Crews of motorized bike-riding thieves — some of them illegal migrant gang-bangers — are terrorizing New York City, viciously snatching thousands of dollars in jewlery from the the necks of unsuspecting cops and civilians alike, The Post has learned.
There have been more than 20 motorized bike chain-snatchings since September, with at least 10 of them turning violent, according to the NYPD — and police sources say that’s just a drop in the bucket.
“There are hundreds of chain snatchings around the city,” said a law enforcement officer, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not cleared to talk to the news media.
“A lot of it has to do with the Trinitarios,” said the officer, referring to the violent street gang founded by Dominican inmates at Rikers Island in the early 1990s that has since grown into a crime empire plaguing the Bronx and upper Manhattan for decades.
“That’s one of their big things, chain snatchings, and two people on a bike doing robberies.”
The most notable mobile mugging happened when an NYPD detective was stabbed 10 times after he tried to fight back against two illegal migrants earlier this month.
Nine other chain-snatching victims reported being punched, knifed or thrown to the ground during the terrifying, lightning-fast robberies.
Two reputed Trinitario gang members on scooters were also responsible for shooting an off-duty federal border patrol agent at a Manhattan park on July 9, 2025, sparking a massive roundup of Big Apple gangbangers in January, federal officials said.
“Operation Salvo” took 54 members of the crew off the streets after the 42-year-old law enforcement officer was shot and wounded at Fort Washington Park in Washington Heights at West 155th Street, the officials said.
In Gotham, the thieves often have the advantage.
If they are caught, lefty judges often spring the crooks just as fast.
And they are never handed over to ICE if their immigration status is in question because NYC is a sanctuary city, an NYPD officer said.
“We’re not allowed to confer with ICE so we just arrest them,” said the cop, who also asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn’t get in trouble. “They get released on their own recognizance [by a judge] and they go back and do it again.”
The revolving-door system was spinning in the case of Jorge Beltre, a Bronx bodega worker and Uber driver who was attacked by two scooter-riding bandits as he walked his 5-year-old son home from school near Mount Eden Parkway and Sheridan Avenue in Claremont on Oct. 8.
Beltre, 30, fought back to save his 14-karat gold Cuban-link chain when one of the attackers pulled a knife and stabbed him in the leg, according to police.
Despite his wound, the Domincan Republic native was able to hold the 17-year-old thief — with the help of eight onlookers — until cops arrived, he said. Beltre’s son was unharmed.
The teenager was charged with robbery and weapon possession, according to police. He was released on $900 bail, Beltre said the Bronx District Attorneys Office told him.
“The community and I caught one,” he told The Post in Spanish. “Why did they let him go? He didn’t say where the other guy is. He didn’t say who the other guy was. I feel outraged. Why do they grant him release?
“It fills me with outrage because I felt my life was in danger,” Beltre continued. “We are living through a scourge. The Bronx is practically being ravaged by these criminals. People are getting their chains snatched — two or three incidents a day. The community is fed up.”
The experience has been “unsettling” for his son, who asked his mom to send him back to school with a baseball bat “so he could hit the criminals if he saw them,” Beltre said. He said his muggers were also from the Domican Republic.
Beltre needed five stitches to close his wound.
The Bronx District Attorneys Office didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
In another incident on Sept. 13, a 54-year-old victim told cops he tried to hold onto the motorbike-riding thief who ripped a chain off his neck on Grand Avenue near West 180th Street in the West Bronx.
But the thief accelerated, dragging the victim, who suffered minor injuries and lost his $2,700 chain, cops said.
Two robbers on e-bikes approached a 60-year-old man near Duncan Street and Laconia Avenue in the East Bronx on Sept. 28, displayed a firearm and punched him in the face before snatching $8,000 of jewelry from his neck. He suffered minor injuries.
The motorized muggers are brazen enough to target cops.
An off-duty female office, had her chain snatched at the corner of Arlington and Barbey streets in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on Oct. 10, police sources said.
The crook grabbed a gold necklace that read “Angie” from the 25-year-old’s neck before riding off on a scooter, the sources said. The necklace was worth about $800, the cop reported.
The female officer’s attack came eight days after two criminals stabbed Detective Jose Mercedes, 33, near East 206th Street and Rochambeau Avenue in Norwood in the Bronx as they tried to rip the necklace given to him by his mom off his neck, he told reporters this week.
Mercedes told the crooks several times in both English and Spanish that he was a detective — but “they didn’t care,” he said.
The accused robbers, whom police identified as D’Angelo Caraballo, 25, and Sneider Mejia, 24, fled the scene on an e-bike. Mercedes chased them but collapsed because he was losing so much blood, he said.
Police hunted the duo down outside of Boston and brought them back to New York to face attempted murder charges.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE said both men have prior criminal records, and are Dominican Republic natives living in the US illegally.
An NYPD spokesperson said the chain-snatchings had been decreasing in the Bronx recently.
“Since the attempted murder of Detective Mercedes, there has been a significant decrease in chain snatches within the confines of Patrol Borough Bronx North,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that major crime declined 7% in all five boroughs of the city so far this year, with the Bronx continuing to lead the city with a 12% reduction — to 20,751 so far this year, versus 23,545 in the same period last year.
Surveillance photos released by the NYPD show the robbers often have their faces completely covered and are difficult to identify, police sources said.
Critics lay some of the blame for the troubling trend at the feet of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called for less enforcement of e-bikers — in purported support the multi-million food app industry. Their lawlessness has surged as cops write fewer tickets.
“Mamdani doesn’t want to enforce summonses against these moped guys because they’re working, but then everyone’s taking advantage of it,” said Michael Alcazar, a former NYPD detective and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“This is what they do in Third World countries,” he added.
Alcazar thinks the NYPD needs to use the broken-window theory of policing to staunch the epidemic.
“Bad guys have to know we’re enforcing these things,” he said of the tactic in which cops write summonses for small infractions to prevent larger crimes. “That will nip this in the bud.”
A return to the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime units, which were disbanded in 2020 under self-described Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio following protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, would also help, he said.
“Nobody wants to talk about bringing back anti-crime but it’s an effective tool,” Alcazar said of the plainclothes cops. “This is what we did when crime was spiking.”