Brooklyn woman sold 18 guns to undercover officer: feds
A pistol-peddling Brooklyn woman had an arsenal at the ready to sell to an undercover officer, personally trafficking 18 firearms in broad-daylight exchanges in Canarsie, federal prosecutors allege.
The feds on Thursday busted Ariana Charles, 28, accusing her in court filings of taking part “in a wide-ranging gun-trafficking conspiracy that flooded guns into our community.”
She’s accused of conspiring with four other gun traffickers — who were charged in January 2023 under a new federal law — to bring guns from Georgia and Virginia into the area around the Breukelen Houses in Canarsie.
Charles, who went by the nicknames “A” and “Almighty A,” sold her wares to an undercover officer in summer 2022, thinking she was dealing with a fellow drug and gun dealer, federal prosecutors allege. The undercover told Charles he intended to “flip” the guns and resell them on the street, according to court filings.
“Charles also repeatedly demonstrated that she had ready access to an arsenal of firearms for distribution,” federal prosecutors wrote.
Several times, she sold different types of firearms during the same transaction, and had the guns ready for sale within hours of the undercover buyer requesting them, prosecutors allege.
Those guns included a small pistol with an “obliterated” serial number, other pistols, and an assault rifle, the feds allege. She’s accused of making the sales outside of apartment buildings and in shopping center parking lots.
Charles is also accused of selling the officer fentanyl and cocaine.
“As alleged, the defendant brazenly trafficked firearms and deadly drugs to the streets of Brooklyn, feeding the cycle of gun violence and drug abuse endangering our community,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Thursday.
Charles pleaded not guilty at her arraignment in Brooklyn Federal Court Thursday and was ordered held without bail.
Federal prosecutors have tied her to a ring of alleged gun traffickers — Raymond Minaya, David McCann, Tajhai Jones and Calvin Tabron — who were accused last January of selling more than 50 guns to an undercover cop in Brooklyn.
They got their weapons from several sources — retailers in Virginia, build-it-yourself “ghost gun” kits and criminals who were already using them in Brooklyn, the feds allege. One of the weapons was linked to a half-dozen gang-related shootings, including a 2021 bloodbath at a Bedford-Stuyvesant family day celebration which left eight people wounded.
Peace at the time described their case as the first public indictment in New York under a bipartisan gun reform law signed by President Biden in June 2022.
