloods grew and unified out West before an East Coast branch was created in 1993.
That occurred when jailed leader Omar Portee established the United Blood Nation in Rikers to battle the more powerful Latin Kings. Known as O.G. Mack (for "Original Gangster"), Portee set up 10 sets of Bloods across the city. One was named the 59 Brims after its LA counterpart, though it operated independently.
The Mac Baller Brims, which formed in 2001, are the most powerful of the four Brim sets in New York (collectively the New York Blood Brim Army) and are now seeking to break away because of their numbers and influence.
Their name mixes a tribute to Mack Portee with slang for gangster or drug dealer ("baller").
They embrace a code of ethics every bit as strict as the Mafia's "omerta."
Calderon — who got busted in April, along with more than 60 other suspected Mac Baller members — is facing murder charges for allegedly killing one of his own over an ethical transgression.
Gang member Frank Russell participated in a botched and unsanctioned home-invasion robbery in 2011 when one of the MBB members was killed and another, Geo Ramirez, was wounded. Instead of helping his companion, Russell bolted and left Ramirez behind.
Diana Rodriguez holds a photo of her daughter, Samantha Guzman, who was gunned down in a 2006 gang shootout.Photo: Robert Kalfus
Rios could face more time but is already serving life for a coldblooded slaying on a Bronx street in 2004.
The killer, accompanied by half a dozen gang members, was apparently put off that the victim, Paul Anderson, and a companion dared to be in the area, asking the pair, "What are you doing on my block?"
So he pulled out his gun and chased the two as they fled. Rios killed Anderson and wounded an innocent bystander in the knee.
The new indictment, which comes on the heels of a takedown of 14 top Mac Ballers in Binghamton in March, spells out 109 alleged crimes, including two homicides and four attempted murders. Bronx DA Robert Johnson called it "an extensive catalogue of violent crimes."
And it reads like an episode of the TV show "The Wire," with patched-together transcripts of conversations made over disposable cellphones. The defendants used nicknames such as Chaddy, Rizo and Weezy, who is heard expressing his "regret for not shooting someone that he had a disagreement with."
But will these roundups dent the Mac Ballers' power?
A lot of YGs and YBs [young Bloods] are going to the Mac Ballers. - A source
Not anytime soon, say experts familiar with the gang.
"They're being careful," said one source, noting that bugged conversations used to get indictments have made the Mac Ballers ultra-cautious. "Guys will drop their cellphones every 20 days," he said.
And, he said, there is no slowing the stream of young gangsters and young Bloods angling for admission.
"A lot of YGs and YBs [young Bloods] are going to the Mac Ballers," he said.
The new generation is supplying bodies so fast even Rios can't keep up. He was heard remarking on the youth of the gang's newest prison arrivals.
"Most of the kids you got me locked up here with I don't even know," he said.
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