Federal prosecutors charged four men from Brooklyn and Virginia with gun trafficking Wednesday, using a new law from the bipartisan gun control legislation passed by Congress last year for the first time in New York.
At a news conference Wednesday, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said it was among the first prosecutions in the nation using the statute included in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo and in Uvalde, Texas.
“The charges brought today exemplify how the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act can be used as an effective tool in our continued battle against gun violence that plagues communities in Brooklyn, across New York City and Long Island and across the nation,” Peace said. “As the first prosecution to utilize this new legislation in New York, and one of the first in the country, we are demonstrating that we are prepared to use all the tools at our disposal, new and old, to combat gun violence.”
Attorneys for the four men could not be immediately reached for comment.
The new law that passed in June 2022 includes a new firearm trafficking conspiracy charge and a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
According to Peace, the statute allows investigators to charge suspects with trafficking without having to prove they intended to sell them. Additionally, the U.S. attorney said the maximum penalties prior to the legislation being signed into law would be five to 10 years.
The four men are charged with firearms trafficking conspiracy in a scheme prosecutors allege included the distribution of more than 50 guns, including difficult-to-track ghost guns and weapons used in two 2021 shootings.
On June 22, 2022, investigators say Raymond Minaya, 26, of Brooklyn, sold an undercover officer a handgun previously used in an August 2021 shooting in Bedford-Stuyvesant at a family event that left eight people with gunshot wounds. The gun was also connected to at least five other incidents, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said at the news conference.
Prosecutors said another handgun allegedly trafficked by the defendants is connected to a December 2021 shooting in Canarsie’s Breukelen Houses NYCHA complex that left one person with gunshot wounds to his right hand, shoulder, neck and skull.
When Minaya was arrested in Brooklyn Wednesday morning, officials said he possessed two illegal firearms and threw one of them out of a window as law enforcement closed in.
Two Virginia men — Tajhai Jones, 28, and Calvin Tabron, 25 — allegedly transported firearms from their home state to Brooklyn, many of which had damaged serial numbers or were made from ghost gun kits. The guns would then be sold by the defendants from their vehicles and at and near the Breukelen Houses.
Between Breukelen and the nearby Bay View Houses, there have been four fatal shootings and 20 nonfatal shootings since the beginning of 2020, said NYPD Deputy Chief Joseph Gulotta, the commanding officer of Detective Borough Brooklyn South. The violence at the NYCHA complexes sparked the investigation by NYPD and federal officials.
Jones and Minaya were also charged with possessing firearms as a felon. And Minaya faces an additional charge of possession of a defaced firearm for owning a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol with its serial number removed.
In 2017, Jones was convicted of abducting one man and robbing two others at gunpoint in Virginia, according to a detention memo filed by federal prosecutors. He was again convicted with possession of narcotics in 2021, the memo said. Minaya was convicted in Kings County Criminal Court in 2017 of second-degree attempted murder and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and five years’ probation, according to the same memo. He was released on parole in 2020.
“The government is also aware of uncharged violent conduct by Minaya. On or about March 18, 2022, Minaya exchanged gunfire with another individual in the Bay View public housing complex in Canarsie,” prosecutors wrote in the memo.
Another Brooklyn man, David Mccann, 28, was charged along with Minaya with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute fentanyl and crack cocaine. The two men had sold a over a kilogram of fentanyl and over 100 grams of crack cocaine to an undercover officer, Peace said.
All four men were arrested Wednesday morning. Mccann and Minaya were set to be arraigned in Brooklyn federal court Wednesday afternoon, while Jones and Tabron were slated to be arraigned in Virginia federal court.