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.
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.
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