Photo: NYPD
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.