Brooklyn Gun Runner Used Chinatown Bus to Traffic $130K in Firearms: DA

Photos courtesy of the NYPD

Just because we live in left-wing New York City doesn’t mean we can escape the lax, right-wing gun laws of America’s red south, city officials warned at a grim press conference on Wednesday.

On a table in front of them, officials had lined up 112 guns in neat rows — all of them allegedly sold to an NYPD officer by a Brooklyn gun trafficker over the course of one year.

Most of the sales allegedly went down in a Walgreens parking lot in Canarsie, Brooklyn between Sept. 2014 and Sept. 2015.

The undercover officer spent upward of $130,000 purchasing this guy’s southern hauls, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. The officer is said to have bought 25 guns in a single exchange, of 13 total exchanges.

NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill called it “the single largest gun buy in New York City history.”

The alleged mastermind of the eight-person ring, Michael Bassier, 31, is believed to have purchased the guns in Atlanta (or, occasionally, Pittsburgh), then trafficked them into NYC via the cheap, somewhat infamous interstate buses that come and go from Manhattan’s Chinatown.

However, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson noted at the press conference:

”This is not about the Chinatown buses. This is about these guns.”

In the past year alone, Thompson said, NYC investigators have busted two other gun-smuggling rings that were trafficking guns to New York from Georgia: The first was sending guns up the I-95 in cars, and the second was packing them onto Delta Airlines flights with the help of corrupt airline employees.

“We had guns in a car, guns on a plane, now guns on a bus,” Thompson said. “How many different ways do we have to try to get to these guns before we wake up as a country, and realize that we have to stop the bloodshed?”

Thompson and O’Neill threw some major shade at politicians in southern states — and in Washington — who’ve repeatedly failed or refused to pass tighter gun laws like the one Gov. Cuomo recently pushed through in New York.

“The problem is not New York state,” Thompson said. ”The problem is we have states that seem to not care about where these guns end up — and so these guns are coming here.”

Of all the illegal guns confiscated in Brooklyn, the DA said, 90 percent originate from out of state.

“Year after year, illegal guns continue to flow into our city from states that don’t have proper safeguards in place,” O’Neill said. “So every day, NYPD officers perform incredibly dangerous work to prevent those guns from being used in acts of violence.”

In a wiretapped phone conversation of Bassier speaking to an acquaintance, he allegedly bragged about how easy it was to purchase guns in the south and haul them up to New York City. Listen below.

Among the guns recovered, according to the DA’s Office:

• 9mm Ruger and Glock pistols

• .22 caliber Walther pistols

• .40 caliber Smith & Wesson pistols

• .45 caliber Taurus pistols

• .22 long rifle caliber semi-automatic Walther Model MP Uzis

• .39 mm caliber semi-automatic Norinco Model SKS

• 9mm Luger semi-automatic Jimenez Arms Model JA25

And here’s a full list of the accused members of Bassier’s alleged gun-smuggling ring, also via the DA.

• Michael Bassier, 31, of Canarsie, Brooklyn

• Willie Ware, 26, of Canarsie, Brooklyn

• Anthony Jackson, 25, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn

• Jonathan Destin, 26, of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn

• Lance Millien, 27, of Norcross, Georgia

• Tanisha Minor, 26, of Stone Mountain, Georgia

• Nicole Taylor, 24, of Monroeville, Pennsylvania

• Terrah Moore, 22, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Despite this historic bust, there’s much more work to be done to ebb the gun pipeline into Brooklyn, Thompson said at Wednesday’s presser.

“I am concerned that as we are all here today, that there’s somebody coming up I-95 right now — with guns — to New York City,” Thompson said.

“We need help at the federal level,” he had said earlier in the press conference, visibly frustrated. “We need our representatives in Congress to do what is right. How many more people have to die? We’re here in Brooklyn on the back end of all of this, but we’ve got to deal with this on the front end.”

“These folks are merchants of death, and we need to deal with them,” he said. “The country needs to deal with them. Until that happens, we’ll continue to bring these cases.”